Kafka Manager vs Starling: What are the differences?

Developers describe Kafka Manager 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. On the other hand, Starling is detailed as "A light weight server for reliable distributed message passing". Starling is a powerful but simple messaging server that enables reliable distributed queuing with an absolutely minimal overhead. It speaks the MemCache protocol for maximum cross-platform compatibility. Any language that speaks MemCache can take advantage of Starling's queue facilities.

Kafka Manager and Starling can be primarily classified as "Message Queue" tools.

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, Starling provides the following key features:

• Written by Blaine Cook at Twitter
• Starling is a Message Queue Server based on MemCached
• Written in Ruby

Kafka Manager and Starling are both open source tools. It seems that Kafka Manager with 7.55K GitHub stars and 1.84K forks on GitHub has more adoption than Starling with 468 GitHub stars and 63 GitHub forks.