Backstage vs Schematix
Backstage
backstage.ioSchematix
schematix.comSide by side
| Figure | Backstage | Schematix |
|---|---|---|
| Price from | Free | $90/mo |
| Free plan | Yes | — |
| Free trial | — | Yes |
| Open source | — | — |
| Web | Yes | Yes |
| macOS | Yes | — |
| Linux | Yes | — |
| API | Yes | Yes |
| Self-hosted | Yes | — |
| Plans published | 1 | 1 |
| Spec score · Application Dependency Mapping Software | 8.5 (#4) | 7.5 (#19) |
| Intended users | Backstage is aimed at organizations whose product and engineering teams need a shared developer portal and software ecosystem catalog. | The maker describes use by IT professionals and says the product serves individuals or teams across industry, research, and government. |
| Purpose | Backstage is an open-source framework for creating and deploying developer portals, originally created at Spotify. | Schematix models and analyzes interactions among complex IT applications, services, systems, and networks. |
| 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. | The maker lists HTTPS, role-based access controls, read-only and API-only permission modes, key-based API authentication, and LDAP identity management. |
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.