Kpow for Apache Kafka® Reviews 2025: Details, Pricing, & Features

Sidnei D.

Mid-Market(51-1000 emp.)

Validated Reviewer

Verified Current User

Review source: Organic

Aug 21, 2023

"The best choice for managing our Apache Kafka environments"

What do you like best about Kpow for Apache Kafka®?

The most helpful about Kpow for Apache Kafka is the easy setup, support for multiple types of schemas (Avro, Protobuf and more), fair price, nice to use and clean UI. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

What do you dislike about Kpow for Apache Kafka®?

The downside of Kpow for Apache Kafka is the topic data inspection of some topics where when we don't inform the key and/or value deserializer the response show those fields as null, making it hard to know why the values are not being show. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

What problems is Kpow for Apache Kafka® solving and how is that benefiting you?

The main problems that Kpow for Apache Kafka is solving for us is the support to query topic with different types of schemas (Avro, Protobuf, etc) and the ease to setup in multiple environments.

Another plus is the free community edition version to use on the local environments for testing/debugging. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

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Antoine B.

Technical Leader

Small-Business(50 or fewer emp.)

Validated Reviewer

Verified Current User

Review source: Organic

Aug 31, 2022

"Best choice for startup and middle size companies"

What do you like best about Kpow for Apache Kafka®?

What we appreciate with kPow is that it gives you all the good features available in the market in one tool :

- Beautiful UI/UX like Kowl

- Efficient topic message searching like Kafka UI

- Excellent to watch and edit topics configuration, even better than Kafka UI

- Able to browse and edit schema registry efficiently like Kafka UI

And in addition, you got multiple bonus features :

- Useful and beautiful monitoring of cluster, connectors, consumers, etc...

- Better consumer offset reset management

- Fully customizable auth mechanism from very simple to very complex

- Fully integrated Kafka Stream topology display and monitoring using kpow-streams-agent

- Human support with excellent technical understanding

- Open about feature requests that can bring value to the product, with a good following after suggestion is made

- Open-minded about license pricing for a small-sized company

- And so on... Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

What do you dislike about Kpow for Apache Kafka®?

As for me, the only downside of this tool is that you have to launch it on your own, using docker container, AWS Marketplace, etc...

I would love to have managed cloud offer where you give a way to connect to your Kafka Cluster (through VPC Peering for example) and everything is handled on kPow side :

- Create a custom VPC for the customer

- Mount a kPow instance on the VPC

- Create the peering between this VPC managed by kPow and your VPC

- Manage authentication/authorization using kPow online dashboard

Such offer could open great opportunities with, for example, a free community version (run on your own) and a priced cloud managed version. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

What problems is Kpow for Apache Kafka® solving and how is that benefiting you?

Our objective was to :

- Monitor our Kafka brokers' state

- Browse our current topics and their contents

- Follow the state of our consumers and manage their offsets

All these in an easy-to-use HMI without learning how to do it through complex Kafka command lines. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

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Verified User in Financial Services

Enterprise(> 1000 emp.)

Validated Reviewer

Verified Current User

Review source: Organic

Mar 07, 2022(Original Sep 07, 2021)

"Swiss army knife for Kafka Custodianship"

What do you like best about Kpow for Apache Kafka®?

A nifty UI for understanding our kafka clusters and topics without needing to resort to the command line. A tool ops and developers can both use alike.

The development team really engage their customers and build new features in colloboration with them. Quick to respond to feedback. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

What do you dislike about Kpow for Apache Kafka®?

Nothing. We even put a halt on purchasing more expensive enterprise kafka tooling because we found kPow met our needs. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

What problems is Kpow for Apache Kafka® solving and how is that benefiting you?

Developers: Can easily see kafka topics and perform administration whilst they are developing new features

Ops: Can securely access our production cluster, and can make maintenance of topics and the cluster in general far easier.

Wider business: Letting users conduct UAT by placing messages onto topics with a friendly UI

The upcoming visualisations around kafka streams are really awesome and we look forward to adopting those when time. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

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Alex H.

Engineering Manager

Mid-Market(51-1000 emp.)

Validated Reviewer

Verified Current User

Review source: Organic

May 25, 2021

"kPow is the missing link in our operations toolkit for supporting a Kafka powered system."

What do you like best about Kpow for Apache Kafka®?

Realtime data view & query language.

Topic & broker config inspect.

Consumer group monitoring including offset lag. (can also export their metrics via prometheus!)

The development team are active in the Kafka community and are extremely responsive to feedback on how kPow could be improved. We have benefited from several usbility enhancements & features that were initated on the back of our feedback. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

What do you dislike about Kpow for Apache Kafka®?

A few minor stability issues (now resolved) Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

What problems is Kpow for Apache Kafka® solving and how is that benefiting you?

kPow provides much-needed transparency across our Kafka event streams. I run a large production system comprised of 50+ micro services all of which have a dependency on Kafka. Events are used as triggers between services and to drive state sharing. Being able to search across and inspect the contents of our event streams has proved invaluable from a production support, debugging & verification perspective. Without kPow our operational abilities would be significantly compromised. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

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