Platform engineering is redefining how software teams operate. Internal Developer Portals are at the core of this shift, empowering developers with self-service workflows.
Here are five Portal tools you should know and what software engineers say about them.
Platform vs. Portal
Just for clarification: An internal developer platform (IDP) is a set of infrastructure and automation tools that enable engineers to deploy, monitor and manage software services. In contrast, an internal developer portal serves as the unified interface for accessing these capabilities and allowing developers, teams, and engineering managers to discover services, track ownership, enforce standards, and improve software.
Although the abbreviation “IDP” is sometimes used to refer to both the platform and the portal, we use it exclusively to mean internal developer platforms.
The Research
To better understand the landscape of Internal Developer Portals, we turned to a place where software engineers often openly share their experiences: Reddit.
Unsurprisingly, Spotify’s Backstage dominated most conversations, reflecting its strong adoption and visibility within the platform engineering community. Port frequently appears in the comments as a common alternative to Backstage. Cortex also surfaces regularly—likely due to its employees active participation in related discussions. Other tools such as OpsLevel and Atlassian Compass are occasionally mentioned or linked, but they tend to receive significantly less engagement or commentary.
Although this isn’t a formal academic study with a structured research methodology, we think it reflects recurring themes and opinions about those tools (…and marketing efforts on reddit ;).
The Tools
#1 Backstage
Backstage is an open-source framework for building developer portals.
The key terms here are “open source” and “framework”. Backstage empowers platform engineers with full customization capabilities, but that also means they need to build and maintain many components themselves.
It’s not a plug-and-play solution; it requires significant ongoing effort and engineering resources. For organizations with the right capacity, however, Backstage delivers a powerful and highly flexible developer portal solution.
Pros:
“Der (sic!) it up in two companies now. It does have an initial learning curve, no need to hide it. You will need a dedicated DevOps maintaining it (at least part time) But when you go microservices/microfrontends/packages where each of it deploys itself from iac in the individual repo… the scaffolder alone is a huge boost to the team. If it gets used to create lots of stuff, the catalog itself gets a killer feature that visually shows dependencies (especially: who is using this thing I am refactoring). Secret bonus points: this gives DevOps people a central point to visualize a lot of other tools in a convenient way for devs to consume. Refactor these bashscripts/CLI tools so they have a nice react frontend and others can „click“ things.” (reddit comment)
Cons
“Yes its a ton of setup and I dont recommend it for a group that has little time to get it right.” (reddit comment)
“Think from a developers perceptive and treat like it like the front end of a platform. You still need high levels of automation behind it. I don’t want to go to Ansible, Datadog, SNOW, GitHub, K8s etc etc. I just want an S3 bucket. I want to know where my stuff is and have a single spot.“ (reddit comment)
“Because you didn’t put in the work to make it work for you. Backstage is not about just installing a few boilerplate plugins and getting value. The real use is in the custom code you write to enable your enterprise. Internal automations etc. it takes a team of people to make it happen.” (reddit comment)
Links
Website: https://backstage.io/
Demo: https://demo.backstage.io/
Documentation: https://backstage.io/docs/overview/what-is-backstage
#2 Port
Port value proposition is: “All about developer experience”. Port offers a no-code setup that makes it easy to get started quickly. It also has automation capabilities, allowing you to respond to events or trigger actions based on user input. Port offers a free tier, making it accessible for teams looking to explore its features without upfront costs.
Pros
“I researched for a developer portal (for 750 developers) to help us improve the developer experience in the tools chaos and the overwhelming number of components. I started implementing Backstage and rapidly understood that this project would require an entirely new team to customize it and make it work for us. simple topics like: SAML/OpenID authentication, Authorization, Jenkins plugin – we have more than one job for a component Visualizations – you need to write in react Self-services – you have a catalog to choose from, but what about operations on existing objects? So we looked into several other alternatives and came up with port. Their key advantage was the ability to define the custom schema of entities that describe your organization. The self-services are very convenient to configure – you can get a webhook, register to Kafka, or use their local agent with some common actions to run. I created a POC in several days and we were super excited. of course, there are features like scorecards, visualizations, etc.” (reddit comment)
Cons
“My teams have been experimenting with IDP’s like Port.io for this. Port.io turned out to be insanely expensive […].” (reddit comment)
Links
Website: https://www.port.io/
Demo: https://demo.port.io/organization/home
Documentation: https://docs.port.io/
#3 Cortex
The Head of DevRel from Cortex is quite active on reddit and wrote: “[…] if you are building for 50+ engineers, you’re going to want to look at an enterprise-class solution that scales, like Cortex.io (for whom I run Developer Relations)”, and it fits their value proposition, which is: “Cortex is the enterprise Internal Developer Portal built to accelerate the path to engineering excellence.“
It has a comprehensive service catalog, scorecards and integrates with a wide array of tools. Unfortunately, they only provide their pricing on request.
