---
title: Aiven for Apache Kafka Reviews
meta_title: 'Aiven for Apache Kafka Reviews 2026: Details, Pricing, & Features | G2'
meta_description: Filter 249 reviews by the users' company size, role or industry
  to find out how Aiven for Apache Kafka works for a business like yours.
aggregate_rating:
  rating_value: 4.3
  review_count: 249
  scale: '5'
date_modified: '2026-07-17'
parent_category:
  name: Big Data
  url: https://www.g2.com/categories/big-data
---

# Aiven for Apache Kafka Reviews
**Vendor:** Aiven  
**Category:** [Event Stream Processing Software](https://www.g2.com/categories/event-stream-processing)  
**Average Rating:** 4.3/5.0  
**Total Reviews:** 249
## About Aiven for Apache Kafka
Aiven for Apache Kafka® is a fully managed distributed event streaming service, that can be deployed in the cloud of your choice. Aiven for Apache Kafka is ideal for event-driven applications, near-real-time data transfer and data pipelines, streaming analytics, and any use case that requires moving huge amounts of real-time data between applications and systems. With Aiven for Apache Kafka you can set up fully managed Kafka clusters in less than 10 minutes — using the Aiven web console or programmatically via Aiven’s API, CLI, Terraform provider or Kubernetes operator. You can easily connect it to your existing tech stack with a fully managed Apache Kafka Connect service with over 30+ connectors. Monitoring your clusters with logs and metrics is also available out of the box via multiple service integrations. Get access to a complete open source ecosystem of streaming technologies and tools around Apache Kafka to fully manage, and operate a real time data infrastructure at scale using: Aiven for Apache Kafka: the core event streaming framework allowing you to transport data within your organization Aiven for Apache Kafka Connect: a fully managed, fully open source, distributed service enabling you to integrate your existing data sources and sinks seamlessly with Aiven for Apache Kafka. Aiven for Apache Kafka MirrorMaker2: a fully managed, fully open source distributed data replication service for cluster to cluster data replication, disaster recovery and geo proximity across multiple regions. Karapace®: a fully open source Kafka Schema Registry that applications can access to serialize and deserialize messages with popular formats such as AVRO, Protobuf and JSON. Aiven for Apache Flink®: a fully managed, fully open source streaming SQL engine for stateful stream processing over your data streams. Klaw: an open source data governance tool that helps enterprises exercise Apache Kafka® topic and schema governance. Aiven is ISO / IEC 27001: 2013, SOC 2, HIPAA, GDPR, and CCPA compliant. Check our pricing and try our free 30-day trial at https://aiven.io/kafka.



## Aiven for Apache Kafka Pros & Cons
**What users like:**

- Users appreciate the **easy setup** of Aiven for Apache Kafka, simplifying the start of their real-time data projects. (29 reviews)
- Users commend the **ease of use** of Aiven for Apache Kafka, appreciating the straightforward setup and minimal training needed. (23 reviews)
- Users appreciate the **smooth scaling** of Aiven for Apache Kafka, enhancing their efficiency without infrastructure concerns. (17 reviews)
- Users appreciate the **management ease** of Aiven for Apache Kafka, enabling quick deployment and hassle-free operation. (14 reviews)
- Users value the **high reliability** of Aiven for Apache Kafka, benefiting from a fully managed, easy-to-use platform. (13 reviews)
- Users value the **24/7 customer support** of Aiven for Apache Kafka, ensuring timely assistance and expert guidance. (12 reviews)
- Users appreciate the **deployment ease** of Aiven for Apache Kafka, simplifying management and saving valuable time. (11 reviews)
- Scalability (11 reviews)
- Users appreciate the **user-friendly interface** of Aiven for Apache Kafka, finding it easy to manage and configure. (10 reviews)
- Maintenance Ease (9 reviews)

**What users dislike:**

- Users find Aiven for Apache Kafka **expensive** as costs rise sharply with increased usage, complicating scalability. (27 reviews)
- Users express frustration with the **poor documentation** , which complicates advanced configurations and slows down the process. (8 reviews)
- Users note the **limited features** for advanced configurations compared to self-managed setups, impacting their control and flexibility. (7 reviews)
- Users find the **operational complexity** of Aiven for Apache Kafka overwhelming, requiring dedicated resources and extensive manual work. (6 reviews)
- Users find Aiven for Apache Kafka **not user-friendly** , citing complexities in configurations and minor UI glitches affecting usability. (5 reviews)
- Limited Control (4 reviews)
- Users struggle with **data management issues** , citing missing features and clunky configuration tools that hinder integration. (3 reviews)
- Users face **integration issues** with Aiven for Apache Kafka, particularly regarding configuration management and advanced features. (3 reviews)
- Cloud Compatibility (2 reviews)
- Poor Customer Support (2 reviews)

## Aiven for Apache Kafka Reviews
  ### 1. Was very usefull

**Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars

**Reviewed by:** Pablo C. | Accounts Payable Coordinator, Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.)

**Reviewed Date:** June 30, 2025

**What do you like best about Aiven for Apache Kafka?**

It was easy to apply and I Did not need Major training

**What do you dislike about Aiven for Apache Kafka?**

Nothing. I think is a good tool to connect modules

**What problems is Aiven for Apache Kafka solving and how is that benefiting you?**

I used the tool for my Master degree, I Did a big data envoirment

  ### 2. Reliable Managed Kafka Service with Easy Setup

**Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars

**Reviewed by:** Verified User in Computer Software | Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.)

**Reviewed Date:** October 02, 2025

**What do you like best about Aiven for Apache Kafka?**

I’ve been using Aiven for Apache Kafka to manage our event streaming needs, and overall it has been a very positive experience. The biggest benefit for me is how quick and simple it was to get a production-ready Kafka cluster running without having to deal with servers or complicated configurations. The platform takes care of scaling, monitoring, and updates, which saves a lot of time for our team.

I also like the integrations with tools like Prometheus and Grafana, since they give us good visibility into performance and metrics. The reliability has been solid so far, and their support team has been responsive whenever I had questions.

On the downside, the cost can be higher than running Kafka on our own infrastructure, and sometimes I wish there were more advanced configuration options available. Still, for most use cases, the trade-off is worth it because it lets us focus on development rather than infrastructure management.

Overall, I would recommend Aiven for anyone who wants a stable, fully managed Kafka service and doesn’t want the hassle of maintaining it themselves.

**What do you dislike about Aiven for Apache Kafka?**

I don’t have problem with anything by using it . Everything was easy ,clear and good . I recommend it for everyone and iam sure they will love it so much

**What problems is Aiven for Apache Kafka solving and how is that benefiting you?**

Aiven for Apache Kafka solves the problem of managing and maintaining Kafka infrastructure. Normally, setting up and operating Kafka clusters requires a lot of time, effort, and expertise, but with Aiven it’s handled automatically. This has benefited me by giving my team a stable, production-ready Kafka service without the headaches of server management. It also makes scaling much easier as data traffic grows, and the built-in monitoring helps us identify and fix issues quickly. Overall, it lets us focus more on building applications instead of spending resources on infrastructure.

