edenhill/kcat

Health v2 · maintenance only

Flags: no_license

Adoption not part of the score

5778 stars · 501 forks observed · 2026-08-28

What it is AI-extracted, prompt v1, taxonomy v1, 2026-08-29, confidence not recorded

kcat (formerly kafkacat) is a lightweight, non-JVM command-line tool for producing to and consuming from Apache Kafka topics, akin to netcat for Kafka. It also supports consumer groups, metadata inspection, and Avro deserialization via Confluent Schema Registry.

Use cases

• produce test messages to a kafka topic from the command line
• consume and inspect messages from a kafka topic
• debug kafka pipelines by viewing raw messages
• list kafka brokers, topics, and partitions metadata
• consume kafka messages with avro schema registry deserialization
• test kafka consumer group behavior
• pipe files or stdin into kafka quickly

When to choose

• you need a fast, lightweight CLI for quick Kafka debugging without JVM overhead
• you want to script Kafka produce/consume operations in shell pipelines
• you need to inspect cluster metadata or troubleshoot message content

When to avoid

• you need a full Kafka Streams or stream processing application
• you require a GUI-based Kafka management tool
• you need long-running production consumers with complex offset management

Facets

cli-tool · maturity stable

message-queue cli serialization developer-tools developer-tools windows cli cross-platform kafka kafkacat producer consumer avro schema-registry netcat-for-kafka debugging messaging command-line data-engineering linux macos docker

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markdown · JSON · MCP: product_card(name="edenhill/kcat")