Backstage vs Humanitec
Backstage
backstage.ioHumanitec
humanitec.comSide by side
| Figure | Backstage | Humanitec |
|---|---|---|
| Price from | Free | $1,979/mo |
| Free plan | Yes | — |
| Free trial | — | Yes |
| Open source | — | — |
| Web | Yes | Yes |
| macOS | Yes | — |
| Linux | Yes | — |
| API | Yes | Yes |
| Self-hosted | Yes | Yes |
| Plans published | 1 | 4 |
| Spec score · Internal Developer Portals | 8.6 (#2) | 8.1 (#9) |
| Spec score · Internal Developer Platforms | 8.6 (#3) | 8.1 (#8) |
| Spec score · Platform Engineering Software | 8.6 (#5) | 8.2 (#11) |
| Integrations | Integrations let Backstage read or publish data using providers such as GitHub, GitLab, Bitbucket, LDAP, and cloud providers. | Humanitec lists built-in database drivers for MariaDB, MySQL, and PostgreSQL, plus AWS Route53 and Cloudflare DNS drivers. |
| Purpose | Backstage is an open-source framework for creating and deploying developer portals, originally created at Spotify. | Humanitec says its Platform Orchestrator unifies infrastructure management, enforces standards, and boosts developer productivity in complex environments. |
| Support | The project lists Discord, FAQs, and community resources for support and discussion. | The Teams plan includes email support and public office hours; Pro includes standard support and monthly office hours with a platform architect. |
Plans
Humanitec
- Teams$1,979 a month
- Pro$4,950 a month
- EnterprisePriced on request
- Self-hostedPriced on request
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.