Confused about the "Connect" vs "Connectors" menu item on the left

[marcosscriven]

In the various screen shots and videos about Console, I see "Connectors" menu option, with an opportunity to create and monitor connectors.

However, running "rpk container start" locally, I see a "Connect" menu option, and just some instructions on how to use rpk to create and run connectors.

Here's the top of the logs showing my version numbers

{"level":"info","msg":"attempting to obtain an enterprise license from the Redpanda cluster"}

{"level":"info","msg":"successfully loaded Redpanda Enterprise license","license_org":"Redpanda Built-In Evaluation Period","license_type":"free_trial","expires_at":"Aug 14 2025","license_source":"Redpanda cluster","enterprise_features_enabled":false}

{"level":"info","ts":"2025-07-15T15:20:14.137Z","msg":"started Redpanda Console","version":"v2.8.5","built_at":"1742920385"}

{"level":"info","ts":"2025-07-15T15:20:14.137Z","msg":"testing admin client connectivity","urls":["http://rp-node-0:9644"]}

{"level":"info","ts":"2025-07-15T15:20:14.138Z","msg":"successfully tested the Redpanda admin connectivity","broker_count":1,"cluster_version":"Redpanda v25.1.7"}

Is the pipeline management a cloud-only feature?

[weeco]

Hey @marcosscriven ,
Console supports both Kafka Connect and Redpanda Connect. For Kafka connect Console has a setup wizard, monitoring etc. for managing Kafka connect connectors.

For Redpanda Connect we only support this in Redpanda Cloud, because the orchestration part of Redpanda Connect is more flexible and therefore there's no single orchestrator that Console could communicate with. "Pipelines" is what we usually use to refer to Redpanda Connect deployments.

Hope that answers your question.