Backstage is an open-source platform to build Internal Developer Portals (IDP). It is the most widely used IDP and one of the main reasons for it is the fact that it is one of the most active projects hosted by CNCF. Still, if you have tried to run it yourself I know you have encountered a few limitations already. Below are some of the shortcomings of Backstage.

Backstage design limitations

• Fixed data model that prevents you ingesting your own data
• Outdated information due to lack of real time data ingestion
• High maintenance costs just to keep up with constant changes
• Most plugins are community-built and don't follow the same standards
• Lack of plugin ownership (in most cases)

Although Backstage is a great tool to take you from 0 to 10%, where you'll be able to see some entities in your Service Catalog with their documentation, you'll struggle with the next steps without having a dedicated team to it. This is one of the reasons why so many companies are moving away from Backstage and looking for alternatives that allow more extensibility and require less effort to maintain.

Looking for a Backstage alternative? You just found it!

If you’re looking for an alternative to Spotify Backstage to adopt a developer portal that is ready and simple to use, Rely.io is exactly what you’re looking for. With an out-of the box software catalog with opinionated default views for service, team and developer homepages, scorecards with industry benchmarks and open source self-service developer actions ready to use.

You can get started in minutes with live discovery in the software catalog, that automatically discovers services and infra resources and centralizes live data on their ownership, dependencies, documentation, deployments, on-call schedules, SLOs, operational maturity and more – ensuring everything is always up-to-date.