--- title: Aiven for Apache Kafka Reviews meta_title: 'Aiven for Apache Kafka Reviews 2026: Details, Pricing, & Features | G2' meta_description: Filter 248 reviews by the users' company size, role or industry to find out how Aiven for Apache Kafka works for a business like yours. aggregate_rating: rating_value: 4.3 review_count: 248 scale: '5' date_modified: '2026-08-05' parent_category: name: Big Data url: https://www.g2.com/categories/big-data --- # Aiven for Apache Kafka Reviews **Vendor:** Aiven **Category:** [Event Stream Processing Software](https://www.g2.com/categories/event-stream-processing) **Average Rating:** 4.3/5.0 **Total Reviews:** 248 ## About Aiven for Apache Kafka Aiven for Apache Kafka® is a fully managed distributed event streaming service, that can be deployed in the cloud of your choice. Aiven for Apache Kafka is ideal for event-driven applications, near-real-time data transfer and data pipelines, streaming analytics, and any use case that requires moving huge amounts of real-time data between applications and systems. With Aiven for Apache Kafka you can set up fully managed Kafka clusters in less than 10 minutes — using the Aiven web console or programmatically via Aiven’s API, CLI, Terraform provider or Kubernetes operator. You can easily connect it to your existing tech stack with a fully managed Apache Kafka Connect service with over 30+ connectors. Monitoring your clusters with logs and metrics is also available out of the box via multiple service integrations. Get access to a complete open source ecosystem of streaming technologies and tools around Apache Kafka to fully manage, and operate a real time data infrastructure at scale using: Aiven for Apache Kafka: the core event streaming framework allowing you to transport data within your organization Aiven for Apache Kafka Connect: a fully managed, fully open source, distributed service enabling you to integrate your existing data sources and sinks seamlessly with Aiven for Apache Kafka. Aiven for Apache Kafka MirrorMaker2: a fully managed, fully open source distributed data replication service for cluster to cluster data replication, disaster recovery and geo proximity across multiple regions. Karapace®: a fully open source Kafka Schema Registry that applications can access to serialize and deserialize messages with popular formats such as AVRO, Protobuf and JSON. Aiven for Apache Flink®: a fully managed, fully open source streaming SQL engine for stateful stream processing over your data streams. Klaw: an open source data governance tool that helps enterprises exercise Apache Kafka® topic and schema governance. Aiven is ISO / IEC 27001: 2013, SOC 2, HIPAA, GDPR, and CCPA compliant. Check our pricing and try our free 30-day trial at https://aiven.io/kafka. ## Aiven for Apache Kafka Pros & Cons **What users like:** - Users appreciate the **easy setup** of Aiven for Apache Kafka, simplifying the start of their real-time data projects. (28 reviews) - Users commend the **ease of use** of Aiven for Apache Kafka, appreciating the straightforward setup and minimal training needed. (23 reviews) - Users appreciate the **smooth scaling** of Aiven for Apache Kafka, enhancing their efficiency without infrastructure concerns. (16 reviews) - Users appreciate the **management ease** of Aiven for Apache Kafka, enabling quick deployment and hassle-free operation. (14 reviews) - Users value the **high reliability** of Aiven for Apache Kafka, benefiting from a fully managed, easy-to-use platform. (13 reviews) - Users value the **24/7 customer support** of Aiven for Apache Kafka, ensuring timely assistance and expert guidance. (12 reviews) - Users appreciate the **deployment ease** of Aiven for Apache Kafka, simplifying management and saving valuable time. (11 reviews) - Scalability (10 reviews) - Users appreciate the **user-friendly interface** of Aiven for Apache Kafka, finding it easy to manage and configure. (10 reviews) - Maintenance Ease (9 reviews) **What users dislike:** - Users find Aiven for Apache Kafka **expensive** as costs rise sharply with increased usage, complicating scalability. (26 reviews) - Users express frustration with the **poor documentation** , which complicates advanced configurations and slows down the process. (8 reviews) - Users note the **limited features** for advanced configurations compared to self-managed setups, impacting their control and flexibility. (7 reviews) - Users find the **operational complexity** of Aiven for Apache Kafka overwhelming, requiring dedicated resources and extensive manual work. (6 reviews) - Users find Aiven for Apache Kafka **not user-friendly** , citing complexities in configurations and minor UI glitches affecting usability. (5 reviews) - Limited Control (4 reviews) - Users struggle with **data management issues** , citing missing features and clunky configuration tools that hinder integration. (3 reviews) - Users face **integration issues** with Aiven for Apache Kafka, particularly regarding configuration management and advanced features. (3 reviews) - Cloud Compatibility (2 reviews) - Poor Customer Support (2 reviews) ## Aiven for Apache Kafka Reviews ### 1. A good experience overall **Rating:** 4.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Ricardo T. | Fullstack Engineer, Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** August 17, 2023 **What do you like best about Aiven for Apache Kafka?** Cool and clean interface that allows me to navigate quickly whenever I need to find some information. **What do you dislike about Aiven for Apache Kafka?** I would appreciate some way to search for messages from within the platform. **What problems is Aiven for Apache Kafka solving and how is that benefiting you?** From my perspective I just need to connect to Kafka and start consuming/processing messages right away ### 2. Aiven review after almost 4 years of experience **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Entertainment | Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** July 30, 2023 **What do you like best about Aiven for Apache Kafka?