# Should I Pick Conduktor or Kpow to Manage Our Kafka Clusters?

"Should I pick Conduktor or Kpow to manage our Kafka clusters?"

> **A note on bias.** This is Conduktor's blog, so you can probably guess which tool we'd like you to pick. We've tried to be fair anyway: the Kpow facts come from Factor House's own site and docs, and our limits get their own section.

Put the two side by side in a demo and they look a lot alike. Both browse topics, search messages, show [consumer lag](https://www.conduktor.io/glossary/consumer-lag-monitoring) per partition, manage connectors, and run against more than one Kafka distribution. A feature checklist mostly comes out as a tie.

The choice depends on something a demo doesn't show: who uses the tool once it's rolled out. For one platform team operating the cluster, both fit. For dozens of application teams sharing it, with data that needs protecting from each other, the two products go in different directions:

| | Kpow | Conduktor |
|---|---|---|
| What it is | [Commercial Kafka UI](https://factorhouse.io/kpow/) from Factor House | Self-hosted Kafka UI and API ([Console](https://www.conduktor.io/console)), plus a separate Kafka proxy ([Gateway](https://www.conduktor.io/gateway)) |
| Free tier | Community: up to 3 clusters and 10 users | Console Community: up to 50 users and 3 clusters, SSO included |
| Consumer lag | Per partition, with recent history kept in Kafka topics | Per partition, in messages and estimated seconds |
| Alerting | Through Prometheus and Alertmanager | Built in, to Slack, Teams, email or a webhook (paid plans) |
| Connector auto-restart | By connector name or pattern, or all connectors | A toggle per connector, with error history (paid plans) |
| Access control | RBAC, SSO, data masking and the full audit log in Enterprise | SSO on every plan; group RBAC, audit logs and masking on paid plans |
| Sharing between teams | Multi-tenancy scopes what each team sees; a Kpow admin approves staged changes (Enterprise) | Federated ownership: the owning team approves access requests, and changes go through Git |
| Cost by team | Not in Kpow's docs or pricing page | Chargeback by cluster, application or label (paid plans) |
| Enforcement on application traffic | No, a UI isn't in the data path | Gateway: field-level encryption, masking, Virtual Clusters, traffic policies |
| Pricing model | Per cluster, 100 users included | Console per seat; Gateway per cluster |

Kpow keeps recent lag history in its own Kafka topics, so lag charts work without Prometheus. It [doesn't send alerts itself](https://factorhouse.io/how-to/kafka-alerting-with-kpow-prometheus-and-alertmanager): the rules and the routing live in Prometheus and Alertmanager, which suits teams that already run them.

## Both are good Kafka UIs for the team that runs the cluster

Take a platform team of four running Kafka on three clusters. They want to see broker and partition health, find the message a consumer is stuck on, reset an offset, and restart a connector. Every one of those jobs works in both tools.

> **Scope.** This compares Kpow with Conduktor Console and Gateway as of October 2026. Both products ship often, so check each vendor's current docs before a final decision.

Kpow has built a following on exactly this work. Its recent lag charts need no extra infrastructure, and its message search and offset management cover most of what an on-call engineer reaches for. If the people using the tool are the people who run the cluster, Kpow is a reasonable choice.

Console covers the same ground, with lag in [messages and estimated seconds](https://docs.conduktor.io/guide/manage-kafka/kafka-resources/consumer-groups) and [alerts](https://docs.conduktor.io/guide/monitor-brokers-apps/alerts) built in. For one team, the two tools are close. The gap opens as more teams share the cluster.

## The choice depends on how many teams will use it

Now give the same four-person platform team fifty application teams to serve, a ratio we hear often. Each application team wants its own topics, access to other teams' topics, and a way to see its own consumer lag. When one team approves everything, each of those requests becomes a ticket for the platform team.

The two products put that approval in different places:

With one approver, every access request waits for the platform team. With federated ownership, each request goes to the team that owns the topic.

In Kpow Enterprise, [multi-tenancy](https://docs.factorhouse.io/kpow/multi-tenancy) limits which clusters, topics and connectors each team sees. Access is set in Kpow's RBAC configuration, and a [staged change](https://docs.factorhouse.io/kpow/workflow/staged-mutations) waits for a Kpow admin, who is usually on the platform team. That works while requests are rare, and it turns the platform team into the queue once they aren't.

Conduktor routes the request to the owner instead, with [federated ownership](https://www.conduktor.io/federated-ownership). Each application owns its topics and service accounts. When another team needs to read a topic, it requests access from the owning team, and the [approved request is applied automatically](https://docs.conduktor.io/guide/conduktor-concepts/self-service). The platform team sets the rules once, such as naming conventions and a cap on partitions, and every change lands in Git.

An incoming access request in Conduktor Console, opened by the team that owns the topic. Committing the YAML it shows to the team's repository approves the request.

## A Kafka UI can't protect what applications read

Both Kpow and Console can mask fields. Kpow Enterprise uses [data policies](https://docs.factorhouse.io/kpow/data/data-policies) that list the fields to redact on a cluster or topic, and Console uses masking policies applied per user or group. Take a `payments` topic with a card number in it: a masking policy hides that field from people who open the topic in the UI.

