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As engineering teams scale, managing tools, services, and workflows efficiently becomes critical. Developer portals like Backstage help address this complexity, but they’re not a one-size-fits-all solution. Whether due to Backstage’s steep learning curve, resource-heavy implementation, or lack of specific features, many teams look for alternatives that better align with their needs.
In this post, we’ll explore some of the top Backstage alternatives, comparing their strengths and weaknesses to help you find the best fit for your team. We’ll also highlight how Rely.io stands out as a modern, lightweight, and feature-rich option for teams seeking to streamline their development workflows.
Why Consider Alternatives to Backstage?
Backstage, developed by Spotify, is a powerful open-source platform for building developer portals. However, it comes with challenges:
- Implementation Complexity: Backstage often requires significant engineering effort to customize and maintain, which can be a barrier for smaller teams.
- Resource Intensity: Running Backstage demands infrastructure and dedicated resources to manage, often taking away engineering capacity from already undersized DevOps, SRE or Platform Engineering teams.
- Feature Gaps: While Backstage shines as a service catalog, some teams find it lacking in features like detailed compliance tracking or integration flexibility.
- Toil heavy migrations & updates: As an open-source project, Backstage has many key components developed and maintained by different vendors. They each have their own update schedules which often introduce breaking changes downstream in other dependent components.
If these challenges resonate with you, there are modern solutions that address these limitations and provide new opportunities for your team.
Rely.io: The Smart, Opinionated Alternative
Rely.io is built around the philosophy of "low floor, high ceiling," making it both approachable for new users and powerful enough for advanced customization. The platform is designed to be as opinionated as possible, addressing the most common use cases right out of the box to save time and effort for users. At the same time, Rely.io acknowledges that every organization is unique, offering an extensive toolset of customizations to adapt to varying needs.
As a vertical product, Rely.io delivers tailored experiences for specific user needs, ensuring clarity and actionable insights. For example, in the pursuit of engineering excellence—a primary reason companies seek internal developer portals—Rely.io provides Engineering Performance views. These views not only highlight bottlenecks in workflows but also offer suggested remediations, empowering teams to take actionable steps toward improvement.
Key Features of Rely.io:
- Dynamic Software Catalog: Automatically syncs with tools like GitHub, Jira, and Kubernetes, providing an always-up-to-date and trusted system of records into your software and infrastructure ecosystems.
- Compliance and Quality Tracking: Scorecards track and enforce standards across teams and services, giving clear insights into performance (e.g. DORA, SPACE, …), security, quality, and operational health.
- Out-of-the-box Analytics: Plugins come packed with opinionated data and formulas for users to visualize from Day 1 engineering KPIs like deployment frequency, lead time, PR cycles, and more.
- Engineering Performance Review: Engineering Leaders should not have to dig into the Catalog to identify performance bottlenecks or non-compliance with Engineering Standards. These opinionated views bring to their attention the relevant data to implement effective initiatives.
- No Toil Deployment: Rely.io is SaaS-based, eliminating the need for complex infrastructure and ongoing maintenance.
- Built-In Guidance: Opinionated features at every turn guide users toward best practices, reducing decision fatigue and setup time.
- Extensive Customization: Adapt workflows, dashboards, and metrics to match your organization’s specific DNA without introducing unnecessary complexity.
By addressing the common pain points of traditional developer portals and balancing pre-configured use cases with advanced customization, Rely.io enables teams to focus on building great software while maintaining operational excellence.Read more about how Backstage and Rely compare to each other in this dedicated article.
Building Your Own Solution
From Scratch: Building a developer portal from scratch gives your team full control and unlimited customization possibilities. This approach often starts with piecemeal solutions, such as creating a service catalog using spreadsheets, CMDBs, or simple dashboards. Some teams extend their CI/CD tooling, like Jenkins or GitHub Actions, to include self-service capabilities.
Over time, these efforts may evolve into a fully-fledged in-house portal, tailored to the organization’s workflows. However, the initial investment in time and resources rarely matches reality. Teams often find themselves facing either underwhelming results—such as long delivery cycles, low adoption rates, and limited functionality—or overwhelming complexity as more resources are added to the project to address growing demands.
This escalation can even reach the point where active Product Management is required to maintain and evolve the solution, further increasing sunk costs and creating a cycle of dependency on internal resources. As organizational requirements evolve—whether through changes in processes, tech stacks, or compliance standards—these in-house portals often reach a breaking point, demanding costly overhauls or rewrites.
The sunk cost dilemma often emerges here: Should the team continue investing heavily in maintaining their portal, or transition to a commercial solution? Many find that modern commercial platforms replicate the functionality of in-house solutions while offering broader features like automations, compliance tracking, and developer experience enhancements at a fraction of the ongoing cost.
Using a Managed Backstage : Managed Backstage solutions, such as Roadie or Spotify Portal for Backstage, aim to streamline the adoption of Backstage by offering hosted or SaaS-based implementations. These solutions reduce initial setup effort by handling infrastructure, updates, and maintenance, enabling teams to focus on customization and use cases.