** I very much like the UI, which is user friendly and easy to access and manage Apache Kafka cluster. Personally I also like the terminal tool (avn) , which makes it more smooth to execute different commands. **What do you dislike about Aiven for Apache Kafka?** My first experience which I like to mention here is the Apache Kafka cluster logs. This is a bit cumbersome to use and scroll in the UI and find a specific date and time details. **What problems is Aiven for Apache Kafka solving and how is that benefiting you?** Event streaming in our designed event driven architecture, which can be considered a key component in our infrastructure. ### 3. Developer Back End **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** David D. | Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** August 08, 2023 **What do you like best about Aiven for Apache Kafka?** The easy graphical interface making Apache Kafka easy to use and manage! **What do you dislike about Aiven for Apache Kafka?** The update management.. We had an issue with an automatic update breaking our consumer. This was due to the admin being in out of office. **What problems is Aiven for Apache Kafka solving and how is that benefiting you?** Allowing our client and us exchnaging data in an efficient way. ### 4. Easy way to have ease mind about your data pipelines **Rating:** 4.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Alireza S. | Sys and network admin, Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** August 29, 2023 **What do you like best about Aiven for Apache Kafka?** Its realy easy to setup your data pipeline without any complexity about how much cloud provider would charge **What do you dislike about Aiven for Apache Kafka?** There are many more databases that we need but aiven didn't support **What problems is Aiven for Apache Kafka solving and how is that benefiting you?** our cloud costs,and our hr costs ### 5. Aiven and kafka **Rating:** 2.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Financial Services | Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** February 21, 2024 **What do you like best about Aiven for Apache Kafka?** Aiven makes managing our kafka easier than without **What do you dislike about Aiven for Apache Kafka?** The integration can be a little challenging **What problems is Aiven for Apache Kafka solving and how is that benefiting you?** Aiven is helping us stream our kafka messages **Official Response from Markos Sfikas:** > Thanks for your review. Great to hear you can easily stream messages with Aiven for Apache Kafka. I would like to understand more about what can be improved so your rating is higher next time. Is there anything specific you have experienced with Aiven for Apache Kafka or would like to have added to the offering? ### 6. It just works. All the benefits without the hassle **Rating:** 4.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Computer Software | Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** July 06, 2023 **What do you like best about Aiven for Apache Kafka?** Simplicty of connecting it with other services, such as Aiven for Apache Flink. Getting the service set up and ready to go with a click of a button was very nice, having set it up manually once before. **What do you dislike about Aiven for Apache Kafka?** I have a problem that if kafka is slow or high cpu, my API´s sending to it start timing out. It feels like i will need a pubsub in between my API and kafka to increase reliability **What problems is Aiven for Apache Kafka solving and how is that benefiting you?** Streaming events into flink for aggregation and transformation, which significantly reduces the data down for us before we stream it into postgresSQL ### 7. First experience with managed kafka **Rating:** 4.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Antoine L. | Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** July 27, 2023 **What do you like best about Aiven for Apache Kafka?** Simplicity and full of functionnality of the Aiven console **What do you dislike about Aiven for Apache Kafka?** A bit of missing documentation. And some feature not supported in aiven console (deserialization of message with zstd compress for example) **What problems is Aiven for Apache Kafka solving and how is that benefiting you?** We are integrating two system from two differents company. Kafka is here to transfer message information between us ### 8. Overall, quite satisfied with Aiven Kafka **Rating:** 4.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Eivind N. | Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** July 06, 2023 **What do you like best about Aiven for Apache Kafka?** Aiven manages the service, so we can use more time to help develop features. **What do you dislike about Aiven for Apache Kafka?** I would have to say the price. After we migrated to Aiven the costs have increased. **What problems is Aiven for Apache Kafka solving and how is that benefiting you?** Aiven manages patching, upgrades, cluster configuration and other managent tasks. The benefit for us is that we don't have to invest in knowledge and time for this. ### 9. Happy with the features & services from Aiven **Rating:** 4.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Information Technology and Services | Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** July 13, 2023 **What do you like best about Aiven for Apache Kafka?** Aiven Kafka provides a great UI for visualising all the Kafka features in a single place. Flexible updates with prior notifications from the team. Quite easy communication with the support staff for any queries. **What do you dislike about Aiven for Apache Kafka?** Aiven should improve on providing the user access for different organisations. Also they must think upon providing a free version for the users to play around. **What problems is Aiven for Apache Kafka solving and how is that benefiting you?