Stop Maintaining.
Start Using.
With Backstage, someone owns the framework.
With Shoehorn, you just run the thing.
Alpha may occasionally be down due to active development
Why Shoehorn?
Backstage needs someone to own the framework long-term. Shoehorn is just another service in your stack — you run it, update it when we ship, and that's it.
- × Days of setup before you see anything useful
- × Someone on your team becomes "the Backstage person"
- × Every new integration means a new plugin to build and maintain
- × Migrating means rewriting catalog files you spent months on
- ✓ Point it at your repos. It figures out the rest.
- ✓ Seriously, 15 minutes. We timed it.
- ✓ No custom plugins or glue code. Update it like any other tool in your stack.
- ✓ Already have catalog-info.yaml files? They just work.
How It Works
Three things. That's it.
Connect Your Stack
Connect your GitHub org, clusters, and repos. Takes about 15 minutes. From there it runs like any other service in your stack.
Auto-Discovery Runs
Shoehorn crawls your repos, clusters, and wikis and maps everything out — services, who owns them, what they depend on, where the docs are. You don't write any of this.
Start Using
Search across everything. See what depends on what. Know who to page when something breaks. No more asking around in Slack.
Continuous Sync
When something changes in your repos or clusters, Shoehorn picks it up. You're not running a cron job or manually triggering imports — it just stays current.
Works Your Way
Choose your approach based on your workflow:
Mix and match as needed—use what works for your team
Everything Included
No plugins to build to get value. No integrations to wire up just to get started. It all ships together, and if you need more, an upcoming SDK will let you extend Shoehorn with custom addons.
Discover
See your stack clearly
Operate
Turn insight into action
Govern
Keep standards and risk visible
Built for Real Problems
The questions your team asks in Slack every single day
"Who owns this service?"
It's 2am, something's down, and nobody knows who owns the payment service. Sound familiar?
Auto-discovered service catalog with team ownership, dependencies, and contact info
Instant search finds services, APIs, and owners in under 200ms
"What's running in prod?"
Three clusters, two environments, fifty services. What's actually running right now? Nobody really knows.
Real-time cluster discovery shows all deployments across all environments
ArgoCD & FluxCD support for GitOps-driven deployment visibility and reconciliation status
"What breaks if I change this?"
You want to deprecate an API endpoint. How many things call it? You could grep for it, or you could just know.
Impact analysis shows which services depend on each entity at configurable depth (1–5 levels)
Dependency graph lets you understand blast radius before making changes
"How do I scaffold new services consistently?"
Every new service starts with copy-pasting another repo's boilerplate. Then someone forgets the CI config. Or the README. Or the security scanning step.
Forge molds define reusable workflows — scaffold repos, provision infra, run multi-step automations from a simple form UI
Built-in approval workflows ensure the right people sign off before anything gets provisioned
"Are we actually meeting our engineering standards?"
You have standards — docs coverage, security checks, test requirements. Whether teams are actually meeting them is a completely different question.
Governance actions track compliance work with priorities, SLA deadlines, and assignees — auto-generated from scorecards and security findings
Remediation tracking ensures nothing slips through — open, in progress, resolved, with audit history on every action
"What cloud resources are we actually running?"
Your cloud console shows 40 servers. Your catalog has 28 services. The relationship between them lives in someone's head.
UpCloud discovery automatically catalogs servers, managed databases, Kubernetes clusters, and object storage — synced every 15 minutes
AWS, Azure & GCP coming soon — one catalog for every piece of infrastructure regardless of where it lives
Built for Platform Teams
Terraform, CLI, REST API, or the UI — pick whatever fits your workflow
Terraform Provider
Declare your entire platform configuration as code
CLI
Script and automate from the terminal — get, put, and pipe
REST API
Automate everything with our comprehensive API
Admin UI
Or manage everything visually with one click
All of it version-controlled, all of it repeatable
Frequently Asked Questions
What is Shoehorn?
How is this different from Backstage?
Can I migrate from Backstage?
Yes. You don't need to migrate on day one — just shoehorn us in.
Shoehorn is fully compatible with Backstage catalog files, so your existing setup keeps working as-is while you evaluate:
- ✓ catalog-info.yaml files are auto-discovered and indexed — no changes needed
- ✓ Run Backstage and Shoehorn in parallel during evaluation
- ✓ When you're ready, the CLI includes convert tooling to migrate your catalog over cleanly
Migration is smooth because compatibility comes first. Start using Shoehorn today — migrate on your own schedule.