Announcing the 2025 State of Backstage Report

Five years on, Backstage has moved far beyond its experimental roots. What started as a way to catalog services is now embedded in the core of platform engineering across enterprises. Teams aren’t asking whether they should use Backstage anymore, they’re asking how to operate it well, how to scale it, and how to keep it maintainable as their environments grow more complex.

To get an accurate picture of how teams are navigating this shift, we surveyed 105 active Backstage practitioners across industries, company sizes, and maturity levels. The State of Backstage 2025 Report brings together those insights and paints a clear picture of where Backstage excels and where teams continue to struggle.

A few themes stood out strongly.

Hosting choices are shaping outcomes more than ever. Teams running Backstage themselves describe a very different day to day reality compared to those using managed platforms, especially around stability and upgrades.

Upgrades remain a defining challenge. Even experienced teams report friction in keeping pace with Backstage’s release cadence, particularly when plugins and customizations accumulate.

Automation is quickly becoming the heart of successful Backstage implementations. As teams lean into templates and workflow automation, the platform shifts from a visibility layer to a genuine control plane.

And maturity isn’t simply a matter of time. Some organizations advance rapidly with the right structure and investment, while others stall even after years of use. Catalog health, governance, and sustained ownership are emerging as the real differentiators.

These findings reflect a framework entering a new phase. Backstage is stabilizing, expectations are rising, and the questions are becoming more operational and long term. The report explores these patterns in detail and highlights what separates thriving implementations from those that struggle to sustain momentum.

You can read the full State of Backstage 2025 Report here:

State of Backstage 2025 Report

If you want to explore how these trends map to your own platform journey, we’re always happy to talk.