August 2023
Compass vs. Spotify Backstage
Create your ultimate developer experience in days, not months, with easy onboarding and no maintenance costs.
Compass offers a complete developer portal right out of the box:
Improve your DevEx with a unified catalog
Reduce cognitive load with a comprehensive software component catalog - track details like ownership, dependencies, docs, CICD events, and more
Get a complete picture of your DevOps health
Apply best practices at scale - measure health metrics, build and communicate policies, and empower teams to improve operations
Connect your data across your entire toolchain
Easily integrate all of your observability, CI/CD, OSS, cloud infrastructure data to save time searching and reduce context switching for your devs
Integrate best practices and ship faster with templates
Accelerate delivery and decrease toil with templates - integrate best practices and quickly build components along golden paths
All the features, none of the maintenance
Compass gives your engineering team all of the features without the expense. Backstage requires 4 full-stack engineers to properly setup and maintain your developer portal1. That’s roughly USD 1 million in annual costs to run Backstage in addition to infrastructure and hosting costs.
1 Spotify Senior Engineering Manager, “DEP Lowdown: How Spotify does DPE with Backstage”
See why thousands of customers choose Compass to improve their developer experience:
Feature Comparison | Compass | Backstage |
|---|---|---|
| Software catalog | Compass
| Backstage
|
| Software templates | Compass
| Backstage
|
| Extensible with plugins and fully open APIs | Compass
| Backstage
|
| Observability and error tracking integrations | Compass
| Backstage
|
| Configuration-as-code for data management | Compass
| Backstage
|
| Automatic setup, configuration, and upgrades1 | Compass
| Backstage
|
| Default scorecards to measure and improve service health2 | Compass
| Backstage
|
| Free to get started3 | Compass
| Backstage
|
| Premium plugins and features out of the box4 | Compass
| Backstage
|
| Maintenance free ownership5 | Compass
| Backstage
|
| Support included | Compass
| Backstage
|
| Automatic data retention | Compass
| Backstage
|
| Default user and team management6 | Compass
| Backstage
|
Backstage limitations: 1 Requires infrastructure provisioning and manual setup, manual upgrades, 2 Requires additional plugin, 3 Pay for hosting, 4 Additional billing costs from Spotify, 5 Self-hosted & patches required, 6 Plugin required
Companies of all shapes and sizes choose Compass
Compass is the largest internal developer platform, chosen by thousands of organizations to improve their developer experience. See why ExpressVPN relies on Compass to catalog its components and preserve a culture of autonomy.
Our developers are able to maintain autonomy over their services and keep up best practices, but most importantly we’ve reduced cognitive load by getting things out of our heads and into one unified place.
David Varvel
VP of Engineering, Culture, ExpressVPN
Why choose Compass over Backstage?
Spend time creating the ultimate developer experience with Compass, not building a developer portal. Get Compass for free today.
Compass
Compass is Atlassian’s SaaS developer portal. Compass helps teams focus on building great software by reducing the cognitive load that comes with today’s complex developer experience. Compass started as an internal tool to address the same challenges our customers face.
Backstage
Backstage is Spotify’s open-source framework for building your own self-hosted developer portal. Backstage is a CNCF project currently in incubation. For engineering teams who want premium plugins from Spotify, there are costs in addition to hosting and maintenance.
Scale engineering best practices and tame software sprawl
Visit the Atlassian Community to learn more about Compass.