# Page 3 | Aiven for Apache Kafka Software 2026: Features, Integrations, Pros & Cons | Capterra > Page 3 - 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 3 - 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 GR GLAUCO ROBERTO C. Architect Integration Manager Retail ### "GREAT EXPERIENCE" 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 9/10 October 30, 2018 We´re having a great experience till now. Once we needed some help Aiven gave us quickly feedbacks Pros The costs are taillored for whom is wondering to start with KAFKA. Cons It doesn´t offer KSQL as a service and so we´re managing a separated instance with KSQL server hosted in AWS EC2 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 November 1, 2018 Hello Glauco, Thanks for the review! We're glad that your experience has been great so far. Just wanted to let you know that we are currently working on KSQL. Stay tuned! AU Anonymous User Senior Fullstack Engineer Education Management ### "Excellent, Cost-Effective Hosted Kafka Solution" 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 10/10 October 30, 2018 We are a small team and our CTO was hesitant to adopt Kafka because of the operational complexity of managing the cluster and price of Confluent. We were able to convince him to adopt the technology by demonstrating Aiven -- ease of use, cost-effective, and quick setup. Pros We chose Aiven as our hosted Kafka provider for two reasons: the best overall cost and unlimited data retention. Cons We don't have any complaints or dislikes of Aiven at this time. 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. AG Arathi G. Senior Software Engineer II Information Technology and Services ### "Amazing - fully hosted Managed Kafka for Enterprises" 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 October 22, 2018 We were been exploring Aiven Kafka - as a streaming platform for our application, and we found it to be apt for our use case. We explored every aspect of Kafka, plus the integration with Aiven InfluxDB back to our hosted Graphing. With ease anybody can get this integrated, I commend them for their UI for the great user experience, Anybody can learn quickly & get it integrated. I was been amazed for their zero downtime - while we upgrade servers from one set of hardware configuration to another & WITH NO DATA LOSS!!! Keep up the good work! Pros Fully hosted & managed Amazing support services Availability across globe across various cloud service providers Most reliable & Highly available services REST service Integration Low cost compared to other Managed Kafka providers Cons Well, none I think for now. You guys are doing great!! 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. SP Swapnil P. DevOps engineer Computer & Network Security ### "Good option for databases." 4.0 Overall Rating 4.0 4.0 Ease of Use 3.0 3.0 Features 4.0 4.0 Customer Service 4.0 4.0 Likelihood to Recommend 6/10 October 12, 2018 Pros \- Nice UI - Easy to use. - Great support. Cons \- Almost none to mention but it can be more interactive for first time users. 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. Alex D. Data Scientist Utilities ### "Deploying Kafka doesn't need to be a Kafkaesque nightmare: Aiven can help you" 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 September 4, 2018 Very positive! Pros \- Simple interface - Concepts are based on familiar devOps technologies, like manifestos in Kubernetes etc. Cons Not much to complain. It's been smooth, apart from having to read documentation and play with some tutorials. 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 Software Engineer Utilities ### "Great service" 4.0 Overall Rating 4.0 4.0 Ease of Use 5.0 5.0 Features 3.0 3.0 Customer Service 5.0 5.0 Likelihood to Recommend 8/10 September 4, 2018 Pros Fantastic support who answers questions swiftly. Easy to use and to setup users/ACL's. Cons Not reactive UI to monitor the Kafka topic. Logs can be improved as well. 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, Thank you for your honest feedback. It¿s great to hear you have enjoyed using Aiven. Just wanted to let know that Aiven now provides Logs Integration via Elasticsearch which enables you to store and search many months worth of Aiven Kafka service logs. You can find more information from this help article about log integrations: https://help.aiven.io/elasticsearch/getting-started-with-elasticsearch-log-integration Thank you! DC David C. Software engineer ### "Positive overall, room for improvement." 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 0/10 June 20, 2018 Pros Not having to maintain a kafka server internally! It was a lot of work and provisioning it was a massive pain. Cons ACL/permission management: \* No ability to see permissions by topic, or by user, just a massive list \* separate entity in permissions list for every partition! \* ability to create permissions for non-existent users \* duplicate entries in permissions list 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 Thanks for your honest review David. Aiven console now provides the ability to setup and view ACLs at the topic level. You can find more information from this article about Kafka Users and Access Control: https://help.aiven.io/kafka/configuration/kafka-users-and-access-control Hope you find this helpful! NG Neeraj G. integration consultant Automotive ### "Good but not excellent" 3.0 Overall Rating 3.0 3.0 Ease of Use 4.0 4.0 Features 4.0 4.0 Customer Service 2.0 2.0 Likelihood to Recommend 4/10 May 15, 2018 1\. Kafka easy to maintain and easy to use, easy to scale up Pros 1\. easy UI and scalability. easy to use kafka features easy and approachable team and easy to see logs. Cons 1\. documentation is not proper. no steps mentioned anywhere for connectivity of aiven with other cloud or on premise clusters. 