Shoehorn The European alternative to Backstage / Cortex

Shoehorn is a self-hosted platform for internal developer portals from Sweden. It connects to GitHub organizations, Kubernetes clusters, and repositories and builds an automatically updated service catalog with ownership, dependencies, and impact analysis. Via Forge Molds, new services and infrastructure can be rolled out consistently, while approval workflows ensure governance. Shoehorn targets platform teams as an alternative to building Backstage in-house.

Shoehorn is operated exclusively self-hosted in the customer’s own stack, so code and service metadata remain in the infrastructure chosen by the customer. The provider is Shoehorn Dev from Sweden; the company is subject to Swedish and European law. An air-gapped variant exists for regulated or offline environments.

Backstage is an open-source framework from Spotify that teams integrate, customize, and operate themselves. Shoehorn ships a ready-to-deploy product with auto-discovery, impact analysis, and Forge molds that runs in your own cluster. Both are self-hosted and connect to GitHub, Kubernetes, and similar sources. Backstage requires significant platform-team investment to build and maintain, while Shoehorn reduces this effort through an out-of-the-box setup.