Your Guide to Internal Developer Platforms (IDPs)
Ever feel like you're spending more time wrangling infrastructure and DevOps tools than actually writing code? You're not alone. The process of managing infrastructure, deployments, security, etc. all slows down developer agility and harms the developer experience.
Today, there are Internal Developer Platforms (IDPs), applications designed to simplify the management aspects of software development so you can focus on writing and shipping code. By abstracting away the messy infra problems, IDPs create a self-service "golden path" for development.
What Exactly is an IDP?
At its core, an IDP is a self-service system that centralizes everything your development team needs. Imagine a single pane of glass where you can access code repositories, CI/CD pipelines, service catalogs, databases, cloud infrastructure, and monitoring tools. IDPs also integrate with knowledge bases like documentation and runbooks, and plug into process tooling like GitHub, Jira, and CI/CD systems.
All this centralization means developers spend less time asking "how-to" questions and more time building features. But it's more than just an aggregator—IDP allows DevOps teams to encode best practices and security controls “in-code”, no longer relying on engineers remembering company protocols.
Strategic Considerations for IDP Adoption
Thinking about bringing an IDP into your organization? It's a significant decision, and you'll inevitably face that classic "build vs. buy" dilemma. Here are some key strategic factors to weigh:
1. Integrations
First, toolchain integration is non-negotiable. Your IDP needs to play nicely with everything you already use – think source control (GitHub/GitLab), CI/CD, cloud providers (AWS, GCP, Azure), ticketing (Jira, Linear, etc), and observability (Datadog, HyperDX, Prometheus). It should aggregate these tools, not force you into a painful rewrite or introduce compatibility issues.
2. Resourcing
Next, consider your resources for building versus buying. If you have a sizable, capable platform engineering team, and truly unique requirements, building your own (perhaps on an open-source base like Backstage) offers maximum customization. However, it demands significant engineering effort to set up and extend.
For smaller teams or those looking for fast results, a ready-made SaaS solution often makes more sense, offloading that maintenance burden and potentially providing quick value. At the end of the day, it comes down to cost: balancing licensing fees of commercial solutions against your internal engineering time and opportunity cost of building it yourself.
3. Customization
Then, you have to weight customization versus out-of-the-box features. Open-source IDPs like Backstage offer extreme extensibility via plugins and custom code if you want to tailor everything. SaaS options, while quicker to implement, come with pre-built features that might be far less customizable.
4. On-Premises vs Cloud Hosted
Then there’s the on-premises versus SaaS question, especially relevant for highly regulated environments. If your platform containing sensitive metadata needs to be hosted in-house for compliance, a self-hosted or open-source solution is likely necessary. Unfortunately, many SaaS IDPs are cloud-hosted, so your security team might be uncomfortable with that model.
5. Security and Governance
Don't overlook security, access control, and governance. A robust IDP needs solid authentication and authorization (e.g., single sign-on integration with Okta/AD or another role-based access control), as well as audit logs and compliance features. This ensures you can control who can do what.
6. Scalability and Performance
For larger organizations with hundreds or thousands of developers, scalability and performance are critical. Can the platform handle tens of thousands of catalog entries (microservices, components) and still provide quick search?
7. Developer Experience
And finally, the developer experience (DevEx) and adoption matters. The whole point of an IDP is to improve DevEx, so the portal’s user experience can be a make-or-break. A clean, intuitive interface and clear workflows will drive higher adoption among your engineers. If the IDP is clunky or outdated, developers might ignore it, defeating the purpose.
Comparing the Top IDP Tools
Now, let's compare some of the key players in the IDP space, each with its unique strengths and sweet spots:
Backstage
An example of Backstage’s User Dashboard
If you're all about maximum flexibility and an open-source ecosystem, then you should definetly take a look at the heavyweight, Backstage. Originally developed by Spotify and now maintained as a CNCF project, Backstage is a well supported open-source framework for building your own internal developer portal. Out of the box, it offers a Software Catalog for tracking services, TechDocs for internal documentation, and Software Templates (Scaffolder) for consistent project bootstrapping. Its plugin architecture is incredibly rich, allowing integration with virtually any tool (e.g., secrets management with Infisical). There's no license cost, and you have full control over your data.
However, that flexibility comes with a high implementation and maintenance cost. We're talking 6 to 12 months for many companies to get it fully in production, and potentially 3-15 full-time engineers just to maintain it in the long run. Since it’s a new framework that you’ll need to learn, there is a bit of a learning curve to overcome. Many teams also complain that without proper curation, it can become a "data dump," leading to adoption issues. I’ve heard several reports of companies that went through the entire implementation process only to see 10% of engineers using the IDP. That said, if you like the idea but not the operational overhead, managed Backstage options like Roadie can handle hosting and upgrades for a recurring cost (e.g., ~$22/dev/month). Depending on your situation, that might be the way to go.
Port
A screengrab of Port’s Dashboard
Port is a commercial SaaS IDP that shines with its ease of use and quick setup. It's meant to be a point-and-click solution, letting you configure your software catalog and workflows through a web UI using "Blueprints". You get a comprehensive software catalog with rich entity relationships and strong self-service actions that can trigger automation in your existing tooling via backends like GitHub Actions or Jenkins. It also features built-in scorecards for measuring compliance with engineering standards. Being fully hosted means low maintenance for your team, as Port handles hosting, scaling, updates, and security. Some teams even report getting a proof-of-concept running in days.
