The 2026 Platform Engineering Stack: What Open-Source Tools Companies Are Actually Running

Every engineering team eventually hits the same wall. You've got five SaaS subscriptions for CI/CD, three more for monitoring, a separate secrets manager, and somehow you're still SSHing into production to check logs. Sound familiar?

The platform engineering movement isn't about adding more tools. It's about assembling the right ones into a stack that actually works together. And in 2026, the open-source options have matured to the point where you can build an internal developer platform that rivals anything the big cloud vendors sell.

Here's what companies are actually running.

The Stack at a Glance

Source Control: Gitea or GitLab

This one depends on your team size. Gitea (53,600 GitHub stars) runs as a single binary with minimal RAM. It's fast, it's clean, and it does exactly what a Git server should do. For teams under 25 engineers who don't need built-in CI/CD, Gitea is the obvious pick.

GitLab makes sense when you need the full DevSecOps suite: integrated pipelines, container registry, security scanning. It's heavier, but for larger organizations, it replaces three or four separate tools.

Both are available as managed services on Elestio.

CI/CD: Jenkins Still Runs the World

Yes, really. Jenkins holds 47.9% of the CI/CD market with over 32,000 verified companies running it. Pipeline jobs grew 79% between 2021 and 2023 (from 27M to 48.6M jobs per month), and that growth hasn't slowed.

GitHub Actions dominates personal projects (62%), but when you need control over your build infrastructure, air-gapped environments, or complex multi-stage pipelines, Jenkins on your own hardware is still the answer.

Automation: N8N Is Having a Moment

N8N went from a niche workflow tool to a $2.5B company in under two years. With 230,000+ active users and 75% of customers actively using AI integrations, it's become the default choice for connecting services, automating deployments, and building internal tooling without writing glue code.

The visual workflow builder means your ops team can build automations that would normally require a developer. Deploy N8N and you'll wonder how you ever managed without it.

Monitoring: Grafana + Prometheus (The LGTM Stack)

Prometheus hit 67% production adoption according to Grafana's 2025 observability survey. Another 19% are actively evaluating it. Combined with Grafana (which serves 70% of the Fortune 50 and crossed $400M ARR), this pairing has effectively become the standard for infrastructure monitoring.

Add Loki for logs and you've got the "LGTM" stack: Loki, Grafana, Tempo (traces), Mimir (long-term metrics). All open-source, all designed to work together.

Here's what makes this stack compelling: 76% of organizations use open-source licensing for observability, and 74% cite cost as their top selection criteria. When Datadog bills can hit six figures monthly, running Grafana and Prometheus on a $29/month server starts looking very attractive.

Containers: Docker Compose + Portainer (Not Everything Needs Kubernetes)

Kubernetes holds 82% of the container orchestration market, but here's the thing: 92% of organizations use containers in production, and many of them are running Docker Compose, not Kubernetes.

Recent developer surveys show Docker Compose usage jumping from 17% to 24% year-over-year, while Kubernetes adoption in smaller teams has actually declined slightly. For teams running fewer than a dozen services, Compose gives you everything you need: declarative configuration, easy networking, volume management, and reproducible deployments.

Pair it with Portainer for a visual management layer, and you've got container orchestration that your entire team can understand. No YAML PhD required.

When you do outgrow Compose, K3s is the natural next step: a single binary under 100MB that runs production Kubernetes with 512MB of RAM.

Identity: Keycloak vs. Authentik

Every platform needs authentication. Keycloak (32,700 stars, CNCF incubation project, Red Hat backing) is the enterprise standard for organizations that need SAML, LDAP integration, and battle-tested stability.

Authentik (20,000 stars, rapidly growing) is the modern alternative. Easier setup, cleaner UI, and increasingly the default recommendation for small-to-medium teams. It recently open-sourced its FIPS compliance components and moved Remote Access Control from paid to free.

Both are available on Elestio: Keycloak and Authentik.

The Licensing Elephant in the Room

If you're building a platform engineering stack in 2026, you need to be aware of the licensing shifts happening across the ecosystem:

This doesn't mean you should avoid these tools. Vault and MinIO remain excellent choices for most use cases (though note that MinIO's community edition moved to maintenance mode in December 2025, so keep an eye on the alternatives). Understanding the licensing landscape helps you make informed decisions about long-term vendor risk.

The Connective Tissue: Messaging and Storage

No stack exists in isolation. Your services need to talk to each other, and RabbitMQ (28.7% market share, 20,000+ companies) handles that reliably. It's the most popular message broker for teams that don't need Kafka's throughput but want proper async communication between services.

For S3-compatible object storage, MinIO remains the go-to with over 1 billion Docker Hub pulls. Backups, artifacts, user uploads, model weights: if your platform generates files, you need an object store.

Getting Started Without the Headache

The beauty of this stack is that every component runs in Docker. You don't need a dedicated DevOps team to get started. Pick two or three tools that solve your biggest pain points, deploy them on a managed platform like Elestio (starting at $16/month with NVMe storage), and expand from there.

Gartner predicts that 80% of large software engineering organizations will have platform engineering teams by end of 2026. The tools are ready. The data proves it. The only question is whether you'll build your platform on tools you control, or keep paying someone else for the privilege.

Thanks for reading. See you in the next one.