Kafka Manager vs Kestrel: What are the differences?

Kafka Manager: 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; Kestrel: Simple, distributed message queue system. Kestrel is based on Blaine Cook's "starling" simple, distributed message queue, with added features and bulletproofing, as well as the scalability offered by actors and the JVM.

Kafka Manager and Kestrel belong to "Message Queue" category of the tech stack.

Some of the features offered by Kafka Manager are:

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

On the other hand, Kestrel provides the following key features:

• Written by Robey Pointer
• Starling clone written in Scala (a port of Starling from Ruby to Scala)
• Queues are stored in memory, but logged on disk

Kafka Manager and Kestrel are both open source tools. Kafka Manager with 7.55K GitHub stars and 1.84K forks on GitHub appears to be more popular than Kestrel with 2.8K GitHub stars and 326 GitHub forks.