Author: Sam Nixon, Head of Product, Roadie
Bio: Sam is a product manager and fullstack engineer who has worked across developer tooling, government tech in the UK, and education and healthcare technology in the UK and US. These days he’s Head of Product for Roadie, building Internal Developer Portals (IDPs) based on Backstage.

As the best open-source IDP solution, the Backstage framework has seen massive adoption in recent years, but best practices on how to build and deploy IDPs using Backstage still remains locked inside individual, organization-specific implementations.

A new State of Backstage survey seeks to address that, charting the rise in enterprise Backstage adoption and how we can all benefit from shared best practice.

Backstage

Backstage is the preeminent framework for building Internal Developer Portals (IDP).

Backstage began as a project within Spotify and was released as an open-source project in 2020. It accepted to CNCF in September 2020 and moved to the Incubating maturity level in 2022.

From day one, Backstage has provided catalogs for components, tooling, services, and documentation, while also providing a scaffolding infrastructure to instantiate new projects and manage migrations. Those features and ability to build on top of Backstage drew in users. For Platform teams, the extensibility, malleability, and control afforded by an open-source solution like Backstage is as important in 2025 as it has ever been. Despite numerous proprietary offerings like Cortex, OpsLevel, Port and Rely.io, companies around the world continue to choose open-source Backstage as their IDP.

Five years is a long time in software, and in that time we’ve seen rapid growth in the Backstage project and wider community. We have new features, new patterns of adoption, and many, many new members of the Backstage community. The core project continues to evolve at a rapid pace, but as Backstage has a plugin-based architecture, a large community of both individuals and companies have taken up the opportunity to build on top of Backstage. We’ve seen the rapid addition of new capabilities in the last few months and years – everything from scorecards to role-based access control:

• Last year Backstage was the Top CNCF Projects by Number of End User Commits.
• The core project was the fourth most contributed to CNCF project in 2024, behind only Kubernetes, OpenTelemetry and Argo.
• In the third-party, open-source plugin space, we’ve seen large contributions from folks like AWS, PagerDuty, Snyk, American Airlines, DX, and io.

Understanding Backstage and tracking its development

While the open-source nature of Backstage and the plugin architecture at the core of the project have driven rapid advancement, the downside for having a sprawling community of business adopting Backstage is that we often don’t have much insight into how it is actually being used. Organisations tend to keep that information close to their chest.

There are some exceptions and some information is in the public domain to help new adopters and those who are looking to super-charge their instance. For instance, case studies are extremely useful for spreading the word about patterns of adoption. The Backstage Discord channels is great for questions about individual features and plugin adoption. Consultants and SaaS providers like Roadie are good for seeing a wider subset of good patterns.

Yet even cumulatively, all of these channels mean that information is fragmented and the flow of information and knowledge is inconsistent.

We lack a systematic and widespread data capture mechanism to ping the community for its current state.

Other OSS technologies or initiatives have established surveys to capture data from their respective communities, like Spectro Cloud’s 2024 State of Production Kubernetes and Devographics State of React 2024.

Backstage and IDPs in general don’t have an impartial equivalent. Proprietary surveys like Port’s State of Internal Developer Portals offer some interesting data but a strong bias towards their respective solution.

State of Backstage 2025

To help solve this the first ever State of Backstage survey has now been launched.

The State of Backstage survey aims to provide a scalable mechanism to gather information from adopters, chart trends, and disseminate that information throughout the community.

The survey will provide a general map of the community and an understanding of its current state. A novice Backstage user, new to the community, maybe even standing up Backstage for the first time, will be able to understand current best practice on deployment, plugin adoption, and UI patterns that are working for organisations successfully adopting backstage.

It maps:

• Feature & Plugin usage
• Catalog health
• Scaffolder usage
• Upgrade and version tracking
• General sentiment and what the community wants to see in the future

A report from this survey in Spring 2025 on the stateofbackstage.io site.

Check it out (and fill it in) at **stateofbackstage.io.**