Wanepia vs Backstage
Backstage is a powerful internal developer portal. Wanepia is a lightweight service catalog with built-in monitoring that teams can run without a dedicated platform engineering team.
Backstage
Spotify's open-source internal developer portal. Extremely extensible via plugins, but requires significant investment to deploy, maintain, and build on. Best suited for large engineering organisations with a dedicated platform team.
Wanepia
API-first service catalog with native uptime monitoring, push checks, and alerting. Single binary, Docker Compose deploy. Built for teams that want a catalog and monitoring without building a platform.
| Feature | Backstage | Wanepia |
|---|---|---|
| Service / component catalog | ✓ | ✓ |
| Built-in uptime monitoring | — | ✓ |
| Push-based health checks (agent reports in) | — | ✓ |
| State transition history & incident log | — | ✓ |
| Slack / Discord / Telegram alerts | plugin | ✓ built-in |
| Public status pages | plugin | ✓ built-in |
| REST API (catalog as code) | limited | ✓ full API |
| Prometheus metrics export | plugin | ✓ built-in |
| Model Context Protocol (MCP) for AI agents | — | ✓ |
| Dependency graph | ✓ | ✓ |
| Health heatmap | — | ✓ |
| Cloud-hosted free tier | — | ✓ (10 services) |
| Docker Compose deploy (single command) | — | ✓ |
| Kubernetes optional | recommended | not required |
| Plugin / extension system | ✓ extensive | roadmap |
| Software templates / scaffolding | ✓ | — |
| TechDocs integration | ✓ | — |
Choose Backstage if…
You're a large organisation (200+ engineers) with a dedicated platform team, and you need a full internal developer portal — software templates, TechDocs, and deep Kubernetes integration. You have the runway to maintain it.
Choose Wanepia if…
You want a service catalog that works on day one, includes monitoring out of the box, and can be driven by your CI/CD, on-call runbooks, or AI agents via a full REST API — without needing a platform team to maintain it.
Bottom line
Backstage is the right choice if you have the team to invest in it. At scale, its plugin ecosystem is unmatched. But for the majority of engineering teams — startups, scale-ups, or teams without dedicated platform engineers — Backstage's operational cost far exceeds its value.
Wanepia fills the gap: a catalog you can deploy with docker compose up, that monitors your services from day one, and that your team, agents, and scripts can query through a proper API.