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  1. Stackups
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  4. Kafka Tools
  5. Airflow vs Kafka Manager

Airflow vs Kafka Manager

OverviewDecisionsComparisonAlternatives

Overview

Kafka Manager
Kafka Manager
Stacks70
Followers173
Votes1
Airflow
Airflow
Stacks1.7K
Followers2.8K
Votes128

Airflow vs Kafka Manager: What are the differences?

Developers describe Airflow as "A platform to programmaticaly author, schedule and monitor data pipelines, by Airbnb". Use Airflow to author workflows as directed acyclic graphs (DAGs) of tasks. The Airflow scheduler executes your tasks on an array of workers while following the specified dependencies. Rich command lines utilities makes performing complex surgeries on DAGs a snap. The rich user interface makes it easy to visualize pipelines running in production, monitor progress and troubleshoot issues when needed. On the other hand, Kafka Manager is detailed as "A tool for managing Apache Kafka, developed by Yahoo". This interface makes it easier to identify topics which are unevenly distributed across the cluster or have partition leaders unevenly distributed across the cluster. It supports management of multiple clusters, preferred replica election, replica re-assignment, and topic creation. It is also great for getting a quick bird’s eye view of the cluster.

Airflow can be classified as a tool in the "Workflow Manager" category, while Kafka Manager is grouped under "Message Queue".

Some of the features offered by Airflow are:

  • Dynamic: Airflow pipelines are configuration as code (Python), allowing for dynamic pipeline generation. This allows for writting code that instantiate pipelines dynamically.
  • Extensible: Easily define your own operators, executors and extend the library so that it fits the level of abstraction that suits your environment.
  • Elegant: Airflow pipelines are lean and explicit. Parameterizing your scripts is built in the core of Airflow using powerful Jinja templating engine.

On the other hand, Kafka Manager provides the following key features:

  • Manage multiple clusters
  • Easy inspection of cluster state (topics, brokers, replica distribution, partition distribution)
  • Run preferred replica election

Airflow and Kafka Manager are both open source tools. It seems that Airflow with 12.7K GitHub stars and 4.62K forks on GitHub has more adoption than Kafka Manager with 7.45K GitHub stars and 1.82K GitHub forks.

Airbnb, 9GAG, and Square are some of the popular companies that use Airflow, whereas Kafka Manager is used by Yahoo!, IgnitionOne, and Ocado Technology. Airflow has a broader approval, being mentioned in 70 company stacks & 30 developers stacks; compared to Kafka Manager, which is listed in 8 company stacks and 4 developer stacks.

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Advice on Kafka Manager, Airflow

Anonymous
Anonymous

Jan 19, 2020

Needs advice

I am so confused. I need a tool that will allow me to go to about 10 different URLs to get a list of objects. Those object lists will be hundreds or thousands in length. I then need to get detailed data lists about each object. Those detailed data lists can have hundreds of elements that could be map/reduced somehow. My batch process dies sometimes halfway through which means hours of processing gone, i.e. time wasted. I need something like a directed graph that will keep results of successful data collection and allow me either pragmatically or manually to retry the failed ones some way (0 - forever) times. I want it to then process all the ones that have succeeded or been effectively ignored and load the data store with the aggregation of some couple thousand data-points. I know hitting this many endpoints is not a good practice but I can't put collectors on all the endpoints or anything like that. It is pretty much the only way to get the data.

294k views294k
Comments

Detailed Comparison

Kafka Manager
Kafka Manager
Airflow
Airflow

This interface makes it easier to identify topics which are unevenly distributed across the cluster or have partition leaders unevenly distributed across the cluster. It supports management of multiple clusters, preferred replica election, replica re-assignment, and topic creation. It is also great for getting a quick bird’s eye view of the cluster.

Use Airflow to author workflows as directed acyclic graphs (DAGs) of tasks. The Airflow scheduler executes your tasks on an array of workers while following the specified dependencies. Rich command lines utilities makes performing complex surgeries on DAGs a snap. The rich user interface makes it easy to visualize pipelines running in production, monitor progress and troubleshoot issues when needed.

