Backstage
Open framework for building an internal developer portal, unifying a company's services, infrastructure, and documentation behind one searchable software catalog.
- Actively maintained
- Foundation-backed
- Well documented
- Permissive license
Overview
Backstage is an open-source framework, originally built at Spotify and now a CNCF incubating project, for building an internal developer portal. Its centralized Software Catalog tracks every service, library, data pipeline, website, and ML model an organization owns, replacing scattered wikis and tribal knowledge about what exists and who owns it with a single, structured source of truth.
On top of the catalog, Backstage provides Software Templates for scaffolding new projects to an organization's standards, and TechDocs for keeping technical documentation next to the code it describes and rendering it in the portal - and because it's a framework rather than a finished product, teams build their own plugins and customize it to their internal tooling.
Backstage is a fit for platform engineering teams at organizations with enough services that 'what exists and who owns it' has become a real problem, giving developers one place to discover, understand, and scaffold software rather than hunting across repos, wikis, and Slack threads.
Why it's in this catalog
Catalog rating: ★★★★☆ (4/5)
Leading internal developer portal platform, well-differentiated within developer-tools.
- Mature
- Foundation-governed
- Categories
- Developer Tools
- Languages
- TypeScript
- License
- Apache-2.0
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