August 2025 Update
Since this article was originally published, the IDP landscape has transformed dramatically. Here's what has changed:
Backstage overhead is now widely understood: Backstage demands a substantial engineering investment. Many organizations start with Backstage and then switch to Cortex using the Backstage Migration Helper.
Low adoption rates: Backstage lacks the features to serve a broader set of stakeholders, and as a result, adoption often stalls at 9%.
Shift to turnkey solutions: The market now favors IDPs that deliver immediate value and a faster return on investment, as noted in Gartner's 2025 Market Guide for Internal Developer Portals.
You might have heard of Spotify Backstage (backstage.io), an open-source option for building internal developer portals. But what is Spotify Backstage? This article will help answer your questions about Backstage and explain important considerations to think about if you’re deciding whether to adopt in your team.
In the last two decades we saw DevOps emerge as a way to push back on the complexity and entropy creeping into the software development ecosystem. This thoughtful and considered approach to development processes has been a positive development, and helped rationalize some of the chaos involved in building software. Before DevOps, each development team, and sometimes each developer, had to navigate a tech stack that resembled a jungle of dependencies, tooling and spotty documentation.
While DevOps was a necessary first step, it didn’t solve the explosion of developer tools on its own. Getting a handle on the huge amount of infrastructure tooling - software components, open-source plugins, SaaS, ml models, Kubernetes etc. - required more than just sound processes. This led to the creation of internal developer portals and internal developer platforms, or IDPs. These tools centralized best practice and built golden paths to help developers focus on building software without being overwhelmed by a complex working environment.
The most widely used developer platform was created by the impressive engineering team at Sweden’s Spotify, called Backstage. This began as an internal project called “System Z” at Spotify to help engineers discover and understand all the company’s software, services, docs, APIs, and tools. This project provided a UX layer to help engineers quickly answer questions about software ownership, deployment, and dependencies.
What is Spotify Backstage?
Spotify Backstage is an open platform for building developer portals to create, manage, and explore software from a single UX layer. Backstage was originally developed at Spotify as an internal tool and then was open-sourced in 2020. Its functionality includes a software catalog, software templates, docs like code, and a variety of plugins that can extend the platform.
The success of Backstage points to a broader demand for developer portals and service catalogs. This is visible in several contributing trends:
Growing complexity of engineering organizations. As more high-growth tech companies emerge, there’s an increasing need for tools that help manage this complexity.
Autonomous teams. The popular “Spotify Model” involves having small “squads” of engineers that own projects end-to-end. Developer portals help teams maintain their independence while enforcing standardization.
Rise of developer tools. Developer portals and service catalogs help organize the growing number of developer tools that teams use internally to improve productivity.
Out of the box Backstage Features
Backstage includes several features for organizing software and related documentation:
Backstage Software Catalog
Currently in alpha, the Backstage Software Catalog is a unified source of metadata and ownership information about all the software that your team works on, based on metadata YAML files.
Backstage Software Templates
Backstage Software Templates let you define a code skeleton with variables that can be filled in to standardize the creation of new services.
Backstage Search
Backstage Search lets you choose from modular components to build a search tool for your organization, including your software catalog and other sources like a wiki or Stack Overflow.
Backstage TechDocs
Backstage TechDocs allows engineers to write technical documentation as Markdown files that live together with the code, removing friction from the documentation process.
Backstage Plugins
As an open-source project, Backstage has a growing number of plugins that can help you customize the platform to your needs.
What engineering problems does Spotify Backstage solve?
Using an IDP like Backstage helps with the following:
Visibility and Discovery: Backstage provides a centralized platform where all services and software components are registered, making it easier for developers to discover existing resources.
Documentation and Collaboration: By integrating documentation directly with the development workflow, Backstage ensures that relevant information is easily accessible.
Standardization: Backstage provides templates for creating new services and components, helping ensure consistency in development practices.
The Reality of Running Backstage
While Backstage was a pioneering force, the reality of deploying and maintaining it has become widely understood in the industry. The challenges are no longer theoretical; they are the lived experience of many engineering teams.
Substantial Engineering Investment: Unlike a commercial platform, Backstage is a framework that requires a dedicated team of full-time engineers to deploy, configure, and maintain. This significant, ongoing investment in overhead is now a well-known cost, and many teams find it distracts from their core mission.
Low Adoption Rates: The VP of Engineering at Spotify has noted that while adoption is high internally, it often stalls at less than 10% in other organizations. Backstage's primary focus on the service catalog means it often fails to provide value to a broader set of stakeholders, like engineering leadership, leading to low engagement.
Missing the Fundamentals: A successful IDP must be built on a foundation of trusted, always-up-to-date data, especially service ownership. Backstage never fully addressed this fundamental challenge, meaning the catalog's data can quickly become stale and untrustworthy, preventing it from being used for critical engineering initiatives.
The Shift to Turnkey Solutions: As the market has matured, the focus has shifted. According to Gartner's 2025 Market Guide for Internal Developer Portals, organizations are now favoring turnkey commercial IDPs that "simplify initial deployment, ease the ongoing maintenance, and provide out-of-the-box functionality... to realize faster return on investment."
Why engineering teams choose Cortex instead of Backstage
For teams that want to realize the benefits of an IDP without taking on the burden of building one, Cortex is the clear alternative. Over the last several years, Cortex has been built to directly address the known challenges of Backstage. We provide a turnkey platform that delivers value on day one.
1) An Effortless Migration Path: Keep the work you've already done. Our Backstage Migration Helper ingests your existing YAML files, allowing you to migrate in minutes and immediately unlock the full potential of your catalog.
2) Drive Adoption with Scorecards: Cortex goes beyond a simple catalog by allowing you to set standards and drive initiatives with Scorecards. This gives every engineer a reason to use the portal and provides leaders with the real-time intelligence they need to measure and improve engineering health.
3) A Complete Platform, Not a Project: Cortex provides developer self-service, a robust catalog, and deep engineering intelligence out-of-the-box. This allows you to provide immediate value to your entire organization—from developers to the C-suite—without the overhead of patching plugins or managing a complex internal tool.
4) Unlock Real-time Engineering Intelligence: Backstage provides a catalog, but it can't tell you about the health of your engineering organization. Cortex has a full Engineering Intelligence platform built-in, allowing leaders to track DORA metrics, find bottlenecks, and measure team performance without building custom plugins or buying a separate tool.
To get started with Cortex, check out our demo here.
