Here, we explore four alternatives to Backstage, each with its pros and cons.

Cloud Provider Tools

Cloud providers like AWS, GCP, and Azure offer native tools to manage your services, such as dashboards, service catalogs, and API listings. For example, AWS Service Catalog gives a generic overview of your services, with API options for further customization and integration.

While handy, these tools lack extendability, as without integrations, they do not easily allow for the addition or modification of features to suit specific needs! They also tie you to a specific cloud provider, and their utility diminishes in a multi-cloud environment. Finally, they  lack intuitive interfaces which makes life harder for non-technical users, providing limited customization options.

Do-It-Yourself (DIY)

If you prefer complete control, a DIY approach using spreadsheets, internal wikis, and homegrown tools may be the way to go. With a DIY solution, you decide what to include, from service listings to metrics and everything in between.

However, the DIY approach has downsides, such as the ongoing cost of ownership and the challenge of scaling as your service ecosystem grows. Teams often underestimate the amount of work involved, which can divert valuable resources from other critical areas.

Rely.io

If you're looking for a specialized solution, Rely.io offers a suite of features that make it a worthy Backstage alternative. Learn more about the specific feature trade-offs between the two here.

Product Catalog

Manage everything from one place with Rely.io’s unified interface, which brings all your services and user journeys. Providing you with easy access to their ownership, dependencies, documentation, deployments, on-call schedules, SLOs, operational maturity and more!

Automated Service Discovery

Say goodbye to manual updates; Rely.io offers automated service discovery to keep your service catalog up to date.

Service Reliability Management

Ensure the robustness of your product without lifting a finger. Rely.io's automated reliability features keep things running smoothly bringing industry best practices to the tip of your fingers. Allowing you to effortlessly track the health of your services, get alerted on both outages and continuous degradation of performance as well as to build beautiful reports to share.

Scorecards and Leaderboards

Drive best practices across your organization by creating scorecards and leaderboards that gamify the adoption of standards like production readiness, DORA metrics, operational maturity and observability coverage. With Rely's seamless integration into your engineering stack, you can view the maturity of each service and team against set standards, to avoid the hassle of manually checking multiple tools.

‍