Lenses vs WarpStream BYOC Schema Registry

Lenses describes its Operating Fabric as a platform for building, governing, and operating Kafka applications with engineers and AI agents. Users can discover streaming data across domains with SQL, prepare it for consumption, and deploy data streams independently. It connects to Confluent Platform, Confluent Cloud, Amazon MSK, Redpanda, and self-managed Apache Kafka, and can run in cloud, on-premises, or hybrid environments. Work interfaces include a Web App, VS Code Extension, Lenses MCP, and Lenses CLI. Lenses says OAuth 2.1 gives agents scoped, short-lived, revocable, and audited access. It also lists open-source Kafka connectors for systems including Amazon S3, Azure Event Hubs, GCP Storage, Cassandra, MongoDB, Redis, and Elasticsearch; the connectors are Apache 2.0 licensed and have enterprise support. The DevX Community Edition supports up to five free users, while SQL Studio supports up to two Kafka clusters. A trial key is available through the guided demo. Team Edition is listed from $4,000 per year and supports up to 15 users with SSO/SAML, RBAC, and Team Support.

WarpStream BYOC Schema Registry stores and serves schemas for Kafka records through a REST server compatible with Confluent’s Schema Registry API. It supports Avro and protobuf, while WarpStream Agents validate records and can reject invalid data or emit metrics. The stateless, zero-disk registry stores schemas in the customer’s object storage, and WarpStream says they remain in that cloud account. Schema Linking migrates schemas from a Confluent-compatible registry while preserving IDs and compatibility rules. Authentication options include Basic Authentication, TLS and mutual TLS. Customers create a Schema Registry Virtual Cluster in the console or API, then deploy an agent using the Kafka Agents binary; agents emit logs and metrics. Each registry allows 100,000 schema versions and each schema 1 MB, with support-requested increases. Plans are Dev at $0.03 a month, Fundamentals at 0.17 USD, Pro at 0.52 USD, and Enterprise with no listed price. Cluster minutes use 15-minute billing intervals.