Maintain clarity across thousands of contributors.
Always free.
Try: Backstage, Kubernetes, OpenTelemetry, React
rkito isn't just for massive projects. Start documenting your architecture from day one—even as a solo developer.
You're the only developer today. Document your architectural decisions as you make them. When your second contributor arrives—whether that's in a week or a year—they'll understand your design choices immediately.
The benefit: Your future self (and future contributors) won't have to reverse-engineer your thinking. Your architecture is documented from commit one.
"I wish I had documented why I chose this pattern six months ago. Now I have three contributors and we're all confused."
— Every developer who waited
Your team is small enough to communicate verbally. But verbal decisions disappear. New contributors don't hear the conversations. Patterns diverge quietly.
The benefit: Capture those verbal decisions as lenses. Now everyone—current and future—follows the same patterns. Your small team builds with the consistency of a large one.
"We're only five people, but we already have three different ways of handling state. It's getting messy."
— Teams at the inflection point
We're not opinionated about whether you're agile, waterfall, or something else. But we are opinionated about this:
Design
Steer
Iterate
Design your architecture. Make intentional decisions. Steer as code evolves to keep it aligned. Iterate and improve. Repeat.
This works whether you ship daily or monthly, work solo or with hundreds. The cycle matters. The methodology doesn't.
Complex architectures that need structured governance
Open platform for building developer portals
Architectural Challenge
"Plugins built in that ecosystem are less consistent, which is bad for people using them" - making plugin architecture standards consistent across 200+ community plugins
Production-grade container orchestration
Architectural Challenge
"Sheer size of the codebase" and coordinating architectural decisions across 100+ repos, multiple SIGs, and ensuring standards are followed across massive contributor base
Vendor-neutral observability framework
Architectural Challenge
"The maturity of documentation, specification, libraries, and collector varies" - coordinating architectural standards and semantic conventions across 15+ independent language SDK implementations
Common architectural problems in large open source projects
With hundreds of contributors, maintaining consistent architectural patterns becomes impossible. Each PR introduces subtle deviations that compound over time.
Projects with 100+ contributors, multiple repos, plugin architectures
Core maintainers spend hours reviewing PRs for architectural compliance. Feedback is often verbal or scattered across issues, not systematized.
Review time increases linearly with contributors
When maintainers leave, architectural decisions go with them. New maintainers struggle to understand "why" behind patterns.
Documentation quickly becomes outdated
New contributors don't know architectural patterns. They submit PRs that require extensive rework, frustrating everyone.
First-time contributors need weeks to learn patterns
Structured architectural review. Zero friction. Humans always in control.
Map components. Create lenses from your design principles and best practices.
Developer creates PR. rkito identifies affected components automatically.
Maintainer reviews against architectural checklists. Manual today, AI-assisted soon.
Approve cleanly, or accept with tracked exceptions. Debt managed transparently.
Currently, maintainers review architectural changes manually using structured checklists. Soon, AI will help pre-analyze code and suggest answers—but humans always make the final decision. Our philosophy: Architecture requires human judgment. AI assists, humans govern.
Setup takes 30 minutes • Always free for open source
Show your community you're using rkito
For light-themed documentation
For dark-themed documentation
Maintain architectural clarity at any scale