Kafka GUI for Mac

Streambench is a local macOS desktop GUI for Apache Kafka and Kafka-compatible brokers such as Redpanda. It connects directly to brokers you already run, whether they live in Docker on your Mac or in a hosted cloud environment. It does not provision or manage clusters for you.

What you can do in the GUI

• Browse topics and open partitions, configuration, and message views
• Tail live traffic or load historical pages with seek by offset or timestamp
• Inspect consumer groups with per-partition lag, committed offsets, and high watermarks
• Reset consumer group offsets without using the CLI
• Produce messages with keys, headers, and explicit partition selection
• Create topics, edit topic configuration, add partitions, and delete topics when you need lightweight admin work

Connection and auth support

Streambench supports plaintext, TLS, and SASL with PLAIN, SCRAM-SHA-256, and SCRAM-SHA-512. Optional CA certificate paths are supported for TLS and SASL over TLS. Passwords are stored in the macOS Keychain.

Streambench does not currently support MSK IAM, OAuth, GSSAPI/Kerberos, or client-certificate authentication flows.

Local Docker troubleshooting

If Streambench connects to localhost:9092 but consume or produce hangs, the broker is probably advertising an internal Docker hostname. See Connecting to Kafka in Docker.

High-throughput tails

Live tails use a virtualized message list. Text filters run locally in Rust before messages cross IPC. On very high-throughput topics the view may sample to stay responsive while counters remain accurate.