Conduktor Gateway vs Gravitee Kafka Gateway: Kafka Proxy Compared
Gravitee's Kafka gateway lives inside an API management platform. Conduktor Gateway is a Kafka proxy built for the platform team. Both speak Kafka; they were built for different owners.
API management with a real Kafka proxy inside
Gravitee's Kafka Gateway speaks native Kafka, is self-hostable, and keeps shipping: virtual topics, ACL and quota policies, auth mediation, field-level encryption, failover in every plan, and a shared developer portal. Pricing is per production gateway, from $1,250 a month.
Where it stops is where an API gateway's model stops. Virtual topics rename and filter; they don't give a team its own namespace, credentials, and policies as a unit. Failover is a manual switch with no rehearsal. The registry is validated against, not governed.
None of this matters if an API team wants events in its portal. All of it matters if the Kafka platform team is choosing its control layer.
Competitor details last checked against Gravitee documentation, pricing, and release posts, September 2026.
Where Conduktor Gateway and Gravitee diverge
Four questions that decide the evaluation.
Tenants, not aliases
Virtual clusters layered with ACLs, quotas, and per-tenant policies, plus topic concentration. Gravitee's virtual topics rename and filter.
Failover you can rehearse
Cluster switching by API call plus chaos-testing interceptors. Gravitee switches endpoints manually, with no readiness tooling.
Data controls on the record
Field-level encryption with KMS keys, masking, tokenization, and CEL data quality rules. Gravitee encrypts JSON fields and masks logs.
The registry, governed too
Schema Registry Proxy adds OIDC authentication and per-subject authorization to the registry. Gravitee uses the registry for validation.
Conduktor Gateway vs Gravitee Kafka Gateway: feature comparison
Conduktor Gateway is licensed per cluster on the Enterprise plan; the free Community Edition covers cross-network reachability only.
| Capability | Conduktor Gateway | Gravitee Kafka Gateway |
|---|---|---|
| License & cost | ⚠Commercial, per cluster with a 3-cluster minimum; free Community Edition for network reachability only. See pricing → | ⚠Event Management plans priced per production gateway: Comet from $1,250/month for one gateway; Meteor and Asteroid by quote |
| Deployment model | ✓Fully self-managed, air-gapped supported | ✓Self-hosted or Gravitee Cloud |
| Kafka providers | ✓Any Kafka 2.7+: Confluent, MSK, Redpanda, Aiven, Apache Kafka | ✓Any Kafka-protocol cluster |
| Multi-tenancy | ✓Virtual clusters with isolated namespaces, ACLs, quotas, and policies stacked per tenant; topic concentration | ⚠Virtual topics, topic mapping, ACL and quota policies; no virtual clusters or concentration |
| Cluster switching & failover | ✓One API call, no client changes; chaos-testing interceptors to rehearse | ⚠Manual endpoint switch through UI or API, included in every plan; no automatic failover or readiness tooling |
| Replication | ✗Routes, doesn't replicate; pair with MirrorMaker 2, Replicator, or Cluster Linking | ✗Not applicable |
| Encryption | ✓Field-level and full-payload encryption for JSON, Avro, and Protobuf with KMS integration (Vault, AWS KMS, Azure Key Vault, GCP KMS), plus masking and tokenization | ⚠Payload or JSON-field encryption (AES-GCM); no Avro or Protobuf fields, no tokenization; masking applies to logs, not records |
| Data quality | ✓Schema enforcement plus CEL business rules on the wire; violations blocked or logged per policy | ⚠Governance rules on produce, fetch, and topic creation; no business rules on field values |
| Schema Registry governance | ✓Schema Registry Proxy: OIDC authentication, per-subject authorization, audit | ✗Registry used for validation only |
| Best-practice guardrails | ✓Topic policies, producer and consumer safeguards, rate limits, large-message handling, per virtual cluster | ✓Rate limits, quotas, compression enforcement, message offloading to object storage |
| Authentication | ✓mTLS, SASL, OIDC/OAuth; centralized service accounts and audit | ✓OAuth2, JWT, API key, and mTLS mediated to Kafka credentials |
| Protocol mediation | ✗Kafka clients only | ✓Kafka to HTTP, SSE, WebSocket, and webhook |
| Developer portal | ⚠Topic and application catalogs in Conduktor Console | ✓Unified API and event catalog |
| Partner data sharing | ✓Partner Zones: isolated virtual clusters with per-partner masking, credentials, and rate limits | ⚠External access through mediation and ACLs; no per-partner masking or isolation |
| Configuration & change | ✓REST API, CLI, Terraform provider; runtime changes | ✓Management UI and API; Terraform since 4.8 |
| Observability | ✓Prometheus metrics, audit log, Console UI | ✓Gravitee analytics and dashboards |
IncludedPartial or gated behind a higher tierNot available
Multi-tenancy
A virtual cluster is more than a renamed topic
Gravitee's virtual topics give consumers a curated view of physical topics. Gateway's virtual clusters give each team a namespace, its own credentials, ACLs, quotas, and interceptors on shared brokers, and topic concentration to keep partition counts down. That's the difference between a curated view of Kafka and tenant isolation.
