
Aiven for Apache Kafka: Managed Streaming Platform
Aiven for Apache Kafka helps businesses manage data streams. It is designed for teams that need to decouple microservices or aggregate logs without managing the underlying infrastructure.
At a glance
- Category
- Data & Analytics
- Best for
- Software companies, Mid-market companies, Enterprise companies, Developers building event-driven applications
- Pricing
- Pricing includes a free tier for prototyping, with paid plans starting at $200/month for Startup, $500/month for Business, and $1,900/month for Premium. A $300 free trial credit is available for 30 days.
- Key use cases
- Event-Driven Microservices, Change Data Capture (CDC), Log and Metrics Aggregation, Data Lake Streaming
- Integrations
- PostgreSQL, MySQL, OpenSearch, Debezium, Iceberg
- Official website
- aiven.io/kafka

Aiven for Apache Kafka is a managed service designed to handle the operational side of Apache Kafka. It is available across several cloud providers, including AWS, Google Cloud, Azure, DigitalOcean, OVH, and UpCloud.
The platform is built for developers and operations teams moving data between services or building event-driven architectures. It includes a built-in Schema Registry for data consistency and supports scaling compute and storage independently via tiered storage.
Buyers should confirm their throughput and retention requirements, as plans vary by the number of dedicated virtual machines and storage capacities. Production environments may require the Business or Premium tiers to access features like Kafka Connect.
Key Features
Supports independent scaling of compute and storage by moving data from local disks to cloud object storage.
Uses Karapace to store Kafka message schemas and helps enforce data consistency.
Provides insights to help identify consumer lag issues early, which may assist in auto-scaling consumers.
Runs multi-node clusters across availability zones with automatic failover to support a 99.99% SLA.
Supports data replication across clusters for disaster recovery or hybrid cloud strategies.
Provides coding suggestions and helps identify database performance issues.
Use Cases
Decoupling services to support communication between different application components.
Streaming updates from PostgreSQL and MySQL databases into Kafka topics using Debezium.
Collecting logs and metrics from multiple systems into a central cluster for analysis in tools like OpenSearch.
Streaming data into Iceberg tables to support queryable data lakes.
Best For
Integrations
Pricing
Pricing includes a free tier for prototyping, with paid plans starting at $200/month for Startup, $500/month for Business, and $1,900/month for Premium. A $300 free trial credit is available for 30 days.
FAQ
Yes, there is a free tier for learning and prototyping with throughput up to 250 KiB/s and 3-day data retention.
Aiven recommends the Business plan for production environments and the Premium plan for enterprise-level production needs.
It is available on AWS, Google Cloud, Azure, DigitalOcean, OVH, and UpCloud.
Paid plans offer a 99.99% availability SLA, while the free tier is not covered by this agreement.
Source category: Data & Analytics
Source subcategory: Data Integration