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tchiotludo/akhq
Kafka GUI for Apache Kafka to manage topics, topics data, consumers group, schema registry, connect and more...
AKHQ is a self-hosted web UI for managing Apache Kafka clusters — topics, consumer groups, schema registry, Kafka Connect, and ksqlDB, all in one place. It's the go-to open-source alternative to Confluent Control Center for teams that run Kafka on-premise or in their own cloud. Used in production at BMW, Klarna, Best Buy, and a few dozen others.
Multi-cluster support is first-class — you can manage several Kafka environments from one AKHQ instance, with per-cluster auth config. The topic data browser lets you filter by offset, timestamp, key, or header and deserialize with Avro/JSON/Protobuf via the schema registry, which is genuinely useful when debugging bad messages. Kafka Connect management is included and actually works — you can create, pause, restart connectors and inspect task status without touching the REST API directly. Docker image is well-maintained and the docker-compose examples make local setup fast.
The React frontend is showing its age — JSX with class components and Redux, no TypeScript, and the test coverage is thin. Any frontend contribution requires context-switching into a codebase that isn't following modern React patterns. RBAC is config-file driven (YAML), which means adding users or changing permissions requires a deployment restart; there's no runtime admin API. The ksqlDB integration is basic — you can run queries and see streams/tables, but it's read-heavy and doesn't surface query performance metrics or execution plans. No alerting or threshold monitoring; AKHQ is purely a management UI, so if a consumer group starts lagging badly you won't find out here.