Failover
Both can switch. One lets you rehearse.
Gravitee includes failover in every plan: a manual endpoint switch from the UI or API, with clients reconnecting on their own. Gateway's switch is one API call with no client changes, and its chaos-testing interceptors let you break brokers deliberately to prove your applications survive before an outage proves it for you. Neither product replicates data; that's MirrorMaker 2, Replicator, or Cluster Linking.
Data security
Encryption is the start. Masking and tokens are the rest.
Both gateways can encrypt a JSON field. Gateway also does it for Avro and Protobuf, holds the keys in your KMS, masks fields for consumers who shouldn't see them at all, tokenizes where analytics need consistent values, and applies different masking per partner in Partner Zones. Every client is covered without a library.
Gravitee fits if...
Your API team already runs Gravitee, you want Kafka topics in the same portal and policy language as your REST APIs, exposing topics over HTTP, SSE, or WebSocket is a real requirement, and your Kafka proxy needs are virtual topics, quotas, and a manual failover.
Conduktor Gateway fits if...
The Kafka platform team owns the decision and needs tenant isolation, masking and tokenization alongside encryption, data quality rules, Schema Registry governance, or a failover it can rehearse, across every Kafka provider you run.
"The Gateway proxy won me over immediately."
Julien Maillard
Senior Architect, CDC Informatique
Read more customer stories
Is Gravitee's Kafka Gateway a real Kafka proxy?
Yes. It speaks the native Kafka protocol, so Kafka clients connect to it directly, and it's self-hostable. Where it differs from Conduktor Gateway is depth: virtual topics rather than virtual clusters, JSON-field encryption without masking, tokenization, or KMS-held keys, and a registry used for validation rather than governed.
How does Gravitee price the Kafka Gateway?
Through its Event Management plans, per production gateway: Comet at $1,250 a month for one production gateway and one federated broker, then Meteor (two) and Asteroid (four) by quote. A resilient Kafka data path typically wants more than one gateway, which moves you off the entry tier quickly. Conduktor Gateway is priced per Kafka cluster, with as many Gateway instances as you need.
Does Gravitee have failover?
Yes, in every Event Management plan. It's a manual endpoint switch from the UI or API, with Kafka clients reconnecting to the new endpoint and no health-check-driven automation or readiness testing. Conduktor Gateway's switch is one API call with no client changes, plus chaos testing to rehearse it. Neither replicates data.
Can Conduktor Gateway expose Kafka as HTTP or WebSocket?
No. Gateway is a Kafka-protocol proxy. If protocol mediation is a primary requirement, Gravitee (or Kong) does that and Conduktor doesn't.
Can we use both?
Yes, and some teams do: Gravitee at the API edge for the portal and protocol mediation, Conduktor Gateway in the Kafka data path for isolation, encryption, data quality, and failover. They govern different traffic.
Is there a free Conduktor Gateway?
Gateway Community Edition is free with no time limit, scoped to cross-network reachability. Interceptors, virtual clusters, encryption, and failover are on the Enterprise plan, priced per cluster.
See Gateway in front of your clusters
Thirty minutes: virtual clusters, field-level encryption, and a failover you can rehearse.