> 🚫 *"We mask PII in our Kafka UI, so the data is protected."*

A Kafka UI is a client like any other, and the applications reading the same topic never pass through it. Console's docs say so plainly: [masking in Console](https://docs.conduktor.io/guide/conduktor-in-production/admin/data-masking) applies only inside Console, and the data stored in Kafka is unchanged. To change what applications read, something has to sit between them and the brokers:

A UI masks what people see in it. Only a proxy in the data path changes what applications read.

Conduktor Gateway is that proxy. Applications connect to it instead of the brokers, so a policy applies to every client on the topic. Gateway can [encrypt individual fields](https://docs.conduktor.io/guide/use-cases/kafka-encryption) in Avro, Protobuf and JSON, so only the teams you choose can decrypt them, and [Virtual Clusters](https://docs.conduktor.io/guide/conduktor-concepts/virtual-clusters) give each team or partner an isolated slice of one physical cluster.

Kpow is a UI, not a proxy, so it doesn't sit in this path. It's a different product category, and if your security team only asks who can see data in the UI, a UI answers it.

## Ownership also decides who gets the alert and the bill

Once each application owns its topics, Console uses that ownership elsewhere. Alerts can be owned by an application, so the team that runs a consumer manages its own lag alerts. [Chargeback](https://docs.conduktor.io/guide/conduktor-concepts/chargeback) splits storage, partition and traffic costs by application, so each team sees what its topics cost. [Stream lineage](https://docs.conduktor.io/guide/conduktor-concepts/stream-lineage) shows which service accounts depend on a topic before somebody changes it:

Stream lineage in Conduktor Console for one service account: the topic it reads, its live throughput, and the ACL that grants the access.

## Per seat or per cluster: how the two are priced

Kpow prices its Enterprise edition per cluster, with 100 users included, and its Community edition is free for up to 3 clusters and 10 users. Factor House lists current prices on its [pricing page](https://factorhouse.io/pricing).

Conduktor prices Console per seat and Gateway per cluster. These are the [published list prices](https://www.conduktor.io/pricing) as of October 2026:

| Plan | Price | What you get |
|---|---|---|
| Console Community | Free | Up to 50 users and 3 clusters, monitoring for the last hour, SSO, API, CLI and MCP |
| Console Team Edition | $1,200 per seat per year, or $125 per seat per month | Every paid Console feature, unlimited clusters, bought online |
| Console Enterprise | Contact sales | Volume pricing, a custom contract and SLA, dedicated support |
| Gateway Enterprise | Per cluster, three-cluster minimum | The proxy, with add-ons for encryption and for failover |

Per-cluster pricing tends to cost less when many people use a few clusters, and per-seat pricing when a few people work across many clusters. Count both before you compare quotes: a Console seat covers ownership workflows, alerting and chargeback, and Gateway is a separate line.

## What Conduktor doesn't do

Our own limits, stated the same way:

- **Console needs PostgreSQL.** It [stores its state in Postgres](https://docs.conduktor.io/guide/conduktor-in-production/deploy-artifacts/deploy-console), so there's a database to run next to the container.
- **The free tier is for getting started.** [Console Community](https://docs.conduktor.io/guide/conduktor-in-production/manage-licenses/console-community-edition) shows the last hour of monitoring, and alerting, data masking, audit logs and federated ownership need a paid plan.
- **Per-seat pricing grows with your user count.** If hundreds of engineers need occasional read access, price that out before you roll it out.

## Which should you pick?

Start from who will open the tool every day, because that decides more than any single feature:

- **One platform team, already running Prometheus.** Kpow is a good fit. You get recent lag charts without extra storage, alerts through the Alertmanager you already run, and a price that grows with clusters rather than people.
- **Your security team asks about the data, not the UI.** Field-level encryption and per-team isolation need a proxy in the data path, which means [Conduktor Gateway](https://www.conduktor.io/gateway).
- **Many application teams, and the platform team is the queue.** [Conduktor Console](https://www.conduktor.io/console) gives each team ownership of its topics, routes access requests to the owning team, lets each team manage its own alerts and see its own costs, and records every change in an audit log.

Pick Kpow if the people using the tool are the people running the cluster. Pick Conduktor if many teams will share the cluster and need to own their own topics, or if some data has to be protected from the applications that read it as well as from the people browsing it in a UI.

## Frequently asked questions about Conduktor and Kpow

**Is Kpow free?**

Kpow's Community edition is free for up to 3 clusters and 10 users, without RBAC, data masking or SSO. Conduktor Console Community is free for up to 50 users and 3 clusters, with SSO included.

**Can a Kafka UI encrypt or mask Kafka data?**

It can mask what people see in the UI, but applications still read the stored data in full. Changing what applications read takes a proxy in the data path, such as Conduktor Gateway.

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Related: [Kafka UI Tools Compared →](https://www.conduktor.io/compare/kafka-ui-tools) · [Apache Kafka for Enterprise: What Tools Do I Need? →](https://www.conduktor.io/blog/apache-kafka-for-enterprise-tools) · [Federated Ownership →](https://www.conduktor.io/federated-ownership)