CMAK vs Kadeck
ComparisonsCMAK vs Kadeck, compared
Key takeaway
CMAK is free under Apache 2.0 and has shipped nothing since April 2022, and it requires a direct ZooKeeper connection that a Kafka 4.0 cluster does not have. Kadeck is commercial software from xeotek, billed per user per month: Teams Free covers five users and one cluster connection, and RBAC, masking and audit logs sit on Enterprise at 32 US dollars per user per month with a ten-user minimum, so a team of four pays for ten seats. Kpow by Factor House is licensed per cluster at a published price.
What is CMAK?
Cluster Manager for Apache Kafka, originally Kafka Manager, is a Scala application on the Play framework. It requires a direct connection to a ZooKeeper ensemble to work at all: the ensemble is where it reads the cluster from, not an optional integration alongside the broker APIs. Its scope is administrative rather than data-plane, and there is no commercial distribution, no hosted offering and no paid support tier.
- registering and monitoring clusters from a single multi-cluster view
- creating and modifying topics, and managing partitions
- partition reassignment and preferred-replica election
- optional JMX polling at broker and topic level
The last stable release, 3.0.0.6, was tagged on 29 April 2022. The last commit on master landed on 12 December 2022, and the last push of any kind was 2 August 2023. 522 issues stand open with nobody triaging them. The repository is public and it is not archived.
What is Kadeck?
Kadeck is not open source. xeotek, its German vendor, ships it in two editions that are separate product lines rather than 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. Apache Kafka, Redpanda and Amazon Kinesis are supported as sources.
- Record view: Avro decoded through Confluent Schema Registry and presented in a columnar layout rather than as raw bytes.
- QuickProcessor: a JavaScript expression derives calculated fields from record values, with no streaming application behind it.
- Dead letter recovery: isolate failed records, transform inline, preview, re-ingest to the source topic, then purge.
- Teams edition: Kafka Connect management, ACL configuration, and role- and group-based access with LDAP and OpenID Connect.
What is the official 2026 pricing of CMAK and Kadeck?
CMAK costs nothing to license and there is no paid edition above it, so its cost is a dependency rather than a price. It is distributed as source needing an sbt and Scala build, with reported OpenJDK 17 compatibility problems on current toolchains. The Docker images that exist are community-maintained. The Kubernetes path was a third-party Helm chart whose last release was 2.2.2 in June 2023 and which is now archived and read-only. Long-running instances hang after 20 to 30 days from thread-pool exhaustion, a failure reported in 2018 and never addressed.
Kadeck’s ladder is per user per month and it is published. Teams Free covers five users and one cluster connection. Professional is 19 US dollars per user per month billed annually, or 25 billed monthly, with unlimited clusters and a one-user minimum. Enterprise is 32 US dollars per user per month with a ten-user minimum, so a team of four pays for ten seats and the entry price is 3,840 US dollars a year; a hundred engineers is 38,400. Floating licences are offered at 30 users or more, and they are still per user underneath. RBAC with LDAP and OpenID, data masking and audit logs all sit on Enterprise, and a desktop licence does not upgrade into it, because the two are separate product lines.
Where does each one run out?
CMAK has no KRaft support and a hard ZooKeeper dependency, and Kafka 4.0 operates entirely without ZooKeeper, so on a 4.0 cluster there is no ensemble left to connect to. The maintainer acknowledged this in 2022 and nothing has shipped since. MSK, Confluent Cloud, Aiven and Redpanda Cloud either lock down or no longer expose ZooKeeper endpoints, and on a cluster that does still run an ensemble, enabling ZooKeeper ACLs breaks the connection outright.
- Data plane: no message browsing, no Schema Registry integration and no Kafka Connect management.
- Freshness: reads come from an internal cache rather than live broker APIs, so a reassignment may appear not to have landed.
- Access control: LDAP basic auth and coarse global feature flags, with no per-topic granularity, no SAML and no OIDC.
- Audit: none.
Kadeck runs out at the edges of its free tier first, and that tier caps in three places at once: five users, one cluster connection, and one certificate at a time, so Dev, Test, Stage and Prod need a paid plan. It also caps how many records a single query returns.
- Packaging: the teams edition ships only as a Docker image. No RPM, no native server binary and no Helm chart.
- State: the documented Kubernetes path wants a persistent external database, so a read-oriented tool acquires backups of its own.
- Licence checks: every container start makes an online validation call, so air-gapped and CI deployments need challenge-response activation first.
- Write path: no streaming of transformed data back into a topic, and no Kafka Streams or ksqlDB integration.
Which should you pick?
Stay on CMAK if:
- the cluster is still on ZooKeeper
- the work is partition reassignment and preferred-replica election
- nobody on the team needs to read a message
Take Kadeck if:
- the work is data exploration and debugging rather than cluster administration
- decoding Avro without writing a consumer is routine
- dead letter queue recovery currently means a script per incident
- one or two engineers want a desktop tool with no container runtime
Neither answers the third case, and it is the common one. A platform team needs both halves at once, administration and data inspection, across more than one cluster, with per-topic access control and an audit trail behind it, and without a ten-seat floor under a team of four. CMAK cannot reach a modern cluster and never carried the governance. Kadeck carries the governance, on a tier priced above where most teams of that size sit.
Kpow: no seat count and no ten-person floor
Neither of these prices governance the way a growing team actually grows. CMAK has none to price: no RBAC, no audit log, no SSO, at any size. Kadeck has it, but only on Enterprise, at 32 US dollars per user per month with a ten-user minimum, so a team of four is billed for ten seats before anyone reads a message. Kpow by Factor House is licensed per cluster rather than per person: one stateless JVM container with no external database, reaching up to 12 clusters from a single instance, at a published price that does not move when the team goes from five engineers to fifty.
A team that outgrows five people shouldn’t have to renegotiate its own tool. Kpow’s pricing is published for exactly that reason.