This guide was last updated on August 5, 2025.
Comparison Guide
What to expect?
This comparison is broken out not just by feature or function, but by the steps required to successfully roll out an IDP and affect material improvements to your engineering organization.
For each of these steps, the comparison document provides an overview of why it matters, the requirement set, a TL;DR, and a detailed breakdown.
Step 1
Import your data & build your catalog
Step 2
Define ownership
Step 3
Create your first 3 Scorecards
Step 4
Deliver your first self-service experience
Step 5
Extend the IDP and make it your own
Step 6
Run an org wide initiative
Step 7
Measure & improve
Step 8
Make your engineering team happy
Note from the Founders
When we set out to build Cortex, we were solving a problem that we faced as engineers, and our personal product philosophy along with the feedback from users who felt Cortex was the right fit for them are the things that drive how our product works.
We’re tired of B2B SaaS compare pages that are so horribly biased that don’t actually serve any purpose. It’s always the same – one column with green checks, and the other with vague indicators of missing features that verge on being outright lies. The reality is that competing products are similar in many ways, but different too, having strengths and weaknesses depending on what the user cares about.
We hope that this comparison page is meaningful and actually helps you decide which product is the right one for you – and of course, we hope it’s Cortex!
Cortex Founders
Cortex vs Port: Comparison overview
We’ve broken down the comparison by the steps involved in building, rolling out, driving adoption, and measuring the impact of your Internal Developer Portal with details so you can better understand our perspective on how we compare.
Cortex starts the IDP journey with service ownership – clear ownership and accountability is the foundation for a successful IDP.
Port relies on a “bring your own data model” approach, with or without ownership.
Cortex is opinionated, yet flexible – sane defaults, but change them when you need to. We index on time-to-value – how quickly can we deliver tangible value through the IDP?
Port has no opinions, and is an empty canvas.
Cortex is focused on driving holistic Engineering Excellence, from reliability Scorecards to developer self service to productivity, serving SREs, Platform Engineers, SREs, Developers, and Engineering leaders
Port focuses more narrowly on Platform Engineers and developer experience.
Launch your IDP with Cortex
See why Canva, Skyscanner, EarnIn, and more companies chose Cortessx over Port
Compare the journey of building an IDP
Step 1
Import your data & build your catalog
Why it matters
The foundation of your IDP is the data in it, including the catalog, integrations, and data model. The accuracy, completeness, and trust in this data is critical when it’s used to drive org-wide initiatives like Production Readiness, security compliance, migrations, and more.
Requirements
Catalog services & infrastructure
Connect all tools in your engineering stack
Model your engineering data ecosystem (like product areas, systems, lines of business, etc)
Run verifications against catalog data at any time and ensure data is trusted
TL;DR
Both Cortex and Port provide a customizable entity data model. Cortex is more opinionated, with flexibility when needed. Port is more of a blank canvas. Cortex supports more complex relationship schemas in the data model.
Full comparison
Vendor supported Integrations
Built in, first class integrations – drop an API key, we handle the rest.
Live data, both push and pull. View current oncall, live health metrics, and more in the catalog.
Hybrid integration model with Axon Relay to support connecting to self-hosted integrations.
Mostly vendor supported, but may need to host your own integrations (Ocean Framework)
Push, polling, or webhook based model that syncs data into Port – potentially out of date information for monitors, oncall, vulns, etc depending on webhook support or sync cadence.
Data import
UI import, or automated based on your configuration.
Ocean Framework can sync entities into the Catalog.
No UI based import (needs code / config)
Performance and scale
Can handle hundreds of thousands of entities
We handle third party rate limits with self-throttling, caching, eTag handling, and more.
Rudimentary handling of rate limits from third party integrations (just backoffs), which leads to challenges when ingesting data or calculating Scorecards for thousands of repositories
Custom entity types and properties
Opinionated, yet flexible. Sane defaults for data like PRs, vulnerabilities, incidents, and repos but flexibility to change the data model.