** Provides a great and easily understandable UI to manage all the kafka services at one place. We have hosted our kafka topics on Aiven. ### 10. Easy to set up and use. **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Information Technology and Services | Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** November 15, 2023 **What do you like best about Aiven for Apache Kafka?** Built in web console and is very easy to be used. **What do you dislike about Aiven for Apache Kafka?** The limited fuctions for the Query Editor. **What problems is Aiven for Apache Kafka solving and how is that benefiting you?** Easy access to members from different part of world. **Official Response from Markos Sfikas:** > Thank you for your review! You can submit your feedback regarding additional functionality on the Query Editor to our product team in Aiven Ideas here: https://ideas.aiven.io/ Thanks again for your trust in Aiven for Apache Kafka! ### 11. Good quality solution, though expensive **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Greg M. | Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** July 27, 2023 **What do you like best about Aiven for Apache Kafka?** - how fast it is possible to start it - how easy it is possible to scale - no infrastructrure team needed in my dev team - available metrics integration - recurring and often updates **What do you dislike about Aiven for Apache Kafka?** - plans are quite expensive, lower cost would be appreciated - the management UI is not intuitive - especially in the context of topic management - no SSO with Microsoft, Google etc **What problems is Aiven for Apache Kafka solving and how is that benefiting you?** - IoT data transfer - Kafka Streams message integration - real time data processing **Official Response from Markos Sfikas:** > Hi Greg, Thanks for your review and trust in Aiven for Apache Kafka. Great to see that Aiven for Apache Kafka is easy to start and scale and you enjoy our regular upgrades and updates to the service. Regarding topic management, I would suggest that you check Aiven's Open Source Project for Apache Kafka Data Governance, Klaw (you can access the project here: https://www.klaw-project.io/). Klaw is a Data Governance toolkit for Apache Kafka topic and user management. I will pass on your feedback to our team. Thanks again Markos ### 12. simple and user friendly, **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** abdurusul k. | System engineer , Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** June 19, 2019 **What do you like best about Aiven for Apache Kafka?** - kafka part , and upgrade of kafka is simple and fast - High quality of service - Really reactive support **What do you dislike about Aiven for Apache Kafka?** - more collaboration with our IT team - prices ? **What problems is Aiven for Apache Kafka solving and how is that benefiting you?** - kafka as a service is always better than the legacy kafka cluster with VM, less administration, high availability - Time to market - Better scaling according to the business needs ### 13. aiven kafka review **Rating:** 4.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Linh T. | Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** July 06, 2023 **What do you like best about Aiven for Apache Kafka?** Easy setup and management ensures high availability and easy to scale **What do you dislike about Aiven for Apache Kafka?** While Aiven provides a user-friendly web interface for managing Apache Kafka clusters, users may not have access to the underlying configuration files or the ability to install custom plugins or modules **What problems is Aiven for Apache Kafka solving and how is that benefiting you?** reduce maintenance tasks easy setup and available many authentication methods ### 14. easy to use and stable **Rating:** 4.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Internet | Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** December 19, 2023 **What do you like best about Aiven for Apache Kafka?** The service is easy to use and stable. The SKD/API documentation is clear and informational. **What do you dislike about Aiven for Apache Kafka?** expecting better viability and statistics about kafka topic - how many messages comes in by minute, hour, day, etc. **What problems is Aiven for Apache Kafka solving and how is that benefiting you?** save time for maitaining kafka cluster and tooling for it. **Official Response from Markos Sfikas:** > Hello, Thanks for your review and trust in Aiven for Apache Kafka. Great to hear that you find our API documentation clear and concise. This is always great to hear! Regarding metrics of the Kafka topics, there is a bunch of available metrics through Prometheus. You can explore the available metrics here: https://docs.aiven.io/docs/products/kafka/reference/kafka-metrics-prometheus If you would like additional metrics for the Kafka service, you can raise this in Aiven Ideas so our product organization can consider your feedback in their roadmap. You can find this here: https://ideas.aiven.io/ Thanks again for your trust in the Aiven Platform! Best Regards Markos ### 15. SAS platform for Managed Kafka service which could be started in no time **Rating:** 4.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Education Management | Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** June 01, 2021 **What do you like best about Aiven for Apache Kafka?** Facile et simpliste UI et outils de gestion. Il y a de bons blogs et documentations qui sont utiles pour se connecter depuis local. Les mises à jour sont simples et une opération en un clic. **What do you dislike about Aiven for Apache Kafka?** Pagination of the topics. If any action is done, it always takes you to the 1st page. Sort on various parameters of the topic like partition, retention, etc. Would prefer to have some SDK provided to connect from code easily. **What problems is Aiven for Apache Kafka solving and how is that benefiting you?