Customizing your instance

You now have the knowledge of what your users want and the go from leadership to continue investing in Backstage. Your job now is to customize your instance for your users to really get the value from. Let's dive in!

Open Source or Build it yourself?

There's a huge community of plugins available for easy installation at https://backstage.io/plugins. We would recommend that you start here for any needs you may be trying to solve. Building a plugin yourself requires significant effort and can be hard to justify early on in your adoption story. If there is a clear gap in the existing offerings for your company, you should build something yourself - otherwise, save yourself the maintenance overhead.

Customizing the theme

Many organizations are tempted to spend a long time making sure the portal resembles their other offerings. This is important but shouldn't be a months long ordeal. Get it looking close enough and iterate.