Backstage Alternatives to Make Your Platform Application

As engineering teams grow, their tools and workflows often expand into a complex network of microservices, APIs, and metadata. Managing this complexity demands efficient solutions, and developer portals like Backstage have become popular. Backstage offers a powerful framework with an extensive plugin ecosystem, helping teams centralize resources and streamline processes.

But Backstage isn’t without its challenges. Many organizations face hurdles with their steep learning curve, resource-heavy setup, and ongoing maintenance. These challenges raise the need for alternatives that address broader organizational requirements beyond what Backstage—or similar portals—are designed to handle. Yet, we cannot fully explore why Backstage falls short of meeting the requirements of Internal Developer Platforms (IDPs) without first understanding the distinction between IDPs and developer portals like Backstage. 

An IDP is a comprehensive system that integrates tools and services to simplify the software development lifecycle (SDLC) through reusable, self-service workflows. Whereas an Internal Developer Portal is an essential part of an IDP, it primarily functions as a centralized frontend interface for managing workflows, accessing resources, and automating tasks. 

This article will explore Backstage’s features, limitations, and why some organizations seek alternatives. We’ll also dive into solutions that offer faster setup, low maintenance, and advanced integration, helping teams choose the right fit for their platform needs.

These are the recommended alternatives to Backstage:

• Mia-Platform: An internal developer platform (IDP) with a suite of tools, templates, and documentation for building and managing microservices-based architectures.
• Cortex: Internal Developer Portal that lets you catalog, score, and assign tasks for operational excellence.
• Configure8: A developer portal that manages development sprawl and streamlines workflow.
• Port: Offers a low-code approach to creating developer portals and streamlining service management.
• Calibo: Provides tools to optimize developer experience and manage your infrastructure with ease.

Backstage has set a high standard for Developer Portals by providing a platform that combines modularity, usability, and integration capabilities. To understand why Backstage became popular among engineering teams, we must also look at its origins and the gap it sought to fill. Spotify introduced Backstage to the open-source community in 2020—an in-house framework they built to manage the challenge of context switching and cognitive overload amongst their engineers. It was Spotify’s answer to scaling developer productivity and standardizing the developer experience. 

Backstage’s success lies in its ability to centralize and streamline the development process through features like an intuitive interface, an extensible software catalog, and a robust scaffolding framework for automating repetitive tasks. Its built-in TechDocs, powerful search capabilities, and customizable plugin architecture provide usability and adaptability across different organizational needs. As a result, many platform engineering teams assume that it is a ready-to-use portal out of the box, only to face a challenging reality during implementation. 

According to Gartner, this misconception frequently leads to frustration, with some organizations abandoning their projects due to unexpected complexities. Adopting Backstage often requires significant rework of existing architecture to fit its framework, making the process complex and time-intensive. 

Having to extend its capabilities demands significant resources, including ongoing updates, bug fixes, and monitoring. According to a report by the State of DevOps Report, 2023 DIY solutions like Backstage typically require approximately 20 specialized experts and a three-year commitment to yield tangible benefits. Additionally, since independent open-source contributors created these plugins, they typically lack consistent support or maintenance, which can lead to security vulnerabilities. Hence, maintaining the security of plugins requires ongoing diligence, as vulnerabilities in third-party plugins can pose risks to the platform.

Although a popular option for building internal developer portals, Backstage does not fulfill the broader requirements of an internal developer platform. It also does not address the unique needs of teams seeking faster deployment, reduced maintenance, or advanced integrations. These limitations, along with the demand for maintenance and expertise, have prompted many engineering teams to explore alternative solutions that deliver similar benefits with less overhead. 

Cortex serves as a portal that has rapidly gained popularity due to its smart software catalog, which consolidates the latest information about all your services and resources from essential developer tools into a centralized location. Cortex features a service catalog and related tools designed to assist teams in managing their microservice ecosystems.

Similar to Backstage, Cortex facilitates scaffolding and initial operations, promoting consistent deployment standards for all new services. It provides development teams with insights into the interactions of their software systems by integrating service and resource metadata. 

Cortex has a developer homepage with actionable insights and a pre-built software catalog, making it easy to customize anything based on your unique business needs. It supports dynamic scoring from multiple sources via its integrations, allowing for complex rules and scorecards compared to Backstage’s manual checks that often require plugins.

