Internal Developer Portal FAQs

How does Harness IDP compare against Self managed Backstage in terms of extensibility and flexibility?

In Harness IDP we offer the support for custom plugins wherein you could build your own backstage frontend plugins and upload the package in IDP or provide the link to their published package on npm registry.

We support the code customers write and build and deploy it to the IDP on their behalf. This solves most of the use cases customers have that could be supported by extensibility. We are yet to receive the support for dynamic frontend plugins on Backstage, which is just on the proposal phase also it would be supported along with the new backend and frontend system, most plugins we see in the Backstage Plugins marketplace are built out of legacy backend system because that's what most adopters of Backstage are running. Today we support almost all the plugins from marketplace required by our customers and are open for customers request to enable any plugin, usually within one week, that's already on backstage marketplace but isn't available in Harness IDP.

Harness IDP doesn't yet support custom entity provider and custom catalog processors but even on Backstage world these are complex code-level customizations which require good knowledge of typescript to implement.