This guide was last updated on September 1, 2025.
Cortex vs Building in-house
Deciding whether to build or buy your Internal Developer Portal (IDP) comes down to more than just initial investment.
It's about understanding the long-term implications for your engineering team's productivity, scalability, and adoption
You don’t build your own CRM, your own data center, your own version control – why build your own IDP?
Let your teams focus on what makes your business tick.
Launch-ready from day one
Building tooling in-house gives you full control over your IDP. If you’re confident you have a strong vision and have the time and resources to invest in building something high quality, this option could work for you.
Based on our conversations with engineering leaders, teams invest over 10,000+* engineering hours to build and maintain their IDPs annually.
What would you ship if you could get
10,000 hours back every year?
*Forrester report
The benefit of using Cortex is that we provide an IDP that's ready to go. At Cortex, we use our years of experience working with world-class engineering teams to create an IDP for your whole engineering team to be ready for anything.
With Cortex
Pre-built templates, best practices, and structured guidance from the get go.
Quick adoption by teams, enabling faster time-to-value.
Guided by a dedicated CS team, enablement programs, and Cortex Academy.
Driving adoption and engagement
IDPs need to provide immediate value to get adoption. That’s why Cortex works for your whole engineering team.
How each team member gains from Cortex
Engineering Leaders
Understand productivity and bottlenecks
Platform Engineers
Deliver self-service experiences for developers
Developers
Get information in AI assistants withminimal context switching
SREs
Roll out automatic production readiness reviews
Security Teams
Shift security left and improve security posture
With Cortex
Built for immediate ease of use, driving rapid adoption.
Sustained engagement through intuitive user experience.
Demonstrable value across different teams and roles.
Understanding true costs: Monetary vs. Opportunity
Whilst you pay to use Cortex, you should bear in mind that there is an opportunity cost to building tooling in-house. Not only is there an upfront time investment (which is likely to be substantial if you want to build something that is polished and withstands the test of time), but there are ongoing costs in terms of maintenance and training.
We’ve helped customers like Xero & Skyscanner deprecate their internally built portals that they’d invested in for years in favor of Cortex.
With Cortex
Predictable costs and clear ROI metrics.
Engineering resources remain dedicated to core product innovation.
Minimal maintenance and operational overhead.
Scalability matters
If your company is fast-growing, building in-house tooling could present challenges for you later down the line. Training new starters to use your tooling will take time, and ensuring continuity if the employees who originally built the tool leave can present challenges.
What Forrester report says about Cortex’s impact
224%
Return on investment (ROI)
$6.38M
Benefits PV
$4.41M
Net present value (NPV)
<6 months
Payback
75%
time savings in project management for software affected by Cortex
20%
total productivity savings for engineering FTEs using Cortex
25%
improved time to market for projects impacted by Cortex
6 FTEs
reallocated due to lower TCO of Cortex
10 weeks
time required for the composite organization to implement Cortex
8 hours
average time to train a new engineer on Cortex
With Cortex, you can scale your business rapidly with confidence that the tool is simple to use, and is supported by a team of experts to guide your team where needed.
With Cortex
Proven to scale seamlessly for global enterprises and fast-growing teams.
Regular, automated updates and feature expansions.
Integration with new tools and services without extra overhead.
Empowering world-class engineering teams
Join leading companies like Clear, Grammarly, and Canva who use Cortex to accelerate engineering initiatives, including Production Readiness, operational maturity, and migrations
Explore the results: fewer incidents, faster delivery, better engineering outcomes.
"One of the biggest improvements we've seen since implementing Cortex is in our Mean Time to Restore- which we reduced by 67%. Being able to quickly find service information is a small operational change that has enormous impact."
Javier de Vega Ruiz
Chief Software Engineer
“More and more we think of Cortex less as a product and more as a platform on which we are building all of our internal intelligence for engineering.”
Kurt Christensen
Senior Engineering Manager
"With Cortex, we’re not just managing services better; we’re fundamentally changing the way we work and collaborate to support the healthcare organizations who rely on us every day."
Franz Hemmer
Principal Software Engineer
“We know if an engineer gets pulled out of what they’re doing, it takes 30 minutes to re-engage, Cortex lets us reduce noise and keep our team focused on the highest priority work.”
Shaun McCormick
Principal Software Engineer
“Walk away from a spreadsheet for a minute, and it’s already stale. With Cortex, we never have that issue. I can just trust that information is always up to date, and we can leave devs alone that have already done what they need to do.”
Amanda Jackson
Technical Program Manager, Rapid7