Backstage vs. CircleCI

Overview
ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price
Backstage
Score 10.0 out of 10
N/A
Backstage is an open source framework for building developer portals. Powered by a centralized software catalog, Backstage restores order to microservices and infrastructure and enables product teams to ship code quickly without compromising autonomy.
$0
CircleCI
Score 10.0 out of 10
N/A
CircleCI is a software delivery engine from the company of the same name in San Francisco, that helps teams ship software faster, offering their platform for Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery (CI/CD). Ultimately, the solution helps to map every source of change for software teams, so they can accelerate innovation and growth.
$0
for up to 6,000 build minutes and up to 5 active users per month
Pricing
BackstageCircleCI
Editions & Modules
No answers on this topic
Server
Contact Sales
Performance
starting at $15
per month
Scale
starting at $2000
per month
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
BackstageCircleCI
Free Trial
NoNo
Free/Freemium Version
YesYes
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
NoNo
Entry-level Setup FeeNo setup feeNo setup fee
Additional Details
More Pricing Information
Community Pulse
BackstageCircleCI
Best Alternatives
BackstageCircleCI
Small Businesses
GitHub
GitHub
Score 9.1 out of 10
GitLab
GitLab
Score 8.6 out of 10
Medium-sized Companies
GitHub
GitHub
Score 9.1 out of 10
GitLab
GitLab
Score 8.6 out of 10
Enterprises
Perforce P4
Perforce P4
Score 6.9 out of 10
GitLab
GitLab
Score 8.6 out of 10
All AlternativesView all alternativesView all alternatives
User Ratings
BackstageCircleCI
Likelihood to Recommend
10.0
(1 ratings)
8.0
(26 ratings)
Usability
-
(0 ratings)
10.0
(1 ratings)
Performance
-
(0 ratings)
7.8
(3 ratings)
Support Rating
-
(0 ratings)
6.9
(6 ratings)
User Testimonials
BackstageCircleCI
Likelihood to Recommend
Open Source
Backstage is well suited in building developer portal or developer platform. It can be easily customized as well, so different companies can use it based on their own situation. It currently focus more on frontend, but I can see there is already a roadmap for improving backend with some core modules. After that has been introduced, it will become really powerful and save developers time to solve common problems.
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CircleCI
CircleCI is perfect for a CI/CD pipeline for an app using a standard build process. It'll take more work for a complex build process, but should still be up to the task unless you need a lot of integrations with other tools. If you have a big team and can spare someone to focus full time on just the CI/CD tools, maybe something like Jenkins is better, but if you're just looking to get your app built, tested, and delivered without a huge amount of effort, CircleCI is probably your preferred tool.
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Pros
Open Source
  • developer portal
  • easy to onboard
  • easy to extend
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CircleCI
  • Multiple builds can be run at the same time in parallel.
  • The CircleCI web interface (UI/UX) is very easy to understand and use.
  • Easy Configuration to learn and use. Just a single configuration YAML file.
  • Many integrations. We use the GItHub, Slack, and DataDog integrations.
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Cons
Open Source
  • it may provide more modules that can solve common problems
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CircleCI
  • The "phases" their config file uses to separate out options seem very arbitrary and are not very helpful for organizing your config file
  • No way that I know of to configure which version of MongoDB you use. You have to write your own shell script to download and start MongoDB if you want a specific version.
  • Hard to access build artifacts in the UI
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Usability
Open Source
No answers on this topic
CircleCI
CircleCI interface is awesome in that it is relatively modern and makes it clear exactly which parts of the engineering lifecycle you are in
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Performance
Open Source
No answers on this topic
CircleCI
It's pretty snappy, even with using workflows with multiple steps and different docker images. I've seen builds take a long time if it's really involved, but from what I can tell, it's still at least on par if not faster than other build tools.
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Support Rating
Open Source
No answers on this topic
CircleCI
Unless you have a reasonably large account, you're going to be mainly stuck reading their documentation. Which has improved somewhat over the years but is still extremely limited compared to a platform like Digital Ocean who invested in the documentation and a community to ensure it's kept up to date. If you can't find your answer there, you can be stuck.
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Alternatives Considered
Open Source
No answers on this topic
CircleCI
Circle was the first CI with simple setup, great documentation, and tight integration with GitHub. Using Jenkins was too much maintenance and overhead, TeamCity was limited in how we could customize it and run concurrent builds, TravisCI was not available for private repos when we switched.
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Return on Investment
Open Source
  • It speeds up our progress on building our own developer portal
  • It's free to use so very little investment
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CircleCI
  • It has eased the burden of standardizing our testing and deployment, making onboarding new developers much faster, and having to fix deployment mistakes much less often.
  • It allows us to focus our process around the GitHub workflow, ignoring the details of whatever environment the thing we're working on is actually hosted in. This saves us time.
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ScreenShots