# Page 2 | Aiven for Apache Kafka Software 2026: Features, Integrations, Pros & Cons | Capterra > Page 2 - Capterra's in-depth exploration of Aiven for Apache Kafka Software's capabilities reveals its suitability for various software needs and provides a comprehensive overview of Aiven for Apache Kafka Software pricing, features, integrations, and potential alternatives. Source: https://www.capterra.com/p/167938/Aiven-Kafka --- Page 2 - Aiven for Apache Kafka Software Review 2026: Features, Reviews, Integrations, Pros & Cons Last updated on March 13, 2026 Provider data verified by our Software Research team, and reviews moderated by our Reviews Verification team. Independent research methodology Capterra’s researchers use a mix of verified reviews, independent research and objective methodologies to bring you selection and ranking information you can trust. While we may earn a referral fee when you visit a provider through our links or speak to an advisor, this has no influence on our research or methodology. [Learn more](https://www.capterra.com/resources/proprietary-data-research/) How Capterra verifies reviews Capterra carefully verified over 2.5 million+ reviews to bring you authentic software experiences from real users. Our human moderators verify that reviewers are real people and that reviews are authentic. They use leading tech to analyze text quality and to detect plagiarism and generative AI. [Learn more](https://www.capterra.com/resources/how-we-verify-reviews/) How Capterra ensures transparency Capterra lists all providers across its website—not just those that pay us—so that users can make informed purchase decisions. Capterra is free for users. Software providers pay us for sponsored profiles to receive web traffic and sales opportunities. Sponsored profiles include a link-out icon that takes users to the provider’s website. [Learn more](https://www.capterra.com/resources/how-we-ensure-transparency/) Aiven for Apache Kafka ## User reviews CS Christopher S. Developer Utilities ### "Good product with some annoying wrinkles" 4.0 Overall Rating 4.0 4.0 Ease of Use 4.0 4.0 Features 3.0 3.0 Customer Service 4.0 4.0 Likelihood to Recommend 5/10 October 4, 2019 I enjoy using Aiven Kafka. Hosted Kafka Connect with the option to use custom connectors and transformers would be great. Pros Aiven Kafka is generally very stable, especially now that Kafka itself is becoming more mature Cons The security model has been very broken. Making an API call to get a certificate and being given a list of all the certificates in the project is simply wrong. Also, the UI does not always contain the same information that is output by the standard Kafka command line tooling. Review source Incentivized review: software users are invited to submit an honest review and offered a nominal incentive for their time and effort. All incentivized reviews are subject to our verification process prior to publication. FS Fredrick S. Lead Engineer Financial Services ### "Mature and reliable" 4.0 Overall Rating 4.0 4.0 Ease of Use 4.0 4.0 Features 4.0 4.0 Customer Service 0.0 0.0 Likelihood to Recommend 8/10 September 9, 2019 Great so far Pros \- interface is well thought out - migrations were a breeze for upgrades - up in running with in an hour - works well! Cons \- a little bit on the expensive side - interface to see topic's events and push test events Review source Incentivized review: software users are invited to submit an honest review and offered a nominal incentive for their time and effort. All incentivized reviews are subject to our verification process prior to publication. RH Russell H. DevOpe Engineer Information Technology and Services ### "Our experiences deploying Kafka with Aiven" 5.0 Overall Rating 5.0 5.0 Ease of Use 5.0 5.0 Features 5.0 5.0 Customer Service 5.0 5.0 Likelihood to Recommend 10/10 August 12, 2019 We are a very new customer but our experience has been good so far. They have taken a lot of headaches out of setting up a Kafka cluster. I am hopeful that this experience will carry over to production as we begin to deliver new projects using Kafka. Pros We liked that Aiven offered us a self service portal and is easy to integrate with our existing software stack. We have a number of environments in development requiring Kafka and they are able to offer us the level of flexibility we need. We are