Measured across 47 engineering orgs over 18 months
Across adopter production environments
Adopter median vs pre-Scaffold baseline
DORA Elite threshold: < 5%
The numbers your platform team wishes they could show leadership.
Every quarter, a platform team somewhere is rebuilding the same deployment pipeline that three other teams already built — and none of them know it.
The cost of
not choosing
carefully
Four axes that matter to platform teams. Measured across 47 engineering orgs over 18 months. Methodology available in the full benchmark PDF.
"We spent 14 months building what Scaffold delivered in a week. The comparison data in this benchmark is almost embarrassingly accurate to our own retrospective."
What gets wired.
How fast it ships.
Every component Scaffold manages. Every hour your platform team doesn't spend maintaining it.
Cluster wiring in minutes
Scaffold detects your existing kubeconfig, provisions namespaces, sets up RBAC, and registers the cluster in your IDP — without a single manual kubectl command from your team.
IDP that teams actually use
Pre-built Backstage integration with auto-populated software catalog. Service ownership, runbooks, and on-call rotations pulled from your existing Git structure.
Paved roads, not guardrails
Opinionated scaffolding templates for Node, Go, Python, and Java services — each pre-wired with observability, secrets management, and CI/CD. Teams deploy to prod without touching a Helm chart.
$ scaffold new service --lang go --template microservice✓ Repository created✓ CI pipeline wired✓ Observability stack linked✓ Registered in IDP→ Ready to deploy in 47s
Zero config drift
Continuous reconciliation between declared golden paths and live cluster state. Drift alerts surface in your IDP before they become incidents.
Engineering intelligence baked in
Deployment frequency, lead time, MTTR, and change failure rate computed automatically from your pipeline events. No dashboards to configure.
Existing infra? No rip-and-replace
Scaffold imports Helm releases, Terraform state, and existing Backstage catalogs. Migration from Heroku, ECS, or bare Kubernetes takes hours, not sprints.
Engineering leads who've run the numbers. And shipped the proof.
We had three separate teams maintaining nearly identical deployment pipelines. Scaffold collapsed that into a single golden path maintained by one engineer. The DORA numbers speak for themselves — deploy frequency up 6× in the first month.
I was skeptical of another opinionated toolkit. What changed my mind was the migration story — Scaffold imported our existing Terraform state and Helm charts in under two hours. No rip-and-replace. That's the only reason we could justify the switch without a dedicated migration sprint.
Backstage was the obvious choice until we saw the plugin maintenance burden at scale. We were spending 30% of one senior engineer's time just keeping plugins compatible. Scaffold's plugin architecture eliminated that entirely.
Run the benchmark
on your own cluster.
One kubectl command provisions a full evaluation environment: Scaffold control plane, sample golden paths, IDP, and a pre-populated DORA metrics dashboard. No account required.
kubectl apply -f https://scaffold.sh/install/latest.yamlDownload the Full
Comparison Report
47-page benchmark covering methodology, raw data, and migration playbooks for Backstage, Humanitec, and custom-built platforms.
No marketing emails. One transactional PDF link.