Roadie provides a single-tenant SaaS experience with built-in features like regular updates, SSO, Kubernetes integration, and optional scorecards. Spotify Portal for Backstage takes a similar approach, with an emphasis on simplifying plugin management and reducing the coding burden.
While these solutions address some of the challenges of managing an open-source platform, they often inherit Backstage's core limitations, such as rigid data models that restrict adaptability and a lack of built-in features for ongoing operations. This means that day-to-day workflows, scaling, and evolving requirements still demand significant manual effort. Additionally, these managed offerings may require continuous investment in custom development to align with unique organizational needs, making scalability and long-term cost-effectiveness a concern.
For organizations starting fresh, managed Backstage can mitigate the initial infrastructure burden but may not deliver the broad, out-of-the-box functionality or flexibility required as needs evolve. This raises critical questions about its sustainability compared to alternative developer portals designed for seamless scalability and comprehensive features.
Commercial Solutions
OpsLevel: OpsLevel is designed to help teams manage their microservices with a strong focus on service maturity and compliance. It provides extensive functionality out of the box, allowing teams to achieve faster time-to-value compared to alternatives like Backstage. Key features include a user-friendly interface, maturity scorecards for service ownership, and integrations with popular tools like Datadog and PagerDuty.
However, OpsLevel's approach comes with trade-offs. Its opinionated data model can restrict customization, limiting use cases and making it difficult to adapt to unique organizational workflows. Additionally, while it supports synchronous self-service actions through HTTP webhooks, the lack of workflow automation or API-first development capabilities can increase integration complexity.
OpsLevel also relies on YAML for metadata storage, which can create additional overhead for developers and erode trust in the catalog’s accuracy if not consistently maintained. Furthermore, its Kubernetes catalog lacks visibility into K8s objects, potentially hindering developers unfamiliar with Kubernetes from fully understanding their services.
While OpsLevel offers robust compliance tracking and service maturity tools, these limitations may reduce its flexibility and long-term effectiveness for organizations with evolving needs.
Port: Port takes a low-code approach to developer portals, branding itself as a flexible toolbox for teams to customize and build their own solutions. This flexibility allows users to define their own data models, views, dashboards, catalogs, and menus, making it an adaptable platform for various workflows.
However, this flexibility can also become a double-edged sword. Without clear guidance or guardrails, users risk introducing unnecessary complexity into their configurations. Port operates as a horizontal product, which means users must first identify their use cases and then build the necessary solutions themselves—an approach that demands time, resources, and a clear strategy.
Data collection in Port further adds to user responsibility. While templates exist to help users get started, the platform relies solely on a push-based mechanism, requiring users to implement data pipelines and integrations to feed information into Port’s APIs. This approach shifts the operational burden onto teams, which can be daunting for organizations without sufficient resources or expertise.
While Port’s low-code model and adaptability make it a compelling choice for certain teams, the lack of built-in structure and the heavy reliance on user-driven implementation can limit its accessibility and time-to-value, particularly for smaller teams or those seeking a more guided solution.
Cortex: Cortex positions itself as a compliance-first developer portal, offering robust tools to enforce service standards and provide visibility into dependencies. While it promises a lower total cost of ownership and faster setup compared to Backstage, its limited flexibility and developer-focused features can hinder adoption and long-term usability.
Despite recent efforts to enhance its data model, Cortex relies on fixed entity types (e.g., services, resources, teams) that cannot be fully customized. This rigidity extends to its self-service actions, which lack support for advanced workflows, asynchronous actions, or granular RBAC configurations. For example, Cortex does not allow temporary permissions for on-call engineers or automated ephemeral environments with TTLs.
Its scorecards, a core feature for enforcing standards, are constrained by limited customization options. You can’t trigger automations or detailed workflows based on scorecard results, and evaluation frequencies (every four hours) can delay feedback loops. This undermines its potential as a proactive tool for maintaining service quality.
The platform’s inability to integrate seamlessly with modern Infrastructure-as-Code (IaC) frameworks like Terraform or Pulumi adds further limitations. Developers also face challenges with metadata management, as Cortex relies on basic JSON schemas, preventing dynamic updates or dashboards from reflecting real-time changes. Features like Markdown ingestion, feedback collection, or notifications are notably absent, reducing its utility as a comprehensive developer experience platform.
Finally, Cortex’s limited integrations (e.g., no cost management tools, partial Kubernetes visibility) and lack of extensibility for custom use cases make it less adaptable to complex organizational needs. While it provides foundational compliance features, the absence of real-time updates, customization, and developer-centric capabilities may lead teams to seek more versatile solutions.
Conclusion: Finding Your Fit
The developer portal landscape is evolving, with solutions that cater to different needs and team sizes. Whether you’re looking for flexibility, ease of use, or advanced compliance tracking, there’s an alternative that can elevate your engineering workflows.
Rely.io stands out as a powerful yet lightweight platform that aligns with modern engineering practices. Ready to see it in action? Book a demo today and take the next step toward operational excellence!
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