** Capture CDC and other events. Easy and simple without any management headache. Reduces management overhead and increases productivity. ### 16. A good tool for kafka **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Vishesh K. | Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** July 06, 2023 **What do you like best about Aiven for Apache Kafka?** Aiven is easy to use, provides the correct insights and helps understand how kafka is used. **What do you dislike about Aiven for Apache Kafka?** Nothing much, aiven is very helpful. If it can alert on anomalies that would be useful **What problems is Aiven for Apache Kafka solving and how is that benefiting you?** Aiven helps us keep track of the messages and kakfa in general **Official Response from Markos Sfikas:** > Thanks for your review and trust in Aiven for Apache Kafka Vishesh. Alerting on anomalies in the Kafka infrastructure is something we want to enable with the service in the future. Thank you again! ### 17. Reallu cool Realy easy to configure **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Marketing and Advertising | Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** October 10, 2023 **What do you like best about Aiven for Apache Kafka?** I think is really easy to configure and start working **What do you dislike about Aiven for Apache Kafka?** I been using this just for a wile and so far there is nothing wrong **What problems is Aiven for Apache Kafka solving and how is that benefiting you?** the configuration is really easy ### 18. Effortless Setup **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Adam L. | Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** August 15, 2023 **What do you like best about Aiven for Apache Kafka?** The ease of administration and downtime recovery makes Apache Kafka on Aiven one of the best places to look to for standing up Kafka. **What do you dislike about Aiven for Apache Kafka?** So far everything has been working well, and have not found anything I dislike about Aiven for Apache Kafka **What problems is Aiven for Apache Kafka solving and how is that benefiting you?** Currently it is helping us process real-time analytics on some of primary business cases. **Official Response from Markos Sfikas:** > Thanks for your review Adam! Great to hear you are enjoying Aiven for Apache Kafka, its ease-of-use and fast recovery times. You can stay in the loop with our public product roadmap here: https://ideas.aiven.io/ Thanks again! Markos ### 19. Great product and easy to use **Rating:** 4.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Accounting | Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** July 27, 2023 **What do you like best about Aiven for Apache Kafka?** The overview tab is very useful to find important information quickly. **What do you dislike about Aiven for Apache Kafka?** It takes too many steps to look at the event messages and have to go through the steps again to look at it after navigating away. **What problems is Aiven for Apache Kafka solving and how is that benefiting you?** It allows me to look at the Kafka event stream to see if it is online and events are coming through. ### 20. Aiven for business application **Rating:** 4.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Information Technology and Services | Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** August 08, 2023 **What do you like best about Aiven for Apache Kafka?** The way managing the environement is easy, dependancies management is really easy, topics, schema, politics is really cool too **What do you dislike about Aiven for Apache Kafka?** I dont like that the UI is not able to read comrpessed data, the manual message posting is not so good **What problems is Aiven for Apache Kafka solving and how is that benefiting you?** we needed a broker for application integreation ### 21. One Stop Solution to Implement CDC in GCP **Rating:** 3.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Financial Services | Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** August 18, 2023 **What do you like best about Aiven for Apache Kafka?** Functionality and setting in aiven that need to improve **What do you dislike about Aiven for Apache Kafka?** Need to get more documentation on how to setup since our infra team with lack of knowledge in aiven is difficult to setup **What problems is Aiven for Apache Kafka solving and how is that benefiting you?** To capture the changes in data production ### 22. easy to start **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Marketing and Advertising | Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** July 06, 2023 **What do you like best about Aiven for Apache Kafka?** I like that it is very easy to set up and start using it with other services, e.g. PostgreSQL. Setup data pipeline from PostgreSQL through kafka-connect into bigquery is easy. **What do you dislike about Aiven for Apache Kafka?** I would like to have more metrics, especially in aiven UI. **What problems is Aiven for Apache Kafka solving and how is that benefiting you?** We need to stream data from DB into data lake storage. ### 23. It's kafka **Rating:** 3.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Logistics and Supply Chain | Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** July 06, 2023 **What do you like best about Aiven for Apache Kafka?** Being able to easily scale and move between clouds. Support for SSL based authentication. **What do you dislike about Aiven for Apache Kafka?** When using azure private endpoint custom load balancer being flaky. Missing schema registry features. Portal is annoying for checking messages and topics. **What problems is Aiven for Apache Kafka solving and how is that benefiting you?** Moving data between services. Messaging. Kafka is our unified message bus, so ease of internal integrations. ### 24. Satisfied with the Aiven Kafka services **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Information Technology and Services | Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** July 07, 2023 **What do you like best about Aiven for Apache Kafka?