
Backstage is the developer portal standard: catalog, docs, and templates. Kestrel automates the operations behind the portal — incident response, provisioning, developer requests, CI/CD, and more. They work well together.
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Backstage is the de facto developer portal: a service catalog, TechDocs, and software templates that scaffold new projects. For discoverability and standardising how services get created, it is the standard for good reason.
Backstage is a portal; Kestrel is the automation behind one. Backstage tells a developer that a service exists and who owns it. Kestrel handles what happens next — the scale request, the failing deploy, the cost anomaly, the CrashLoopBackOff at 3am — as workflows that run with approvals and an audit trail.
| Backstage | Kestrel | |
|---|---|---|
| Primary job | Service catalog, documentation, and scaffolding templates | Executing operational workflows across your stack |
| Day-2 operations | Plugins surface information; acting on it happens elsewhere | Incident response, provisioning, CI/CD, and cost workflows that actually run |
| Setup cost | A Backstage instance is a real internal product to build and maintain | Connect integrations and describe a workflow; onboarding takes minutes |
| Developer requests | Templates scaffold new services | Slack requests are routed, approved, and executed against live infrastructure |
| AI investigation | Not part of the framework | Built-in RCA across logs, metrics, and cloud state |
| Do you need both? | Best where a catalog and docs are the gap | Best where the gap is operational toil; the two are complementary |
Both are reasonable choices. These are the cases where each one wins.
If your problem is discoverability, ownership, and standardising how new services get created — Backstage is the right tool for that, and Kestrel does not replace it.
If your catalog is in place but the operational toil is unchanged — or you are considering building a portal mainly to automate operations, which is a much larger project than automating them directly.
Use natural language to build automations for incident response, cloud provisioning, CI/CD pipelines, security, and more. Edit with words, visually, or in code.
Use your words to build automations for incident response, cloud provisioning, CI/CD pipelines, developer requests, and more — with 200+ pre-built actions across 40+ integrations, and any number of custom actions.

Describe your workflow in plain English. The AI agent will generate a workflow graph you can edit.
Add steps, parameters, or approvals using natural language, edit visually on a DAG canvas with 200+ actions, or jump into the CLI and SDK for full programmatic control.

Describe your workflow in plain English. The AI agent will generate a workflow graph you can edit.
When a Kubernetes deployment rollout fails, in parallel: trigger the rollback GitHub actions and send a Slack message to #k8s-incidents; run RCA, create a GitOps PR for the fix, and on PR merge update the message in #k8s-incidents
Once configured, workflows always run the exact code you define. AI builds the workflow — deterministic execution ensures it runs reliably, every time.

Define who can trigger workflows and who needs to approve before execution. In-platform, Slack-based, and PR-based approval gates.

Track every workflow run with a real-time dashboard. Execution history, step-level logs, latency, and failure reasons.

Browse, filter, and inspect all workflow execution runs.
The Kestrel CLI, Python SDK, and MCP server give developers full control of Kestrel workflows from the terminal, application code, or AI coding assistants.

AI agents analyze your connected integrations and suggest ready-to-use workflows for your organization — so you know exactly what to automate next.

Automate operations with signal-driven, composable pipelines.






40+ integrations across infrastructure, PaaS, CI/CD, security, observability, databases, and more. Plus custom webhooks and HTTP APIs for anything else.
Workflows is usage-based — you pay per execution, not per seat. 14-day free trial, no credit card required.
Usage-based — pay per execution
| Tier | Price | Actions |
|---|---|---|
| Light | $0.10 | Slack, Jira, Linear, GitHub, GitLab, Confluence, Notion, PagerDuty, ArgoCD, Datadog, PostHog, Vercel, AWS Cost queries, custom HTTP APIs and webhooks, conditions, approvals, wait steps |
| Regular | $0.20 | K8s manifest generation, Helm values generation, cloud resource generation, AI cost analysis |
| Heavy | $0.40 | K8s RCA & fix generation, Cloud RCA & fix generation, AI code investigation, AI code fix generation, K8s investigation, cloud investigation, Vercel investigation |
Describe an automation in plain English and Kestrel builds a workflow you can review, test, and run. 14-day free trial with $1,000 in credits — no credit card required.