What is MarBoba?
A two-minute orientation for evaluators — what MarBoba does, who uses it, and how it differs from Backstage / Port / Cortex.
MarBoba is an Internal Developer Platform (IDP) that bundles a catalog, CI/CD orchestration, secrets vault, scorecards, runbooks, on-call routing, and an AI assistant into one product. The job-to-be- done is consolidate the dozen tools an engineering team currently juggles (Backstage + Argo + Vault + Linear + PagerDuty + Cortex + Sentry + DataDog + LaunchDarkly + …) into a single seat-based subscription that ships catalog-aware AI on day one.
Who uses MarBoba
| Role | What they do here |
|---|---|
| Platform engineer | Models the org’s catalog: components, APIs, resources, systems, domains. Defines scorecards. Wires CI/CD. |
| Application engineer | Ships code. Reviews PRs from the Velocity dashboard. Responds to incidents through the runbook UI. |
| SRE / on-call | Reads the on-call binding for a project. Runs an agent action (rotate vault secret, rollback) with two-person approval. |
| Engineering manager | Watches the DORA metrics + Velocity dashboard. Audits scorecards. Runs initiatives. |
| Security / compliance | Reviews the audit log. Runs compliance scorecards. Manages SSO + SCIM. |
How MarBoba differs from the obvious comparables
- Backstage: open-source, self-hosted, plugin-based. MarBoba is hosted, batteries-included. Backstage gets you primitives; MarBoba ships the whole IDP wired together.
- Port + Cortex: closest direct comparables. MarBoba’s differentiators are catalog-grounded AI (Concierge + MCP server), built-in agent actions with two-person approval, and a per-seat price that’s typically 2-3× cheaper.
- OpsLevel: scorecard-first product. MarBoba’s scorecards are one feature among dozens.
- Humanitec: deployment-orchestration-first. MarBoba’s deploy surface (the Workload Spec) is Humanitec-shaped but lives inside a richer catalog.
How to read these docs
- Get to first deploy in 10 minutes — start here.
- Guides are task-shaped. Open one when you need to do a specific thing (set up SSO, propose an agent action, buy an AI Boost pack).
- Architecture explains the why — data model, AI provider routing, plan tier shape.
- Reference documents every programmatic
surface — the REST
/v1API, the CLI, the Terraform provider, and the MCP server. - What’s new lists recently shipped features with ship dates.
Where else to look
- In-app help at
apps.marboba.com— task-shaped help for daily users. Same content lives there asGuideshere, but the in-app version is bookmarked off each screen. - Marketing site at marboba.com — pricing, features catalog, blog. If you’re evaluating, start there; if you’re integrating, start here.
- CLI reference:
marboba helpafterbrew install marboba/npm install -g marboba.
See also
- First deploy in 10 minutes — End-to-end path from signup to a green deploy on dev. Assumes you have a GitHub repo and a Stripe-test card.
- The catalog data model — How MarBoba models your engineering org. Six entity kinds (component / API / resource / system / domain / team), explicit dependency edges, and per-entity scorecards.