However, Cortex’s self-service features are limited in their role-based access control (RBAC) and day two functionalities. For example, it does not allow you to create rules that automatically grant temporary permissions to on-call staff or establish ephemeral environments with a time-to-live (TTL) that ends automatically.

Configure8 is a developer portal that focuses on providing self-serve, no-code setup.

At its core, Configure8 offers a Universal Catalog that helps teams build a dynamic sociotechnical knowledge map encompassing applications, services, data pipelines, ML jobs, environments, and cloud resources. This catalog enables teams to visualize key metrics, such as application reliability, performance, cost, security, and CI/CD insights, in one centralized location.

Some key advantages of Configure8 over Backstage include:

Its flexible design enables seamless integration with existing systems, supporting tailored data structures, customized calculations, and configurable visualizations. Advanced capabilities, like dynamic scorecards for automated compliance and cost management insights, further empower teams to maintain high standards while streamlining their operations. Additionally, Configure8’s hands-on support approach, including consultative onboarding and seamless integration guidance, ensures an efficient and low-friction adoption process.

While Configure8 offers valuable features for managing developer workflows, it comes with notable challenges like complexity in setup. Integrating Configure8 with existing systems and workflows can be resource-intensive, presenting a steep learning curve for teams seeking a quick and seamless onboarding experience. Its heavy reliance on third-party tools for its functionality can introduce limitations in flexibility.

 Port is an internal developer portal that lets you define any catalog for services, resources, K8s, CI/CD, etc. It supports any developer self-service action and is easily extensible. Its software catalog covers microservices, resources, and custom assets and fits any data model with in-context maturity scorecards. It also has a no-code user interface for developer self-service actions like setting up a temporary environment, provisioning a cloud resource, and scaffolding a service.  

At the heart of Port’s functionality are Blueprints, highly adaptable entity definitions that let teams model and manage assets such as microservices, clusters, databases, and environments. Its advanced Kubernetes integration provides multi-cluster visibility and simplified management of containerized resources.

Port also integrates with key tools like Backstage, offering minimal-code scorecard generation, robust RBAC, and enhanced self-service capabilities. Live integrations with tools such as DataDog and Jira enable real-time scorecards and actionable insights, helping teams maintain operational excellence across performance, reliability, and compliance standards.

Port also has its limitations that may not suit organizations with specialized needs. Its “no coding required” model restricts extensibility and customization, making it less adaptable for unique workflows. It also lacks robust standards enforcement, as customizable scorecards are not first-class objects, making it challenging to track service maturity, compliance, and production readiness. Its limited reporting and automation features also hinder engineering leaders from maintaining long-term visibility into service health.

Calibo is a commercial internal developer platform that offers pre-integrated capabilities, plugins, and add-ons that eliminate the complexity associated with setting up an IDP. It accelerates the development of data and internal developer portal solutions by integrating, orchestrating, and automating the software development lifecycle. 

Calibo’s platform offers various functionalities, including self-service provisioning, CI/CD pipeline automation, and containerized deployment orchestration. It also includes a Data Fabric Studio for intelligent data stack orchestration and product release orchestration capabilities. It stands out as a strong alternative to Backstage with its comprehensive integrations, template-driven automation, and product release orchestration, enabling faster delivery timelines. Calibo also excels in product lifecycle management, real-time monitoring, and built-in governance templates for automated security checks.

However, Calibo’s proprietary nature can be limiting as organizations have to deal with the potential for vendor lock-in, which can lead to additional challenges when deciding to migrate to another platform in the future. While it may offer pre-built capabilities, the customization options are limited compared to Backstage, which is designed to be a modular and extensible framework.

Backstage is excellent for organizations looking for a highly customizable developer portal and a thriving open-source community, but it requires significant effort in setup and ongoing maintenance. 

Many organizations seek flexible, market-ready solutions to speed up the platform setup process. However, conducting a thorough analysis of your IT factory’s required capabilities is essential to identifying and adopting the market solution that best fits your needs.

Therefore, choosing a platform solution like Mia-platform ensures faster set, advanced scoring, deep customization, or comprehensive platform integration. For a deeper dive into this topic, the Mia-Platform whitepaper on Platform Engineering provides a comprehensive overview of the evolution and current state of platform applications.