Backstage in Production: The 10% Adoption Problem (2025 Reality Check)
Your team spent nine months implementing Backstage. The portal looks beautiful. You have 47 services cataloged. Internal adoption? Eight percent. Three developers use it regularly. The rest go directly to AWS console, kubectl, and GitHub.
Sound familiar? You're not alone. Backstage's own community acknowledges the 10% adoption problem—average adoption stalls at 10% within organizations, and teams require 7-15 FTE to maintain it. Here's why it happens, and the decision framework I wish we'd had before investing 2 person-years of engineering time.
🎙️ Listen to the podcast episode: Backstage in Production: The 10% Adoption Problem - Jordan and Alex discuss the real costs, alternatives, and decision frameworks for choosing Backstage vs Port, Cortex, and custom portals.