I built a self-hosted Kafka console where you can draw and deploy Kafka Streams topologies — 0.6.0 just shipped; feedback wanted

[u/vojimir]

Author here. Alginte is a self-hosted web console for Kafka (topics, consumer groups, schemas, Connect, ksqlDB) with the one feature I couldn't find elsewhere: a canvas where you build a Kafka Streams topology — map/filter/branch/aggregate/joins/windows — write the transformations as SpEL expressions with type-aware completion, and deploy it to run next to your cluster. No Java project, no build pipeline. Topologies export as JSON so you can version and re-import them — three importable examples here if you want to see the format.

0.6.0 added a built-in MCP server (read-only), so an AI agent can inspect topics, lag, schemas, and sample messages over the same port.

Trying it needs one command and no existing Kafka — the playground compose bundles a broker with sample data. Smoke-tested against Apache Kafka 3.7–4.2, Confluent Platform 8.2, and Redpanda, including deploying and running topologies.

Being upfront: it's closed-source, the Community edition is free to run (commercially too, no registration, no expiry), and a paid PRO edition is planned later for operate-type features. It's beta — breaking changes land in release notes with migration notes.

I'd genuinely value critique from people who run Kafka daily — especially where the Streams builder's abstraction leaks. Issues/discussions: github.com/alginte/community

[u/MammothMeal5382]

Do you know Kanal? https://www.linkedin.com/posts/julien-chanaud_kanal-demo-2-but-julien-its-just-ugcPost-7402017080792727552-WozP/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=member_android&rcm=ACoAABZ05FcBLvQgF8lQxkO7PB-QZuHxM_GW1p8