Spotify Backstage vs. configure8

A developer portal for

cataloging everything

achieving high standards

velocity via self-service

improving via insights

cataloging everything

configure8 is the preferred choice for enterprises seeking an internal developer portal with more value-added features and a lower total cost of ownership.

What Makes configure8 Unique

A Truly Universal Catalog

Rather than stop at the service boundary, configure8 has built the first truly universal catalog – all your services and their cloud costs, dependencies, environments, clusters, resources, pipelines, metrics, owners, and more. It’s easy to set-up and automatically reflects changes. Best of all, it lays the foundation for other unique features like scorecards and analytics as well as artfully integrates the user experience and knowledge with self-serve actions.

Achieve High Standards

Want to define best practices and measure engineering teams’ compliance via Scorecards? You’ll need a solution like configure8 with a powerful data ingestion, storage and organization system to power it.

Accelerate Velocity via Self-Service

Liberate developers from process bottlenecks and cognitive load without sacrificing standards. Enable them to easily configure a production-ready application (not just scaffold a microservice) and also manage common day 2 operations related to existing services, environments, and resources via configure8's no-code UI that loosely couples with your existing tools and processes.

Superior Return On Investment

Deliver more business value to your stakeholders with configure8. Get powerful functionality not available in
Backstage OSS, incur significantly less set-up and maintenance overhead, and de-risk your success with a partner who delivers a solution not just a tool or framework.

Product Comparison

configure8
Spotify Backstage
Universal Catalog

Applications

configure8
Backstage

Services

configure8
Backstage

(confirm availability of data pipelines, serverless, etc.)

Environments

configure8
Backstage

Kubernetes

configure8
Backstage

(no visibility for certain K8 objects nor multi-cluster support)

Resources

configure8
Backstage

Credential-based, read-only AWS, Azure, GCP; many services per cloud; on-prem via API

Service + Resource Dependencies

configure8
Backstage

Limited

Search Quality

configure8
Backstage

(due in part to uneven plugin quality as well as the Backstage data model and back-end)

Data Model + Back-End

configure8
Backstage

Robust

Limited; largely syndicated via plugins of uneven quality

UI Functionality

configure8
Backstage

Rich functionality per plugin, such as result filtration and native metrics + actions

?

Depends on plugin quality

UI Configurability

configure8
Backstage

Drag and drop

Coding required

Scorecards

Feature Functionality

configure8
Backstage

(paid plugin, coding required)

Breadth of Functionality

configure8
Backstage

Over 40 metrics plus custom data passed via API

?

Unknown

Native Data Integrations

configure8
Backstage

(repos, APM, on-call, ticketing, CI/CD, etc. + API)

Notifications

configure8
Backstage
?

Unknown

Manager View

configure8
Backstage
Self-Serve Actions

Create Something New

configure8
Backstage

Create production ready applications, services, environments, and resources

Limited to code scaffolded by Cookiecutter

Day 2 Actions

configure8
Backstage

3rd-Party Runner Orchestration

configure8
Backstage

Trigger via API

configure8
Backstage

Usage Restriction Policies

configure8
Backstage
Analytics

Usage Insights

configure8
Backstage

Paid plugin; limited functionality

Set-Up + Maintenance

Ease of Tool Integration

configure8
Backstage

Credential-based and API; no YAML required

Manual

Automatically Load Services Into Catalog and Map Dependencies

configure8
Backstage

Via supported tools or API

Manually declared; subject to drift

Drift Avoidance

configure8
Backstage

Via supported tools or API

Maintenance Cost

configure8
Backstage

White-glove support; minimal LOE to maintain

No support; LOE to maintain can be very high

Get Started in Minutes!

See how easy it is to get started in our documentation.

Single-click integrations

  • Why write YAML and manually configure each plugin when you can securely integrate in 1 click? Integrate K8s without an agent too.

Quickly populates; avoids drift

  • Automatically populate your catalog with services and dependencies.*
  • Automatically map resources to environments and services.
  • Avoid drift to maintain catalog accuracy.*

* Requires use of supported tools

Enterprise features + support

  • RBAC, SSO, and rigorous security.
  • Hosted or deployed on-premise.
  • "White glove" success and support.