Early access · macOS, Windows, Linux
A native desktop client for Apache Kafka. Fast, local, agent-ready.
Browse topics and messages, watch consumer-group lag, manage offsets and schemas, no JVM and no cloud account. Hundreds of thousands of messages and partitions render in seconds. A built-in MCP server lets Claude Code, Cursor or any MCP client inspect your clusters with the same scoped, read-only credentials you use.
Conduktor Desktop is end-of-life
The builds repository was archived in May 2026 and the desktop app was replaced by a web console with a three-cluster free cap.
Offset Explorer is a 2015 Java app
$139 per user plus $46 a year, needs its own Java on Linux, and freezes on large topics.
Web UIs need a server someone runs
Kafbat UI and AKHQ are great for a team deployment; a developer at a laptop wants a double-click.
What's in the box
- Connections PLAINTEXT, SSL, SASL/PLAIN, SCRAM, OAUTHBEARER, AWS IAM for MSK; profiles stored in the OS keychain.
- Topics and messages live tail, time and offset seek, key/header filters, JSON, Avro, Protobuf and JSON Schema decoding via Schema Registry, produce with templates.
- Consumer groups lag per partition with trend, stalled-group alerts, reset offsets to time or offset with a dry run first.
- Operations create and alter topics, partitions, configs, ACLs; compare two clusters' topic configs.
- Built-in MCP server read-only by default; every tool call is logged and scoped to one connection, so an agent can answer "why is the orders group lagging" without ever seeing the password.
- Native and local one small binary per OS, keyboard-first, no telemetry, works offline against localhost and Docker.
Pricing
Personal
$79 one-time
One developer, all three OSes, a year of updates, then it keeps working.
Team
$99 per seat / year
Shared connection profiles, central licence management, priority email support.
Open source and students
Free
A free licence for maintainers of OSS projects and students, by email.
Prices are the launch plan and may change before release. Early-access participants get the launch price locked in.