Manage multiple clusters;Easy inspection of cluster state (topics, brokers, replica distribution, partition distribution);Run preferred replica election;Generate partition assignments (based on current state of cluster);Run reassignment of partition (based on generated assignments)
Dynamic: Airflow pipelines are configuration as code (Python), allowing for dynamic pipeline generation. This allows for writting code that instantiate pipelines dynamically.;Extensible: Easily define your own operators, executors and extend the library so that it fits the level of abstraction that suits your environment.;Elegant: Airflow pipelines are lean and explicit. Parameterizing your scripts is built in the core of Airflow using powerful Jinja templating engine.;Scalable: Airflow has a modular architecture and uses a message queue to talk to orchestrate an arbitrary number of workers. Airflow is ready to scale to infinity.
Statistics
Stacks
70
Stacks
1.7K
Followers
173
Followers
2.8K
Votes
1
Votes
128
Pros & Cons
Pros
  • 1
    Better Insights for Kafka cluster
Pros
  • 53
    Features
  • 14
    Task Dependency Management
  • 12
    Beautiful UI
  • 12
    Cluster of workers
  • 10
    Extensibility
Cons
  • 2
    Observability is not great when the DAGs exceed 250
  • 2
    Open source - provides minimum or no support
  • 2
    Running it on kubernetes cluster relatively complex
  • 1
    Logical separation of DAGs is not straight forward
Integrations
Kafka
Kafka
No integrations available

What are some alternatives to Kafka Manager, Airflow?

GitHub Actions

GitHub Actions

It makes it easy to automate all your software workflows, now with world-class CI/CD. Build, test, and deploy your code right from GitHub. Make code reviews, branch management, and issue triaging work the way you want.

Apache Beam

Apache Beam

It implements batch and streaming data processing jobs that run on any execution engine. It executes pipelines on multiple execution environments.

Zenaton

Zenaton

Developer framework to orchestrate multiple services and APIs into your software application using logic triggered by events and time. Build ETL processes, A/B testing, real-time alerts and personalized user experiences with custom logic.

Luigi

Luigi

It is a Python module that helps you build complex pipelines of batch jobs. It handles dependency resolution, workflow management, visualization etc. It also comes with Hadoop support built in.

Unito

Unito

Build and map powerful workflows across tools to save your team time. No coding required. Create rules to define what information flows between each of your tools, in minutes.

Shipyard

Shipyard

na

Flumio

Flumio

Flumio is a modern automation platform that lets you build powerful workflows with a simple drag-and-drop interface. It combines the power of custom development with the speed of a no-code/low-code tool. Developers can still embed custom logic directly into workflows.

PromptX

PromptX

PromptX is an AI-powered enterprise knowledge and workflow platform that helps organizations search, discover and act on information with speed and accuracy. It unifies data from SharePoint, Google Drive, email, cloud systems and legacy databases into one secure Enterprise Knowledge System. Using generative and agentic AI, users can ask natural language questions and receive context-rich, verifiable answers in seconds. PromptX ingests and enriches content with semantic tagging, entity recognition and knowledge cards, turning unstructured data into actionable insights. With adaptive prompts, collaborative workspaces and AI-driven workflows, teams make faster, data-backed decisions. The platform includes RBAC, SSO, audit trails and compliance-ready AI governance, and integrates with any LLM or external search engine. It supports cloud, hybrid and on-premise deployments for healthcare, public sector, finance and enterprise service providers. PromptX converts disconnected data into trusted and actionable intelligence, bringing search, collaboration and automation into a single unified experience.

iLeap

iLeap

ILeap is a low-code app development platform to build custom apps and automate workflows visually, helping you speed up digital transformation.

AI Autopilot

AI Autopilot

Agentic AI Platform for Intelligent IT Automation built by MSPs for MSPs. Revolutionize your operations with advanced AI agents.

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