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# Auto Data Balancing in Confluent Platform

The `confluent-rebalancer` tool balances data so that the number of leaders and
disk usage are even across brokers and racks on a per topic and cluster level while
minimizing data movement. It also integrates closely with the replication quotas
feature in Apache Kafka® to dynamically throttle data-balancing traffic.

The tool is part of Confluent Platform and can also be installed on its own using the `confluent-rebalancer`
package.

#### IMPORTANT
- The [Manage Self-Balancing Kafka Clusters in Confluent Platform](../sbc/index.md#sbc) feature is the preferred alternative to Auto Data Balancer, starting in Confluent Platform 6.0.0.
  For a detailed feature comparison, see [Self-Balancing vs. Auto Data Balancer](../sbc/index.md#sbc-adb-compare).
- Do not use Auto Data Balancer and the log directory cordoning feature, added in Confluent Platform 8.3, together. The two features can conflict
  and lead to unexpected behavior.
- Auto Data Balancer and Self-Balancing cannot be used together. If you want to run Auto Data Balancer, you must first make sure that Self-Balancing is off.
- If [Configure Multi-Region Clusters in Confluent Platform](../../multi-dc-deployments/multi-region.md#bmrr) is enabled and a topic is created with a replica placement policy, Auto Data Balancer will redistribute the preferred leaders among all racks that have replicas.