** Aiven provides a good console that accommodates all the kaha features at one place. Easy to navigate to different Kafka features and properties. Well managed and maintained. Support team is easily reachable. **What do you dislike about Aiven for Apache Kafka?** I think a more easy access to the Aiven APIs for integrating it in the system would be helpful. A little more description of the APIs and the response fields would be great. **What problems is Aiven for Apache Kafka solving and how is that benefiting you?** Provides an excellent console to view and manage all the Kafka features and properties at a single place. Easy to navigate and use. **Official Response from Markos Sfikas:** > Thanks for your review and trust in Aiven for Apache Kafka. I will pass the feedback about Aiven's APIs to our product team. ### 25. Works as a service, solid to keep running. **Rating:** 4.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Consumer Electronics | Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** July 06, 2023 **What do you like best about Aiven for Apache Kafka?** Fire and forget service that is easy to maintain, upgrade and keep serving. Terraform integration is golden. **What do you dislike about Aiven for Apache Kafka?** Some values are hard to maintain and visualize in portal. Some custom modules have made some hicups in past. **What problems is Aiven for Apache Kafka solving and how is that benefiting you?** Ingestion on iot events from devices around the world for processing. ### 26. Using Kafka instances **Rating:** 3.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Information Technology and Services | Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** July 06, 2023 **What do you like best about Aiven for Apache Kafka?** Easy to manage and get started with. Can integrate different things along with kafka. **What do you dislike about Aiven for Apache Kafka?** Need to understand what is Kafka to use it in the better way, also it is expensive. **What problems is Aiven for Apache Kafka solving and how is that benefiting you?** You don't need to provision your own kafka, Aiven saves your time. ### 27. Makes Kafka an option for teams with limited devops resources **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Information Technology and Services | Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** July 06, 2023 **What do you like best about Aiven for Apache Kafka?** Fully managed solutions with upgrades that just work. **What do you dislike about Aiven for Apache Kafka?** Price is high and may be prohibitive for some. Smaller instances or a pay-per-throughput/storage model may help. **What problems is Aiven for Apache Kafka solving and how is that benefiting you?** Real-time analytics, reliable processing. Kafka helps us ingest and analyze data without dataloss. ### 28. Quick Connect to Kafka **Rating:** 4.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Computer Software | Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** July 19, 2023 **What do you like best about Aiven for Apache Kafka?** The setup was very easy and quick. It even provide integration snippets that re very helpfull and the support team is one of the quickest to respond. **What do you dislike about Aiven for Apache Kafka?** The pricing can be more competitive and the loging can be improved. The RBAC and dashboard stability has to be improved. **What problems is Aiven for Apache Kafka solving and how is that benefiting you?** Maintaining atraditional Kafka vm or container is a mess. The monitoring and downtime handling is difficult. It solves this problem. ### 29. I find it very useful to quickly check the sample messages from topics **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Consumer Goods | Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** July 06, 2023 **What do you like best about Aiven for Apache Kafka?** Simplicity of use and ease to search for topics nd projects that I want to view **What do you dislike about Aiven for Apache Kafka?** The UI can be confusing at times, but we get used to it **What problems is Aiven for Apache Kafka solving and how is that benefiting you?** To process streams and view them on UI ### 30. Aiven for Apache Kafka **Rating:** 4.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Financial Services | Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** June 26, 2023 **What do you like best about Aiven for Apache Kafka?** The UI is comprehensive, and the support responsive. **What do you dislike about Aiven for Apache Kafka?** We've had a few bugs in the UI, which when raised took some time to fix (depending on roadmap). **What problems is Aiven for Apache Kafka solving and how is that benefiting you?** Saves hosting our own infra. ### 31. work with Aiven **Rating:** 4.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Djamel H. | Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** June 26, 2023 **What do you like best about Aiven for Apache Kafka?** you can create a service very easy way manage kafka is really easy **What do you dislike about Aiven for Apache Kafka?** the global search on all projects it is really a lack **What problems is Aiven for Apache Kafka solving and how is that benefiting you?** it is solve all security purpose ### 32. Great **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Internet | Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** August 17, 2023 **What do you like best about Aiven for Apache Kafka?** It is a great way to cluster and organize your kafka topics, implement authentication and easy to use. **What do you dislike about Aiven for Apache Kafka?** I can not find anything at the moment... **What problems is Aiven for Apache Kafka solving and how is that benefiting you?** We are keeping important data on real time which is crucial for our business model ### 33. Fantastic product **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Michael Z. | Chief Technology Officer, Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** May 31, 2023 **What do you like best about Aiven for Apache Kafka?