Backstage vs sqlc
Backstage
backstage.iosqlc
sqlc.devSide by side
| Figure | Backstage | sqlc |
|---|---|---|
| Price from | Free | Free |
| Free plan | Yes | Yes |
| Free trial | — | — |
| Open source | — | — |
| Web | Yes | — |
| Windows | — | Yes |
| macOS | Yes | Yes |
| Linux | Yes | Yes |
| API | Yes | — |
| Self-hosted | Yes | Yes |
| Plans published | 1 | 2 |
| Spec score · Code Generators | 8.5 (#6) | 7.6 (#23) |
| Plugins | Organizations can extend Backstage with open-source plugins or build their own; the plugin directory warns that community plugins have not all been vetted by the core team. | The documentation says new languages can be added via plugins and lists community plugins for languages including C#, F#, Java, PHP, Ruby, Zig, Python, and Rust. |
| Purpose | Backstage is an open-source framework for creating and deploying developer portals, originally created at Spotify. | sqlc generates fully type-safe, idiomatic code from SQL queries. |
| Support | The project lists Discord, FAQs, and community resources for support and discussion. | The maker invites users to contact [email protected] or join the sqlc Discord server with feedback. |
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.
sqlc
sqlc is a free command-line tool that turns SQL queries into type-safe application code. You write queries, run sqlc, and call the generated methods from application code through type-safe interfaces. Its documented database matrix covers MySQL, PostgreSQL, and SQLite. Official generators are available for Go, Kotlin, Python, and TypeScript; Go is stable, while Kotlin, Python, and TypeScript are marked beta for MySQL and PostgreSQL. Plugins allow additional languages, with community plugins listed for C#, F#, Java, PHP, Ruby, Zig, Python, and Rust. The sqlc vet command checks queries against configured rules, and sqlc verify checks whether schema changes break existing queries and generated code. Installation options include prebuilt Linux, macOS, and Windows downloads, package managers, Go, and Docker. sqlc Cloud can create short-lived hosted databases for analysis and linting, with managed databases described as read-only.