Your platform team spent a year and $2 million building an internal developer portal. Or maybe you bought one off the shelf. Either way, you're probably wondering if you made the right choice.
Here's what I've learned after working with dozens of companies implementing internal developer portals: the "build versus buy" decision isn't really the question anymore. The market has changed completely since 2020. Companies that went with self-hosted Backstage discovered that "free and open-source" actually means paying for 3-12 full-time engineers. Organizations that bought proprietary platforms found themselves locked into data models they can't escape. And the ones who picked wrong are now facing painful migrations.
I've spent the last few years talking to engineering leaders about their IDP implementations, and I've noticed the landscape has evolved into three distinct approaches:
Build: Self-hosted Backstage installations that give you maximum flexibility but cost over $1M per year to operate.
Buy: Proprietary SaaS platforms like Cortex and Port with polished interfaces but permanent vendor lock-in.
Hybrid: Managed Backstage solutions that give you the open-source ecosystem without the engineering overhead.
In this guide, I'll walk through the seven platforms that enterprise teams are actually using at scale. I'm focusing on the strategic trade-offs that matter three years after your initial decision, when you'll discover whether you made the right choice or not.
What Actually Matters in an Enterprise Developer Portal
Before I dive into specific platforms, let me share what I've learned matters most when evaluating IDPs. A lot of these platforms look great in demos but fall apart in production.
Ecosystem and Extensibility
Can you integrate with your entire toolchain, or are you stuck with whatever the vendor decides to support? At enterprise scale, you're probably using 50+ different tools across CI/CD, monitoring, security, and cloud infrastructure. The difference between supporting 20 integrations versus 250+ becomes critical when half your value comes from centralizing everything in one place.
Vendor Lock-In Risk
What happens to your data if you need to switch platforms in two years? Open-source-based solutions like Backstage use standardized YAML entity definitions you can export and migrate anywhere. Proprietary platforms often use custom data models that trap all your organizational knowledge inside their systems forever.
Maintenance Overhead
Does running the platform require a dedicated team, or can your existing platform engineers manage it alongside their other work? I've seen self-hosted solutions consume 3-5 full-time engineers just for maintenance, upgrades, and troubleshooting. This is what I call the "TypeScript tax," the hidden cost of maintaining frontend infrastructure that most DevOps teams aren't equipped to handle.
Enterprise Readiness
Does the platform provide role-based access control (RBAC), single sign-on (SSO), and SOC2 compliance out of the box? For regulated industries or companies with strict security requirements, these aren't nice-to-haves. They're table stakes. Building them yourself in a self-hosted environment can take months.
Day 2 Operations
Look beyond the initial setup. How difficult is it to upgrade when breaking changes occur? How do you handle search infrastructure at scale? What happens when you need to migrate to a new backend system? The platforms that look easiest on day one often become maintenance nightmares by day 700.
1. Roadie: Managed Backstage for Teams Who Value Their Time
Category: Hybrid (Managed Backstage)
Best For: Teams that want Backstage's ecosystem without the operational burden
Roadie delivers the full power of Spotify's open-source Backstage platform as a managed SaaS service. This is what I call the hybrid approach. You get access to the entire Backstage ecosystem with 211 open-source plugins, standardized data models, and active community development. But you don't need to maintain any of the infrastructure.
The platform handles everything you'd normally spend engineering time on: hosting, security patches, database management, enterprise-grade search, and those painful upgrades like the New Backend System migration that challenged self-hosted teams throughout 2024. Your team focuses on configuring integrations and building workflows, not debugging TypeScript or updating React components.
Key Features:
- Minimal-maintenance Backstage platform with automated upgrades
- Access to entire open-source plugin ecosystem (211 plugins, 82 supported out-of-the-box)
- Built-in Tech Insights for scorecards and engineering standards (paid add-on)
- Enterprise RBAC (basic RBAC in Teams plan, custom RBAC in Growth plan)
- No vendor lock-in since the data model is standard Backstage YAML
What I Like:
The biggest advantage is what I call avoiding the TypeScript tax. Platform engineering teams can focus on building platform capabilities instead of maintaining TypeScript and React frontends. Any Backstage plugin works, including community-developed integrations. Complex upgrades like the New Backend System transition happen automatically. Most customers see value within weeks, not months. Your catalog definitions are portable YAML files, not proprietary formats.