using Terraform in AWS so being able to provision everything using their Terraform provider is also beneficial to us. Setting up a cluster to the point where we are able to monitor it with our existing Prometheus is very easy to do thanks to their external integrations. Cons The documentation is lacking in some parts. Trying to set up logging to am external Elasticsearch cluster is difficult if you have your cluster secured with SSL. The terraform documentation is also lacking documentation and expects you to figure it out yourself from reading JSON. Alternatives considered [Confluent Platform](https://www.capterra.com/p/191177/Confluent-Platform/) Reasons for choosing Aiven for Apache Kafka For the reasons mentioned above, the main ones being flexibility with the self service offering. Review source Incentivized review: software users are invited to submit an honest review and offered a nominal incentive for their time and effort. All incentivized reviews are subject to our verification process prior to publication. PC Patrick C. Software Engineer Media Production ### "Intuitive Data Platform" 5.0 Overall Rating 5.0 5.0 Ease of Use 5.0 5.0 Features 5.0 5.0 Customer Service 0.0 0.0 Likelihood to Recommend 9/10 July 30, 2019 Creating a data platform for tracking user interaction events as well as creating pub-sub architecture for service communication. Pros The UI/UX makes it extremely simple to setup new clusters and makes it extremely clear as to what you're spinning up, it's state, etc. Integration between services is also very intuitive. Cons I know it's a best practice beyond SSL/HTTPS, but enforcing basic auth is a bit of a pain when you're first starting a proof-of-concept. And believe it or not adding basic auth credential providers in some languages/packages isn't as clear as it should be. Reasons for choosing Aiven for Apache Kafka Amazon MSK made integration with some of the open source packages difficult, so we nixed them. Confluent's pricing was a bit much especially given they artificially cap throughput. On top of that, at the time they weren't providing a fully managed schema registry. Review source Incentivized review: software users are invited to submit an honest review and offered a nominal incentive for their time and effort. All incentivized reviews are subject to our verification process prior to publication. ST shijiyas T. team lead Information Technology and Services ### "Need to give more support to C#" 4.0 Overall Rating 4.0 4.0 Ease of Use 3.0 3.0 Features 4.0 4.0 Customer Service 0.0 0.0 Likelihood to Recommend 8/10 July 27, 2019 Its good. But,I am using KAFKA as a mediator between my admin panel and API.So,using KAFKA is slowing down my process to a small amount. Pros I am getting a better stability on my results and able to track more clearly.Also,KAFKA helps me in scaling my API and Admin panel Cons KAFKA support for IIS hosting/C# is very poor that i had to migrate my whole project to dotnet core to avoid this Reasons for choosing Aiven for Apache Kafka I go through many reviews and finalize this. Also,am using AWS services,so preferred KAFKA Review source Incentivized review: software users are invited to submit an honest review and offered a nominal incentive for their time and effort. All incentivized reviews are subject to our verification process prior to publication. MM MARCOS M. Enterprise Architect Telecommunications ### "Kafka improvements" 5.0 Overall Rating 5.0 5.0 Ease of Use 5.0 5.0 Features 5.0 5.0 Customer Service 3.0 3.0 Likelihood to Recommend 10/10 July 26, 2019 Pros \- Flexible - Easy to Use - Modern - Velocity Cons \- Price - Support at Brazil - Roadmap and product developments Review source Incentivized review: software users are invited to submit an honest review and offered a nominal incentive for their time and effort. All incentivized reviews are subject to our verification process prior to publication. JR Jevgeni R. Architect Information Technology and Services ### "Almost good tool" 4.0 Overall Rating 4.0 4.0 Ease of Use 3.0 3.0 Features 3.0 3.0 Customer Service 5.0 5.0 Likelihood to Recommend 7/10 July 11, 2019 I'm considering to find a good tool for loading data into Data Warehouse Pros Easy to set up, good interface, many service integration exists Cons Quite hard to search needed information within topics Review source Incentivized review: