Backstage vs Red Hat Developer Hub
Backstage
backstage.ioRed Hat Developer Hub
developers.redhat.comSide by side
| Figure | Backstage | Red Hat Developer Hub |
|---|---|---|
| Price from | Free | — |
| Free plan | Yes | — |
| Free trial | — | Yes |
| Open source | — | — |
| Web | Yes | Yes |
| macOS | Yes | — |
| Linux | Yes | — |
| API | Yes | — |
| Self-hosted | Yes | Yes |
| Plans published | 1 | 1 |
| Spec score · Internal Developer Portals | 8.6 (#2) | 7.2 (#23) |
| Spec score · Internal Developer Platforms | 8.6 (#3) | 7.1 (#19) |
| 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 hub can be deployed on premises, including in air-gapped setups, or in the cloud on Amazon EKS, Microsoft AKS, or Google GKE; the hub itself runs in one chosen environment. |
| Product | Backstage is an open-source framework for building developer portals. | Red Hat Developer Hub is a Backstage-based internal developer portal for enterprises that centralizes tools, documentation, and development workflows. |
| Support | The project lists Discord, FAQs, and community resources for support and discussion. | Red Hat advertises 24/7 enterprise support for Developer Hub. |
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.
Red Hat Developer Hub
Red Hat Developer Hub has no write-up on Specifiction yet; its figures are above.