Gartner Market Guide for Internal Developer Portals offers “Platform engineering teams are tasked with improving developer experience, ensuring consistent governance, and enabling discovery and access to software development and delivery capabilities. Platform engineering leaders can use internal developer portals to address these challenges.”
Organizations with a current Gartner license can check out the report here.
But if you don’t have access, we’ve pulled some key findings for you below.
Why Internal Developer Portals Matter
Modern software organizations rely on internal developer portals (IDPs) to create a seamless, self-service experience for developers. These portals serve as centralized hubs where teams can quickly discover, integrate, and manage all the necessary tools, services, and documentation. IDPs not only enhance developer productivity and experience but also improve operational efficiency by ensuring:
Standardized Access: A single point of entry to software catalogs, templates, and infrastructure.
Improved Governance: Centralized control over compliance, security policies, and quality metrics.
Operational Visibility: Real-time insights into service health, build pipelines, and performance benchmarks.
Key Findings from Gartner Market Guide for Internal Developer Portals
Gartner research highlights several emerging trends and strategic recommendations for organizations looking to implement or enhance their IDPs:
Rapid Adoption Forecast: According to Gartner, “By 2028, 85% of organizations with platform engineering teams will provide internal developer portals—a significant leap from 60% in 2025.” This projection underscores the growing importance of IDPs as an integral component of digital transformation.
Our take? Now is the time to act. Without an IDP today, you may be already falling behind in an increasingly competitive landscape.
Like how great sales leaders wouldn’t operate without a CRM, engineering leaders are increasingly realizing that an Internal Developer Portal (IDP) isn’t just a tool—it’s the self-service engine that transforms complexity into clarity, empowering teams with daily utility and driving lasting engineering excellence.
Backstage disillusionment: According to the report, “Gartner sees organizations misconstruing Backstage as a ready-to-use portal that requires no additional work. Misunderstanding the cost of implementing Backstage sometimes leads to disillusionment, and the portal project is either put on the back burner or abandoned. Supporting a portal using Backstage requires considerable software development skills, spanning TypeScript, Node.js, React, YAML, PostgreSQL and containerization (Docker, Kubernetes).”
Our take? Many of our customers started their IDP journey with Backstage, but like Gartner’s findings, they didn’t fully realize that Backstage is not a ready-to-use portal.
If you built your catalogs on Backstage but maintenance isn't what you expected, and adoption isn't what you hoped, you can save your work and get more value from your IDP with Cortex's Backstage migration helper.
Commercial providers: “Commercial providers simplify initial deployment, ease the ongoing maintenance, and provide out-of-the-box functionality with sensible and secure defaults to realize faster return on investment.”
Our take? Cortex customers do in fact see a quick return on investment. In March of 2024, Cortex commissioned Forrester Consulting to conduct a Total Economic Impact™ (TEI) study and examine the potential return on investment (ROI) enterprises may realize by deploying Cortex IDP. The purpose of this study was to provide organizations with a framework to evaluate the potential financial impact of Cortex IDP on their organizations. Their findings? “Cortex IDP boosts productivity by 20% through operational improvements like reduced context switching, reduced “time-to-find,” and higher velocity in deploying new services and resources”.
And, “Cortex IDP reduces the overall time required to deploy new software, system upgrades, or new features by 25%, significantly improving ability to drive new revenue.”
Enhancing Developer Experience with AI: The guide illuminates the growing role of generative AI in transforming software development. Examples include AI-powered chatbots for improved portal navigation and retrieval augmented generation (RAG) plug-ins that enhance knowledge discovery.
Our take? Only IDPs with logic that persists throughout the system will be able to fully take advantage and benefit from AI-powered capabilities. Cortex already is the only IDP with an AI-powered service prediction model.
Must-Have Capabilities: Gartner identifies several core functionalities that any IDP should offer:
Comprehensive software and resource catalogs
Customizable dashboards that can be tailored via plug-ins
Seamless platform integrations across CI/CD tools, monitoring systems, and collaboration software.
Standard Capabilities: Gartner identifies several standard capabilities for the IDP market:
Assessment scorecards to assess software quality, security and production readiness against codified guidance.
Self-service actions to help developers discover and access underlying platform components, provision environments and infrastructure, and automate workflows.
Curated templates to enable the creation and execution of templatized configurations, deployments and workflows.
Service health metrics to measure software delivery performance; for example, DevOps research and advisory (DORA) metrics and service-level objectives (SLOs).
Support for role-based access controls (RBACs) and single sign-on (SSO) for segregation of responsibilities, policy governance and administration via existing enterprise identity and access management tools.
Related core Cortex capabilities:
Docs: Workflows RBAC
Docs: Configuring SSO
Where does Cortex fit in?
At Cortex, our approach to internal developer portals is informed by the very insights Gartner presents. Here’s how Cortex is ensuring that platform engineering teams and development organizations thrive:
Accelerating Time-to-Value: Cortex delivers a user-friendly, out-of-the-box solution that minimizes the deployment overhead while offering flexible customization options. Our OOTB catalogs, always-on ownership, and robust scorecards + workflows mean that developers can focus on innovation, not configuration.
Future-Proofing with AI: We’re actively integrating AI capabilities within our portal, like AI service ownership prediction. If you have no idea where to start in figuring out who owns what, get in touch.
Cross-Team Collaboration: Recognizing that internal portals serve diverse personas—from software engineers to security experts to CTOs—Cortex ensures that everyone has full context and is working towards shared goals.
Centralized Governance and Scalability: With the proliferation of microservices and complex dependency trees in modern architectures, Cortex helps to map out service relationships and infrastructure dependencies. Cortex provides visibility and enforceable governance policies that maintain consistency across multiple teams and projects.
Conclusion
Gartner’s Market Guide for Internal Developer Portals reaffirms “Create a path from piloting to implementing IDPs by dedicating a platform team and appointing a platform owner for IDPs who can liaise with developers and build a roadmap to solve the team’s most pressing challenges. IDPs are a long-term investment, and platform owners must ensure an IDP delivers business outcomes for the organization.”
At Cortex, we’re proud to be at the forefront of this transformation, ensuring that our platform not only meets today’s challenges but is also primed for tomorrow’s opportunities. As the market shifts toward smarter, AI-enhanced developer experiences, now is the time to invest in a robust, scalable, and intuitive internal developer portal that empowers every member of your engineering team.
