Top 8 Free Kafka UI Tools 2025

1. Aiven Kafka UI Plugin for JetBrains

A lightweight and intuitive IDE-based UI for managing Kafka clusters.

Pros:

• Works directly inside your IDE
• Quick and easy cluster connection
• Great UI
• Easy to use with Aiven or Confluent Kafka
• Supports multiple clusters, secure access, topic management, consumer groups, partition assignments
• Reliable support

Cons:

• Limited advanced analytics features
• Feature set might lag behind dedicated UIs

Try Aiven's JetBrains Kafka UI

2. Provectus Kafka UI

An open-source lightweight web-based UI for managing Apache Kafka clusters.

Pros:

• Actively maintained with a large GitHub community
• Supports Avro, JSON, and Protobuf formats
• Multi-cluster management capabilities

Cons:

• Limited advanced analytics features
• May require additional configuration for complex setups

Try Provectus

3. Aiven Web Kafka UI

A web-based UI for managing Kafka clusters in Aiven’s console.

Pros:

• Quick and easy cluster connection
• Great UI
• Easy to use with Aiven or Confluent Kafka
• Multi-cluster management and secure access
• Reliable support

Cons:

• Limited advanced analytics features
• Feature set might lag behind dedicated UIs

Try it Aiven Web Kafka UI

4. AQHQ

An open-source web-based UI for managing Kafka clusters.

Pros:

• Supports cluster management, topic operations, consumer group views, ACLs, and schema registry integration
• Multi-cluster support

Cons:

• UI can feel basic
• Lacks richer analytics and visualizations
• Performance may be limited on very large clusters

Try AQHQ

5. Burrow

A monitoring tool focused on Kafka consumer lag and health.

Pros:

• Automatically computes consumer lag
• Provides HTTP endpoints for querying consumer group status
• Integrates well into alerting and monitoring pipelines

Cons:

• Not a full UI for topics or cluster administration.
• Limited to monitoring; requires pairing with other tools for full management.

Try Burrow

6. Aiven Kafka UI Plugin for VS Code

A lightweight and intuitive IDE-based UI for managing Kafka clusters.

Pros:

• Works directly inside your IDE
• Quick and easy cluster connection
• Great UI
• Easy to use with Aiven or Confluent Kafka
• Multi-cluster management and secure access
• Reliable support

Cons:

• Limited advanced analytics features
• Feature set might lag behind dedicated UIs

Try Aiven's VS Code Kafka UI

7. CMAK

A web-based admin tool for managing Kafka clusters.

Pros:

• Mature and widely used
• Supports multiple clusters, topic management, consumer groups, partition assignments
• Functions like replica reassignments and leader election

Cons:

• UI is somewhat outdated
• May struggle with very large clusters
• Limited built-in security/auth features

Try CMAK

8. Kafdrop

A lightweight web UI for browsing Kafka topics and consumer groups.

Pros:

• Easy to deploy and use (Docker/Spring Boot)
• Supports SASL/TLS and Kubernetes deployment
• Good for browsing topics, partitions, and messages

Cons:

• Minimal administration features
• Lacks dashboards and analytics
• Scaling to very large clusters may require extra setup

Try Kafdrop

Why Aiven?

Aiven is one of the leading Apache Kafka providers for streaming solutions, and we're experts in the Kafka architecture. We bring together all the elements needed for you to move massive amounts of data with very low latency. Our streaming platform is ideal for event-driven architectures, streaming data pipelines, fine-tuning AI models, real-time analytics, and more.