** Great UI, we migrated from another vendor completely in 4 hours!! upgrades are touchless, we can see how everything is setup and running. **What do you dislike about Aiven for Apache Kafka?** Challenging to implement exactly once processing. **What problems is Aiven for Apache Kafka solving and how is that benefiting you?** Layer between the systems creating messages and the database. Adds significant resiliancy. ### 34. Good stuff **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Consumer Services | Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** July 06, 2023 **What do you like best about Aiven for Apache Kafka?** Easy to maintain. Always new versions. Good stuff **What do you dislike about Aiven for Apache Kafka?** Managing certificates is painful when you have > 200 servces **What problems is Aiven for Apache Kafka solving and how is that benefiting you?** Stream all kind of events ### 35. Robust event platform **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Package/Freight Delivery | Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** July 07, 2023 **What do you like best about Aiven for Apache Kafka?** From my experience the platform has been very robust and efficient. I do not remember ever, even during some exceptional situations a single event being lost or undelivered. **What do you dislike about Aiven for Apache Kafka?** Learning curve for kafka has been quite steep at least form. But that is probably more related to the kafka itself than Aiven. **What problems is Aiven for Apache Kafka solving and how is that benefiting you?** Provides robust backbone for the event driver architecture. ### 36. Reliable **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Financial Services | Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** June 06, 2023 **What do you like best about Aiven for Apache Kafka?** The best thing about Aiven for Apache Kafka has been it's reliability. **What do you dislike about Aiven for Apache Kafka?** That there is no backup option for data. **What problems is Aiven for Apache Kafka solving and how is that benefiting you?** Kafka underpins all our services. ### 37. Happy Aiven Kafka user **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Gambling & Casinos | Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** July 09, 2023 **What do you like best about Aiven for Apache Kafka?** - Great customer support - Product of good quality - High availablity **What do you dislike about Aiven for Apache Kafka?** I did not encouter anything I dislike about Aiven in particular. However, I think that the Aiven console is not too user friendly. **What problems is Aiven for Apache Kafka solving and how is that benefiting you?** Aiven Apache Kafka enables our organization to integrate various microservices. **Official Response from Markos Sfikas:** > Thanks for your review and trust in Aiven for Apache Kafka. We will be introducing some updates to the Aiven Console that you can already test out here: https://console.aiven.io/profile/feature-preview. You can do this by enabling the 'Experience the new console navigation' section. ### 38. Service that is worth trying **Rating:** 3.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Information Technology and Services | Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** July 19, 2023 **What do you like best about Aiven for Apache Kafka?** Simple setup did work out of the box with no troubles **What do you dislike about Aiven for Apache Kafka?** Most of my team's problems were related to keys management, they never got addressed or were addressed slowly **What problems is Aiven for Apache Kafka solving and how is that benefiting you?** None, we've gave up and switched to Confluent ### 39. Senior Software engineer **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Computer Software | Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** August 22, 2023 **What do you like best about Aiven for Apache Kafka?** The UI is easy to use. Easy switching between environments. **What do you dislike about Aiven for Apache Kafka?** It is confusing to filter by some offset value. **What problems is Aiven for Apache Kafka solving and how is that benefiting you?** - ### 40. Well made UI but lack of flexibility in access rights **Rating:** 4.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Financial Services | Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** September 16, 2022 **What do you like best about Aiven for Apache Kafka?** It is very easy to create new clusters and enable connectivity with public cloud environments, also user management is quite simple which makes it easy to work with. **What do you dislike about Aiven for Apache Kafka?** I do not like that there is a lack of access rights for user management. We can either grant user read-only which gives him too little permissions or we can grant him developer, which gives him too much permissions in the Aiven Kafka Console. Since we are controlling everything via IaC, we cannot grant users anything more then read-only, but with that they cannot really "read" 99% of the stuff like see topics or schema content or on the other hand in INT or lower envirnomnets we cannot grant them to see passwords of users or check ACL's in the console. Granularity is missing badly :) **What problems is Aiven for Apache Kafka solving and how is that benefiting you?** It is giving us possibility to use it as central messaging BUS from multiple on-prem or public cloud systems and we can process them and forward them to systems as per requirement ### 41. Satisfied so far with technical side - UI can be better **Rating:** 4.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Andrii H. | Staff Software Engineer, Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** September 16, 2022 **What do you like best about Aiven for Apache Kafka?