  ### 3. Does its job perfectly.

**Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars

**Reviewed by:** SHUBHAM ASHISH S. | Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.)

**Reviewed Date:** July 10, 2024

**What do you like best about Aiven for Apache Kafka?**

What distinguishes aiven from other database providers is it's super quick to get a cluster up and running, followed by a generous 300$ coupon so you can tinker around and utilise the platform wholeheartedly. It also gives an option to run upto 25 clusters, so even in a free plan you could power your 25 side projects for free, which the other providers restrict to just one. I sincerely love their service and would continue to be a user for them.

**What do you dislike about Aiven for Apache Kafka?**

I think perhaps they could optimize their cluster closing time. Tho fast, I wish it'd be quicker.

**What problems is Aiven for Apache Kafka solving and how is that benefiting you?**

I could create multiple database clusters up and running and power my side projects hassle free.

  ### 4. An easy-to-use, cost-effective managed Kafka service.

**Rating:** 3.5/5.0 stars

**Reviewed by:** Verified User in Hospital & Health Care | Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.)

**Reviewed Date:** June 04, 2024

**What do you like best about Aiven for Apache Kafka?**

I use Aiven for Kafka because I wanted a 'vanilla' Kafka installation that was supported and maintained by others. This avoids the overhead of operating it myself but also ensures we have a native Kafka deployment, without the overhead of adopting a more elaborate binary-compatible platform for features we are unlikely to require, and at great cost.

Aiven for Kafka was simple to set up and establish within our infrastructure, and comes with a range of extensibility options that ensures we are able to grow our offering in future (for example, built-in support for Kafka Connect and schema registry are bonuses we may want to use in future). I am especially pleased with the real-time dashboard updates in Aiven's console and the ability to manipulate services via Terraform, as this enables Aiven to plug into our existing cloud operations architecture easily.

Aiven's costs for its services are transparent, which is appreciated in a world of used car salesman 'talk to us for pricing' models which add friction to the purchasing process of otherwise commodity services.

The service is well documented and does what it says on the tin, so there has been no need to speak with support at any time during its operation; it just works.

**What do you dislike about Aiven for Apache Kafka?**

Some capabilities are missing or clunky, especially on configuration management and security. A key feature I wish Aiven for Kafka supported is the ability to authenticate via mTLS using our own root of trust, as this would enable the Aiven for Kafka service to be embedded with our existing service mesh mechanism (a feature I have relied upon in past self-hosted deployments). At present, we must distribute login details to each consumer of the service, which adds frustrating amounts of overhead in generating, distributing and managing the lifecycle of secret material.

Additionally, the ability to embed Kafka into our existing control-loop based declarative workflow for setting up users, topics and ACLs would be appreciated, i.e. by allowing easier adoption of Kubernetes-based operators for declaring these resources. There are third-party solutions but they require customisation or are not intended for use in this model, which makes them tricky to adopt.

More generally, the Aiven Terraform provider would benefit from some significant overhaul to make resource names more consistent and improve the documentation around certain behaviours. The Aiven team appears to be in the process of migrating abstractions within the provider around 'organization' objects, with old and new abstractions present and it not being clear that one has been deprecated.

**What problems is Aiven for Apache Kafka solving and how is that benefiting you?**

Aiven for Kafka is providing a hosted service to remove the obligation on us to run Kafka ourselves, which would otherwise have added huge overhead in running infrastructure, and also huge risk to the business in terms of justifying ongoing maintenance activities. Aiven performs this for us, so we just use the service without thinking very much about the operational needs of keeping it running, maintained and highly available.

  ### 5. Easy to create and test different configurations

**Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars

**Reviewed by:** ☆ ☆ Jim Z. | AWS Solutions Architect / Engineering Manager / Technical Program Manager, Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.)

**Reviewed Date:** August 09, 2024

**What do you like best about Aiven for Apache Kafka?**

The website makes it easy to create and test different configurations.  I also had an occation to use support and they where very responsive and helped me resolve my questions quickly.

**What do you dislike about Aiven for Apache Kafka?**

For lower, not production envirments I would like to be able to create smaller configurations to cost optimize.  Especially in development where one engineer maybe using the brokers for small tests.

**What problems is Aiven for Apache Kafka solving and how is that benefiting you?**

Creating multiple non-production environments to support our SDLC.

  ### 6. We used managed services with Aiven

**Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars

**Reviewed by:** Dipin  S. | Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.)

**Reviewed Date:** September 18, 2024

**What do you like best about Aiven for Apache Kafka?**

We used mongo and kafka managed services from Aiven. Things are quick. Ochestration has done with in few clicks. No need to worry about monitoring and all everything is self-managed.

**What do you dislike about Aiven for Apache Kafka?**

Data transfer charges between cloud accounts are a thing to worry. Need to check it further

**What problems is Aiven for Apache Kafka solving and how is that benefiting you?**

We got a managed kafka cluster. Managing a cluster on on-prem with having critical data is a huge task and need more bandwidth but Aiven made it easy

  ### 7. An evolving product

**Rating:** 4.0/5.0 stars

**Reviewed by:** Verified User in Food Production | Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.)

**Reviewed Date:** September 03, 2024

**What do you like best about Aiven for Apache Kafka?**

The services are straight forward to configure, theres a lot of documentation which helps one resolve doubts, however if this is not enough one can reach customer support to ask for guidance.

**What do you dislike about Aiven for Apache Kafka?**

There are two features missing which i found relevant they are governance tools and  the Pay-as-you-use pricing model. I think that implementing these 2 things will create a more valuable product.

**What problems is Aiven for Apache Kafka solving and how is that benefiting you?**

As a managed cluster it  provides the running service with its infrastructure which is very valuable for us as we can focus on improving our event oriented architecture and team integration. Also  cluster updates and administration is something we need to concern less.

  ### 8. An easy solution to use for Kafka

**Rating:** 2.5/5.0 stars

**Reviewed by:** Verified User in Commercial Real Estate | Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.)

**Reviewed Date:** September 24, 2024

**What do you like best about Aiven for Apache Kafka?**

Convenience and ease of use would strike me as the striking feature.

**What do you dislike about Aiven for Apache Kafka?**

Too expensive for me especially if you are an up and coming business, can not compete with rivals

**What problems is Aiven for Apache Kafka solving and how is that benefiting you?**

If you would like to have things maintained for you and do not want to tackle with resource allocation, performance etc... It is a good option.

  ### 9. Simply scalability with Aiven

**Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars

**Reviewed by:** Pasquale M. | Devops Manager, Enterprise (> 1000 emp.)

**Reviewed Date:** December 06, 2023

**What do you like best about Aiven for Apache Kafka?**

Aiven Kafka services offer a plethora of advantages that significantly elevate the efficiency and reliability of data streaming and processing. In my opinion, the primary benefit is the ease of scalability. With Aiven Kafka, I can effortlessly scale their clusters to handle varying workloads and accommodate growing data volumes. This eliminates the need for manual intervention and ensures seamless performance even during periods of increased demand.

