Top 10 Backstage plugins for 2025

Backstage is an open source developer portal that engineering teams can leverage to establish their own internal developer portals. Built by the team at Spotify, Backstage offers a centralized hub for service catalogs, templates, documentation, and internal tools that facilitate developer self-service. 

As an open-source platform, Backstage requires significant effort from engineering teams to implement. Part of this work often includes adding plugins that help them better integrate with their existing tools and systems. Spotify offers its own plugins, such as Role-Based Access Control (RBAC) and Insights, while developers have also created a rich ecosystem of third-party plugins in recent years.

What are Backstage plugins? 

Backstage plugins typically bring in existing functionalities from other applications and platforms (e.g., OpsLevel or AWS Lambda) and place them within the context of Backstage. While this adds capabilities to the internal developer platform, it also centralizes important developer functions so that developers don’t have to context switch.

Backstage features a plugin marketplace where teams can browse, compare, and implement plugins with guided instructions. While teams often choose plugins for tools  already in their tech stack, they also adopt others enhance the functionality of their internal developer portal. 

Top 10 Backstage plugins

There are hundreds of third-party Backstage plugins to choose from. From covering monitoring and services use cases to CI/CD and search, there’s likely a plugin for nearly every tool your developers use daily. To help you find the best ones for your team, we’ve curated a list of our top picks.

Best AI Backstage plugins

RAG AI plugin

The Backstage AI Assistant -  RAG AI plugin, developed by Roadie, integrates Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) capabilities into your Backstage developer portal. It enables intelligent, context-aware interactions with your internal documentation, APIs, and catalog entities, providing tailored responses to natural language queries.

Key features include:

• Context-aware AI responses: Delivers responses by leveraging your Backstage catalog, docs, and APIs through RAG.
• Flexible embedding and LLM support: Works with providers such as AWS Bedrock and OpenAI for efficient vector storage and retrieval using PostgreSQL and pgVector.
• Extensible configuration: Enables customization or prompts, embedding parameters, and data sources to suit your organization’s needs.

ChatGPT Playground plugin

The ChatGPT Playground plugin, developed by Enfuse, integrates OpenAI's language model into your developer portal, enabling natural language interactions for code generation and ideation.​

Key features include:

• AI-powered code generation: Generates files in various formats based on user-provided descriptions, facilitating rapid prototyping and development.​
• Adjustable creativity and response length: Offers controls for temperature and maximum tokens, allowing users to fine-tune the creativity and length of AI-generated outputs.

Backchat GenAI plugin

The Backchat GenAI plugin, developed by Ben Wilcock, integrates open-source generative AI interfaces into your developer portal, enabling private, local interactions with large language models (LLMs).​

Key features include:

• Local AI integration: Connects Backstage to self-hosted LLM interfaces like Chatbot UI, Text Generation Web UI, and Ollama Web UI via Docker, ensuring data privacy and control. 
• Customizable AI endpoints: Supports configuration of various AI server URLs through the app-config.local.yaml file, allowing flexibility in choosing AI backends. 
• Open-source and extensible: Offers a foundation for further development, with plans to support OpenAI API compatibility, chat history storage, and multimodal AI capabilities.

Best CI/CD Backstage plugins

GitHub Actions plugin

GitHub Actions is a continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) platform that introduces automation into the process of building, testing, and running a deployment pipeline. It leverages pre-built actions from the community so developers can set up their essential CI/CD in a matter of minutes. Plus, they can also create workflows that build and test every pull request in the repository, or deploy merged pull requests to production. 

The GitHub Actions plugin, developed by the Backstage community, integrates GitHub Actions workflow data into your developer portal. It provides developers with real-time visibility into CI/CD pipelines directly within Backstage. extends these workflow functionalities to Backstage, making requests to the GitHub API directly from your browser. It authenticates users via OAuth and surfaces all the relevant systems in Backstage. 

Key features include:

• Workflow run visibility: Displays a list of workflow runs for each project, allowing developers to monitor build statuses and job steps without leaving Backstage.
• Interactive controls: Enables users to dive into individual runs to see job steps and provides the ability to retry failed runs directly from the interface.
• Flexible UI: Offers an optional card view for workflow runs, enhancing visual presentation and facilitating branch selection for more targeted insights.

Harness CI/CD plugin

The Harness CI/CD plugin, developed by Harness.io, integrates Harness pipeline executions directly into your developer portal, enhancing visibility and control over your CI/CD processes.​
Key features include:

• Pipeline execution visibility: Displays the top 50 recent pipeline executions for each service, including status, execution time, and associated triggers or deployed services. 
• Pipeline re-execution: Enables re-running of failed pipelines directly from Backstage, streamlining the remediation process. ​
  Customizable pipeline selection: Allows configuration to display specific pipelines or services, providing tailored views per service
• Seamless integration: Utilizes annotations in catalog-info.yaml to link Backstage components with Harness pipelines, ensuring relevant data is surfaced appropriately.