** Simplicity. Working with aiven is straightforward and doesn't include any underwater currents. The documentation is excellent. **What do you dislike about Aiven for Apache Kafka?** UI is not optimized for small screens (13 inch laptop), and generally, can be more "smooth". Takes some time to get used to it, and it still not very convenient. Kafka connectors are not restarting if there were no configuration change, even when I press the button - some status icon (spinning wheel) would greatly contribute to useability. UI for connectors can be better. (https://console.aiven.io/project/stg-eu/services/replicator/connectors) There is no buttons to jump to configuration from there, probbaly will be much better if we have unified view for connector with "tasks" section etc. Use case - I open multiple connectors for debugging with "ctrl +click" from the list menu so they will be separate windows. Right now I have to copy paste link on list view and then click the button "edit configuration" separately on all of them - suggestion - all the views to have URIs which could be accessed directly. **What problems is Aiven for Apache Kafka solving and how is that benefiting you?** CDC data capture scenarios ### 42. Easy to use **Rating:** 3.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Human Resources | Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** July 06, 2023 **What do you like best about Aiven for Apache Kafka?** Terraform provider is nice for automatize maintenance. **What do you dislike about Aiven for Apache Kafka?** Logs exports depends on other service and the default screen to see the logs is not good. **What problems is Aiven for Apache Kafka solving and how is that benefiting you?** Microservice communication and temporal shared data storage ### 43. Backend Engineer **Rating:** 4.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Financial Services | Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** July 06, 2023 **What do you like best about Aiven for Apache Kafka?** Working out of the box, nice UI to manage the app, straightforward integration with our application. **What do you dislike about Aiven for Apache Kafka?** Sometimes we struggle debugging or investigating the issues we encounter. **What problems is Aiven for Apache Kafka solving and how is that benefiting you?** Not having to deal with managing self hosted Kafka ### 44. Easy to find topics and read their content **Rating:** 4.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Information Technology and Services | Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** August 24, 2022 **What do you like best about Aiven for Apache Kafka?** How easy it was to look up topics (using search), view the messages that are on a particular topic and then decode the b64 and read the contents. We needed to look up a mongo change stream and found what we were looking for in this message 💪 **What do you dislike about Aiven for Apache Kafka?** One thing that would have been good was to see what kind of volume a particular topic has. For instance, we wanted to know just how many messages were on a mongo change stream in case we needed to do some caching on the consumer end to be more efficient querying the DB. **What problems is Aiven for Apache Kafka solving and how is that benefiting you?** At Wolt it helps when trying to communicate between different microservices. In our particular case we want to see when an object changes in the core mongo database and make some changes elsewhere in a separate system. Obviously that's the benefits of Kafka :) but as far as Aiven goes it's great to have a managed solution and a UI for seeing messages / topics etc. ### 45. It has beengreat **Rating:** 3.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Accounting | Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** July 06, 2023 **What do you like best about Aiven for Apache Kafka?** How the data is transfered from one serive **What do you dislike about Aiven for Apache Kafka?** The limitation of how bigger of a data we can send **What problems is Aiven for Apache Kafka solving and how is that benefiting you?** the transfer of data from one serivce to another. ### 46. Setting up was extremely easy **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Package/Freight Delivery | Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** August 04, 2022 **What do you like best about Aiven for Apache Kafka?** Setting up was extremely easy. Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua. Ut enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud exercitation ullamco laboris nisi ut aliquip ex ea commodo consequat. Duis aute irure dolor in reprehenderit in voluptate velit esse cillum dolore eu fugiat nulla pariatur. Excepteur sint occaecat cupidatat non proident, sunt in culpa qui officia deserunt mollit anim id est laborum. **What do you dislike about Aiven for Apache Kafka?** Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit, but do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua. For the purpose of minimizing the inconvenience, quis nostrud exercitation ullamco laboris nisi ut aliquip ex ea commodo consequat. Duis aute irure dolor in reprehenderit in voluptate velit esse cillum dolore eu fugiat nulla pariatur. Excepteur sint occaecat cupidatat non proident, they are in fault who officia deserunt mollit anim id est laborum. **What problems is Aiven for Apache Kafka solving and how is that benefiting you?** Its all managed by Aiven and needs no attention from us. ### 47. Awesome integration into Terraform and DigitalOcean **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Farming | Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** July 07, 2022 **What do you like best about Aiven for Apache Kafka?** It sits right in the middle between hosting everything on your own on one hand and booking confluent cloud on the other hand. We do not need to take care of the machines, zookeeper, ... and still get Kafka up and running wiht just "terraform apply"! **What do you dislike about Aiven for Apache Kafka?