Kpow for Apache Kafka® Pros and Cons

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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