software users are invited to submit an honest review and offered a nominal incentive for their time and effort. All incentivized reviews are subject to our verification process prior to publication. RH Richard H. CTO Oil & Energy ### "Moving to Kafka, Kubernetes and stateless micro-services" 5.0 Overall Rating 5.0 5.0 Ease of Use 5.0 5.0 Features 4.0 4.0 Customer Service 0.0 0.0 Likelihood to Recommend 9/10 July 9, 2019 Pros Kafka is a great tool on paper but in practice it takes a lot of work to setup and run it successfully. Aiven takes the headache away and enabled us to get up and running quickly. Aiven even supports unlimited storage retention, great for a modern event based architecture. Cons Kafka needs better support for CQRS as topic resource overhead is high. Review source Incentivized review: software users are invited to submit an honest review and offered a nominal incentive for their time and effort. All incentivized reviews are subject to our verification process prior to publication. AV Antte V. dev Printing ### "Minimum maintenance" 5.0 Overall Rating 5.0 5.0 Ease of Use 5.0 5.0 Features 3.0 3.0 Customer Service 0.0 0.0 Likelihood to Recommend 8/10 June 17, 2019 We use kafka in aws and so far we are quite pleased. Pros Ease of use, minimal setup needed and aws vpc peering is great. Cons There should be some more logging tools, so you can view the messages in the queue. Review source Incentivized review: software users are invited to submit an honest review and offered a nominal incentive for their time and effort. All incentivized reviews are subject to our verification process prior to publication. RI Ruben I. DevOps Engineer Information Technology and Services ### "Kafka on a Click" 4.0 Overall Rating 4.0 4.0 Ease of Use 5.0 5.0 Features 4.0 4.0 Customer Service 3.0 3.0 Likelihood to Recommend 8/10 June 12, 2019 It has been a great journey with Aiven so far. Cheap and effective so far compared to the competitors. Pros 1\. Ease of use 2. High Availability and One click Deployment. 3. Security with SSL 4. Adaptability and readiness to comfort end user needs Cons 1\. More features on CLI than GUI 2. Less exposure for end user on deeper details 3. Not serving in China Reasons for choosing Aiven for Apache Kafka Easiness and add on features plus forceful SSL. Review source Incentivized review: software users are invited to submit an honest review and offered a nominal incentive for their time and effort. All incentivized reviews are subject to our verification process prior to publication. OP Oleg P. Software expert Computer & Network Security ### "My review" 5.0 Overall Rating 5.0 5.0 Ease of Use 5.0 5.0 Features 4.0 4.0 Customer Service 4.0 4.0 Likelihood to Recommend 7/10 May 21, 2019 Kafka is used as queue for our project. We store customer reports in kafka streams Pros It's reliable and simple to administer. Support is answering questions in prompt manner. Cons Missing some useful features. I was not able to configure Confluent connector. Aiven Kafka S3 Connector is missing some parameters like max size per file or max time interval per file. Review source Incentivized review: software users are invited to submit an honest review and offered a nominal incentive for their time and effort. All incentivized reviews are subject to our verification process prior to publication. MB Maciej B. Data Engineer Financial Services ### "Exactly what we needed!" 5.0 Overall Rating 5.0 5.0 Ease of Use 4.0 4.0 Features 4.0 4.0 Customer Service 0.0 0.0 Likelihood to Recommend 8/10 May 10, 2019 Pros It helps to visualise our pipeline and give a high level overview. Soon after moving to Aiven we actually noticed a few errors in the config, which would probably stay hidden if it wasn't for the clear UI Cons Some potentially useful features are missing from the dashboard. For example, it is not immediately clear how to manage different consumer groups and how to remove unused ones. Review source Non-incentivized review: any software user can leave a review for any product listed on our site. All submitted reviews are subject to our verification process prior to publication. KG Karsten G. Staff Software Engineer Information Technology and Services ### "Kafka @ Wowza Media Systems LLC" 4.0 Overall Rating 4.0 4.0 Ease of Use 4.0 4.0 Features 3.0 3.0 Customer Service 5.0 5.0 Likelihood to Recommend 8/10 May 