7 Backstage Plugins Worth Installing in Production

The plugin ecosystem has hundreds of options. Most of them will cost you more time than they save.

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Here’s the uncomfortable truth about the Backstage plugin ecosystem: there are hundreds of plugins out there. A good chunk of them are half-finished side projects that nobody maintains anymore. If you go down the awesome-backstage-plugin list and install everything that looks shiny, you’ll spend more time maintaining plugins than actually using Backstage.

I’ve been running Backstage in production at OP Financial Group for years now. I’ve also built some plugins myself, so I have opinions. The kind that come from maintaining this stuff at scale.

There are two places I know of you can find these plugins. First one is the official Backstage plugin documentation and another is Roadie’s plugin list.

These 7 are the ones that earned their place.

1. TechDocs

TechDocs is the first-party plugin that makes Backstage feel like a real developer portal. You write docs in Markdown next to your code, push them to the repo, and TechDocs renders them inside Backstage. No separate wiki. No docs in Confluence that get stale the moment they’re written.