Best monitoring Backstage plugins

DX plugin

The DX Backstage frontend plugin, developed by DX, enriches your Backstage developer portal with actionable metrics and insights–streamlining and enhancing visibility of your engineering workflows.

Key features include:

• DORA metrics: Visualizes critical DevOps metrics, such as deployment frequency, lead time for change, mean time to recovery (MTTR), and change failure rate, directly within Backstage.
• Integration with DX Data Cloud: Automatically syncs your Backstage catalog with DX Data Cloud using the companion backend plugin, helping to centralize analytics and reporting without the need to build and maintain your own data in infrastructure.

Firehydrant plugin

The FireHydrant plugin, developed by FireHydrant and maintained by the Backstage community, integrates incident management directly into your developer portal, offering real-time visibility into service incidents and reliability metrics.

Key features include:

• Active incident monitoring: Displays the total number of active incidents for each service, providing immediate insight into ongoing issues.
• Quick access to recent incidents: Offers direct links to the five most recent active incidents in FireHydrant.
• Comprehensive incident analytics: Presents detailed metrics for the past 30 days, including service health, total time impacted, number of incidents, and key mean time to (MTT) metrics, such as mean time to detect (MTTD), mean time to acknowledge (MTTA), mean time to mitigate (MTTM), and mean time to resolve (MTTR).

Grafana plugin

The Grafana plugin, developed by the Backstage community, integrates Grafana dashboards and alerts into your developer portal, providing real-time observability insights for your services.

Key features include:

• Dashboard integration: Displays Grafana dashboards associated with each service, offering immediate visibility into key metrics.​
• Alert monitoring: Presents recent Grafana alerts for each service, enabling prompt awareness of issues.​
• Flexible embedding: Allows embedding of specific dashboards or an overview dashboard directly within Backstage pages.​
• Tag-based association: Utilizes Grafana tags to link dashboards and alerts to Backstage entities, ensuring relevant data is surfaced appropriately.

Best metrics and health check Backstage plugins

OpenDORA plugin

The OpenDORA plugin, developed by Devoteam, surfaces DevOps performance metrics directly in your developer portal, making it easier to track and improve software delivery.

Key features include:

• DORA metric dashboards: Displays deployment frequency, lead time, change failure rate, and time to restore across teams and services.
• Team-level insights: Breaks down metrics by service or squad to pinpoint areas for improvement.
• Trend tracking: Visualizes performance over time to help teams spot regressions or gains.
• CI/CD integration: Pulls data from popular pipelines, such as GitHub Actions and Jenkins, for automated, real-time reporting.

OpsLevel Service Maturity plugin

OpsLevel Service Maturity was designed to measure service maturity and drive progress. Going beyond a simple checklist for production readiness, this tool takes a true service maturity approach, continuously monitoring your services and automatically measuring them against established maturity rubrics. This way, you can have a close-up or holistic view of your software health across categories and determine your overall production readiness. 

The OpsLevel Service Maturity plugin, built by OpsLevel, makes it easy to measure and improve service maturity within your existing service catalog. It provides a comprehensive dashboard of service metrics and a set of tools to help teams identify and fix service issues.

With the OpsLevel Checks function, teams can verify that their services:

• Are using a particular version of a library or framework
• Aren’t lagging in the adoption of a new third-party tool 
• Meet baseline operational requirements
• Are compliant with new and existing standards
• And so much more

From a visibility standpoint, the Service Maturity plugin enables teams to view maturity progress in context with the rest of their service information in Backstage, giving them a central source of information that prompts activities and decision-making.  

Next steps

Curious to learn more about how OpsLevel helps teams build service maturity beyond our Backstage plugin?

Book a call with our team to learn more.

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Frequently asked questions about Backstage plugins

What are Backstage plugins?

Backstage plugins are powerful software components that extend the functionality of Backstage, the open-source platform developed by Spotify for building and managing developer portals. 

While Backstage comes with a core set of built-in plugins, the majority are created by third-party developers. These community-contributed plugins introduce a wide range of features, including custom integrations, authentication solutions, and advanced data management, allowing teams to tailor Backstage to their unique needs and enhance their development workflows.

What are some alternatives to Backstage plugins?

Alternatives to Backstage plugins include custom development, open source projects, and other third-party solutions. Custom development can be used to create a bespoke solution tailored to your specific needs, while open source projects can provide a more cost-effective and accessible solution. 

Other third-party internal developer platform solutions, such as OpsLevel, can provide additional features and capabilities that are not available in the Backstage platform.

How do I choose the right plugins for my team?

Choosing the right plugins for your team will depend on your needs. Consider the features and capabilities that your team needs, such as authentication, service maturity dashboards, or custom integrations. Additionally, consider the cost of the plugin, the level of support provided, and the ease of use and maintenance.

Are there any plugins that are easy to use and maintain?

Yes, there are plugins that are designed to be easy to use and maintain. For example, the OpsLevel Service Maturity plugin for Backstage is designed to make it easy for teams to measure and improve service maturity. 

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