Unblock Engineers.
Unlock Productivity.
Cortex is the Internal Developer Portal eliminating “developer tax” with paved paths to production.
Create, catalog, score, and drive action to continuously improve software.
World-class engineering teams rely on Cortex
Our customers do amazing things every day. We’re grateful to play a part in supercharging their already talented teams.
The system of record for engineering teams
Cortex's Internal Developer Portal integrates with all your tools, centralizing the information needed to understand, operate, and build new software.
Build a culture of continuous improvement
Find owners, share context, and eliminate hurdles to engineering excellence with the only Internal Developer Portal that answers both, “What should we do?” and “How did we do?”
Catalog
Centralize service and resource ownership info
Score & Assess
Define minimum requirements and assess where services fall
Prescribe next steps
Define paths for improvement and templatize best practices
Take easy action
Incentivize developers to take recommendation actions
Customize
Deliver experiences tuned to each developer and reduce overhead
Drive consistency and improvement
Scorecards help teams centralize and continuously monitor alignment to standards of quality, security, production readiness, or operational efficiency. Prioritize tasks with targeted alerts, and finally get past 60% on that migration.
Stop asking who owns what, or who's on-call
Never be surprised by orphaned software. Cortex auto-updates software ownership and on-call information by syncing with Identity Providers like Okta or Workday and Incident Management tools like PagerDuty.
Empower devs to build better, and ship faster
Provide golden paths for bootstrapping new software. Use Actions to trigger no-code events like API calls, service deploys, or resource provisioning. Need more? Build custom experiences with our flexible Plugin framework.
Completely customizable with plugins
Bring data from anywhere including internal tools, expose custom metrics like cost insights, and trigger actions like deployments right from the Cortex UI.
Loved by entire engineering teams
Cortex is loved not only by platform engineers but also across the entire engineering organization, including SREs, security engineers, DevOps, infrastructure and platform teams, and leadership.
"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."
"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."
"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.”
FAQs
What are Internal Developer Portals?
Internal Developer Portals (IDPs) are the engineering system of record. They use connection to all tooling to provide golden paths for new software builds, and ensure continuous alignment to standards of excellence.
From services and APIs to Kubernetes clusters and data pipelines—IDPs eliminate “swivel chair” for devs by centralizing the information they need to build, deploy, and maintain healthy software. LetsGetChecked, BigCommerce, and Grammarly see results like decreased incident frequency and duration, and increased in deployment velocity with Cortex's IDP.
What does Cortex do that my existing tool stack can’t?
You have lots of tools for developing software, and likely many more to ensure the health of that software. But despite having an abundance of data, it’s harder than ever to answer questions that require inputs from multiple sources—including who owns what, what it’s made of, and what needs to happen to ensure alignment to standards of readiness and excellence. This has led to longer ramp time, slower deployments, and more incidents that take longer to resolve. Cortex unites data from all of your existing tools to:
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Reduce time-to-find in onboarding as well as development and trouble-shooting
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Ensure alignment to standards of excellence, and accelerate initiatives of quality and consistency
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Abstract away effort once spent gathering context, searching for standards, and waiting in approval queues
To learn more about how an IDP can help your team, take a look at our blog post: What is an Internal Developer Portal?
How does Cortex solve software ownership?
Cortex’s fully custom software catalogs connect to identity providers like Okta, Google, and Workday to automatically track software ownership through team, title, and personnel changes. No more orphaned software means software stays in alignment with standards you define.
To learn more about driving software ownership at your organization, check out this blog.
How does Cortex help with production readiness?
Cortex draws on data from all of your connected tools to drive alignment to any standard of production readiness you define. Set owners and SLOs, require runbooks and rollback plans, create caps for maximum vulnerabilities or tickets, or ensure connection to the latest code coverage and observability tools—all in one place. Turn standards into templates and workflows that make it easy to build and quick to deploy production ready software. And when code is updated, ownership changes, new tools are adopted, or old packages hit end-of-life, auto-alert owners of action needed to bring software back into alignment.
To see this firsthand, check out the Cortex Production Readiness Tour!
How does Cortex help improve developer productivity?
By centralizing the tools, templates, and tasks developers need to build healthy software, Cortex reduces context switching across applications, and eliminates rote work. Reduce time-to-find when onboarding or during an incident by automatically surfacing all relevant context from tools like Pagerduty, Git, Jira—or even homegrown sources and tools. Reduce fire drills with always-on standards of excellence that make it easy for devs to keep software perpetually secure and reliable. And get devs out of approval queues for common tasks like secrets allocation and service deployment.
To track how software health impacts productivity take a tour of our Eng Intelligence solution, or check out this blog.
How is Cortex different from Backstage?
Backstage is a framework for building internal developer portals. As such, It requires dedicated resources to stand up, build and test integrations/plugins, and support engineers through troubleshooting and use case expansion.
Cortex is a SaaS IDP with 50+ pre-built integrations, the ability to overlay custom and continuous software scoring, self-service actions, and a mechanism for alerting when software requires attention—all things you need to increase adoption and reduce maintenance time. Plus, you can customize your experience with our industry-first plugin framework.
If you're trying to avoid pulling engineers away from their core work, but still looking for the same flexibility, Cortex's Internal Developer Portal is where you should start. For more details, check out our Cortex vs Backstage comparison page.