Pros
“A great scalable flexible tool and easy to integrate” (G2 review)
Cons
“We liked it but their pricing was expensive if your org isn’t ready to invest a lot of money into scorecards. We left Cortex for OpsLevel for half the price.” (reddit comment)
Links
Website: https://www.cortex.io/
Documentation: https://redesign-docs.cortex.io/
#4 OpsLevel
OpsLevel is up-to-speed with its value proposition: “The portal for AI-enabled software development.”
The spotlight is clearly on one key feature: AI. But what does that actually mean? With this capability, OpsLevel can automatically generate comprehensive descriptions for your components.
Beyond that, OpsLevel offers robust developer self-service features, scorecards, and integrates with a wide range of tools. They also have an impressive customer base, including companies like Duolingo and Hudl.
OpsLevel was mentioned on Reddit, but redditors didn’t go into detail about its pros and cons.
That’s why we’re highlighting insights from the AWS Marketplace, where users have shared their feedback.
Pros
“Extensibility and many APIs to cover many information sources and types in order to add as many data points for the services as possible.Starting using it primarily for service ownership, then added service tiers and checks in order to also focus on service quality. Opslevel team taking feedback into consideration and improving the product.” (AWS Marketplace comment)
Cons
“Some features are still being worked on and don’t offer the full support we’d want at this point – e.g. versioning support for documentation or other types of documentation (REST being the only type currently supported).” (AWS Marketplace comment)
Links
Website: https://www.opslevel.com/
Documentation: https://docs.opslevel.com/docs/introducing-opslevel
#5 Atlassian Compass
Atlassian Compass is part of the Atlassian tools. It integrates smoothly with Atlassian tools like Jira, Bitbucket and Confluence. Compared to other Portals, Compass may lack more advanced automation features. Compass is well-suited for teams who already use Atlassian.
Pros
“I am sunsetting our internal backstage.io instance and migrate templates to compass. The price is a steal compared with the effort one needs for customized maintenance.” (reddit comment)
Cons
“Really annoying that there’s no on-prem option with this.” (reddit comment)
Links
Website: https://www.atlassian.com/software/compass
Documentation: https://support.atlassian.com/compass/docs/getting-started-with-compass/
Other Portals
- Humanitec Portal https://humanitec.com/products/portal
- Cycloid https://www.cycloid.io/
- Harness https://www.harness.io/
- Roadie https://roadie.io/
Why your Portal needs a Backend
Keep in mind: Portals are the often just the face — not the engine. They offer interfaces, UX and sometimes basic automation features to help devs move faster. But to coordinate all the moving parts you need a “brain” which glues together multiple tools.
That’s where our product comes in: a dedicated backend / platform orchestrator built to orchestrate the complexity beneath the surface. Because integrating services with a portal is often a highly manual process featuring lots of custom scripts or handmade plugins (or similar things).
A backend (or platform orchestrator) will make your lives a lot easier by providing a layer of abstraction and functionality that allows platform engineers to tie together services, orchestrate them in one place, and expose them to your portal in a standardized and sustainable way.
Read more about platform orchestration tools.
Sources
- https://www.reddit.com/r/devops/comments/1ae7l8r/actual_succesfull_experiences_with_internal/
- https://www.reddit.com/r/devops/comments/193ro7n/what_is_your_experience_like_working_with/
- https://www.reddit.com/r/devops/comments/18h7jt9/idp_internal_developer_platform_recommendations/
- https://www.reddit.com/r/devops/comments/1dyb1f1/which_internal_developer_portal_should_we_use/
- https://www.reddit.com/r/devops/comments/1ae7l8r/actual_succesfull_experiences_with_internal/
- https://www.reddit.com/r/devops/comments/193ro7n/what_is_your_experience_like_working_with/
- https://www.reddit.com/r/devops/comments/17u6tmv/purpose_of_internal_developer_portal/
- https://www.reddit.com/r/devops/comments/17bhr7s/atlassian_have_jumped_on_the_internal_developer/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web3x&utm_name=web3xcss&utm_term=1&utm_content=share_button
- https://www.reddit.com/r/Terraform/comments/1fo62oi/how_do_you_approach_selfservice_in_an_idp_style/
- https://www.reddit.com/r/devops/comments/10guddj/backstageio_common_issues_and_pitfalls/
- https://www.reddit.com/r/devops/comments/1g8yw66/backstage_idp_why/
- https://aws.amazon.com/marketplace/reviews/reviews-list/prodview-bhqx7c2xajs5w
- https://www.g2.com/products/cortex-io-cortex/reviews/cortex-review-8715969
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