Why Buying A Developer Portal Is Better Than Building Via Backstage

See more item types, like services, data pipelines, serverless functions, even 3P APIs and SaaS applications. See more information about each item

See every environment and its resources for a service and globally

Plugin with limited functionality

Search, filter and see every cloud and on-prem resource along with key information like owners, configuration settings, dependent environments and/or resources, cost drivers, and deep link into the right account in your console. Supports all major clouds as well as on-prem resources

Present metrics around Delivery, Reliability, Security, Resource Costs, and more globally, at the service level, and more. No code required, supports any tool or data via API

Unless plugins available

See cloud costs per service or environment, per resource costs, resource cost drivers, and everything you need to make a change. Makes it easy for developers to monitor daily cost trends

Very limited reporting and depth, build your own data collection mechanism

Keeps your users and teams in sync automatically via SCIM to minimize your maintenance costs

Superior global search, faceted results for easy filtration. Filter tables by many dimensions.

(due in part to uneven plugin quality as well as the Backstage data model and back-end)

No Code Flexibility

Limited, Laborious to Customize

No code personalization (look/feel, logo, widgets, tables, and templated layouts).

Coding required

1st class plugins to pull in data from common tools, no code required. API to ingest data from any tool

Plugins of uneven quality, difficult to configure and maintain

Rapid time to value, easy to maintain

Extremely slow time to value, difficult to maintain

RBAC for every item, search, and API.

No code set-up

Paid feature, not intuitive, high difficulty level (i.e., writing code, writing custom data collectors, etc.)

Largest library of pre-built checks plus the ability to scorecard any custom data means you can create Scorecards for any scenario. Ideal for Security, DevOps, Reliability, Architecture, and Governance

Writing custom data collectors

In-app updates, weekly email progress summaries, and the ability to create custom notification flows across communication channels

Limited (for selected campaigns in Slack)

Leaderboards, Team Progress Over Time, % achievement and next best action to improve, Customizable Milestones (not just Gold/Silver/Bronze), views for service owners and teams

Milestones, Excel-like reporting

Block deployments if a service fails a certain scorecard check by calling our API in your CD pipeline

Dynamic forms and the ability to pull in context to populate menu choices from the catalog and any 3rd-party tool minimize developers’ cognitive load. See detailed results.

Create production ready applications, services, environments, and resources

Limited to code scaffolded by Cookiecutter

Discover available actions via search, global actions library, or see relevant, approved actions inside catalog and scorecard workflows

Library only

Loosely couples with any Infrastructure-as-Code or CI/CD tool to kick off complex workflows and capture responses. Seamlessly integrates with your existing approval processes

No code UI

Coding required

Paid plugin; limited functionality

Automated service ingestion and dependency map presentation

Manually declared; subject to drift

Automatically maps resources to environments to services. No code bulk edits

Manually declared relationships, often stored in YAML. Often quickly becomes out of sync. No bulk edits

Avoids drift via automations and integrations so your catalog is always fresh and accurate

SaaS Hosted or deploy on-premise or to your private cloud

Self-hosted unless paying 3rd-party provider

White Glove Success, Consultative Support to ensure you achieve high adoption. Minimal maintenance burden.

No support. High adoption failure rate. Heavy maintenance burden.