2. no troubleshooting steps available 3. very tough to use if face errors, as there is no way to go out as documents are not avilable in detail. 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. Response from Vendor February 20, 2019 Hi Neeraj, We appreciate your feedback! Just wanted to let you know that a limited amount (typically 1-2 days worth) of Aiven service logs are provided in the ¿Logs¿ tab for your service in the Aiven console. If you wish logs from a longer duration, you can use Logs Integration offered by Aiven. More information about this can be found at: https://help.aiven.io/elasticsearch/getting-started-with-elasticsearch-log-integration Thanks again! AU Anonymous User Technical Lead Automotive ### "Easy setup with many cloud providers and excellent support" 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 March 27, 2018 a managed environment without the operational support from internal teams. Pros Setup in minutes, uses reliable cloud providers, able to do VPC peering and easy management of the clusters. Cons When we have the VPC peering, the cluster is not accessible from the public anymore, it would be nice if there is an option to have the kafka rest endpoint as public even in vpc peering. 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 Thanks for the review. We¿re glad to hear your experience with Aiven has been good. About the feature you requested, it is currently available. Please contact Aiven support if you need this feature. Thank you again! IM Iulian M. Software Engineer ### "Interface is clean and easy to use" 5.0 Overall Rating 5.0 5.0 Ease of Use 4.0 4.0 Features 5.0 5.0 Customer Service 5.0 5.0 Likelihood to Recommend 0/10 March 8, 2018 Pros The interface is really clean and easy to navigate through. It offers some basic metrics, the event log is very useful and the ability to set up different users with permissions Cons Some filtering functionality in the events and members dashboards would be helpful so that you can search for a specific event or date. 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 Software Engineer Utilities ### "Using Kafka for messaging between many microservices belonging to different teams" 4.0 Overall Rating 4.0 4.0 Ease of Use 4.0 4.0 Features 4.0 4.0 Customer Service 4.0 4.0 Likelihood to Recommend 9/10 March 5, 2018 Pros No need for us to deal with setting up and running our own clusters. All that difficult work is done for us and we can get on with delivering useful functionality. Cons Sometimes useful information is hidden and hard to get hold of. Sometimes changes have occurred in Kafka without us expecting them. That said, the Aiven team are responsive to improvement suggestions so as issues occur they tend to get dealt with and the product improves. 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. JC Jesse C. Full Stack Developer ### "A relatively easy to use solution to the Kafka/Zookeeper problem" 5.0 Overall Rating 5.0 5.0 Ease of Use 4.0 4.0 Features 4.0 4.0 Customer Service 4.0 4.0 Likelihood to Recommend 0/10 February 15, 2018 Pros It's super simple to set up and do some basic monitoring. The fact that I could spin up a kafka cluster in minutes with a click of a button instead of spend hours or days setting one up in kubernetes is amazing Cons I with the web console had more utilities for things like testing and modifying offsets. More metrics about the state of kafka would be nice too 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 Jesse, We appreciate your feedback! First, resetting consumer group offsets can be accomplished per Aiven help documentation: https://help.aiven.io/kafka/getting-started/viewing-and-resetting-consumer-group-offsets Second, Aiven provides detailed gathering of Kafka telemetry and subsequent visualization through built-in dashboards using Aiven PostgreSQL(TimescaleDB) and Aiven Grafana. 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 and we hope you find this helpful! MV Martino V. Software Engineer ### "Good, if a bit limited and expensive." 4.0 Overall Rating 4.0 4.0 Ease of Use 4.0 4.0 Features 3.0 3.0 Customer Service 0.0 0.0 Likelihood to Recommend 7/10 November 7, 2017 no more downtime! Pros It works, it is reliable. The UI is pretty good, although doesn't work in Firefox very well :'( All in all, a good way to run kafka for some use cases. Oh my god there's a limit on the characters for the review? you're really making me work hard for that tshirt! Cons Expensive, especially to increase storage. That is limiting, especially if you want to use Kafka for infinite durable, HA storage, which IMO is a very interesting use case. Some configs (e.g. \`min.insync.replicas\` = 1) are not ideal (see above). Changing them is hard (i'm told) and requires restarting the brokers, which cannot be done through the UI. Basically I wish the usecase of kafka-as-db had better support. As it stands, it's not really an option. 