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kafbat/kafka-ui
Open-Source Web UI for managing Apache Kafka clusters
Kafbat UI is a web-based management console for Apache Kafka clusters, forked from the now-archived Provectus kafka-ui project. It covers the full operational surface: browsing topics and messages, managing consumer groups, Kafka Connect, Schema Registry, and ACLs — all in one dashboard. Aimed at teams running self-managed Kafka who want something cheaper and more hands-on than Confluent Control Center.
The message browser is genuinely good — CEL filter expressions, live tailing, and Avro/Protobuf/JSON deserialization in the same view is more than most alternatives offer. RBAC is fine-grained down to individual topic actions, which matters when you have multiple teams sharing one cluster. The pluggable SerDe architecture (including custom JAR plugins) means you're not stuck when your encoding is non-standard. Active maintenance with recent commits and a proper CI pipeline (separate backend/frontend/e2e workflows, dependabot, CodeQL) — not a dead fork.
The backend is Java/Spring WebFlux, which means the Docker image is heavy (~500MB+) and startup time is slow — not ideal for local dev or resource-constrained environments. Multi-cluster support works but config management becomes unwieldy fast: no UI-native way to version or diff cluster configs, you're back to YAML. The MCP server feature is brand new and thin — it's there but don't expect it to be production-ready. No built-in alerting or threshold-based notifications on consumer lag; you still need external monitoring for anything ops-critical.