Backstage vs PHPMaker
Backstage
backstage.ioPHPMaker
phpmaker.devSide by side
| Figure | Backstage | PHPMaker |
|---|---|---|
| Price from | Free | — |
| Free plan | Yes | — |
| Free trial | — | Yes |
| Open source | — | — |
| Web | Yes | Yes |
| Windows | — | Yes |
| macOS | Yes | — |
| Linux | Yes | — |
| API | Yes | Yes |
| Self-hosted | Yes | Yes |
| Plans published | 1 | 4 |
| Spec score · Code Generators | 8.5 (#6) | 8.1 (#15) |
| 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. | Generated applications can run on Linux or Windows web servers. |
| Integrations | Integrations let Backstage read or publish data using providers such as GitHub, GitLab, Bitbucket, LDAP, and cloud providers. | The feature list names Google, Facebook, Microsoft Azure, and SAML login support. |
| Purpose | Backstage is an open-source framework for creating and deploying developer portals, originally created at Spotify. | PHPMaker generates PHP scripts from supported databases to create web applications for viewing, editing, searching, adding, and deleting records. |
| Security | The official threat model outlines security considerations for operators, developers, and security researchers, and points to the project’s security policy for vulnerability reporting. | Generated applications can use record-level User ID security, table-level User Level security, and two-factor authentication via Google Authenticator, email, or SMS. |
| Support | The project lists Discord, FAQs, and community resources for support and discussion. | The maker lists email support for registered license holders and provides support contact addresses. |
Plans
PHPMaker
- TrialFree
- PHPMaker (3-Month Subscription)$179.90, paid once
- PHPMaker (6-Month Subscription)$249.90, paid once
- PHPMaker 2026 (Perpetual)$399.95, paid once
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.