Kowl vs Kafka Manager: What are the differences?

Kowl: An Open Source WebUI for Apache Kafka with a good UI and UX. It is a web application that helps you to explore messages in your Apache Kafka cluster and get better insights on what is actually happening in your Kafka cluster in the most comfortable way; 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.

Kowl and Kafka Manager can be primarily classified as "Kafka" tools.

Some of the features offered by Kowl are:

• Supports Kafka Clusters newer than v1.0+
• Topic overview
• Show disk usage per topic or per broker

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

Kafka Manager is an open source tool with 9.31K GitHub stars and 2.2K GitHub forks. Here's a link to Kafka Manager's open source repository on GitHub.