the diy developer portal

What is Spotify Backstage?

If you're considering an open-source developer portal solution like Backstage by Spotify, you should weigh the pros and cons and identify other solutions that can help you achieve your goals faster.

what is backstage?

The Evolution of Internal Dev Portals

Backstage is an open-source project from Spotify, donated to CNCF, designed to provide teams with a framework for building their own internal developer portals. While it offers flexibility for those with the resources to build and maintain it, many organizations have found the cost of implementation and ongoing maintenance too high.

That’s where OpsLevel comes in. As a hosted developer portal solution, OpsLevel provides all the benefits of a powerful internal portal without the heavy lifting. By eliminating the overhead of building and then maintaining custom solutions from scratch, OpsLevel helps teams achieve productivity and operational excellence faster.

ownership cost

The Real Cost of Backstage: 3x More Expensive

Backstage is an open-source framework for platform engineering teams to DIY their developer portal. Building a portal using Backstage, and then onboarding users often takes 9-12 months.

OpsLevel is a hosted internal dev portal built by first engineers from PagerDuty and Amazon who have felt the pain of sprawling architecture firsthand. OpsLevel allows engineering teams to create a flexible and customized solution in less than 30 days.

Backstage might be a good solution if:

  • You have a lot of extra resources for DIY projects
  • You don't need to see the value of a portal for a long time
  • You have product managers dedicated to internal tools

FAQs: Backstage by Spotify

An internal developer portal can unlock engineering team productivity if you choose the right solution for your team and business. Here are some of the questions we often hear from engineering leaders.

How long does Backstage take?

According to the Backstage community, most spend 9-12 months building the portal before rolling out to their team which is an additional 3-6 months. In total, about 18 months.

How many people does it require?

Most teams who have built with Backstage require 2-6 full-time resources dedicated to building and maintaining their instance.

Isn't Backstage free?

The open-source framework is free of charge, but the plugins required to make your portal function are an additional charge by Spotify or through their plugin marketplace.

free guide

Should You Build or Buy?

Just like most things in life, there are pros and cons to both build or buy solutions. We've spent hundreds of hours speaking with leaders who have been successful and many more talking with leaders who ditched Backstage for OpsLevel.

We put our findings in a free guide to help you make a good decision about whether to build or buy your internal developer portal.

ditch the diy

Why Prodigy ditched Backstage for OpsLevel

After a slow and painful start at building their own internal developer portal with Backstage, Prodigy Education ditched the DIY and moved to OpsLevel. The switch earned them a faster rollout and improved software maturity.

  • Uncovered unknown databases
  • Triaged and de-risked 300+ repositories
  • Improved team-wide ownership
Testimonial by Ben Johnson, SVP of Engineering at Prodigy

OpsLevel vs Backstage

OpsLevel is the leading hosted internal developer portal designed to give teams the flexibility to meet their unique needs without spending months building and maintaining a DIY solution.

Feature

Fully supported, no DIY maintenance
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AI features to proactively catalog software and fill knowledge gaps
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Full rollout within 30 days
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No plugins needed, everything is built into the platform
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Flexible and predictable pricing
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Expert-led onboarding and support for rapid adoption
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A roadmap focused on rapid innovation, listening to customer needs
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SOC 2 Type II certified
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Automatically provision and deprovision users via SCIM
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Robust RBAC to ensure security standards are met
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Robust, turnkey integrations with 3rd party tools
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Data export to your data warehouse for custom reporting
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Flexible search via ElasticSearch
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The Pain of Upgrading & Maintaining Backstage

Get a glimpse into a common challenge for Backstage users.

Start today

Engineering is hard work. Your developer portal doesn’t need to be.

OpsLevel Dashboard