Backstage
Originally by Spotify
Backstage is an open-source platform for building developer portals, unifying a software catalog, technical documentation, and self-service tooling into a single internal hub.
Definition
Backstage is an open-source platform for building developer portals, unifying a software catalog, technical documentation, and self-service tooling into a single internal hub.
Overview
At its core, Backstage centralizes metadata about every service, library, and pipeline an organization owns into a searchable software catalog, so engineers can answer "who owns this, where does it deploy, and where are its docs" without hunting across wikis and dashboards. TechDocs renders documentation-as-code alongside each catalog entry, and the Scaffolder lets teams spin up new services from standardized templates that already wire in CI/CD, Kubernetes manifests, and monitoring. Backstage is built as a pluggable frontend framework: organizations extend it with plugins that surface data from tools like GitHub Actions, Docker registries, and cloud infrastructure, rather than replacing those tools outright. Spotify open-sourced Backstage in 2020 and donated it to the Cloud Native Computing Foundation in 2022, where it has become one of the most widely adopted foundations for internal developer platforms (IDPs) and the broader platform engineering movement.
Key Features
- Centralized software catalog of services, APIs, and ownership metadata
- TechDocs for docs-as-code rendered directly in the portal
- Scaffolder for creating new projects from golden-path templates
- Extensible plugin architecture with a large open-source plugin ecosystem
- CNCF-governed open-source project with broad community backing
- Search across catalog entries, docs, and integrated tools
- Role-based access and ownership tracking for services