Port vs. Backstage: What’s the Best Internal Developer Portal?

High Resource Requirements for Customization

The primary downside of Backstage is the significant resource investment required to implement and maintain the platform. While open-source flexibility is a selling point, it’s a double-edged sword. Customizing Backstage often requires the expertise of full-time developers with knowledge of React, TypeScript, and authentication protocols like SAML/OpenID. This level of customization and maintenance isn’t feasible for teams that don’t have the luxury of dedicated developers for portal management.

Moreover, the time required to stand up a functional instance of Backstage can take months—anywhere from 6 to 12 months depending on the complexity of your needs. For teams that need immediate results, this can severely hamper productivity.

Fixed Data Models and Manual Maintenance

Another issue with Backstage is its fixed data models, which make it difficult to represent entities beyond simple services, such as machine learning models, infrastructure components, or repositories. This rigidity limits how organizations can use Backstage to accurately reflect their tech stack. Additionally, Backstage requires manual data ingestion through YAML files, which further complicates service catalog maintenance .

Low External Adoption Rates

Although Backstage boasts a 99% internal adoption rate at Spotify, external organizations report an average adoption rate of only 10%. This discrepancy is often due to the platform’s complexity and lack of task prioritization features. Developers can easily become overwhelmed by the noise and sheer volume of unstructured data, which lowers engagement and productivity.

Instability at Spotify

While Spotify has made a concerted effort to monetize the Backstage framework lately, their primary focus as a business is the Spotify platform. This means that when the business as a whole struggles, Backstage isn’t necessarily going to be “safe” from layoffs and restructuring which has happened as recently as December of 2023 when they laid off 17% of their workforce.

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Comparison to OpsLevel

OpsLevel addresses these pain points by providing a fully-managed platform with an intuitive interface and automated catalog creation. There’s no need for manual YAML file updates, and OpsLevel integrates easily with your existing services. Most importantly, OpsLevel is ready to use within 30 to 45 days, offering faster time to value than Backstage .

Over-Customization Leading to Complexity

Port’s greatest strength is also its biggest weakness. The platform’s extreme focus on customization often results in unnecessary complexity, particularly for teams that need to deploy quickly. Organizations find themselves spending too much time building, tweaking, and maintaining blueprints instead of solving core operational problems . This creates barriers to adoption and can lead to a poor developer experience.

Additionally, Port’s catalog creation is entirely manual, which is both time-consuming and error-prone. As teams scale, keeping the catalog up to date becomes a challenge, increasing operational overhead and introducing the risk of data inconsistencies.

Inefficient Reporting and Standards Tracking

Port also falls short in the area of standards enforcement. While it offers customizable scorecards, these are not first-class objects within the platform. As a result, tracking service maturity, compliance, and production readiness becomes difficult. Reporting on service health is limited, and there’s no way to enforce standards across teams without a significant amount of manual intervention. This lack of deep reporting and automation makes it hard for engineering leaders to maintain visibility into service health over time.

Long Implementation Time and High Costs

Much like Backstage, Port’s implementation time is lengthy. Teams often report taking 3 to 6 months to fully deploy the platform, with some organizations needing even longer. The high degree of customization leads to increased ownership costs, both in terms of engineering time and financial investment. Port’s licensing fees are also significantly higher than OpsLevel’s, often doubling the total cost of ownership.

Comparison to OpsLevel

In contrast, OpsLevel provides a more balanced approach to customization. While teams can still tailor scorecards and workflows to meet their needs, OpsLevel avoids the pitfalls of over-customization by offering out-of-the-box functionality that works immediately. The platform’s automated catalog maintenance and robust reporting features ensure that service health is always visible, and OpsLevel’s standards enforcement tools help teams maintain operational efficiency without introducing unnecessary complexity .

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