Glue vs ChatGPT for Product Managers

By Arjun Mehta, Principal Engineer at Glue

The comparison between Backstage and Cortex-style developer portals comes up frequently in engineering leadership discussions. If you are evaluating a Backstage vs Cortex developer portal solution and wondering where Glue fits, the answer requires understanding that these tools serve different audiences and solve different problems.

Backstage (originally built by Spotify, now a CNCF incubated project) is a developer portal for managing service catalogs, developer documentation, and internal tooling. Glue is an AI codebase intelligence platform for product teams. The overlap is smaller than the names might suggest.

Spotify open-sourced Backstage in 2020 to solve a problem they faced at scale: hundreds of microservices, dozens of teams, and no centralized way to find who owned what. The platform has since grown into the leading open-source developer portal, with over 300 plugins and adoption by companies like Netflix, American Airlines, and Expedia.

Backstage is an infrastructure tool for engineering organizations. It catalogs services, enforces standards, and consolidates developer tooling into a single portal. Its users are platform engineers and developers who need operational visibility.

Glue serves a different audience with a different goal. Where Backstage asks "what services exist and who owns them?", Glue asks "what does the code inside those services actually do, and what would changing it involve?" The distinction is between operational management and strategic understanding. For organizations evaluating both, the question is whether you need one, the other, or both.

Backstage solves a real and significant problem: managing the complexity of large engineering organizations.

Service catalog. Backstage provides a single place to track every service, library, and infrastructure component in your organization. Ownership, documentation, API specs, and health status are all centralized. For organizations with hundreds of services across dozens of teams, this catalog prevents the chaos of "who owns this?" questions.

Plugin ecosystem. Backstage's extensibility is its greatest strength. With 300+ community plugins, you can integrate CI/CD pipelines, monitoring tools, cost management, security scanners, and virtually any internal tool into a single developer portal. This consolidation reduces the number of dashboards engineers need to check.

Software templates. Backstage lets you create standardized templates for spinning up new services. This enforces consistency across the organization and reduces the "blank canvas" problem when teams start new projects.

Open source and customizable. As a CNCF project, Backstage is free to use and infinitely customizable. Large engineering organizations can tailor it to their specific needs. The trade-off is setup and maintenance complexity, which is significant.

The core difference is audience. Backstage is built for engineers, particularly platform engineering teams. Glue is built for the people making product decisions about the software.

Natural language codebase access. Backstage requires technical fluency to use. You need to understand service architectures, navigate plugin interfaces, and interpret technical metadata. Glue lets non-technical stakeholders ask questions in plain English: "How does the checkout flow work?" or "What depends on the user service?" The answers come back in language anyone can understand.

AI-powered code understanding. Backstage catalogs what exists. Glue understands what exists. The difference is between a phone book (listing services) and a conversation with someone who has read every service's code. Glue can explain how modules interact, why architectural decisions were made, and what the blast radius of a proposed change would be.

Product team use cases. Feature discovery, effort estimation context, competitive gap analysis grounded in code, spec generation that references actual architecture. These use cases do not exist in Backstage because Backstage was not built for product teams.

Deployment simplicity. Backstage is self-hosted and requires significant DevOps investment to deploy and maintain. Glue is a SaaS platform that connects to your repository and starts providing value without infrastructure setup.

For engineering leaders managing the tooling stack, the question is not Glue or Backstage. It is whether you need both.

Choose Backstage when your primary challenge is engineering operational complexity. If you have hundreds of services, dozens of teams, and no centralized catalog of who owns what, Backstage provides the infrastructure for organizational clarity. It is especially valuable for platform engineering teams building internal developer experience.

Backstage is the right choice when the audience is exclusively engineering and the need is service discovery, ownership tracking, and developer tool consolidation.

One consideration: Backstage requires significant setup and maintenance investment. As an open-source, self-hosted platform, you need engineering resources to deploy it, configure plugins, and keep it running. Organizations with dedicated platform engineering teams handle this well. Smaller teams may find the overhead prohibitive, which is why commercial alternatives like Cortex and Port exist in the same space.

Choose Glue when your primary challenge is the gap between product teams and the codebase. If PMs cannot see what exists in the software, if estimates are wrong because nobody maps dependencies, if tribal knowledge loss creates recurring problems, Glue addresses the visibility gap.

Glue is the right choice when non-technical stakeholders need to understand the codebase and when product planning needs to be grounded in system reality. For a broader look at code intelligence platforms, Glue fits into the emerging category of tools that make codebases accessible beyond engineering.

Absolutely. Backstage manages the operational layer: service catalog, developer tooling, and engineering infrastructure. Glue manages the intelligence layer: codebase understanding, feature discovery, and product-engineering alignment. They serve different audiences and different use cases with minimal overlap.

A mature engineering organization might use Backstage for developer experience and service management while using Glue to give product teams codebase visibility. The combination covers both operational and strategic needs.

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Is Glue a developer portal?

No. Glue is an AI codebase intelligence platform, not a developer portal. Developer portals like Backstage focus on service catalogs, plugin ecosystems, and developer tooling consolidation for engineering teams. Glue focuses on making codebase understanding accessible to non-technical stakeholders: product managers, engineering leaders, and CTOs. The audiences and use cases are different, though both tools provide organizational visibility into software systems.

Can Backstage give product managers codebase visibility?

Not directly. Backstage is designed for engineering users and requires technical fluency to navigate. While some Backstage plugins provide documentation and API specs that PMs could theoretically access, the interface and mental model are built for developers. Product managers looking for codebase visibility need a tool with a natural language interface and AI-powered explanation capabilities, which Backstage does not provide natively.

What is the difference between a developer portal and codebase intelligence?

A developer portal (Backstage, Cortex, Port) provides a centralized hub for engineering operations: service catalogs, documentation, tooling, and workflows. It answers "what services exist and who owns them?" Codebase intelligence (Glue) provides semantic understanding of what the code does and how it connects. It answers "how does this feature work?" and "what would changing this involve?" Developer portals organize engineering infrastructure. Codebase intelligence translates code into strategic insight.