**What do you dislike about Aiven for Apache Kafka?**

Less control over the configuration and tuning of the Kafka cluster. If your use case requires fine-grained control over Kafka settings, a managed service might not be the best fit

**What problems is Aiven for Apache Kafka solving and how is that benefiting you?**

Aiven kafka allows abstracting away the underlying infrastructure and operational complexities. This allows my team to focus on building and managing applications rather than dealing with the intricacies of Kafka cluster deployment and maintenance.

**Official Response from Markos Sfikas:**

> Hi Pasquale, 

Thanks for your review and trust in Aiven for Apache Kafka. 

It's great to hear you are enjoying the ease of scalability with Aiven for Apache Kafka and your team can easily adjust the Kafka clusters depending on data traffic. 

Thanks again for your trust in Aiven Platform and Aiven for Apache Kafka. 

Markos 

  ### 10. So far so good, pretty intuitive

**Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars

**Reviewed by:** Verified User in Consumer Goods | Enterprise (> 1000 emp.)

**Reviewed Date:** August 23, 2024

**What do you like best about Aiven for Apache Kafka?**

The ease of use and speed of configurating. Customer Support is also great.

**What do you dislike about Aiven for Apache Kafka?**

So far, nothing stands out as a clear negative.

**What problems is Aiven for Apache Kafka solving and how is that benefiting you?**

Helping to reduce costs

  ### 11. Great initiative that surmises the upside of using fully managed Apache Kafka with Aiven

**Rating:** 4.0/5.0 stars

**Reviewed by:** Redowan D. | Software Engineer, Enterprise (> 1000 emp.)

**Reviewed Date:** December 04, 2023

**What do you like best about Aiven for Apache Kafka?**

- Fully managed 
- Fully featured 
- Transparent cost
- Takes little more than a few minutes to get up and running
- Great customer support
- Easy to integrate other toolings

**What do you dislike about Aiven for Apache Kafka?**

- Smaller community
- Less known than Confluent Kafka

**What problems is Aiven for Apache Kafka solving and how is that benefiting you?**

We wanted a fully managed solution with minimal vendor-locking where all our pre-existing OSS tooling would work without additional code-level refactoring. Aiven solved that for us.

**Official Response from Markos Sfikas:**

> Hi Redowan, 

Amazing to hear that you are enjoying Aiven for Apache Kafka as a way to simplify the way you manage your Kafka environment. 
Great to see that our compatibility with open source Apache Kafka allowed you to move your pre-existing OSS tooling without any code level changes. 

Thanks again for your review and trust in the Aiven platform! 
Best 
Markos 

  ### 12. Apache Kafka first time

**Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars

**Reviewed by:** Jimmy L. | Dev ops, Enterprise (> 1000 emp.)

**Reviewed Date:** December 05, 2023

**What do you like best about Aiven for Apache Kafka?**

Managed services like Aiven often provide a simplified setup and configuration process, making it easier for users to deploy and manage Apache Kafka clusters without the need for extensive expertise.
Aiven typically takes care of the underlying infrastructure, handling tasks such as maintenance, scaling, and security updates. This allows users to focus more on their applications and less on managing the Kafka infrastructure.

**What do you dislike about Aiven for Apache Kafka?**

Some users may prefer more control and customization over their Kafka clusters, and a managed service may limit certain configuration options compared to a self-managed setup. Evaluate whether the level of control provided by Aiven aligns with your specific requirements.

**What problems is Aiven for Apache Kafka solving and how is that benefiting you?**

Aiven simplifies the deployment and management of Kafka clusters, allowing users to focus on their applications without the need for extensive Kafka infrastructure knowledge.
Aiven automates routine maintenance tasks, such as software updates and scaling operations, making it easier for users to ensure their Kafka clusters are up-to-date and appropriately sized.

**Official Response from Markos Sfikas:**

> Hi Jimmy, 

Thanks for your review and trust in Aiven for Apache Kafka! 
We are glad to hear you are enjoying our fully managed Kafka service. 

Thank you for your trust in the Aiven Platform
Best 
Markos 

  ### 13. Effortless kafka management using Aiven

**Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars

**Reviewed by:** Verified User in Food Production | Enterprise (> 1000 emp.)

**Reviewed Date:** December 10, 2023

**What do you like best about Aiven for Apache Kafka?**

Aiven provides highly available Kafka features and significant redundancy. Kafka clusters boast automatic replication across multiple availability zones, guaranteeing top-notch data durability with minimal downtime. 

Aiven provides end-to-end data encryption for data in transit and at rest, as well as SSO login, making it a secure choice for sensitive data.

Aiven offers seamless integration with popular tools like Prometheus and Grafana for monitoring and alerting. It simplifies the process of monitoring Kafka cluster health.

**What do you dislike about Aiven for Apache Kafka?**

Aiven abstracts most of the underlying infrastructure management, which can be both an advantage and a drawback. However, engineers with more experience may desire more control over Kafka configurations and cluster settings, which is not possible.

The logs for Kafka Connect are not separated per connector, making it difficult to retrieve logs for a specific connector.

Sometimes, the Aiven User Interface can be buggy, particularly when it comes to Kafka connectors. These connectors may display incorrect statuses, causing confusion and potential issues.

**What problems is Aiven for Apache Kafka solving and how is that benefiting you?**

Aiven for Apache Kafka is helping our business solve a few key problems. Firstly, it provides a reliable and scalable platform for managing our data streaming needs. With Aiven, we are able to easily set up and configure Kafka clusters, and the platform takes care of the underlying infrastructure, ensuring high availability and fault tolerance.

Additionally, Aiven for Apache Kafka provides a range of advanced features and integrations, such as support for multiple protocols and connectors, which allows us to easily integrate Kafka with other systems and tools in our tech stack.

Overall, using Aiven for Apache Kafka has helped us streamline our data streaming processes and improve the reliability and scalability of our infrastructure.

  ### 14. Aiven is a great tool

**Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars

**Reviewed by:** Verified User in Information Technology and Services | Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.)

**Reviewed Date:** November 08, 2024

**What do you like best about Aiven for Apache Kafka?**

Stable platform with intuitive UI for managing Kafka clusters, topics, consumer groups etc.

**What do you dislike about Aiven for Apache Kafka?**

I personally have not experienced any issues so far.

**What problems is Aiven for Apache Kafka solving and how is that benefiting you?**

Cannot share due to NDA

  ### 15. User-friendly experience

**Rating:** 4.0/5.0 stars

**Reviewed by:** Ismael M. | Junior NOC Engineer, Enterprise (> 1000 emp.)

**Reviewed Date:** August 14, 2024

**What do you like best about Aiven for Apache Kafka?**

Very easy to use platform with amazing features and ease of use.

**What do you dislike about Aiven for Apache Kafka?**

Sometimes product updates end up flooding the screen

**What problems is Aiven for Apache Kafka solving and how is that benefiting you?**

By providing secure and increased observability for data infrastructure

  ### 16. Best for business requirement fulfil

**Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars

**Reviewed by:** khagendra p. | Enterprise (> 1000 emp.)

**Reviewed Date:** January 18, 2024

**What do you like best about Aiven for Apache Kafka?**

Users often share insights into the platform's strengths, such as ease of use, reliability, performance, customer support, and additional features. Keep in mind that opinions can vary based on individual needs and use cases.

