Backstage alternatives: 4 top tools to use instead | OpsLevel

Backstage has made a name for itself as an extensible platform for building developer portals. If you're looking for alternatives to Backstage, you probably realize that you need a developer portal or a microservice catalog. You understand the benefits this tooling can provide your engineering teams, but you're not quite sure which route to take. And yes, Backstage has received a lot of hype—but are there alternatives that you should consider? 

Perhaps you've realized that implementing Backstage fully will require an entire team just to get started with building out your own custom instance. After all, it's a platform, not a product. And even once you’re all set up for deployments, authorization, and authentication, adding plugins and defining workflows remains a heavy burden. 

In this post, we'll look at four alternatives to using Backstage and consider when those tools may be right for you. 

Overview: Backstage vs alternative tools

Related resources

• Opslevel vs Spotify Backstage
• Opslevel vs Atlassian Compass
• Opslevel vs Port
• Opslevel vs Cortex.io

What problems does Backstage.io solve?

As organizations scale, their service landscape becomes more complex. They slowly acquire dozens to hundreds of services and even more APIs, and each of those services and APIs has metadata and processes attached. 

Backstage is an open source framework for building internal developer portals and service catalogs. It enables organizations to create a central hub where teams can manage services, infrastructure, documentation, deployment pipelines, metrics, monitoring, and more.

It does this by:

• Consolidating hundreds, or thousands, of micro services into a searchable, organized service catalog.
• Providing a single portal where new developers can discover services, documentation, ownership, and dependencies.
• Integrating CI/CD, observability, monitoring, and infrastructure tools into one interface.
• Encouraging consistent documentation, ownership, and lifecycle management across services through templates and metadata.
• Centralizing information like health checks, deployment status, and ownership, making it easier to understand the state of services.

What are the drawbacks of Backstage?

The flexibility that Backstage provides also comes with the responsibility of building and maintaining your portal from the ground up. Unless you're staffed to host and maintain Backstage - often requiring TypeScript expertise - you may quickly encounter  hidden costs. For teams looking to accelerate time-to-value or reduce operational overhead, exploring turnkey alternatives can be a smart way to get the same benefits with faster implementation.

Drawbacks include:

• Requiring significant time and engineering resources to configure, customize, and maintain.
• Built on React / TypeScript, which can be a challenge for backend-heavy platform teams with limited frontend expertise.
• High cost of ownership, estimated at ~$150,000 per 20 developers when accounting for hidden engineering and operational costs.
• Most plugins are community-built and not vetted by Spotify; lack of support can lead to vulnerabilities and instability.
• The service catalog's fixed schema lacks flexibility, limiting customizations and real-time data integration.
• Regular updates are needed to prevent broken or outdated data; static setups can introduce operational inefficiencies.

Backstage.io alternatives

We'll introduce four strong alternatives to Backstage. While not an exhaustive list, these options will give you a solid starting point and help you evaluate the best fit for your team. 

Cloud-specific tools and portals

Your first step would be to utilize what your cloud provider gives you. 

Whether it's AWS, GCP, or Azure, your provider will have dashboards, service catalogs, API listings, and more. For example, the AWS Service Catalog offers out-of-the-box solutions that provide a generic view of your services with options to control access and build integrations using their APIs. 

With the right access and knowledge, you can find your way around your organization without knowing how to write code. You'll get features soon after your cloud provider makes them available, and you don't have to work to maintain any custom code. 

These tools also have their drawbacks. 

• They create reliance on a particular cloud provider. You can't take them with you if you decide to change platforms. Or if you work in a multi-cloud environment, they don't provide the high-level visibility you need across all environments. 
• They're not always intuitive. They will require that your teams learn and understand cloud-specific categorization and workflows. Access may also not be fine-grained enough to provide what you need or may be complex to maintain as your organization and its permissions model scale. 
• They often feel disjointed. Similar resources often get grouped together, limiting your ability to present the information clearly, especially for non-developers.

Starting with tools from your cloud provider works well for small teams managing a limited number of microservices. At that stage, a full platform may be more than you need. As your organization and service landscape grow, these built-in tools often fall short, potentially pushing you toward a DIY approach as your first step toward scaling.

Homegrown, or DIY, developer portals

For some engineering teams, building a custom internal developer portal can seem like a natural progression, especially after outgrowing basic tools from cloud providers. A homegrown solution gives you full control over architecture, UI and UX, and integrations, tailored to your exact workflows. This level of customization allows you to create a truly seamless developer experience that aligns perfectly with how your teams operate. Plus, you get to prioritize the features your developers need most and roll them out incrementally, avoiding the overhead of adopting an entire platform all at once. Building your own developer portal also enables tighter integration with internal tools and systems that off-the-shelf solutions might not support.

Drawbacks include:

• Shift from focus on business value. Building a homegrown solution requires significant time and a dedicated team to support it long-term. For most product-focused organizations, this kind of internal tooling isn’t core to your competitive edge, and investing developer resources here can divert attention from delivering customer-facing features.
• Reinventing the wheel. You may end up solving issues that other platforms, like Backstage or OpsLevel, have already addressed.
• Feature gaps. Common platform features, such as RBAC, scorecards, service templates, and software catalogs may take a long time to build internally–if at all.

A DIY approach can get you started and help visualize the need for more robust tools. However, you need to consider whether having an internal team build an internal product to manage your service ecosystem will give you a competitive advantage in the market. Our bet? It won’t, and your product teams’ time is better spent shipping new features and applications.

Managed Backstage

Managed Backstage offerings like Spotify Portal and Roadie make it significantly easier to get started with Backstage by removing the need to host, configure, and maintain the platform yourself. They provide built-in features, automated updates, and infrastructure management, helping teams reduce operational overhead. With UI-based plugin management, single sign-on (SSO), and integrations like Kubernetes support, these managed solutions offer a smoother, more user-friendly experience. They also allow for some customization, such as deploying your own plugins, and include enhancements like scorecards and custom API rendering that go beyond the core open-source version.

Drawbacks include:

• Inherits core limitations of open source Backstage: Such as rigid data model and lack of self-service actions.
• High cost: Long-term costs can exceed initial investment due to paid plugins, add-ons and internal resources.
• Limited customization: This makes it harder to adapt to an organization’s unique needs.

OpsLevel

With OpsLevel, you're not actually getting a Backstage alternative, but a fully managed SaaS solution. It offers the same flexibility and functionality of Backstage, without the hosting, maintenance, or the risk of platform abandonment. This allows you to focus your efforts on what matters most–delivering product-enhancing features–while having access to dedicated support and success professionals   to help with feature requests or questions. 

OpsLevelis intentionally opinionated, which means your team does not have to carry the mental load of deciding which workflows to support, how to integrate various tools, and what customizations and plugins are essential. Plus, your team won’t have to learn React, TypeScript or other new languages to get everything up and running.

Beyond the software catalog and templates found in Backstage, OpsLevel offers additional features like quality and maturity checks, simple CI/CD integrations, service creation, and custom actions that empower developers to self-serve key operational tasks.

Next steps

There are plenty of options out there for developer portals and microservice catalogs, from open-source projects to fully supported SaaS solutions. Every engineering team has different needs, but there are a few key things to think about as you figure out which one’s right for you:

1. How complex is your environment?
2. What level of control or flexibility do you need?
3. Where should your teams focus their time and energy?
   

Want to learn more about how OpsLevel can help you meet your internal developer portal requirements? See it in action by signing up for a demo.

‍