I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately as we evaluate our platform engineering strategy. Backstage now owns 89% market share among organizations that have adopted an IDP. That’s not dominance—that’s near-monopoly territory. Over 2 million developers across 3,400+ organizations are using it, including household names like Airbnb, LinkedIn, and American Airlines.
But here’s the product strategy question that keeps me up at night: When everyone has the same tool, how do you differentiate?
The Market Maturity Signal
Gartner forecasts that by end of 2026, 80% of large software engineering organizations will have platform teams as internal providers of reusable services. We’re already there. The question is no longer “should we have a platform team?” or “should we adopt an IDP?” The question is: what value are you creating on top of the standard implementation?
When I came from Google and Airbnb, we built custom internal tools because there wasn’t a market standard. Now, with Backstage’s CNCF backing and overwhelming adoption, the baseline has shifted. Port has 8% market share, Cortex has 5%, but let’s be honest—Backstage is the default choice unless you have very specific reasons to go elsewhere.
Infrastructure vs. Product: Where’s the Line?
Here’s where my product thinking gets challenged. I’m used to asking: “What’s our competitive moat?” But when it comes to internal developer portals, the answer might be: “There isn’t one, and that’s okay.”
Consider the parallel: AWS is table stakes. Kubernetes is table stakes. Terraform is table stakes. Nobody says “our competitive advantage is that we use Kubernetes.” The advantage comes from how you use it—your architecture decisions, your golden paths, your specific workflows.
The research I’ve been reading makes a critical distinction: the internal developer platform (IDP) is the entire engine—all the tools, workflows, and infrastructure. The internal developer portal is the dashboard—the UI that provides developers access to platform capabilities.
So maybe the question isn’t “is Backstage a product or table stakes?” but rather: “Is your portal differentiation, or is it your platform capabilities that matter?”
The Buy vs. Build Dilemma in 2026
Here’s where this gets practical for product and engineering leaders:
- Standard Backstage adoption = fastest time to value, largest community, most plugins
- Port or Cortex = faster implementation than Backstage, more opinionated workflows
- Custom-built portal = maximum flexibility, but you’re maintaining infrastructure instead of building capabilities
Every platform engineer has seen teams install Backstage expecting transformation, only to face low adoption and frustrated developers. The problem isn’t the tool—it’s understanding why you’re choosing it and how it serves your developers’ daily workflows.
What Actually Differentiates?
Based on conversations with our platform team and other product leaders, here’s what I’m seeing as emerging differentiators:
- Data sovereignty and governance: Flexible hosting (SaaS, hybrid, on-premises) for compliance
- AI integration: How you’re embedding GenAI into developer workflows
- Golden paths: Your specific templates, standards, and “paved roads to production”
- Developer experience design: Not just portal UI, but end-to-end workflow optimization
- Metrics and insights: What you measure and how you use it to improve velocity
The platforms that succeed aren’t the ones with the shiniest portal. They’re the ones that deeply understand their developers’ pain points and build capabilities that eliminate friction.
The Strategic Question
So here’s what I’m wrestling with as we plan our next phase:
Should we invest engineering time customizing our Backstage portal, or should we invest in building better platform capabilities behind it?
From a product perspective, I keep coming back to: customers don’t care about your internal tools. They care about velocity, quality, and innovation. The IDP is a means to those ends, not the end itself.
But if 89% of the market has Backstage, and your competitors have Backstage, then where’s the sustainable competitive advantage in your platform engineering strategy?
Questions for the Community
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For those of you running platform teams: Where are you investing your customization efforts—portal UI or backend capabilities?
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For product leaders: How do you think about internal platform as a competitive advantage vs. operational necessity?
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For those who chose Port, Cortex, or custom solutions: What specific needs drove you away from the default choice?
I suspect the answer is: Backstage (or any IDP) is infrastructure—necessary but not sufficient. The competitive advantage comes from what you build on top of it. But I’d love to hear how others are thinking about this.
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