Frequently Asked Questions

Shoehorn is an intelligent developer platform that surfaces who owns what across your stack. Point it at your GitHub org and clusters, and it builds the catalog, search, docs, workflows, governance, and Kubernetes view for you, without turning your team into platform developers.

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, with 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

Compatibility comes first. Start using Shoehorn today, and migrate on your own schedule.

Self-hosted, runs on your own infrastructure. Deploy with the Helm chart directly or via the Terraform Helm provider and you're up in minutes. Multi-arch containers (amd64 and arm64) mean it works wherever you run things.

Shoehorn currently supports Zitadel and Okta out of the box. Support for other OIDC providers like Microsoft Entra ID (Azure AD) and Google Workspace is coming soon. Need a different provider? Get in touch. We prioritise additions based on customer demand.

Shoehorn includes a read-only MCP server for AI assistants that need safe access to catalog and platform context. For anything operational, scriptable, or CI/CD-driven, the fully-featured CLI is still the best integration point: get, put, pipe, automate. The REST API is also available for custom integrations.

Shoehorn uses hardened base images, and every new release ships dependency patches alongside the code. The default install path stays current without your team having to maintain a hardened build of its own.

We're transitioning Shoehorn to an open-source license. We'll announce the details when it's ready.

Currently, GitHub. Repo discovery, catalog ingestion, docs indexing, and workflows are all built around it today. If you need another source control provider, get in touch. We're open to adding more.