---
id: what-is-backstage
title: What is Backstage?
description: Backstage is an open platform for building developer portals.
Powered by a centralized service catalog, Backstage restores order to your microservices and infrastructure
---

![service-catalog](https://backstage.io/blog/assets/6/header.png)

[Backstage](https://backstage.io/) is an open platform for building developer
portals. Powered by a centralized service catalog, Backstage restores order to
your microservices and infrastructure. So your product teams can ship
high-quality code quickly — without compromising autonomy.

Backstage unifies all your infrastructure tooling, services, and documentation
to create a streamlined development environment from end to end.

Out of the box, Backstage includes:

- [Backstage Service Catalog](../features/software-catalog/index.md) for
  managing all your software (microservices, libraries, data pipelines,
  websites, ML models, etc.)

- [Backstage Software Templates](../features/software-templates/index.md) for
  quickly spinning up new projects and standardizing your tooling with your
  organization’s best practices

- [Backstage TechDocs](../features/techdocs/README.md) for making it easy to
  create, maintain, find, and use technical documentation, using a "docs like
  code" approach

- Plus, a growing ecosystem of
  [open source plugins](https://github.com/spotify/backstage/tree/master/plugins)
  that further expand Backstage’s customizability and functionality

## Backstage and the CNCF

Backstage is a CNCF Sandbox project. Read the announcement
[here](https://backstage.io/blog/2020/09/23/backstage-cncf-sandbox).

<img src="https://backstage.io/img/cncf-white.svg" width="400" />

## Benefits

- For _engineering managers_, it allows you to maintain standards and best
  practices across the organization, and can help you manage your whole tech
  ecosystem, from migrations to test certification.

- For _end users_ (developers), it makes it fast and simple to build software
  components in a standardized way, and it provides a central place to manage
  all projects and documentation.

- For _platform engineers_, it enables extensibility and scalability by letting
  you easily integrate new tools and services (via plugins), as well as
  extending the functionality of existing ones.

- For _everyone_, it’s a single, consistent experience that ties all your
  infrastructure tooling, resources, standards, owners, contributors, and
  administrators together in one place.

If you have questions or want support, please join our
[Discord chatroom](https://discord.gg/EBHEGzX).