**What do you dislike about Aiven for Apache Kafka?**

To get the most accurate and up-to-date information about any potential drawbacks or user criticisms of the Aiven Platform, consider checking recent customer reviews, forum discussions, or other online communities where users share their experiences. This will provide you with insights into both the strengths and weaknesses of the platform, helping you make an informed decision based on your specific requirements

**What problems is Aiven for Apache Kafka solving and how is that benefiting you?**

Simplified Management: Aiven simplifies the often complex process of deploying and managing open-source data infrastructure. This can reduce the operational burden on businesses, allowing them to focus more on their core applications and services.

  ### 17. A good alternate for Cloud SQL

**Rating:** 4.0/5.0 stars

**Reviewed by:** Avik R. | SDM, Enterprise (> 1000 emp.)

**Reviewed Date:** May 01, 2024

**What do you like best about Aiven for Apache Kafka?**

The infrastructure setup is comparatively easier and upside being cost is lower

**What do you dislike about Aiven for Apache Kafka?**

Can't comment on downsides as we are doing the infra migration to Aiven for the first time.

**What problems is Aiven for Apache Kafka solving and how is that benefiting you?**

Mainly pricing and also it is enterprise wise adoption

  ### 18. Good platform for hosting and managing Kafka, w/ some support issues

**Rating:** 3.5/5.0 stars

**Reviewed by:** Verified User in Information Technology and Services | Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.)

**Reviewed Date:** December 06, 2023

**What do you like best about Aiven for Apache Kafka?**

Overall Aiven provides a good and relatively stable platform for hosting and managing Kafka clusters. The console is easy to use and provides clear tools for admins to create/delete/etc topics, ACLs and users, among others. Terraform (IAC) resources are available and well-documented.

**What do you dislike about Aiven for Apache Kafka?**

We faced a few unexpected technical issues/difficulties a few times. While the support channels were fairly responsive most of the time, there were a few ocassions when it felt slow for a number of days, while feeling somewhat left in the dark - more clarity would've been appreciated in those instances.

**What problems is Aiven for Apache Kafka solving and how is that benefiting you?**

Removing the need to directly install and manage the underlying infrastrcture of our Kafka platform and providing intuitive UI for managing our Kafka projects. This allows us more time to focus on providing a robust Kafka service to the teams in the company, and move faster towards our goals with Kafka solutions.

  ### 19. Aiven is an amazing tool!

**Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars

**Reviewed by:** Nikhil  M. | Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.)

**Reviewed Date:** August 21, 2023

**What do you like best about Aiven for Apache Kafka?**

One cool thing I really like about Aiven is how it simplifies managing Kafka clusters. The user interface is super user-friendly, even for folks who aren't total tech wizards. Plus, the whole setup process is a breeze, and they handle the nitty-gritty maintenance stuff for you. Time-saver, for sure! I have used it for production uses of my company and also for deploying some of my own development features.

**What do you dislike about Aiven for Apache Kafka?**

While Aiven offers a lot of positives, one area that might benefit from improvement is the pricing structure. Depending on usage, costs can add up. It would be great to see more flexibility in pricing plans to cater to a broader range of users, especially for development purposes.

**What problems is Aiven for Apache Kafka solving and how is that benefiting you?**

We use Aiven as a stand-in tool to help transfer data from one application to another. The second application is used to combine lots of data and is to be used as an aggregate db, to prevent running long queries on the primary DB.

  ### 20. Aiven for Apache Kafka Provides an Easy Way for Managing Kafka Cluster

**Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars

**Reviewed by:** Muhammad Z. | Blogger, Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.)

**Reviewed Date:** December 04, 2023

**What do you like best about Aiven for Apache Kafka?**

Aiven for Apache Kafka provides great UI for managing Kafka, from managing Kafka clusters, topics, consumer groups, and many configurations. It also supports multiple authentication, not only providing security but also a convenient way to interact with Kafka.

**What do you dislike about Aiven for Apache Kafka?**

Their UI could be slow, especially when you have many things to manage. It's a trade-off for the great UI.

**What problems is Aiven for Apache Kafka solving and how is that benefiting you?**

Managing the Kafka cluster is hard, and Aiven for Apache Kafka makes it easier for developers to manage it.

**Official Response from Markos Sfikas:**

> Hi Muhamad, 

Glad to hear you are enjoying Aiven for Apache Kafka as a way to simplify how you manage your Kafka clusters! 
Thank you for your review and trust in Aiven for Apache Kafka.

Markos 

  ### 21. Simple and intuitive

**Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars

**Reviewed by:** Verified User in Computer Software | Enterprise (> 1000 emp.)

**Reviewed Date:** May 02, 2024

**What do you like best about Aiven for Apache Kafka?**

The UI/ console is very simple and intuitive eleminating abstracting complexities whic meks it easy to use, understnd and visualise. The Terraform support also makes the life of developer easy.

**What do you dislike about Aiven for Apache Kafka?**

Though not frequent and I personally have not experienced any, I have the team complain about slow message processing particularly in non-prod environments.

**What problems is Aiven for Apache Kafka solving and how is that benefiting you?**

We require a highly available messaging queue for audit logging evenet processing. Aiven provides both availability and scalability for this purpose.

  ### 22. Reliable and Responsive Kafka Hosting Service

**Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars

**Reviewed by:** Carlos A. | Senior Principal Software Engineer, Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.)

**Reviewed Date:** May 21, 2023

**What do you like best about Aiven for Apache Kafka?**

We have been running Aiven’s Apache Kafka service in our Industrial IoT data ingestion system. They have been a reliable and responsive partner for our organization's event-driven architecture, enabling us to run our systems smoothly with a small team of engineers.

Their responsiveness to customer support requests is remarkable. Whenever we've encountered issues or needed assistance, their team has promptly and effectively addressed our concerns. With their deep expertise in Kafka, it is reassuring to have their knowledgeable professionals available to assist us whenever needed.

**What do you dislike about Aiven for Apache Kafka?**

The one limitation in using Aiven (or any managed Kafka service for that matter) is the difficulty to run custom connectors or plugins in your cluster. I understand the difficulty involved in taking in external code while providing gurantees or security and stability. Regardless, the benefits outweight this limitation and we are willing to pay the price of running our own little Connect cluster for our custom code as a satellite.

**What problems is Aiven for Apache Kafka solving and how is that benefiting you?**

Aiven Apache Kafka powers our Industrial IoT data ingestion services. With Kafka we can ingest large quantities of data reliably while mantaining a lot of flexibility to evolve our data pipelines over time. With Kafka at the core of our architecture we can add or update our systems to scale or meet new requirements with reliability.

  ### 23. Everything has been good so far

**Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars

**Reviewed by:** Verified User in Hospitality | Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.)

**Reviewed Date:** August 01, 2023

**What do you like best about Aiven for Apache Kafka?**

Simple to setup, reliable. I enjoy the debugging features on to console, such as viewing message queues, so I don't have to set up my codebase to check everything is working ok. In fact I think I would enjoy any additional features added to the console for making setting up, debugging, viewing messages etc. easier.

