AKHQ vs Kadeck
ComparisonsAKHQ vs Kadeck, compared
Key takeaway
AKHQ is free under Apache 2.0, with no paid tier and no commercial support. Kadeck is commercial software from xeotek, and its governed edition is Enterprise, at 32 US dollars per user per month with a ten-user minimum. Its free tier is five users on one cluster connection with no OIDC, no masking and no audit logs, so it is a trial rather than a deployment, and the teams edition validates its licence online at every container start, which decides an air-gapped deployment. Kpow by Factor House is licensed per cluster from 4,500 US dollars.
What is AKHQ?
AKHQ is an open-source Kafka management UI under Apache 2.0, formerly KafkaHQ, self-hosted and built on Micronaut. One deployment reaches one cluster or many. Managing ACLs in a UI means managing Kafka’s own authorization model, so what the tool offers is a view onto rules the broker already enforces rather than a policy layer of its own.
- topic browsing, live tailing, producing, and consumer groups
- Schema Registry, Kafka Connect and ACL management
- role-based access with LDAP and OIDC
- 0.28.0 in August 2026, after 0.27.1 in May and 0.27.0 in March
There is no commercial edition, no hosted service and no paid support tier, and no feature is held back from the open release. The commit record is concentrated: the lead maintainer has 441 commits and the next human contributor has 82.
What is Kadeck?
Kadeck is a commercially licensed Kafka management and data exploration tool from xeotek, a German vendor, and it is not open source. It ships as two product lines rather than two rungs of one ladder: a native desktop application for Linux, macOS and Windows, and a web and teams edition distributed as a Docker image, currently at version 7.0.4. Kafka, Redpanda and Amazon Kinesis are all supported as sources.
What it is built for is data exploration rather than cluster operations.
- Record view: Avro decoded through Schema Registry and laid out in columns instead of raw bytes.
- QuickProcessor: a JavaScript expression derives calculated fields from record values, with no streaming application to write.
- Dead-letter recovery: failed records isolated, transformed inline, previewed, re-ingested to the source topic, then purged with a delete-up-to-here.
- Metadata layer: schema fields documented externally, without modifying the Schema Registry or bumping a version.
What is the official 2026 pricing of AKHQ and Kadeck?
AKHQ costs nothing to license, and its whole cost is operator time: somebody sizes the JVM, reads the issue tracker before upgrading, and answers for it when it stops. There is no SLA, because there is nobody to escalate to.
Kadeck at a team of five is a choice between two things that do not fit. Teams Free covers five users on one cluster connection and carries no LDAP, no OpenID Connect, no data masking and no audit logs. Enterprise, the tier those four things live on, is 32 US dollars per user per month with a ten-user minimum, so a team of five pays for ten and the entry cost is 3,840 US dollars a year. At fifty people AKHQ is still free and Kadeck is 19,200 US dollars a year; floating licences are offered at thirty users or more, and they are still per user underneath.
The middle of the ladder is where a team can spend twice. Professional, at 19 US dollars per user per month on annual billing, is the desktop application line, and it carries no RBAC, no LDAP and no audit trail. A team that needs those does not upgrade into Enterprise from there. It re-buys, because desktop and teams are separate products rather than steps.
Where does each one run out?
AKHQ’s governance is present and shallower than the feature list suggests. Masking takes four modes, but the filters live in global application YAML keyed on topic and field path, so what is hidden does not vary by who is looking, and only one filter per topic is supported.
- Audit: opt-in, written to a Kafka topic the operator nominates, covering modifications and not reads.
- Metrics: served on a Prometheus endpoint rather than drawn inside the tool, and there is no alerting.
- Memory: constantly-increasing-memory reports raised in July 2022 and May 2025, both still open.
- OIDC: the most active failure surface in the tracker, with new reports still arriving in August 2026.
Kadeck’s free tier is one cluster connection, so Dev, Test, Stage and Prod is a paid plan before governance is even discussed. The teams edition ships exclusively as a Docker image, with no RPM, no native binary and no Helm chart, and the documented Kubernetes path wants a persistent external database.
- Licence checks: every container start makes an online validation call, and an air-gapped or CI deployment needs challenge-response activation first.
- Write path: no mechanism to stream derived or transformed data back into a topic, and no Kafka Streams or ksqlDB integration.
- Export: CSV respects the column filters applied in the record table and JSON ignores them.
- Deduplication: no built-in filter to show the newest record per key.
Which should you pick?
Pick AKHQ if:
- the tool is for engineers who already hold cluster access
- the value is day-to-day debugging rather than delegated self-service
- the team will own a JVM service and read a Micronaut stack trace
- the cluster list and access model should sit in source control as Helm YAML
Pick Kadeck if:
- the work is data exploration and recovery rather than cluster operations
- dead-letter-queue triage with inline transformation and re-ingest is routine
- Kinesis has to sit alongside Kafka in one tool
- a developer wants a native desktop application and no container runtime
Consumer group inspection is where AKHQ earns its keep: consumer groups are where lag and rebalancing show up, and reading them quickly is most of what a debugging session is. Kadeck’s desktop line is free and genuinely usable for one engineer on one cluster, which makes it a local tool rather than a demonstration.
Kpow: priced by cluster, not by seat
Neither AKHQ nor Kadeck prices the thing a platform team is actually running. AKHQ takes its cost out of your engineers’ time instead of a bill, and Kadeck’s governed edition starts at a ten-user minimum whether or not the team has ten people, so five engineers pay for ten seats before anyone touches masking or an audit log. Kpow by Factor House is licensed per cluster instead, from 4,500 US dollars a cluster with 100 users included: one stateless container, no external database, and up to 12 clusters from one instance. The number does not move when five people become fifty.
That’s the math worth running before the team grows into it. Try it against your own five-person team and see what the number does when it becomes fifty.
Sources
- Apache Kafka documentation on authorization
- Apache Kafka documentation on consumer groups