6, 2019 Pros \* overall easy to get started \* UI is well structured, easy to use \* reliable service so far \* friendly and supportive team at Aiven helping us to get going Cons \* currently there is no way to inspect messages on topics online Reasons for choosing Aiven for Apache Kafka \* supports all features we need \* flexible pricing models \* no annual contract needed \* cheaper Review source Incentivized review: software users are invited to submit an honest review and offered a nominal incentive for their time and effort. All incentivized reviews are subject to our verification process prior to publication. AU Anonymous User Principal Engineer Computer Software ### "Easy to use messaging system" 5.0 Overall Rating 5.0 5.0 Ease of Use 4.0 4.0 Features 4.0 4.0 Customer Service 0.0 0.0 Likelihood to Recommend 9/10 April 19, 2019 This has sped up the interfaces to several databases and minimized the custom code to basically just data transformations. By following the subscribe/notify model a clear master for data is indicated and the speed is very quick for our needs. Pros Our organization found it very easy to use. Using the hosted version we were able to get up and running quickly and were able to keep a number of databases in sync Cons The list of connectors isn't as big natively as I would like however there are a good number of open source options available, you just need to compile and deploy them yourself Review source Non-incentivized review: any software user can leave a review for any product listed on our site. All submitted reviews are subject to our verification process prior to publication. DR Dyana R. Software Engineer Marketing and Advertising ### "Easy to set up, easy to connect to, handled the data" 5.0 Overall Rating 5.0 5.0 Ease of Use 5.0 5.0 Features 4.0 4.0 Customer Service 0.0 0.0 Likelihood to Recommend 9/10 April 18, 2019 Pros It was very straight forward to connect our existing applications through to Aiven Kafka. Cons I don't see the ability to add automated alerting to different metrics. Review source Incentivized review: software users are invited to submit an honest review and offered a nominal incentive for their time and effort. All incentivized reviews are subject to our verification process prior to publication. Response from Vendor April 26, 2019 Hello Dyana, Thanks for your feedback. If I understand you correctly; the metrics integration, which includes Grafana, should solve your issue because you would be able to create alerts. It's fairly simple to set up; here is a small help article to get you on your way: https://help.aiven.io/services/integrations/getting-started-with-service-integrations AU Anonymous User IT Architect Retail ### "Simple and Reliable Kafka as a Service" 5.0 Overall Rating 5.0 5.0 Ease of Use 5.0 5.0 Features 5.0 5.0 Customer Service 5.0 5.0 Likelihood to Recommend 10/10 April 8, 2019 Pros Good relationship between price/aggregated value Stable Control Cons Lack of support for KSQL as a service. I know that could be very challenge but it'd be great to have. Review source Incentivized review: software users are invited to submit an honest review and offered a nominal incentive for their time and effort. All incentivized reviews are subject to our verification process prior to publication. SK Sebastian K. CEO / IT Consultant Computer Software ### "Awesome service with some room for improvement" 5.0 Overall Rating 5.0 5.0 Ease of Use 5.0 5.0 Features 3.0 3.0 Customer Service 0.0 0.0 Likelihood to Recommend 8/10 March 27, 2019 Pros The Aiven console has a slick UI, which is easy to use and not overwhelming. Everything is very intuitive and you have a good overview of your services. Service metrics are very useful especially having the Grafana integration. I like the fact that you always see what you will be charged for the current month. Cons I am missing is topic introspection within the Aiven console, that tools like Kafka Topic UI provide. Billing information could be more fine-grained within the console. And it would be nice to have some selected KPIs across services. Review source Incentivized review: software users are invited to submit an honest review and offered a nominal incentive for their time and effort. All incentivized reviews are subject to our verification process prior to publication. AU Anonymous User Devops Computer