The Trade-offs:
You're working within Backstage's UI constraints, which means less drag-and-drop flexibility compared to tools like Port. It's more structured, which some teams see as a feature and others see as a limitation. While Roadie offers secure connectivity options like the Roadie Broker for on-premises resources, it's primarily a hosted service. If your security team absolutely requires on-premises deployment, self-hosted Backstage might be your only option.
Pricing: Teams plan starts at $24 per developer per month with a 50-seat minimum (50-150 developers). Growth plan pricing is custom with a 100-seat minimum (100+ developers). Only active contributors to your source control management incur costs. Non-coding team members like product managers and leadership can access for free. Tech Insights is an optional paid add-on. View pricing details.
2. Cortex: When You're Obsessed with Scorecards
Category: Proprietary SaaS
Best For: Organizations focused on service maturity scorecards and reliability metrics
Cortex built a polished, opinionated developer portal that's heavily focused on measuring and improving service quality through scorecards. The platform excels at gamifying service ownership with detailed maturity models, SLO tracking, and automated scoring based on engineering best practices using Bronze/Silver/Gold levels.
The UI feels modern and intuitive, especially if your team is already familiar with SaaS tools like Datadog or PagerDuty. Cortex's scorecard system is more sophisticated than most alternatives, offering fine-grained control over scoring criteria with flexible rule definitions and excellent visualization of how your services stack up against engineering standards.
Key Features:
- Advanced scorecard system with customizable rubrics using Bronze/Silver/Gold levels
- Strong reliability engineering focus with SLOs, incidents, and on-call tracking
- Polished, modern UI optimized for service discovery
- AI-powered features including Ownership Prediction and Velocity Dashboard for DORA metrics
- 60+ out-of-the-box integrations with major monitoring and development tools
What I Like:
The scorecard sophistication is genuinely best-in-class. If you want to track service maturity with Bronze/Silver/Gold level visualization and detailed point-based scoring, nothing else comes close. The UI is beautiful and impresses stakeholders. The reliability focus is excellent for teams prioritizing SRE practices. You can get a basic catalog running quickly. New AI features for ownership prediction and metrics analysis are interesting additions.
The Trade-offs:
Cortex is known for being expensive at enterprise scale, especially compared to Backstage-based alternatives. The data model is Cortex-specific, making migration difficult if you ever want to leave. You're limited to whatever integrations Cortex builds. You can't leverage community plugins like you can with Backstage. The template and workflow capabilities lag behind Backstage's Software Templates.
Pricing: Not publicly disclosed. You need to sign up for a demo to get pricing information. However, the Forrester Total Economic Impact study from July 2024 lists pricing at approximately $65 per user per month at scale. Multiple tiers available (Engineering Intelligence, Accelerate, Full IDP, Site License) with features scaling from basic catalog and scorecards to full platform capabilities. Request pricing.
3. Port: The Builder's Platform
Category: Proprietary SaaS
Best For: Teams that need to model non-standard assets or want maximum UI customization
Port takes a completely different approach. Instead of giving you an opinionated developer portal, it gives you building blocks to create your own. The platform's no-code interface lets you define custom data models (called Blueprints) for any asset type, not just services and APIs, but environments, IoT devices, or cloud resources.
This flexibility makes Port uniquely suited for organizations with complex, non-standard infrastructure that doesn't fit typical service catalog patterns. You can build custom views, define relationships between any entity types, and create workflows that match your exact processes. Port recently rebranded as an "Agentic Internal Developer Portal" with enhanced AI capabilities.
