Backstage vs Hackathon Starter
Backstage
backstage.ioHackathon Starter
github.comSide by side
| Figure | Backstage | Hackathon Starter |
|---|---|---|
| Price from | Free | Free |
| Free plan | Yes | Yes |
| Free trial | — | — |
| Open source | — | — |
| Web | Yes | Yes |
| Windows | — | Yes |
| macOS | Yes | Yes |
| Linux | Yes | Yes |
| API | Yes | — |
| Self-hosted | Yes | Yes |
| Plans published | 1 | 1 |
| Spec score · Code Generators | 8.5 (#6) | 8.0 (#16) |
| Deployment | The standalone installation guide creates a locally running app with an in-memory SQLite database and demo content, and says this setup is not production-ready. | The README describes optional production deployment and HTTPS proxy setup using ngrok or Cloudflare. |
| Integrations | Integrations let Backstage read or publish data using providers such as GitHub, GitLab, Bitbucket, LDAP, and cloud providers. | API examples cover services including Stripe, PayPal, QuickBooks, Twilio, Google Maps, HERE Maps, Google Drive, Google Sheets, GitHub, and GIPHY. |
| Intended users | Backstage is aimed at organizations whose product and engineering teams need a shared developer portal and software ecosystem catalog. | The maker describes the project as generic and reusable for common hackathon web app use cases and as a learning guide for developers interested in individual features such as Google sign-in. |
| Purpose | Backstage is an open-source framework for creating and deploying developer portals, originally created at Spotify. | Hackathon Starter is a reusable boilerplate for Node.js web applications, intended to help developers get projects started and can also be used as a learning guide. |
Plans
In their own words
Backstage
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.
Hackathon Starter
Hackathon Starter has no write-up on Specifiction yet; its figures are above.