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. Response from Vendor February 20, 2019 Hi Martino, Thanks for the review! Regarding customizing Kafka settings (e.g. \`min.insync.replicas\` = 1), Aiven now provides the ability to set some advanced Kafka (broker-side) configuration settings. This can be accomplished via the Aiven commandline client (https://github.com/aiven/aiven-client). Here¿s an example of how to set this parameter in newer versions of Kafka. $ avn service types -v $ avn service update myservice -c ¿kafka\_rest\_config.producer\_acks=2¿ # \`kafka\_rest\_config.producer\_acks¿ The number of acknowledgments the producer requires the leader to have received before considering a request complete. If set to 'all' or '-1', the leader will wait for the full set of in-sync replicas to acknowledge the record. Hope this helps and thank you again! AU Anonymous User Principal Developer Computer Software ### "Seamless and full featured." 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 0/10 October 16, 2017 Pros Seamless deploys of kafka without the burden of opsing it yourself. Up to date with the latest kafka and offers one click schema registry deploys as well. Cons More documentation of the web console please! Would love to more easily see the kafka configuration generated for the config specified via the UI. 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 Software Engineer ### "Using Kafka as a persistent queue for large amount data" 4.0 Overall Rating 4.0 4.0 Ease of Use 4.0 4.0 Features 4.0 4.0 Customer Service 5.0 5.0 Likelihood to Recommend 8/10 October 12, 2017 It helped us build a scalable real-time analytics platform. Pros Scale well to handle large loads, resilient. Customer support from Aiven is reactive and competent, a pleasure to work with them. Cons Configuration is a bit difficult, there's a learning curve. In particular understanding the concepts of Kafka, the impact of configuration parameters, in order to have a setting corresponding to the need take some time. Fortunately, the Aiven team is able to help with helpful advices. 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. Filippo D. Principal Software Engineer Utilities ### "It has been a game changer in our business" 5.0 Overall Rating 5.0 5.0 Ease of Use 3.0 3.0 Features 5.0 5.0 Customer Service 5.0 5.0 Likelihood to Recommend 8/10 October 11, 2017 It saved us from the hassle to manage Kafka cluster ourselves, with a very fast response customer support Pros It provides a working out of the box Kafka with REST API, Schema Registry, and Kafka Connect. It also makes available a very powerful REST API and command line tool to manage the services. Topics ACL and per user certificates are a very good addition for any non-trivial use case. Cons Some available settings are not very well documented. Also using Kafka is not the most trivial things in the hearth. Would be good to have more detailed monitoring maybe coupled with InfluxDb that is already available in Aiven 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 Thank you Filippo for your comments. We¿re glad to hear you have enjoyed using Aiven! Aiven provides detailed gathering of Kafka telemetry and subsequent visualization through built-in dashboards using Aiven PostgreSQL(TimescaleDB) and Aiven Grafana. 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! DC David C. Software Developer Information Technology and Services ### "Was able to get started very quickly and pushing data to a new Kafka cluster within minutes." 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 9/10 October 11, 2017 Pros The ability to specify a specific data center in Azure to ensure it is as close as possible to the rest of our applications. How easy it is to configure in the dashboard. Cons Options for extended retention periods. We had thoughts of using Kafka data retention as our source of all historical data, but the limited retention periods were problematic. Perhaps an option to specify longer, or hook it into our own storage. 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 October 16, 2017 Thank you for your honest feedback David. First, we'd like to apologize for not making it readily apparent that we do have this feature available. Second, here is our help article on the available options to extend your retention periods: http://help.aiven.io/kafka/kafka-data-retention Third, we are currently working on a process to ensure that our clients stay abreast of the features available to them so stay tuned! Thanks again! PK Piotr K. CTO Consumer Goods ### "Works great nothing to add ;) " 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 8/10 October 11, 2017 painless kafka service Pros The high level professional support. Fast adding new features and very flexible if you need a custom configuations Cons I would love to chose my kafka version as well as having no-SSL by option. Also auto VPC peering would be cool 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 Piotr, We appreciate your comments. Just wanted to let you know that Aiven Kafka enables the customer to select the version of Apache Kafka supported in Aiven. Aiven typically supports the three latest versions. At the time of this writing, the latest Apache Kafka version was 2.1, and Aiven Kafka supported Apache Kafka versions 2.1, 2.0 and 1.1. Thanks again and we hope this helps! ST Samppa T. CTO Information Technology and Services ### "Very easy and fluent operation" 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 October 11, 2017 Flexibility and open architecture. Pros The ability and capability to switch cloud of hot production system. and te fact that the prices are clearly shown. Cons Lack of "reset topic" feature that would be nice for testing and CI purposes. And of course the service could be 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. ## 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/)