Key Features:
- Fully customizable data models and UI views via Blueprints
- No-code interface for defining entities and relationships
- Strong visualization capabilities for complex systems
- Self-service actions using Cookiecutter templates
- 50+ integrations including DORA metrics tracking
- AI agent capabilities and Engineering360 dashboard
What I Like:
Port gives you ultimate flexibility to model anything your organization needs, not just traditional services. You can build exactly the interface your teams need. It's excellent for multi-cloud, hybrid environments with diverse asset types. The visual workflow builder lets you create automation without writing code.
The Trade-offs:
Maximum flexibility means you're building everything from scratch. There's less out-of-the-box value compared to opinionated platforms. You can't leverage the Backstage open-source plugin ecosystem, though the Ocean Framework provides extensibility through data integrations and workflow automation. While Port supports Markdown, it lacks the full TechDocs build pipeline and search capabilities you get with Backstage. Teams need time to master the data modeling concepts, which means a steeper learning curve.
Pricing: Free tier available (up to 15 seats, 10,000 entities). Startup tier at $30 per developer per month. Enterprise tier available with premium features including SSO, advanced RBAC, ISO 27001 and SOC2 Type 2 certifications, and dedicated support. View pricing details.
4. OpsLevel: Fast Setup, Limited Growth
Category: Proprietary SaaS
Best For: Teams focused primarily on service ownership and maturity tracking
OpsLevel started as a service maturity and ownership tool before evolving into a broader developer portal. This shows in its excellent service ownership features and straightforward approach to tracking engineering standards through its Rubric system with Bronze/Silver/Gold levels, plus separate Scorecards for team-specific standards.
The platform offers the fastest time-to-initial-value for basic service cataloging. Typical deployments complete in 30-45 days. You can have a working catalog with ownership information and basic checks running within hours. But this simplicity comes at a cost. OpsLevel's feature set is more constrained than platforms built on extensible architectures. Recent additions include AI-powered features for check generation and catalog enrichment.
Key Features:
- Fast setup for basic service catalog (typical 30-45 day deployment)
- Strong focus on service ownership and maturity rubrics
- Good integration with CI/CD systems for automated checks (60+ integrations)
- AI-generated checks and AI-enriched catalog
- Package version inventories for SBOM visibility
- Clean, straightforward UI
What I Like:
You can get a basic catalog running faster than with any alternative. The service ownership focus is excellent for clarifying who owns what. Good built-in templates for measuring service quality. The interface is less complex than more feature-rich platforms, which some teams prefer. New AI features streamline catalog management.
The Trade-offs:
You can't easily add community plugins or build custom integrations. The UI is less flexible than Port or Backstage for customization. The feature set is primarily focused on cataloging and checks, with less emphasis on documentation or scaffolding. The migration path is unclear if you outgrow the platform since it uses a proprietary data model.
Pricing: Not publicly disclosed. Pricing is based on team size with custom quotes. Per-developer pricing model with volume discounts available. Includes SOC2 Type 2 compliance and SAML-based SSO. Pricing customizable based on needs including self-hosted options and support levels. Request pricing.
5. Atlassian Compass: The Jira Extension
Category: Proprietary SaaS
Best For: Organizations deeply invested in the Atlassian ecosystem
If your company runs on Jira, Bitbucket, and Confluence, Compass offers the most seamless native integration you'll find. The platform leverages Atlassian's identity system, pulls in data from other Atlassian products automatically, and feels like a natural extension of your existing toolchain.
Compass provides automated service health monitoring, tracking metrics from integrated tools and surfacing problems before they escalate. For teams already paying for Atlassian products, Compass represents an incremental cost with minimal integration effort. The platform has scorecards with a new Maturity Levels feature added in 2025.
Important Note: Atlassian deprecated the Templates and scaffolding feature on December 1, 2025. This is a significant capability reduction for teams requiring self-service service creation.
Key Features:
- Native integration with Jira, Bitbucket, Confluence, and Opsgenie
- Automated service health monitoring
- Component tracking with Atlassian-native data models
- Integrated incident management through Opsgenie
- Scorecards with Maturity Levels feature
- Built on Atlassian Forge with GraphQL APIs for extensibility
What I Like:
The Atlassian integration is unbeatable if you use Jira for everything. The UX feels consistent with other Atlassian products, so there's minimal learning curve. Automated health monitoring works well. You can get it as a standalone product or bundled with some enterprise packages.
