Shoehorn is a self-hosted internal developer portal built for simplicity, speed, and maintainability. It gives you a unified place for your service catalog, docs, ownership, workflows, governance, and Kubernetes visibility without turning your team into portal developers. Point it at your GitHub org, clusters, and repos, and Shoehorn discovers the rest. Your stack stays yours — Shoehorn just makes it usable.
How is this different from Backstage?
Backstage gives you a framework to build your own portal. Shoehorn gives you a portal that's already built. That difference matters: with Backstage, teams often end up owning plugins, upgrades, and custom integrations themselves. With Shoehorn, the common IDP needs are already there out of the box — catalog, search, docs, ownership, workflows, governance, and Kubernetes visibility — so you can start using it without taking on a long-term framework maintenance project.
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.
How do I install Shoehorn?
Self-hosted, runs on your own infrastructure. Deploy with the Helm chart and you're up in minutes — multi-arch containers (amd64 and arm64) so it works wherever you run things.
What's included in the Beta release?
Everything we ship today. The goal right now is simple: make Shoehorn easy to adopt, easy to evaluate, and useful from day one. If packaging changes over time, we'll keep it straightforward and communicate it clearly.
How much does Shoehorn cost?
Free for up to 50 entities. Paid plans start at €239/mo during Beta. Unlimited users, unlimited sources, all features included. See pricing for details.
What identity providers do you support?
Shoehorn currently supports Zitadel & Okta out of the box. Support for other OIDC providers like Microsoft Entra ID (Azure AD) and Google Workspace is coming soon.
Do you support AI or MCP?
Shoehorn ships with a fully-featured CLI that AI agents work great with — get, put, pipe, automate. If you're using AI-driven workflows or CI/CD, the CLI is the integration point today. We don't have a built-in MCP server yet, but it's something we'd consider building if there's customer demand. The REST API is also available for custom integrations.
How do you handle security updates?
We care about security. Shoehorn uses secure hardened images, and every new release includes security patches for the dependencies we ship, so the default install path stays current without teams needing to maintain their own hardened build.
What source control providers do you support?
Currently, GitHub. That's the best-supported path today and what Shoehorn is built around right now for repo discovery, catalog ingestion, docs indexing, and workflows. If you need support for another source control provider, get in touch — we're open to adding more.