**What do you dislike about Aiven for Apache Kafka?**

We are a mid-stage start-up and still having trouble utilizing all of the free tier capacity. To be honest as a poor start-up (especially if we had started using aiven earlier) we would prefer to have a less reliable cheaper instance at first that we can scale up later once we need proper reliability.

**What problems is Aiven for Apache Kafka solving and how is that benefiting you?**

We can stream messages from our IoT devices to a single endpoint and process them in an orderly manner in vertically scaled instances.

We have a fairly simple tech stack and Kafka is the correct tool for the task.

  ### 24. Aiven makes light work of an otherwise rather complex solution.

**Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars

**Reviewed by:** Brian W. | Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.)

**Reviewed Date:** July 27, 2023

**What do you like best about Aiven for Apache Kafka?**

I've had to run Kafka clusters in the past and had to dedicate specialist teams and resources just to kee the lights on. In contrast, I set up my cluster in Aiven when I first joined and I haven't had to touch it--it just works! Saves me countless hours and resources!

**What do you dislike about Aiven for Apache Kafka?**

There isn't much to dislike when it quite literally runs in the background. So, maybe not really a "dislike" so much as a request: custom domain mains for Kafka clusters. I use a single cluster in a multi-tenant environment; I give each tenant their own topics and secure them that way, but it would be awesome if I could whack my own domain in front of the cluster!

**What problems is Aiven for Apache Kafka solving and how is that benefiting you?**

We use Apache Kafka for secure, real-time communication for our multi-tenant environment. We separate the tenants using topics which are secured to each one, and Avro templates to normalise the data before it hits our back end. This makes our back end development super easy.

**Official Response from Markos Sfikas:**

> Hi Brian, 

Thanks for the review and trust in Aiven for Apache Kafka! We are glad to hear that Aiven for Apache Kafka saves time and resources for your team and organization. 
I have passed on your feedback regarding custom domain names for Kafka clusters and will inform you once this is available in the future. 
P.S. For fin-grained topic, ACL and user management, you can check Aiven's Open Source project Klaw, which provides data governance for Apache Kafka. 
Link here: https://www.klaw-project.io/
Best 
Markos 

  ### 25. Enterprise grade solution, professional service, startup friendly

**Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars

**Reviewed by:** Burak O. | CEO, Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.)

**Reviewed Date:** December 21, 2023

**What do you like best about Aiven for Apache Kafka?**

Aiven not only provides a really effortless to set-up, highly flexible to customise and incredibly robust to operate platform but also offers white-glove support and customer service. They understand, appreciate and tailor their approach to start-up's needs and wants, which is invaluable.

**What do you dislike about Aiven for Apache Kafka?**

To be perfectly honest, nothing comes to mind aside from slight confusion in pronouncing Aiven:)

**What problems is Aiven for Apache Kafka solving and how is that benefiting you?**

Streaming data into our algorithms in an effortless, efficient and cost-effective way. They are the best-in-class in all those aspects.

  ### 26. Easy and straight forward setup

**Rating:** 3.5/5.0 stars

**Reviewed by:** Francisco E. | Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.)

**Reviewed Date:** October 11, 2023

**What do you like best about Aiven for Apache Kafka?**

Being able to use terraform to setup the kafka and kafka connectors had been quite useful. Everything can be automated and scripted. We can upscale at ease

**What do you dislike about Aiven for Apache Kafka?**

The terraform library could be improve to avoid so many terraform lists for kafka components, etc. and instead use just mapped objects

**What problems is Aiven for Apache Kafka solving and how is that benefiting you?**

I dont need to setup the whole kafka cluster and nodes and can be saved a lot of time doing it and mantaining it

**Official Response from Markos Sfikas:**

> Thanks for your review Francisco! 
Glad to see you are enjoying Aiven's Terraform provider! 

You can directly add your feedback here: https://ideas.aiven.io/

Our product team is reviewing user feedback on an ongoing basis and will be able to get back to you with an update. 

Thanks for your trust in Aiven for Apache Kafka! 
Best 
Markos 

  ### 27. Humble but honest tool for Kafka

**Rating:** 3.5/5.0 stars

**Reviewed by:** Verified User in Gambling & Casinos | Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.)

**Reviewed Date:** July 17, 2023

**What do you like best about Aiven for Apache Kafka?**

This tool is not something overloaded with features. I have used many tools for various purposes around software development, it's not like datadaodge where unexperienced user would be overwhelmed with options and colors. The user interface is friendly, the most important things you need are available for user to see. Great thing is schema comparator, works like good old JSON Formatter

**What do you dislike about Aiven for Apache Kafka?**

I don't think it's something on Aiven side although I noticed that sometimes site is not responding and topics are loading very very slow, but like I said, might be caused by the fact the infrastructure I work with is enourmous. There is a thing though that I notices inconvenient. When trying to fetch messages the UI loads them (sometimes I get timeout, but that's fine) although then it is impossible to perform any search and it might be that you need to manually click thorough hundrets of nodes to look for something

**What problems is Aiven for Apache Kafka solving and how is that benefiting you?**

Solving communication in microservices architecture type system. Using messages is beneficial for ensuring close to real time reaction to action performed and also storing real time state of objects

  ### 28. It is always accessible and never faced any downtime

**Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars

**Reviewed by:** Adam . | Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.)

**Reviewed Date:** July 27, 2023

**What do you like best about Aiven for Apache Kafka?**

the ui present everything that you need for development and you can simply use ui to manage everything on the kafka rather than using console and also the notifications that its giving about for example expiring certs or etc is cool

**What do you dislike about Aiven for Apache Kafka?**

the really bad problem is that whenever you open the ui with a lot of components in it like list of schemas the ui become really really slow and sometime unusable :(

**What problems is Aiven for Apache Kafka solving and how is that benefiting you?**

the best thing that aiven is providing is the ui pannel that we are using it a lot rather than using cli and also the notifications about the errors is cool too

  ### 29. Great managed Kafka solution

**Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars

**Reviewed by:** Janek W. | IT-Experte, Enterprise (> 1000 emp.)

**Reviewed Date:** December 07, 2023

**What do you like best about Aiven for Apache Kafka?**

- easy to operate
- upgrades and maintenance without any big effort
- open source version of Kafka
- offers a lot of options

**What do you dislike about Aiven for Apache Kafka?**

- not clearly communicated costs for reserved IPs (but costs are very small)

**What problems is Aiven for Apache Kafka solving and how is that benefiting you?**

price updates

**Official Response from Markos Sfikas:**

> Hi Janek, 

Thank you for your review and trust in Aiven for Apache Kafka.
It's great to hear Aiven's fully managed solution is easy to operate and provides effortless upgrades and maintenance for you and your team. 
Thank you again for your trust in the Aiven platform! 

Best Regards
Markos 

  ### 30. Apache Kafka

**Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars

**Reviewed by:** Nasir Q. | Application Architect, Enterprise (> 1000 emp.)

**Reviewed Date:** February 14, 2024

**What do you like best about Aiven for Apache Kafka?**

Low maintenance: Aiven is low maintenance and doesn't require manual upgrades or scaling.
Security standards: Aiven has a long list of security standard compliances.

**What do you dislike about Aiven for Apache Kafka?**

Operational complexity: Aiven has significant shortcomings in operational complexity.