“Blueprints” let you create your own data model in Port entirely from scratch, though at the cost of sane defaults
Custom relationships (basic) to relate entities to each other
Complex relationships including hierarchical and recursive (like an org chart)
Full control over the relationship cardinality and shape (cyclic or acyclic). Supported in reports with multi-level drilldowns.
Support for controlling cardinality, but not shape – could lead to cyclic data issues without validation. Recursive or 1/n-to-many relationships (like org charts) not supported in rollup reports.
Infrastructure catalog
Ingests resources from AWS, GCP, and Azure
GitOps, UI, and Terraform
Entity verification to confirm data accuracy
Built-in configurable verifications periods with admin notifications and auditable in Scorecards & reports.
Requires modeling verification status in the catalog and building your own workflow to run verifications
Step 2
Define ownership
Why it matters
Whether it’s enabling innersourcing or driving accountability around Scorecards and Initiatives, ownership is the cornerstone of a successful IDP. You can define all the best practices you want, and catalog everything under the sun, but without accurate ownership and organizational context, migrations take longer, production readiness falls by the wayside, and operational overhead increases.
Requirements
Reflect your teams & members accurately
Define org chart hierarchy, from VP -> Directors -> Managers -> ICs
Define ownership across all software assets – from services to repos to infrastructure and more
TL;DR
Both Cortex and Port support basic ownership constructs. Cortex predicts ownership with AI, supports multi-level org charts in reporting, keeps teams in sync with your source of truth, and prevents the risks that come with orphaned services. With Port, ownership is not much better than a spreadsheet.
Full comparison
Automatically sync teams and team members from source of truth
Sync from Workday, Okta, Google Groups, Entra, GitHub, and more
Only syncs GitHub teams and ADO groups. Docs mention OIDC, but that only adds users to groups on login, not an ongoing sync of all teams and members.
Reflect multi-level org-chart (VP -> Directors -> Managers -> ICs)
Automatically synced from Workday, and supported natively in the team catalog.
Can model an org chart, but cannot be used in reporting for multi-level drilldowns.
Fallback ownership for orphaned services
An entity that doesn’t have an owner can inherit ownership through the entity graph, recursively. For example, a credit card processing microservice that’s orphaned may be auto-assigned to the owner of the Payment product area.
Properties can be inherited through the blueprint graph, but this doesn’t handle reassignment of ownership or validation of ownership
Orphaned entities report
Built into the Executive Report.
Requires a custom dashboard filtering on services without owners and doesn’t handle inherited ownership.
Manually define teams and memberships
Map a user’s representations across multiple tools to create a single identity. For example, tie a GitHub user to a Slack User to a Workday account to a Cortex user
Native capability and user properties are used to send notifications, compute productivity metrics, and more
Need to manually create and manage properties on user blueprints. These properties are not automatically used to map a user’s objects. For example, PRs are not tied to a Port user without custom configurations.
✨AI predictions for ownership
Using AI & ML to predict ownership of repositories with over 90% accuracy.
Need to define ownership manually, repo-by-repo.
Step 3
Roll out your key Scorecards
Why it matters
Scorecards are a key driver of adoption and ROI for an IDP. They supercharge your engineering organization by letting you automate manual processes like Production Readiness, Operational Excellence Reviews, Security compliance, and migrations.
Requirements
Build a Scorecard that combines data from third party and internal tools
Enable stakeholders, like SRE and Security, to build their own Scorecards
Provide leadership with actionable, tailored reports
Notify and nudge users and teams to take action
TL;DR
Scorecards are one of Cortex’s most powerful features. Cortex supports turing-complete rule definitions with access to integration data, makes it easy for technical and nontechnical users, provides out of the box drill-down leadership reports, and supports enterprise features like rule exemptions and notifications. Port’s scorecards are limited to pre-ingested data, can be configured only with basic JSON, and lack in-depth reporting.
Full comparison
Support for user-defined rules in a Scorecard
Ability to create Scorecards based on third party integration data
Needs to be pre-processed to use in a scorecard. For example, to check whether a package.json file contains a devDependencies section, you need to configure Port’s Ocean ahead of time to upload the package.json contents.
