Klag vs Redpanda Console

Klag and Redpanda Console solve different problems. Redpanda Console is an interactive web UI for Kafka and Redpanda clusters; Klag is a headless metrics exporter for consumer lag. Despite the name, Redpanda Console works with any Kafka-compatible cluster, not just Redpanda — and so does Klag.

What each tool is

• Klag is a lag metrics exporter. No UI; it publishes metrics to Prometheus, Datadog, or OTLP.
• Redpanda Console is a web UI for exploring topics and messages, viewing consumer groups and their lag, inspecting schemas, and browsing cluster configuration. It presents lag interactively in the browser.

At a glance

	Klag	Redpanda Console
Category	Lag metrics exporter	Web UI / console
Interface	Metrics endpoint	Interactive browser UI
Message browsing	❌	✅
Time-series lag & alerting	✅	❌ (point-in-time view)
Runtime	Java / Vert.x / GraalVM	Go
License	Apache 2.0	BSL (enterprise features separately licensed)

Feature comparison

Feature	Klag	Redpanda Console
Browse topics & messages	❌	✅
Consumer-group & lag views	❌	✅
Schema & config inspection	❌	✅
Current lag in a UI	❌	✅
Lag as time-series metrics	✅	❌
Lag velocity, time-based lag	✅	❌
Retention / data-loss alerting	✅	❌
Prometheus / Datadog / OTLP export	✅	❌
MCP endpoint for AI agents	✅	❌

When to use which

• Use Redpanda Console when a human needs to explore the cluster interactively — read messages, inspect a group, check a schema — through a polished UI.
• Use Klag when you need lag as metrics: continuous history, dashboards, and alerts that fire automatically. Redpanda Console shows lag point-in-time in the UI; it isn’t a Prometheus/Datadog metrics source.

They’re complementary: Redpanda Console for interactive exploration, Klag feeding lag metrics into Prometheus/Grafana for continuous alerting.

Spotted something out of date? Open an issue or PR against website/ and we’ll fix it.