Software ### "Kafka review" 5.0 Overall Rating 5.0 5.0 Ease of Use 5.0 5.0 Features 4.0 4.0 Customer Service 3.0 3.0 Likelihood to Recommend 9/10 March 18, 2019 Pros Very easy setup, The web interface is very intuitive Cons Expensive.. The cost is higher then AWS MSK Review source Incentivized review: software users are invited to submit an honest review and offered a nominal incentive for their time and effort. All incentivized reviews are subject to our verification process prior to publication. DK Deepika K. Senior QE Financial Services ### "Aiven Review" 5.0 Overall Rating 5.0 5.0 Ease of Use 5.0 5.0 Features 5.0 5.0 Customer Service 5.0 5.0 Likelihood to Recommend 9/10 March 14, 2019 Pros Ease of use and is easily compatible. good monitoring available Cons It will be nice to have the test account not consumer credits when idle Review source Incentivized review: software users are invited to submit an honest review and offered a nominal incentive for their time and effort. All incentivized reviews are subject to our verification process prior to publication. Response from Vendor April 26, 2019 Hello Deepika, Thanks for your review. As a note to your concern over the trial consuming credits when the account is idle, your services only consume credits when the service is powered on. This is because we are running your VMs even if you aren't necessarily sending data to them. Hope that clears some things up! Aharon L. Senior Software Engineer Internet ### "Aiven gave us the confidence to migrate from Kinesis to Kafka" 5.0 Overall Rating 5.0 5.0 Ease of Use 5.0 5.0 Features 4.0 4.0 Customer Service 5.0 5.0 Likelihood to Recommend 10/10 February 11, 2019 So far its given us great value. Very professional. Pros Sane pricing for solid Kafka hosting! Awesome developer oriented api's for doing everything Team is very responsive and helpful Cons The UI for creating Kafka Connections is hard to use. They should just refer to Confluent documentation instead Review source Incentivized review: software users are invited to submit an honest review and offered a nominal incentive for their time and effort. All incentivized reviews are subject to our verification process prior to publication. Response from Vendor April 26, 2019 Hello Aharon, Thanks for the great feedback. We've been making significant improvements to the Kafka Connect UI since your review that should make it more intuitive and easier to use. Keep the feedback coming! Victor L. Data Engineer Intern Internet ### "A review of an intern working at a startup" 5.0 Overall Rating 5.0 5.0 Ease of Use 5.0 5.0 Features 5.0 5.0 Customer Service 5.0 5.0 Likelihood to Recommend 10/10 February 4, 2019 Pros The product is great, it delivers what it promise, the doc is good, the connectors compatibility is one of the best features. Cons It’s not about the product but about the documentation, I’m not an expert in kafka and I’d like to see some examples using spark streaming, it’s used a lot by the community. Review source Incentivized review: software users are invited to submit an honest review and offered a nominal incentive for their time and effort. All incentivized reviews are subject to our verification process prior to publication. ZT Zan T. Cloud Engineer Computer Software ### "Very nice" 4.0 Overall Rating 4.0 4.0 Ease of Use 4.0 4.0 Features 4.0 4.0 Customer Service 0.0 0.0 Likelihood to Recommend 8/10 January 10, 2019 Easy to use and saves the headache of hosting kafka yourself. Pros Very easy to configure and get up and running! Cons I don't really have any complaints but it is somewhat expensive. Review source Incentivized review: software users are invited to submit an honest review and offered a nominal incentive for their time and effort. All incentivized reviews are subject to our verification process prior to publication. AU Anonymous User Associate Director - Product Innovation E-Learning ### "Easy to use and Excellent customer support. " 4.0 Overall Rating 4.0 4.0 Ease of Use 3.0 3.0 Features 5.0 5.0 Customer Service 5.0 5.0 Likelihood to Recommend 9/10 December 14, 2018 Pros \- Very easy to use and setup and should not need customer support at all. - when you do need customer support , they are super fast to respond. Cons \- API documentation is good , but can be better Review source Incentivized review: software users are invited to submit an honest