Backstage vs tmux
Backstage
backstage.iotmux
github.comSide by side
| Figure | Backstage | tmux |
|---|---|---|
| Price from | Free | Free |
| Free plan | Yes | Yes |
| Free trial | — | — |
| Open source | — | — |
| Web | Yes | — |
| macOS | Yes | Yes |
| Linux | Yes | Yes |
| API | Yes | Yes |
| Self-hosted | Yes | Yes |
| Plans published | 1 | 1 |
| Spec score · Plugins & Extensions Software | 8.6 (#1) | 7.5 (#3) |
| Intended users | Backstage is aimed at organizations whose product and engineering teams need a shared developer portal and software ecosystem catalog. | The project describes tmux as a tool for working with multiple terminals from one screen, including sessions that can persist across SSH disconnections. |
| Purpose | Backstage is an open-source framework for creating and deploying developer portals, originally created at Spotify. | tmux is a terminal multiplexer that lets users create, access, and control multiple terminals from one screen. |
| Support | The project lists Discord, FAQs, and community resources for support and discussion. | The project directs users to its tmux-users mailing list for general discussion and bug reports. |
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.
tmux
tmux is a free terminal multiplexer for creating and controlling multiple terminals from one screen. Work is arranged in sessions, which can stay running after detachment or a connection loss and be reattached later. Sessions contain windows, and windows can be divided into rectangular panes, each with its own pseudo-terminal. Multiple tmux instances can connect to a shared session. A server manages sessions while clients display them and communicate with it through a socket; the command-line interface also offers a control mode. The project lists Linux, macOS, OpenBSD, FreeBSD, NetBSD and Solaris, and installation can use a release tarball, version control or binary packages where available. Building from source requires libevent 2.x, ncurses, a C compiler, make, pkg-config and a suitable yacc implementation. The repository identifies the source under the ISC license. The listed Open source plan costs nothing, with no paid tiers or usage limits stated.