But be warned: while flexible, teams can find themselves spending too much time building, tweaking, and maintaining blueprints, potentially leading to complexity in setup. Catalog upkeep can become manual without robust integrations. It's also a multi-tenant SaaS solution, so data considerations might be a concern for some highly regulated environments. And for larger organizations, the cost at scale can become "insanely expensive," with reports of enterprise pricing being roughly double that of some competitors.
Cortex
Cortex is a SaaS IDP positioned as an "enterprise-class" solution for tracking software health and standards, focusing on "enforcing engineering best practices and providing leadership insights". It combines a robust service catalog (integrating with git repos, CI pipelines, incident trackers) with powerful scorecards and standards tracking to ensure services meet quality benchmarks like test coverage, SLOs, security checks, often with automated grading and alerts. Cortex also provides developer-centric insights like service health metrics and targeted alerts. It's fundamentally built for organizations of 50+ engineers that prioritize microservice governance.
Its main limitation is a somewhat rigid data model; if your components don't fit its predefined types, you might have to shoehorn them in. It's also less focused on arbitrary self-service actions or complex asynchronous workflows compared to Port or Backstage. Maintaining Cortex can involve high manual data input if not fully automated. Full rollout in a large organization can take six months or more, with a notable learning curve for engineers. And be prepared for the higher-end enterprise pricing, with anecdotal reports of around $65–$69 per user per month for larger organizations.
OpsLevel
An overview of OpsLevel dashboard UI
OpsLevel is another popular SaaS IDP that focuses on providing a fully-managed, ready-to-use portal with strong automations. OpsLevel offers Backstage-like capabilities without the headache, simplifying set-up and rollout. It emphasizes automated service cataloging, ingesting, and updating services automatically by connecting to sources like git repositories, Kubernetes clusters, and cloud accounts, thus reducing manual work. Similar to Cortex and Port, it includes standards and scorecards (Checks) for compliance, plus self-service actions and service templates for scaffolding new services. Additionally, their Campaigns feature makes it easy to plan cross-org changes, distribution a plan, and track changes.
However, it's a proprietary platform. Accordingly, that means no modifying the core software (but there is a self-hosted option for companies that cannot do SaaS). And while quite flexible in configuration, it offers less "infinite" customization than Backstage where you can write any plugin you want. But those tradeoffs are worth the streamlined nature of the tool, and the pricing is quite approach at $39 per user per month.
Overall, OpsLevel is an all-rounder in the category, with features spanning catalog, checks, templates, actions, and docs.
Atlassian Compass
A look at Altassian Compass’ product
A newer entrant (launched in 2023), Atlassian Compass is naturally tightly integrated with the Atlassian suite like Jira, Confluence, and Bitbucket. It offers a software component catalog linked to your documentation, issues, and repos, acting as a centralized index of your engineering assets. Similar to other IDPs, it also includes scorecards for software health. Being an Atlassian product it integrates natively with Jira Software as you would expect. It’s super easy to get started, even offering a generous free plan (up to 3 full users) and a low-cost Standard plan (~$7 per user/month).
Its main limitation is its Atlassian-centricity, which means it might not integrate as broadly with non-Atlassian tools compared to more tool-agnostic platforms. It also lacks some advanced automation features compared to more mature IDPs, primarily functioning as a catalog and tracking tool, not a full platform automation solution. Additionally, it offers less customization. You’re beholden to the Atlassian product roadmap for Compass. While I can tell they’re gearing up for enterprise use with Premium plans, it's relatively new, so large-scale references might be harder to come by.
Other Noteworthy Platforms and Concepts
Beyond these main contenders, the IDP landscape is buzzing. Humanitec, for example, is a Platform Orchestrator rather than a portal itself. It focuses on being the backend engine to dynamically provision and manage infrastructure, creating on-the-fly development environments. It's great for enabling true self-service deployments with guardrails and often pairs with a portal like Backstage for the UI. In this kind of setup, Humanitec provides the APIs, while Backstage is the frontend. Humanitec also offers multiple ways to integrate with Infisical for secrets management.
Other notable mentions include Roadie (a SaaS managed Backstage offering), Harness IDP (Harness's own Backstage-based solution with CI/CD integration), , and various PaaS offerings like Mia Platform, Qovery, Mogenius, and Nullstone which bundle entire cloud platforms with a developer portal component. While the products I highlighted are my personal shortlist, it might be worth researching some of these other players for the sake of completeness.
Thoughts on AI Readiness
The goal of employing an IDP is to bring together all of the data about your DevOps so that your engineers can reason about it all in one place. This doesn’t reduce the amount of data that they need to reason about though. Vibe coding is great, but it only focusing on the code, not the messy DevOps around the code. It won’t be long before we have AI-powered workflows that can assist with DevOps tasks and even debug issues. This world is more likely to become a reality if your DevOps data is already in one place thanks to your use of an IDP.
Conclusion
Ultimately, adopting an IDP is about empowering your engineers and accelerating software delivery. The right choice is honestly based on your organization's unique needs: your existing toolchain, team size and skills, desired level of customization, and your budget.
If this all sounds daunting, think of Internal Developer Platforms are a long-term investment, not a one-time project. You can start small, perhaps just with a service catalog or a new service template, and iterate from there. This gives you faster onboarding of new developers, reduced operational load on your DevOps teams, and greater consistency and reliability across your services.
