Backstage vs Gantry

Backstage is a free, open-source framework for building and deploying developer portals. Its software catalog records ownership and metadata for services, websites, libraries and data pipelines, for teams managing a small set of services or company catalogs of thousands. Software Templates can fill code skeletons with variables and publish generated projects to destinations such as GitHub or GitLab. TechDocs keeps documentation in a docs-like-code workflow close to code. Integrations can read or publish data through GitHub, GitLab, Bitbucket, LDAP and cloud providers. Teams can extend a portal with existing open-source plugins or build their own; Backstage Search can index sources such as TechDocs, Confluence and Stack Overflow. Its Kubernetes feature aggregates a service’s deployments through the Kubernetes API. Backstage is self-hosted. The standalone installation guide creates a local demo with an in-memory SQLite database and says this setup is not production-ready. It lists minimum requirements of 20 GB disk and 6 GB memory, with more disk needed as modules and plugins are added. Its threat model describes only rudimentary denial-of-service protection and recommends a protected deployment environment.

Gantry is an open-source internal developer platform for teams that need a service catalog and self-service workflows without dedicated platform engineering staff. Its catalog brings together services, APIs, teams, infrastructure components, and environments, including ownership and dependency relationships. Teams can create executable runbooks and workflows with schema-driven forms for tasks such as deployments and environment provisioning. Catalog entities can be written in YAML and applied with `gantry apply`, supporting version control, review, diffs, and rollback. Search uses SQLite FTS5, so Elasticsearch is not required. Official integrations include Kubernetes, GitHub, and ArgoCD; PagerDuty, Datadog, Grafana, and Flux are planned. Gantry ships as a Go binary with embedded SQLite and no external runtime dependencies. It can be installed from a binary, run through Docker or Docker Compose, or built from source. The documentation describes JWT authentication and requires installers to set an admin password. Gantry is self-hosted, licensed under Apache 2.0, and free. Its documentation says it is in active development and that APIs and schemas may change before its first stable release.