**What problems is Aiven for Apache Kafka solving and how is that benefiting you?**

managing and marshalling of messages based of kafka

  ### 31. Aiven for Apache Kafka is transparent and easy to operate.

**Rating:** 4.0/5.0 stars

**Reviewed by:** Verified User in Information Technology and Services | Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.)

**Reviewed Date:** June 29, 2023

**What do you like best about Aiven for Apache Kafka?**

Aiven offers a diverse range of tools for interacting with their platform. I utilized Terraform to create a Kafka cluster, employed the CLI to extract the certificates, and utilized the console UI to create some testing topics. Additionally, Aiven allows us to access various metrics and logs from the instances, with the option to export them to Prometheus, among other possibilities.

**What do you dislike about Aiven for Apache Kafka?**

The Azure Privatelink feature needs to be more mature, it is still in the beta stage, and for us, this would be a requirement for production deployments, there was some features missing in their Terraform provider. 
But we also configured VPC Peering that helped us to convey it.

**What problems is Aiven for Apache Kafka solving and how is that benefiting you?**

In the current scenario, we were using another Kafka like cloud solution, and the migration to Aiven Kafka helped us to scale and to easy apply patches and version updates.

  ### 32. it's reliable and upgrade process is safe without any side effect

**Rating:** 4.0/5.0 stars

**Reviewed by:** Seyedesmaeil R. | Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.)

**Reviewed Date:** July 27, 2023

**What do you like best about Aiven for Apache Kafka?**

it's a really good service to use. fully compatible with terraform and we also have vpc peering for internal connection between services and kafka. they also provide kafka connector.

**What do you dislike about Aiven for Apache Kafka?**

we use apache kafka for 3 years without downtime. but i think logs is not good enough to trouble shoot and they can provide better ui fo user to have a better logs Visualization.

**What problems is Aiven for Apache Kafka solving and how is that benefiting you?**

helped me to provide message streaming between backend services. i also use kafka to provide pubsub system between aiven and google. i use kafka connector wich is really good to communicate with kafka.

**Official Response from Markos Sfikas:**

> Hi Seyedesmaeil, 

Thanks for the review and trust in Aiven for Apache Kafka.
Great to hear that you enjoy using Aiven for Apache Kafka with Terraform and you leverage our VPC peering. 
I will pass on your feedback regarding log visualization to our team and will inform you once there is an update available. 

Best
Markos 

  ### 33. Managed Kafka solution for enterprise

**Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars

**Reviewed by:** Upendra Rao V. | Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.)

**Reviewed Date:** August 21, 2023

**What do you like best about Aiven for Apache Kafka?**

1. Solution works right out of the box. Easy to setup and scale a cluster.
2. Better integrations for metrics and logs
3. Good technical and sales support

**What do you dislike about Aiven for Apache Kafka?**

1. Ability to manage users with more granular access abstractions
2. Ability to manage SSH client7server certificates to integrate with other systems
3. KafkaConnect monitoring and connector management

**What problems is Aiven for Apache Kafka solving and how is that benefiting you?**

1. Management of Kafka infrastructure 
2. Keeping up with latest updates in Apache Kafka
3. We are more productive while focussing more on business specific problems

**Official Response from Markos Sfikas:**

> Thanks Upendra. 

Great to see you have a good experience with Aiven for Apache Kafka. 
You can directly submit your feedback regarding granular access control, client certificates and Kafka connect monitoring directly on Aiven Ideas so our product team can review and work on the relevant functionality.
Here is the link for you: https://ideas.aiven.io/

Best 
Markos

  ### 34. Dev team are pleased

**Rating:** 4.0/5.0 stars

**Reviewed by:** Gidon K. | Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.)

**Reviewed Date:** November 19, 2023

**What do you like best about Aiven for Apache Kafka?**

Managed solution, ease of use, delegated access.

**What do you dislike about Aiven for Apache Kafka?**

not much. most usage is by dev team which are happy. so happy in fact we are considering as the devops team to replace our log shipping tool to Aiven kafka as well.

**What problems is Aiven for Apache Kafka solving and how is that benefiting you?**

currently we use FluentD for writing business logs to s3 buckets, and there are some limitations to this solution.
we are interested in a more complete managed solution which Aiven Kafka might hold

**Official Response from Markos Sfikas:**

> Hi Gidon, 

Thanks for your review and trust in Aiven for Apache Kafka! 

We are glad to hear your dev team is enjoying Aiven's fully managed solution for Apache Kafka! 

If you consider additional use cases for Apache Kafka, our solutions engineering team can be a great resource in figuring out the best way forward. 

You can contact our team directly here: https://aiven.io/contact

Thanks again for your trust in Aiven! 
Markos 

  ### 35. Software engineer

**Rating:** 4.0/5.0 stars

**Reviewed by:** Yaozhi  L. | Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.)

**Reviewed Date:** July 27, 2023

**What do you like best about Aiven for Apache Kafka?**

I work with the aiven dashboard a lot to check the running status of our platform. I do like the UI a lot, very intuitive and easy to use.

**What do you dislike about Aiven for Apache Kafka?**

We have a lot of topics, everytime there's something wrong and I feel its related to a topic been blocked for some reason. Its not easy to find that topic in Avien. Because it loads lags only if I click into the topic.

**What problems is Aiven for Apache Kafka solving and how is that benefiting you?**

Aiven hosts the kafka for us. So we don't need to spend time building and maintaining our own Kafka service.

**Official Response from Markos Sfikas:**

> Hi Yaozhi, 

Thanks for the review and trust in Aiven for Apache Kafka. 
Great to see that your team can reduce the time to build and maintain your Kafka infrastructure with Aiven. 
I will share your feedback with our product organization and let you know when I hear back. 

Thank again



  ### 36. SRE

**Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars

**Reviewed by:** Verified User in Financial Services | Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.)

**Reviewed Date:** December 08, 2023

**What do you like best about Aiven for Apache Kafka?**

One of the most important features Aiven compares to other competitors:
- Latest technology trend
- Instantly customer support and guidance
- Various services to offer
- Fair pricing

**What do you dislike about Aiven for Apache Kafka?**

- Some of the document is outdated or instruction unclear

**What problems is Aiven for Apache Kafka solving and how is that benefiting you?**

Aiven Kafka offer:
- no downtime when upgrade or maintenance
- lots of features like connector, vpc peering
- fair pricing
- support SSO

  ### 37. Good for quick start, good as managed solution

**Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars

**Reviewed by:** Verified User in Computer Software | Enterprise (> 1000 emp.)

**Reviewed Date:** March 04, 2024

**What do you like best about Aiven for Apache Kafka?**

Managed solution, ease of use, delegated access. 
Good support. We used Kafka as a managed service.

**What do you dislike about Aiven for Apache Kafka?**

There is nothing. Engineers were happy, business objective were delivered. Now and then, you would need to report on SOC2 compliance, but this is expected for a PaaS.

**What problems is Aiven for Apache Kafka solving and how is that benefiting you?**

General purpose real-time queue solution. AWS style PaaS.

