Backstage vs Substrate
Backstage
backstage.ioSubstrate
substratecore.comSide by side
| Figure | Backstage | Substrate |
|---|---|---|
| Price from | Free | $299/mo |
| Free plan | Yes | Yes |
| Free trial | — | — |
| Open source | — | — |
| Web | Yes | Yes |
| macOS | Yes | — |
| Linux | Yes | — |
| API | Yes | Yes |
| Self-hosted | Yes | — |
| Plans published | 1 | 4 |
| Spec score · Internal Developer Platforms | 8.6 (#3) | 7.6 (#13) |
| Spec score · Platform Engineering Software | 8.6 (#5) | 7.7 (#21) |
| 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 platform provides multi-cluster workload deployment and real-time dashboards for cluster health, resource use, and deployment status. |
| Integrations | Integrations let Backstage read or publish data using providers such as GitHub, GitLab, Bitbucket, LDAP, and cloud providers. | The integrations page lists GitHub, GitLab, self-hosted Git, Docker Hub, Amazon ECR, Google GCR, Azure ACR, and private OCI registries. |
| Product | Backstage is an open-source framework for building developer portals. | Substrate is a control plane for managing and optimizing Kubernetes clusters, virtual machines, and databases across cloud providers. |
Plans
Substrate
- FreeFree
- Starter$299 a month
- Growth$999 a month
- EnterprisePriced 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.
Substrate
Substrate has no write-up on Specifiction yet; its figures are above.