Custom data
Supports JQ for additional parsing within Scorecard rules.
Computed values need to be predefined in blueprints, and can’t be computed in-line within rules.
Config as code / GitOps
YAML/JSON
JSON format
Declarative language for rules within a Scorecard
Turing complete, with complex filtering, conditionals, JQ, and more.
JSON format, supports operators like =, !=, contains, startsWith, etc.
UI-based Scorecard rule builder for non-technical users
JSON support only, requires knowledge of blueprint properties
Complex conditionals & logic in Scorecard evaluations
CQL is turing complete.
Only supports AND or OR conditions across multiple rules. Doesn’t support scopes, like (A and B) or (C and D)
Guidance on how to fix failing rules
Configurable failure message with ability to include rule results and actionable steps for remediation
Allow users to request exemptions for specific rules
Reports for engineering leaders, with multi-dimensional rollups
Group-by only supports a single level in the tree (or multiple disjoint relationships). For example, you cannot create a report where one reporting structure goes VP -> Director -> Manager, but a second tree goes VP -> Dir -> Sr Mgr -> Mgr.
Notifications for individuals and teams
Automatically sends weekly rollups to service owners, as well as team channels. No additional configuration needed for email or after installing Slack or Microsoft Teams.
Port provides a GitHub action that uses the Port API to fetch scorecard updates and then sends notifications. Their docs specify this only supports sending notifications to a single channel, not individuals through DMs or team specific channels.
Step 4
Deliver your first self-service experience
Why it matters
A core pillar of an IDP is providing easy to use self service experiences to end users, especially developers. These may include bootstrapping new services, provisioning infrastructure, deploying new versions, granting access to tools, and more.
Requirements
Collect user inputs
Coordinate with internal and external systems
Collect necessary approvals
Run code scaffolding for new services or terraform
Handle edge cases and multiple user journeys
TL;DR
Cortex provides a full workflow engine for multi-step self-serve workflows with conditional branching, API calls, out-of-the-box actions, and more. Port supports only single-step actions and offloads advanced logic to your own backend, and doesn’t notify end users regarding pending approvals or self-serve actions.
Full comparison
Form builder to collect user inputs
Dynamically update user input forms based on previous data
Dynamically generate inputs based on responses from API calls, previous context, user inputs, or even in-line JavaScript code.
Fields can depend on each other (ie show one field if a different field is set), or reference blueprint objects in the catalog.
Cannot dynamically generate inputs based on API calls to other systems.
Make API calls to internal or external systems, using a broker when necessary
Pause self-service action for approval by individuals
Supports multiple approvers, conditionally based on the self service flow.
Supports one approver, pre-defined.
Advanced, multi-step self service experiences
Workflow engine supports orchestrating across multiple tools, conditional branching, JavaScript support
Actions are a single step – cannot encode logic or call multiple systems.
Out-of-the-box steps to call third party integrations
Over 200 out of the box steps for actions from Git, CI, ServiceNow, PagerDuty, and more that use your existing connected integrations.
Only supports calling CI pipelines out of the box, other actions require manual configuration.
Native code scaffolder for service bootstrapping
Built-in support for Cookiecutter to create repos and bootstrap projects, generate code, and open PRs against existing repos.
Code scaffolding and generation needs to be handled by the user in your own backend.
Inline code execution for complex logic
Sandboxed JavaScript can be run in-line in a self-service workflow.
Event triggered workflows
We view self-service actions in the IDP as human-in-the-loop experiences, not a replacement for CI.
Step 5
Extend the IDP and make it your own
Why it matters
Cortex supports custom plugins with React, similar to Backstage. Port provides widgets and custom layouts in-app. Cortex and Port both support ingesting data from homegrown tools.
Requirements
Ingest data from custom sources
Consume data from the API, including Scorecards
Build custom UI plugins to reduce tool spraw
TL;DR
High performing engineering organizations view the IDP as the foundation of their engineering excellence initiatives and the beating heart of their engineering team. This means that the IDP should be extendable, and the data it manages should be consumable from external systems. It should allow you to centralize all the disparate tools and UIs in your engineering toolkit, including homegrown tools.