The Trade-offs:
This is what I call the Atlassian trap. The platform struggles with non-Atlassian tools like GitHub, GitLab, or CircleCI. The scaffolding feature was removed on December 1, 2025, so it's no longer available for service creation. You can't extend it with community plugins since it uses a proprietary ecosystem. It's more of a service catalog with add-ons than a complete platform interface.
Pricing: Free tier available (3 full users, unlimited basic users). Standard tier at $8 per user per month includes basic features. Premium tier at $25 per user per month includes IP Allowlisting, advanced integrations, 99.9% uptime SLA, and premium support. Discounted rates available for teams above 101 users. Compass is a standalone product with separate billing from other Atlassian tools. View pricing details.
6. Backstage: The Industry Standard (Self-Hosted)
Category: Open Source (Self-Hosted)
Best For: Large enterprises with dedicated platform engineering teams and specific compliance requirements
Spotify's Backstage is the industry-standard open-source developer portal framework. It powers IDPs at Spotify, American Airlines, Pinterest, and thousands of other organizations. You own the code, control the infrastructure, and can customize anything.
But this flexibility comes with significant operational costs. Self-hosting Backstage requires 3-5 dedicated engineers to manage infrastructure, handle upgrades, maintain search systems, and keep up with the rapidly evolving codebase. Roadie's survey of the Backstage community found that successful self-hosted deployments had at least three engineers dedicated full-time. Some companies have teams of 12 people just for Backstage.
Breaking changes occur regularly with monthly releases. Major migrations like the New Backend System transition that completed in 2024 consumed months of engineering time for self-hosted teams. For perspective on the true cost, Zalando invested over $4 million across four years developing their internal platform before open-sourcing their work as part of Backstage.
Key Features:
- Fully open-source with Apache 2.0 license
- 250+ community plugins covering every major tool
- Extensible architecture for custom plugins and integrations
- Active community and regular monthly releases
- CNCF Incubating project with strong enterprise adoption
What I Like:
You have ultimate control and can customize without limits. There are no license costs since it's free to download and use. The ecosystem is massive with the largest community and plugin library (250+ plugins). You have no vendor dependency and can run it anywhere, modify anything. It's the industry standard backed by CNCF and major enterprises.
The Trade-offs:
The operational overhead is substantial. Successful deployments require 3-5 full-time engineers minimum. Some teams reach 12 full-time employees just maintaining Backstage. Most DevOps teams lack frontend skills for React and TypeScript customization, which is what I call the TypeScript tax. Monthly breaking changes and major migrations like the New Backend System require significant engineering investment.
You manage databases, search infrastructure with Elasticsearch, monitoring, and security patches. The hidden costs are enormous. At typical senior platform engineer compensation of $250K per year fully loaded, 3-5 engineers cost $750K to $1.25M annually, plus infrastructure costs of $12K to $24K per year. Total cost of ownership typically exceeds $2M+ over three years when you factor in engineering time, opportunity cost, and infrastructure.
Pricing: Free (open source under Apache 2.0 license). However, total cost of ownership includes 3-5 engineer salaries ($750K to $1.25M+ annually) plus infrastructure costs ($12K to $24K+ annually). TCO typically exceeds $2M+ over three years.
7. Configure8: The Discovery Platform
Category: Proprietary SaaS
Best For: Organizations prioritizing discovery and cost analytics
Configure8 positions itself as a universal catalog that can ingest and relate data from virtually any source. The platform emphasizes discovery features, helping teams understand what they have and how it's interconnected. It also offers strong cloud cost integration, surfacing spending data alongside technical resources.
While Configure8 has solid core features including 30+ integrations and workflow-based Self-Serve Actions, its smaller market presence and proprietary nature make it a riskier choice than platforms with larger ecosystems or open-source foundations.