review and offered a nominal incentive for their time and effort. All incentivized reviews are subject to our verification process prior to publication. Anthony S. VP of Engineering Computer Software ### "Great ROI" 4.0 Overall Rating 4.0 4.0 Ease of Use 5.0 5.0 Features 3.0 3.0 Customer Service 4.0 4.0 Likelihood to Recommend 8/10 December 6, 2018 We are using Kafka as a traditional message queue in a semi-event driven application. The greatest benefit has been getting a Kafka service up and running in our VPC without needing to expend the money or person hours to set up our own cluster. Pros Ease of use is great. Support is fast and helpful. Cons Cost is prohibitive when you need a lot of features (Kafka REST) but not a lot of throughput. We are paying for more capacity than we need in order to get those features. Review source Incentivized review: software users are invited to submit an honest review and offered a nominal incentive for their time and effort. All incentivized reviews are subject to our verification process prior to publication. PJ Priyabrata J. Technical Architect E-Learning ### "Done PoC with Aiven.Experience was too good" 4.0 Overall Rating 4.0 4.0 Ease of Use 4.0 4.0 Features 5.0 5.0 Customer Service 5.0 5.0 Likelihood to Recommend 10/10 November 8, 2018 We were planning to move event-driven architecture and also looking for a service provider which will manage the Kafka Infra. We found Aiven is one of the best players in the market. Definitely, I would like to highlight their response to any of our queries and very good support. The man behind this achievement(PoC with Aiven Kafka) is PREM. Pros It's easy to use. Allow us to focus on our application logic instead of managing Kafka Infra. Good UI to use Kafka service. Cons I hope It would be better if add more monitoring tool as well as partition balancing. Review source Incentivized review: software users are invited to submit an honest review and offered a nominal incentive for their time and effort. All incentivized reviews are subject to our verification process prior to publication. Response from Vendor February 20, 2019 Hello Priyabrata, Thank you for your review! We¿re happy to hear you¿ve enjoyed your experience so far. Regarding your comment on monitoring tools and partition balancing, topic rebalancing is a task that is taken care of for your by Aiven back-end monitoring and operations system. Monitoring for Aiven Kafka can be setup by using Service Integrations by following the blogs and documentation. Here's some links you might find useful: Aiven Service Integrations https://help.aiven.io/services/integrations/getting-started-with-service-integrations Aiven Kafka - Telemetry and Dashboards https://aiven.io/blog/gain-visibility-with-kafka-dashboards/ DataDog integration https://aiven.io/blog/datadog-meets-aiven/ Prometheus integration https://aiven.io/blog/prometheus-can-now-be-integrated-with-aiven/ Thanks again! ## Top-rated software of 2026 ### Fill out the form and we'll send a list of the top-rated software based on real user reviews directly to your inbox. Independent research methodology Capterra's researchers use a mix of verified reviews, independent research and objective methodologies to bring you selection and ranking information you can trust. While we may earn a referral fee when you visit a provider through our links or speak to an advisor, this has no influence on our research or methodology. [Learn more](https://www.capterra.com/resources/proprietary-data-research/) How Capterra verifies reviews Capterra carefully verified over 2.5 million+ reviews to bring you authentic software experiences from real users. Our human moderators verify that reviewers are real people and that reviews are authentic. They use leading tech to analyze text quality and to detect plagiarism and generative AI. [Learn more](https://www.capterra.com/resources/how-we-verify-reviews/) How Capterra ensures transparency Capterra lists all providers across its website—not just those that pay us—so that users can make informed purchase decisions. Capterra is free for users. Software providers pay us for sponsored profiles to receive web traffic and sales opportunities. Sponsored profiles include a link-out icon that takes users to the provider's website. [Learn more](https://www.capterra.com/resources/how-we-ensure-transparency/)