Full comparison
Standard framework to ingest data from custom sources
Axon Handlers
Ocean Framework
API for CRUD operations including Catalog and Scorecards
Build custom plugins for the UI
JavaScript, TypeScript, and React based plugin engine with full custom component support along with a quick-start template.
Widget-based layouts and pages
Plugins can be embedded throughout Cortex. We do not yet support fully customizable pages using built-in Cortex widgets. This is on our roadmap.
No plugins which limits the extent of customization, but supports custom page layouts with native widgets.
Step 6
Run org wide initiative
Why it matters
Engineering organizations commonly run initiatives such as migrations, vulnerability mitigations, seasonal event scaling, and more. These initiatives are often managed using spreadsheets, but an IDP can serve as a “TPM copilot” and help you automate all the toil around tracking and driving progress on these org-wide initiatives.
Requirements
Create an initiative with a deadline based on your Scorecard
Create items in issue management system
Send notifications and reminders to ensure completion
TL;DR
Cortex helps you drive org-wide initiatives with deadlines, reminders, and ticket creation. Port does not provide this capability.
Full comparison
Define requirement-scoped initiative with a clear deadline
Send notifications and reminders to ensure completion
Built in notification cadence for nudges and reminders.
Supports customized cadence for notifications.
Create backlog items and auto-close when completed
Automatically create tickets in JIRA, ClickUp, and more and place them in the appropriate team’s backlog.
Only supports a single project, and only for Scorecards. No deadline support or team-specific project assignment.
Step 7
Measure & improve
Why it matters
You shouldn’t have to buy two separate tools to find bottlenecks that are slowing down your team and then change the process, systems, and culture to unblock them. Engineering Intelligence metrics should be a core part of an IDP – the whole point of an IDP is to reduce the number of places your developers, managers, and leaders need to go to find everything they need!
Requirements
Visualize engineering metrics, including productivity and DORA
Drill down into metrics across multiple dimensions (org chart, product, system, etc)
Handle mapping of identities across multiple systems (git, on-call, project management, etc)
TL;DR
Cortex provides a full fledged Software Engineering Intelligence platform natively, including velocity, incident, and issue related metrics. Port claims to do so but requires you to build your own custom pages and compute metrics on your own, and doesn’t support multi-level organization structure rollups.
Full comparison
Out of the box dashboards
Cortex automatically calculates and tracks velocity, incidents, issue, deploy, and other metrics.
Port provides a template for an engineering metrics page layout with widgets, not a full-fledged SEI platform. Integrating the metrics requires custom configuration.
Roll up metrics in multiple dimensions, such as developer seniority
Requires manually configuring reports with specific dimensions. Does not support multi-level drill downs.
Roll up metrics across the org chart
Supports complex organizational structures
Only supports single level hierarchies or hard-coded number of reporting layers
Custom metrics
Supports timeseries data ingestion, as well as CQL based queries to generate timeseries metrics based on catalog data.
History of blueprint object custom properties are tracked over time, but does not support historical ingestion of timeseries data.
Map users across multiple systems for metrics tracking
A single user can be mapped to their representations across VCS, Issue tracking, and more.
Step 8
Make your engineering team happy
Why it matters
At the end of the day, IDPs are only effective in helping you accelerate engineering initiatives if they are fully adopted across the organization. This requires ensuring that everyone across the organization, from engineering leaders to SREs and platform teams to developers are realizing the value of the IDP.
Requirements
Use your IDP in core meetings, like operational excellence reviews and quarterly planning.
Show users clear benefits through self-service, improved initiative tracking, and more.
Meet users in their environments using the MCP.
Drive adoption across your organizations.
TL;DR
At the start of this page, we admitted that we’re tired of B2B SaaS compare pages. We hope that this in-depth guide gives you an honest view of the differences of our two products and a foundation for how to think about building an IDP and the core requirements.
Read how customers like Relias, Rapid7, Xero and more accelerated their engineering excellence initiatives with Cortex.
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"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