  ### 38. Good solution for Streamlined Data Processing

**Rating:** 4.0/5.0 stars

**Reviewed by:** Verified User in Mental Health Care | Enterprise (> 1000 emp.)

**Reviewed Date:** August 17, 2023

**What do you like best about Aiven for Apache Kafka?**

What I like best about Aiven for Apache Kafka is its remarkable ease of use and efficient management interface. Setting up and configuring Kafka clusters is a breeze, and the platform's user-friendly design simplifies complex processes, allowing me to focus on data processing rather than grappling with technical complexities.

**What do you dislike about Aiven for Apache Kafka?**

One aspect that I find somewhat challenging with Aiven for Apache Kafka is the pricing structure. While the service does offer great value, it could benefit from more transparent pricing tiers and clearer guidelines on how costs can scale as data demands increase. This would help users like me better anticipate and manage expenses as our data processing requirements grow.

**What problems is Aiven for Apache Kafka solving and how is that benefiting you?**

Scalability features enable seamless handling of increased data volumes. As my data processing needs grow, I can easily scale my Kafka clusters without the hassle of managing intricate scaling processes. This scalability ensures that my applications can handle spikes in demand and accommodate future growth.

  ### 39. Great managed services for our organization

**Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars

**Reviewed by:** Dawid W. | Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.)

**Reviewed Date:** July 27, 2023

**What do you like best about Aiven for Apache Kafka?**

Aiven for Apache Kafka helps our organization, and software team to forget about time-costly maintenance. Each upgrade to the LTS is effortless. Additionally, with the DataDog integration, our organization can collect all the necessary metrics and statistics that help us with maintaining our business in a healthy state.

**What do you dislike about Aiven for Apache Kafka?**

- Missing MongoDB support,
- Missing long-term contract option (With potential saving plans),
- Missing plan between migration from Startup-2 to Business-4 (It's costly migration).

**What problems is Aiven for Apache Kafka solving and how is that benefiting you?**

Streaming telemetry events from vehicles actually buses, across different kinds of microservices.

**Official Response from Markos Sfikas:**

> Hi Dawid, 

Thanks for the review and trust in Aiven for Apache Kafka! 

Great to hear that maintaining your Kafka infrastructure is a lot easier with Aiven. 

Regarding MongoDB support, we provide both source and sink connectors from/to MongoDB. You can access the full list of connectors here: https://docs.aiven.io/docs/products/kafka/kafka-connect/concepts/list-of-connector-plugins

Regarding long-term contract options as well as plan migration from Startup-2 to Business-4  you can reach out to our team and they will be able to help you. Feel free to submit this form here: https://aiven.io/contact

Thanks again
Best 
Markos 


  ### 40. Works great for everything I need as a data engineer

**Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars

**Reviewed by:** Verified User in Financial Services | Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.)

**Reviewed Date:** August 21, 2023

**What do you like best about Aiven for Apache Kafka?**

Simple and intuitive for what I need to do about 99% of the time. It doesn't take a tutorial to do the basics and necessary things required. Compared to confluent this was much easier to jump into and do what I need to do.

**What do you dislike about Aiven for Apache Kafka?**

It works well for simple things, but for more complex queries it does not. Searching for existing messages and being able to copy the message as a raw json would be a great addition.

**What problems is Aiven for Apache Kafka solving and how is that benefiting you?**

Handling of our consumers for kafka. The issue is not hosting our own kafka clusters which is awful. This makes things far easier and more productive.

  ### 41. good platform user friendly

**Rating:** 4.0/5.0 stars

**Reviewed by:** VAIBHAV H. | Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.)

**Reviewed Date:** November 15, 2023

**What do you like best about Aiven for Apache Kafka?**

grafana, prometeus and loki topics management

**What do you dislike about Aiven for Apache Kafka?**

metrics that is use to measure some traffic and consumer lag

**What problems is Aiven for Apache Kafka solving and how is that benefiting you?**

helping us manage topics and kafka

  ### 42. Simple to use solution across the cloud platform

**Rating:** 3.0/5.0 stars

**Reviewed by:** Verified User in Telecommunications | Enterprise (> 1000 emp.)

**Reviewed Date:** January 01, 2024

**What do you like best about Aiven for Apache Kafka?**

Fully managed kafka solution which is simple  to use  across multiple cloud platform with full set of kafka capabilities

**What do you dislike about Aiven for Apache Kafka?**

Struggle with the connectivity and integration with the existing onprem implementations

**What problems is Aiven for Apache Kafka solving and how is that benefiting you?**

Single solution supports multiple cloud platform

**Official Response from Markos Sfikas:**

> Hello, 

Thanks for your review and trust in Aiven for Apache Kafka. 

It's great to hear you're enjoying the simplicity of using Aiven for Apache kafka across different cloud platforms.

Can you elaborate on the challenges you are facing when connecting/integrating with existing on-prem implementations? We would like to understand the challenges you are facing and see how these can be resolved. 

You can always reach out to our support team here for additional guidance: https://docs.aiven.io/docs/platform/howto/project-support-center#support

Best 
Markos 

  ### 43. A good experience with apache kafka

**Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars

**Reviewed by:** Verified User in Sports | Enterprise (> 1000 emp.)

**Reviewed Date:** February 22, 2024

**What do you like best about Aiven for Apache Kafka?**

The simplicity to create an instance with terraform

**What do you dislike about Aiven for Apache Kafka?**

The support ticket that is frustating, no live chat in case of outage, 
However we have a slack connection with aiven so, it's not a big deal.

**What problems is Aiven for Apache Kafka solving and how is that benefiting you?**

it makes me able to communicates / expose my data to my consumers

**Official Response from Markos Sfikas:**

> Hello! 

Thanks for your review and trust in Aiven for Apache Kafka. 
Great to hear you leverage the simplicity of Aiven's tooling like Terraform to create new instances. 
I will share your feedback regarding live chat support with our team, however for more direct communication, you use Slack as you pointed correctly. 
Thanks again for your trust in Aiven! 


  ### 44. Easy to use and easier to configure

**Rating:** 4.0/5.0 stars

**Reviewed by:** Verified User in Computer Software | Enterprise (> 1000 emp.)

**Reviewed Date:** December 05, 2023

**What do you like best about Aiven for Apache Kafka?**

Ease to configure the roles and access controls. Very easy to create topic and gives you a hollistic view of configuration.

**What do you dislike about Aiven for Apache Kafka?**

Some spaces takes a lot of time to load, for example user profiles takes a lot of time to load. Sometimes, when you are trying to see the members for projects, it takes a lot more time to render list of 50 users.

**What problems is Aiven for Apache Kafka solving and how is that benefiting you?**

Ease of use of configuration in one place and also easier to monitor the health of nodes is quite useful for us.

**Official Response from Markos Sfikas:**

> Hello! 


Thanks for submitting your review. 
It's great to hear you are enjoying the ease of configuration and use of ACLs in Aiven for Apache Kafka.
Thank you for bringing to our attention the longer loading times for user profiles. We will look into this further. 
You can also contact our support team directly in the Aiven console. For more information, see here: https://docs.aiven.io/docs/platform/howto/project-support-center

Thanks again for your trust in Aiven for Apache Kafka
Markos 

  ### 45. Discovering Managed Kafka

**Rating:** 2.5/5.0 stars

**Reviewed by:** Verified User in Computer Software | Enterprise (> 1000 emp.)

**Reviewed Date:** March 15, 2024

**What do you like best about Aiven for Apache Kafka?**

Ease of management. Decrease in amount of manual effort required to manage Kafka.

