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Backstage

Free
open sourcedeveloper portalcncfplatform engineeringdevopsspotifyinternal developer platformmicroservicesdeveloper experience

An open source framework for building developer portals, originally created by Spotify. It unifies all your infrastructure tooling, services, and documentation to create a single, consistent development environment.

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Backstage is an open-source platform, donated by Spotify to the CNCF, for building internal developer portals. It acts as a single pane of glass, providing a unified UI on top of a company's entire toolchain and infrastructure. The primary audience is platform engineering teams and developers in mid-to-large organizations seeking to tame complexity and improve developer experience. Its core value proposition lies in its extensibility via a robust plugin architecture, allowing teams to integrate everything from CI/CD pipelines to service catalogs and documentation. This creates a streamlined environment that boosts developer productivity, simplifies onboarding, and standardizes software development practices across an organization.

Pros

  • Completely free and open-source under the Apache 2.0 license, backed by the CNCF.
  • Highly extensible through a rich plugin ecosystem, allowing for deep customization.
  • Creates a 'single pane of glass' for developers, reducing context switching and improving discoverability of tools and services.
  • The Software Catalog provides a central, version-controlled system for tracking ownership and metadata of all software components.
  • Built-in 'TechDocs' feature treats documentation as code, keeping it close to the source and easy to maintain.

Cons

  • Requires significant engineering investment to deploy, configure, and maintain.
  • The value is heavily dependent on the effort invested in developing or configuring plugins for your specific toolchain.
  • Can be overly complex for smaller organizations with a simple technology stack.
  • The learning curve for developing custom plugins can be steep.

Key features

  • Software Catalog for tracking all microservices, libraries, websites, and other software assets.
  • Software Templates for scaffolding new projects with organizational best practices built-in.
  • TechDocs for a 'docs-as-code' approach to technical documentation.
  • Extensible frontend and backend plugin architecture.
  • Unified search across all integrated components and documentation.
  • Kubernetes monitoring plugin to view the state of workloads.
  • Built-in identity management with support for various auth providers.

Integrations

GitHubGitLabKubernetesJenkinsCircleCIJiraPagerDutyGrafanaSentryArgo CD

Target audience

Platform engineering teams, DevOps engineers, and engineering leaders at scaling companies looking to build an internal developer platform (IDP) to improve developer experience and tame infrastructure complexity.

Ratings & Reviews

0.0

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Key Metrics

Active Users

850+ known adopters

Founded

2020

Headquarters

N/A (Open Source Project)

Pricing Tiers

Open Source

The complete, self-hosted open-source framework. Requires your own infrastructure for hosting and dedicated engineering resources for setup, plugin integration, and ongoing maintenance.

Free

Frequently Asked Questions

Top Alternatives to Backstage

Cortex

A commercial developer portal focused on driving engineering excellence with service scorecards and maturity metrics, ideal for teams prioritizing quality and standards.

Roadie

A SaaS for Backstage that handles hosting and maintenance, making it a great choice for teams that want Backstage's core benefits without the operational overhead.

Port

Another commercial developer portal platform that allows for building internal developer platforms with a focus on no-code workflows and a developer self-service interface.

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