Key Features:
- Universal catalog supporting diverse asset types
- Strong discovery and search capabilities
- Cloud cost analytics integration
- Relationship mapping across resources
- Workflow-based Self-Serve Actions
- Available as SaaS or on-premises deployment
What I Like:
It's good at helping teams understand what exists in their infrastructure. The cost integration is unique, combining cloud spending data with technical resources. It can pull data from many systems. You get deployment flexibility with both SaaS and on-premises options.
The Trade-offs:
The ecosystem is smaller with less community support and fewer integrations (30+) than larger platforms. The data model is Configure8-specific, which means proprietary lock-in. There are fewer public case studies and enterprise deployments than alternatives. As a smaller player in a competitive market, there's some uncertainty about long-term viability.
Pricing: Free tier available (up to 10 users for scorecards). Paid tiers available with SOC2 certification and RBAC features. Enterprise pricing available with additional features and volume discounts. Available as both SaaS and on-premises deployment. Contact Configure8 for detailed pricing. View pricing page.
Quick Comparison
| Platform | Foundation | Maintenance | Ecosystem Size | Lock-In Risk | Enterprise Features |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Roadie | Open Source (Backstage) | Minimal (Managed) | 211 plugins | Low (standard YAML) | RBAC, SSO, SOC2 Day 1 |
| Cortex | Proprietary | Minimal (SaaS) | 60+ integrations | High (proprietary) | Strong |
| Port | Proprietary | Minimal (SaaS) | 50+ integrations | High (proprietary) | Good |
| OpsLevel | Proprietary | Minimal (SaaS) | 60+ integrations | High (proprietary) | Basic |
| Compass | Proprietary | Minimal (SaaS) | Atlassian-centric | High (proprietary) | Good (if Atlassian) |
| Backstage | Open Source | High (3-12 engineers) | 250+ plugins | None | DIY |
| Configure8 | Proprietary | Minimal (SaaS) | 30+ integrations | High (proprietary) | Moderate |
Making Your Choice
The right IDP depends on your organization's constraints, technical culture, and platform engineering maturity. Here's how I'd think about it:
Choose Self-Hosted Backstage if you have a team of 10+ platform engineers, unlimited budget, and specific requirements that absolutely can't be met by managed solutions. You're willing to invest significant engineering time in maintenance and customization for maximum control. Be prepared for 3-12 dedicated engineers and $2M+ total cost of ownership over three years.
Choose Cortex or Port if you value polished UI above everything else, don't mind proprietary lock-in, and want specific workflow capabilities their platforms emphasize. Budget for potentially higher costs at scale (around $65 per user per month for Cortex, around $30+ per user per month for Port enterprise tiers).
Choose OpsLevel if you need a basic service catalog immediately and your primary use case is tracking ownership and maturity, not building complex workflows or maintaining extensive documentation.
Choose Compass if you live entirely in the Atlassian ecosystem and can accept its limitations with non-Atlassian tools. Note that scaffolding and templates were deprecated on December 1, 2025. The integration efficiency may outweigh the platform's constraints if you're already deep in the Atlassian world.
Choose Roadie if you want the industry standard (Backstage) with its entire ecosystem and community support, but you value your engineers' time too much to spend it on infrastructure maintenance. It's what I consider the golden path for enterprises that want modern platform capabilities without the platform tax or the $2M+ cost of building from scratch.
The key question isn't which platform has the most features. It's which platform lets your engineers focus on building platform capabilities instead of maintaining platform infrastructure. At the 150+ engineer scale where IDPs become critical, that distinction determines whether your portal becomes a force multiplier or just another thing to maintain, potentially at a cost exceeding $2M over three years if you go the self-hosted route.
Final Thoughts
After evaluating these platforms for the past few years, I keep coming back to a simple principle: your platform team should build platform capabilities, not maintain platform infrastructure. The $2M+ you'd spend on self-hosting Backstage could fund a lot of actual platform work.
If you're serious about Backstage but want to skip the TypeScript tax, request a personalized demo of Roadie that'll show you what managed Backstage looks like in practice. Worth checking out before you commit to building everything yourself.
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