**What do you dislike about Aiven for Apache Kafka?**

Lack of control and access to Kafka brokers and ability to manually change the infrastructure.

**What problems is Aiven for Apache Kafka solving and how is that benefiting you?**

Manual effort to manage Kafka.

  ### 46. Kafka working as espected

**Rating:** 3.5/5.0 stars

**Reviewed by:** Verified User in Broadcast Media | Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.)

**Reviewed Date:** November 15, 2023

**What do you like best about Aiven for Apache Kafka?**

Simple to deploy. Simple to scale. Integrates well to our monitoring services.

**What do you dislike about Aiven for Apache Kafka?**

Lack of backup/restore possibilities. Would like an option to at least have transaction logs (backup/restore option) for specific topics that requires retention.

**What problems is Aiven for Apache Kafka solving and how is that benefiting you?**

We have chosen Kafka to be the preffered event stream processing platform. It is essential for the performance of our business.

**Official Response from Markos Sfikas:**

> Thank you for your review! 
Tiered Storage in Aiven for Apache Kafka is currently in Limited Availability (more information here: https://ideas.aiven.io/discovery/roadmap/feature/127968) and will be coming to Early availability soon. 

This could be an option for larger retention times in your clusters. 
Thanks again for your trust in Aiven for Apache Kafka.

  ### 47. Easy and ready to use production grade Kafka cluster.

**Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars

**Reviewed by:** Verified User in Consumer Goods | Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.)

**Reviewed Date:** July 10, 2023

**What do you like best about Aiven for Apache Kafka?**

For my use case, it's the dashboard, it helps me to debug issues easier when setting up a new project which uses Kafka, and also helps me to investigate issues like consumer lags, etc.

**What do you dislike about Aiven for Apache Kafka?**

There is nothing to dislike, but I wish I had more advanced debugging tools like filtering messages in a topic. features like `trubka` cli provides, I know it might not be relevant in large scale, but at least having tools to make life easier for these kind of investiagtions is good.

**What problems is Aiven for Apache Kafka solving and how is that benefiting you?**

As I said earlier, I mostly use the dashboard features to investigate issues, like initial consumer setup, consumer lags,  etc.
Being able to access these data improves our daily life as developers.

  ### 48. Kafka provider must try!

**Rating:** 4.0/5.0 stars

**Reviewed by:** Verified User in Financial Services | Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.)

**Reviewed Date:** November 09, 2023

**What do you like best about Aiven for Apache Kafka?**

Example of client source code in various languages, friendly UI, easy explorer features.

**What do you dislike about Aiven for Apache Kafka?**

It is hard to connect from the local environment and requires a cert file that's hard to implement in the first time.

**What problems is Aiven for Apache Kafka solving and how is that benefiting you?**

Use Aiven helps me not to take effort in setup, monitor, configuration things like infra, environment, resources and permission management.

**Official Response from Markos Sfikas:**

> Hello! 

Thanks for your review! Grreat to hear that Aiven for Apache Kafka minimizes your efforts in setup, monitoring, and permission management for your data streaming workloads. 

We appreciate your input and valuable feedback. 

If you have additional feedback for the Aiven product team, you can directly influence our development roadmap by submitting your ideas here: https://ideas.aiven.io/

Thanks again for your trust in Aiven for Apache Kafka! 

Best 
Markos

  ### 49. All in one Kafka management

**Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars

**Reviewed by:** Verified User in Hospital & Health Care | Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.)

**Reviewed Date:** July 21, 2023

**What do you like best about Aiven for Apache Kafka?**

Aiven for Apache Kafka allows us to manage our Kafka instance very well. We have smooth topic creation with most of the customisations. Also it provides a UI to produce messages, view the messages, partitions, consumer lag in real time

**What do you dislike about Aiven for Apache Kafka?**

Improvements can be showing timestamp in the header of each message since that data is already there in Kafka. Navigation to topics, info, messages can be improved

**What problems is Aiven for Apache Kafka solving and how is that benefiting you?**

Event driven approach is being solved by Aiven and we are able to process events without any hindrance to the data flow. Any data transfer isn't lost because we are abke to reprocess the error events easily through Aiven

  ### 50. Highly reliable, configurable, and overall a greal experience!

**Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars

**Reviewed by:** Kevin X. | Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.)

**Reviewed Date:** May 18, 2023

**What do you like best about Aiven for Apache Kafka?**

Everything about Aiven has been great to power our company's analytics and has truly been a set-it-and-forget-it piece of our infrastructure. Aiven has been extremely responsive with their support and has been great at working with us to fit to our custom needs. We have had no notable outages in the last 3 years of our partnership together. It is flexibile with the cloud providers allowed and is very cost effective. Would recommend it!

**What do you dislike about Aiven for Apache Kafka?**

I think the thing that could use the most love would be the initial learning curve on how to set custom specifications. At the beginning we had to use settings that weren't well documented to have everything play smoothly, but the support quickly sorted that out.

**What problems is Aiven for Apache Kafka solving and how is that benefiting you?**

It powers our data warehouse and serves as the point where all data flows through.


## Aiven for Apache Kafka Discussions
  - [What are the characteristics of Apache Kafka?](https://www.g2.com/discussions/what-are-the-characteristics-of-apache-kafka) - 1 comment

- [View Aiven for Apache Kafka pricing details and edition comparison](https://www.g2.com/products/aiven-for-apache-kafka/reviews?page=2&section=pricing&secure%5Bexpires_at%5D=2026-07-20+16%3A21%3A32+-0500&secure%5Bsession_id%5D=00938c1b-00bb-453e-8b49-787f61cf7b1b&secure%5Btoken%5D=8612ce05376fc7eea8cbb38c0fff3e81e95335b372efce368f60e6c1cc77175c&format=llm_user)
## Aiven for Apache Kafka Integrations
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  - [Python](https://www.g2.com/products/python/reviews)
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## Aiven for Apache Kafka Features
**Data**
- Data Processing
- Data Sources
- Integration
- Real-Time Processing

**Analytics**
- Reporting & Analytics

**Building Reports**
- Data Transformation
- Data Modeling
- WYSIWYG Report Design
- Integration APIs

**Platform**
- User, Role, and Access Management
- Sandbox / Test Environments
- Performance and Reliability
- Breadth of Partner Applications

## Top Aiven for Apache Kafka Alternatives
  - [Confluent](https://www.g2.com/products/confluent/reviews) - 4.4/5.0 (111 reviews)
  - [Amazon Managed Streaming for Apache Kafka (Amazon MSK)](https://www.g2.com/products/amazon-managed-streaming-for-apache-kafka-amazon-msk/reviews) - 4.0/5.0 (22 reviews)
  - [Lenses](https://www.g2.com/products/lenses/reviews) - 4.2/5.0 (17 reviews)