** We have a small integration setup and would like to have a small (as in cheap) one machine setup to just play with it. We plan on using review Apps in GitLab and spinning up a 200 $ / month setup everytime will soon get pricy ;-) **What problems is Aiven for Apache Kafka solving and how is that benefiting you?** We could run Kafka anywhere, but we are a small company and even though our developers have fun playing with operations, we need to tightly focus the small amount of time we have. And having someone else taking care of Kafka and everything surrounding it helps us keeping this focus. ### 48. Still not in production, but super nice experience **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Kumar Saurabh S. | Senior Engineering Manager, Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** September 15, 2022 **What do you like best about Aiven for Apache Kafka?** Communication was super seamless. Every time we need support Aiven team is just a message away. For example, in the PoC phase, we were looking for some on-demand thing to help us with the journey, and the team was always there to support us. **What do you dislike about Aiven for Apache Kafka?** Probably documentation around complex problems would be interesting. For example, we want to connect two clouds with Aiven, and yes, there were some architecture diagrams provided, but I think when the use case is not so straightforward and Aiven has already solved it with previous clients, it's better to have detailed solution descriptions on the same. **What problems is Aiven for Apache Kafka solving and how is that benefiting you?** Event sourcing and CDC with multiple clouds ### 49. Yeah! **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Daniel V. | DevOps Engineer, Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** November 07, 2022 **What do you like best about Aiven for Apache Kafka?** That fact that everything is managed by professionals focusing on delivering a great service. With clear pricing. **What do you dislike about Aiven for Apache Kafka?** Nothing, all is good, I believe. Great service and great documentation. **What problems is Aiven for Apache Kafka solving and how is that benefiting you?** It solves time constrains we have by allowing us to not manage our Kafka environment. ### 50. Aiven Apache Kafka **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Wholesale | Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** August 29, 2022 **What do you like best about Aiven for Apache Kafka?** Nice UI, nice terraform module, k8s operator, variety of cloud providers, ability to scale both vertically and horizontally. I like the way your documentation is structured and the fact that it is really concise. **What do you dislike about Aiven for Apache Kafka?** There are pros and cons of each point that I mention. 1. As for scalability: I would highly appreciate having a possibility to scale automatically somehow. It would be precious to be able to scale based on some metrics and Kafka usage and to set minimun and maximum number of nodes. Of course, Kafka scalability may be not that straight-forward due to the fact that scaling it would surely take some amount of time and may take a lot of time if the data volume is really high; but at least having an option to scale it up and down automatically would be cool and would imply reliability and assurance in the service. 2. As for documentation: documentation is concise but sometimes I would like to have a link to dive deeper into details on how that or another thing works. And just noticed that for example on this page: https://docs.aiven.io/docs/products/kafka/concepts.html, the underlined topics and the UI itself looks a bit poorer than the rest of your UI. **What problems is Aiven for Apache Kafka solving and how is that benefiting you?** For now, we are just starting to use Aiven Apache Kafka, and we are in the middle of the consideration if to use it and how. From my side, I am an infrastructure engineer, and my benefits are to use a managed service, do not spend a lot of time and effort managing Kafka, describing it in IaC and so on. ## Aiven for Apache Kafka Discussions - [What are the characteristics of Apache Kafka?](https://www.g2.com/discussions/what-are-the-characteristics-of-apache-kafka) - 1 comment - [View Aiven for Apache Kafka pricing details and edition comparison](https://www.g2.com/products/aiven-for-apache-kafka/reviews?page=3§ion=pricing&secure%5Bexpires_at%5D=2026-08-05+16%3A29%3A32+-0500&secure%5Bsession_id%5D=f057a98e-f058-4534-877b-732b22d9a289&secure%5Btoken%5D=31b662b171a633a5d778a4930d95c584d7d4042cfd1c0c876aa7798145ecfc5d&format=llm_user) ## Aiven for Apache Kafka Integrations - [Amazon CloudWatch](https://www.g2.com/products/amazon-cloudwatch/reviews) - [Amazon S3 Glacier](https://www.g2.com/products/amazon-s3-glacier/reviews) - [Apache Maven](https://www.g2.com/products/apache-maven/reviews) - [Kotlin](https://www.g2.com/products/kotlin/reviews) - [LiveChat](https://www.g2.com/products/livechat/reviews) - [Python](https://www.g2.com/products/python/reviews) ## Aiven for Apache Kafka Features **Data** - Data Processing - Data Sources - Integration - Real-Time Processing **Analytics** - Reporting & Analytics **Building Reports** - Data Transformation - Data Modeling - WYSIWYG Report Design - Integration APIs - Real-Time Data - Real-Time Data - Third-Party Integrations **Platform** - User, Role, and Access Management - Sandbox / Test Environments - Performance and Reliability - Breadth of Partner Applications - Mobile Access - Metadata Management ## Top Aiven for Apache Kafka Alternatives - [Confluent](https://www.g2.com/products/confluent/reviews) - 4.4/5.0 (111 reviews) - [Amazon Managed Streaming for Apache Kafka (Amazon MSK)](https://www.g2.com/products/amazon-managed-streaming-for-apache-kafka-amazon-msk/reviews) - 4.0/5.0 (23 reviews) - [Lenses](https://www.g2.com/products/lenses/reviews) - 4.2/5.0 (17 reviews)