Backstage is Spotify's open-source framework for building developer portals, offering a software catalog, TechDocs, templates, and a plugin ecosystem.
Backstage is an open-source framework for building internal developer portals. It was created inside Spotify, open-sourced in March 2020, and donated to the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) later that year, reaching CNCF Incubating project status in 2022.
At its core is a Software Catalog that centralizes information about an organization's microservices, libraries, data pipelines, and infrastructure, giving engineering teams a single source of truth for what software exists and who owns it.
Beyond the catalog, Backstage includes Software Templates (the Scaffolder) for spinning up new projects using organization-approved patterns, and TechDocs, a docs-as-code system that keeps technical documentation versioned alongside source code.
An extensible plugin ecosystem lets platform teams add integrations for CI/CD, cost tracking, security scanning, and other tooling, allowing Backstage to serve as a unified front door to an organization's development tooling.
The open-source Backstage framework is free and self-hosted under CNCF governance. Spotify separately sells a commercial managed product called Portal for Backstage, built on the framework, for organizations that prefer not to operate their own instance.
Yes, the open-source Backstage framework is free under CNCF governance and self-hosted.
Backstage was created inside Spotify and open-sourced in March 2020, later donated to the CNCF.
The open-source project is self-hosted only, though Spotify offers a commercial hosted product called Portal for Backstage built on the framework.
It centralizes information about an organization's services, libraries, and infrastructure in one searchable place.