nowfound

Alternatives

Products that do what Franz – A desktop client for Apache Kafka does

This is the source code to Franz, a native desktop client for Apache Kafka I've been working on for the past ~three years or so. Around 2021, I started using Kafka at a startup and I didn't like any of the clients that were available at the time, so I decided to build my own in my spare time[1]. I wanted a solid native experience on the Mac that wasn't web based and didn't require any Docker containers to run. A few months ago, I decided to make the code source-available[2] in part because I like the idea of my users being able to see the code they're running and in part because I want to…

  1. 1
    Franz 5455

    One desktop app for (almost) all of your messaging apps

    2017

  2. 2
    Franz879

    Messenger for WhatsApp, Telegram, Facebook, Slack & Hipchat

    2016 · meetfranz.com

  3. 3
    Franz 6260

    All your messaging apps in one window — with private AI

    Jun 2026 · meetfranz.com

  4. 4UF

    2021 · github.com

  5. 5KA
  6. 6NB

    Hey folks, I'm super excited to announce the release of a new UI for Apache Kafka, Confluent, Redpanda and Kinesis that focuses on Teams and Data Mesh. (Note: the desktop version is also very popular with individual developers!) Why is this important? Because providing a solution that can be used by both IT and business (non-technical) users is essential when building applications that process business data. Of course, we are mainly developers working on Kadeck. So you won't miss any of the features you need to troubleshoot and monitor Kafka and your applications. In fact, we have put a lot…

    2023 · kadeck.com

  7. 7KA
  8. 8

    When building Hookie, I worked with NATS Jetstream a lot. While you can do everything using the CLI, I prefer the feeling of a nice GUI better. So I built one.

    23d ago · streambench.app

  9. 9K0

    2022 · github.com

  10. 10KU
  11. 11MK

    I built a Model Context Protocol server that allows users to interact with Kafka using natural language instead of complex CLIs. It uses LLMs to interpret commands in plain English and executes the corresponding Kafka operations. This makes Kafka more accessible to non-experts while maintaining its powerful functionality.

    2025 · github.com

  12. 12KD

    I've built this to make it easy to host your own infra for lightweight VMs at large scale. Intended for exec of AI-generated code, for CICD runners, or for off-chain AI DApps. Mainly to avoid Docker-in-Docker dangers and mess. Super easy to use with CLI / Python SDK, friendly to AI engs who usually don't like to mess with VM orchestration and networking too much. Defense-in-depth philosophy. Would love to get feedback (and contributors: clear & exciting roadmap!), thx

    Oct 2025 · github.com

  13. 13
    Conduktor169

    Collaborative Kafka development platform

    2024

  14. 14WA
  15. 15KA

    A large part of our (Real Kinetic's) business is helping organizations implement platform engineering, but we've found the existing tooling to be lacking. For IaC, Terraform state becomes a pain because TF treats infrastructure as "one-shot" commands. The Kubernetes controller model provides a nicer approach to managing infrastructure, but the tooling here is also lacking. For configuration management, Helm just doesn't really scale with complexity, nor does Kustomize. For resource orchestration, Crossplane is a step in the right direction but still has challenges and limitations. As a…

    2025 · koreo.dev

  16. 16AK

    I shipped a wiki layer for AI agents that uses markdown + git as the source of truth, with a bleve (BM25) + SQLite index on top. No vector or graph db yet. It runs locally in ~/.wuphf/wiki/ and you can git clone it out if you want to take your knowledge with you. The shape is the one Karpathy has been circling for a while: an LLM-native knowledge substrate that agents both read from and write into, so context compounds across sessions rather than getting re-pasted every morning. Most implementations of that idea land on Postgres, pgvector, Neo4j, Kafka, and a dashboard. I…

    Apr 2026 · github.com

  17. 17LF

    Shuru is a lightweight sandbox that spins up Linux VMs on macOS using Apple's Virtualization.framework. Boots in about a second on Apple Silicon, and everything is ephemeral by default. There's a checkpoint system for when you do want to persist state, and sandboxes run without network access unless you explicitly allow it. Single Rust binary, no dependencies. Built it for sandboxing AI agent code execution, but it works well for anything where you need a disposable Linux environment.

    Feb 2026 · shuru.run

  18. 18DF

    Hello Everyone! We built SQLFlow as a lightweight stream processing engine. We leverage DuckDB as the stream processing engine, which gives SQLFlow the ability to process 10's of thousands of messages a second using ~250MiB of memory! DuckDB also supports a rich ecosystem of sinks and connectors! https://sql-flow.com/docs/category/tutorials/ https://github.com/turbolytics/sql-flow We were tired of running JVM's for simple stream processing, and also of bespoke one off stream processors I would love your feedback, criticisms and/or…

    Dec 2025 · sql-flow.com

  19. 19SS

    Hey HN, I built StreamHouse, an open-source streaming platform that replaces Kafka's broker-managed storage with direct S3 writes. The goal: same semantics, fraction of the cost. How it works: Producers batch and compress records, a stateless server manages partition routing and metadata (SQLite for dev, PostgreSQL for prod), and segments land directly in S3. Consumers read from S3 with a local segment cache. No broker disks to manage, no replication factor to tune — S3 gives you 11 nines of durability out of the box. What's there today: - Producer API with batching, LZ4 compression, and…

    Feb 2026 · github.com

  20. 20

    Codex now runs natively on Windows with secure sandbox

    Mar 2026

  21. 21
    Karve71

    The API client for developers on Windows

    Aug 2026 · karve.dev

  22. 22

    Kafma is a Kafka GUI client and desktop IDE. Debug fast, close the gap between prod and dev. Intuitive. Simple. Elegant.

    4d ago · kafma.app

  23. 23KA
  24. 24MA

    Hey HN I've been using ECS for a while now and found it annoying having to log into the console everytime I use Lens for Kubernetes but couldnt find an equivalent for ECS so i built one! The project is open source as well https://github.com/utibeabasi6/mercek

    Jun 2026 · mercek.dev

Ranked by how close each launch is in meaning, then by votes. Refine with a description →