Open-source Humanitec alternatives

Backstage is a framework, published openly, for creating developer portals. It was created at Spotify and is now a Cloud Native Computing Foundation project at the incubation level. Centered on a software catalog, it brings order to microservices and infrastructure so product teams can ship code quickly while keeping their autonomy. It is written in TypeScript and released under the Apache-2.0 license.

Out of the box it includes a Software Catalog for tracking services, libraries, data pipelines, websites and machine learning models, Software Templates for starting new projects with organization-approved defaults, and TechDocs for a docs-like-code approach to documentation. A growing ecosystem of open-source plugins extends what the portal can show and do. Because it is a framework rather than a finished product, organizations build and host their own Backstage instance, guided by the getting started documentation and roadmap.

KubeVela is a modern application delivery platform that aims to make deploying and operating applications across hybrid and multi-cloud environments easier and more reliable. It follows a render, orchestrate, deploy approach built on the Open Application Model, and is a CNCF project written in Go.

Deployment plans are declared as workflows that can be run by any CI/CD or GitOps system and extended with CUE, so there is no need for ad hoc scripts. It natively supports multi-cluster and hybrid-cloud scenarios, including progressive rollout across test, staging and production, automatic canary and blue-green releases, continuous verification, and placement strategies across clusters and clouds. Observability dashboards, LDAP integrations, multi-tenancy and fine-grained RBAC are built in.

The architecture is lightweight, with a control plane that can run in a single pod, and extensible through reusable modules and community addons. KubeVela is licensed under Apache-2.0. It suits platform engineering teams that want to give developers a simpler way to ship applications onto Kubernetes.