This guide was last updated on June 2, 2025.

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Cortex vs OpsLevel

In-depth comparison

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

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Comparison logo

Cortex vs OpsLevel:
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.

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  • Cortex starts the IDP journey with ownership – clear ownership and accountability is the foundation for a successful IDP.

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  • OpsLevel also emphasizes ownership, but lacks depth – for example, it doesn’t support automatic reassignment for orphaned services, and uses a simple recent-contributor heuristic (this heuristic, in our own testing, maxes out at <50% accuracy, versus our AI approach which is >90% accurate).

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  • Cortex is opinionated, yet flexible – sane defaults, but change them when you need to.

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  • OpsLevel offers many integrations, but most rely on user‑hosted webhooks rather than first‑party adapters.

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  • Cortex is focused on driving holistic Engineering Excellence, from reliability Scorecards to developer self service to productivity, serving SREs, platform engineers, developers, and engineering leaders.

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  • OpsLevel focuses on catalog visibility, maturity checks and campaign management.

Build your IDP 
with Cortex

See why Canva, Skyscanner, EarnIn, and more companies chose Cortex over OpsLevel

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Dive deeper

Compare the journey of building an IDP

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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
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Catalog services & infrastructure

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Define relationships graph

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Model your engineering data ecosystem (like product areas, systems, lines of business, etc)

TL;DR

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Both Cortex and OpsLevel provide a flexible entity data model. Cortex supports over 50+ native, fully‑managed integrations. OpsLevel offers many connectors, but most are webhook or API driven and require customer maintenance. Cortex supports more complex relationship schemas in the data model.

Full comparison
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Vendor supported Integrations

YES

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.

YES

Mostly vendor supported, but may need to set up your own webhooks and triggers.

Push, polling, or webhook based model that syncs data into OpsLevel – potentially out of date information for monitors, on-call, vulnerabilities, etc depending on webhook support or sync cadence.

Data import

YES

UI import, or automated based on your configuration.

YES

UI import, or automated based on your configuration.

Performance and scale

YES

Can handle hundreds of thousands of entities

We handle third party rate limits with self-throttling, caching, eTag handling, and more.

NO

Large organizations must shard webhook traffic manually.

There is no documented rate-limit handling.

Custom entity types and properties

YES
YES

Custom relationships (basic) to relate entities to each other

YES
YES

Complex relationships including hierarchical and recursive (like an org chart)

YES

Full control over the relationship cardinality and shape (cyclic or acyclic). Supported in reports with multi-level drilldowns.

PARTIAL

Supports parent-child relationships but does not offer recursive graph validation – could lead to cyclic data issues without validation. Recursive or 1/n-to-many relationships (like org charts) not supported in reports, only support filtering.

GitOps, UI, and Terraform

YES
YES
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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
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Reflect your teams & members accurately

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Define org chart hierarchy, from VP -> Directors -> Managers -> ICs

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Define ownership across all software assets – from services to repos to infrastructure and more

TL;DR

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Both Cortex and OpsLevel 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. OpsLevel suggests ownership based on recent git contributors, potentially leading to mis-assigned ownership. OpsLevel can model team hierarchies but has limited fallback logic.

Full comparison
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Automatically sync teams and team members from source of truth

YES

Sync from Workday, Okta, Google Groups, Entra, GitHub, and more

PARTIAL

Only syncs GitHub teams. 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)

YES

Automatically synced from Workday, and supported natively in the team catalog.

PARTIAL

Can model an org chart, but must be done manually and cannot be used in reporting for multi-level drilldowns, only in filtering.

Fallback ownership for orphaned services

YES

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.

PARTIAL

OpsLevel can detect unowned services and will suggest who might own it based on recent commit information but does not auto‑reassign or inherit ownership.

Orphaned entities report

YES

Built into the Executive Report.

PARTIAL

Requires a custom check for ownership and doesn’t handle inherited ownership.

Manually define teams and memberships

YES
YES

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

YES

Native capability and user properties are used to send notifications, compute productivity metrics, and more

PARTIAL

Slack & Git profiles are integrable, but mappings are not automatically unified for analytics.

✨AI predictions for ownership

YES

Using AI & ML to predict ownership of repositories with over 90% accuracy.

PARTIAL

Recommends owners based on top 3 recent committers; Recommendations are not powered by AI, leading to low accuracy varies.

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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
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Build a Scorecard that combines data from third party and internal tools

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Enable stakeholders, like SRE and Security, to build their own Scorecards

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Provide leadership with actionable, tailored reports

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Notify and nudge users and teams to take action

TL;DR

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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. OpsLevel’s Rubrics and Checks have few native integrations (relying instead on webhook payloads), support JQ but lack further complex data processing, and don’t provide key features like rule exemptions or drill-down reports.

Full comparison
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Support for user-defined rules in a Scorecard

YES
YES

Ability to create Scorecards based on third party integration data

YES
PARTIAL

Few native third party integrations available in checks, without using webhook payloads.

This means a rule like “How many of the last 30 commits didn’t contain a JIRA ID” isn’t possible in OpsLevel without building your own data ingestion pipeline.

Custom data

YES

Supports JQ for additional parsing within Scorecard rules.

YES

Supports “Custom event” checks with JQ

Config as code / GitOps

YES

YAML/JSON

YES

YAML/Terraform provider

Declarative language for rules within a Scorecard

YES

Turing complete, with complex filtering, conditionals, JQ, and more.

PARTIAL

Supports JQ and operators like =, !=, contains, startsWith, etc in certain types of checks. Does not support nested scopes.

UI-based Scorecard rule builder for non-technical users

YES
YES

Complex conditionals & logic in Scorecard evaluations

YES

CQL is turing complete.

PARTIAL

Supports JQ in some Check contexts

Allow users to request exemptions for specific rules

YES
NO

Exemptions must be modeled externally and hardcoded in a Check filter.

Reports for engineering leaders, with multi-dimensional rollups

YES
PARTIAL

Supports component maturity and check reports. Limited cross-dimension and drill-down support. For example, you cannot roll up maturity at the VP level, then drill down through Directors, Managers, and so on.

Notifications for individuals and teams

YES

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.

PARTIAL

OpsLevel provides Slack and email notifications on level changes. OpsLevel does not support automatic per service digests.

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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
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Collect user inputs

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Coordinate with internal and external systems

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Collect necessary approvals

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Run code scaffolding for new services or terraform

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Handle edge cases and multiple user journeys

TL;DR

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Cortex provides a full workflow engine for multi-step self-serve workflows with conditional branching, API calls, out-of-the-box actions, and more. OpsLevel treats code scaffolding and self-service actions as two separate features, limiting the types of self-serve experiences you can provide. OpsLevel’s Actions feature supports only single API calls and expects you to offload all complexity to your own backend.

Full comparison
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Form builder to collect user inputs

YES
YES

Dynamically update user input forms based on previous data

YES

Dynamically generate inputs based on responses from API calls, previous context, user inputs, or even in-line JavaScript code.

PARTIAL

Fields can depend on each other (ie show one field if a different field is set).

Cannot dynamically generate inputs based on API calls to other systems.

Make API calls to internal or external systems, using a broker when necessary

YES
PARTIAL

One call allowed per action, all complex logic must live outside of the action.

Pause self-service action for approval by individuals

YES

Supports multiple approvers, conditionally based on the self service flow.

PARTIAL

No built-in approval step for scaffolding. Single team and user approvals for Actions.

Advanced, multi-step self service experiences

YES

Workflow engine supports orchestrating across multiple tools, conditional branching, JavaScript support

NO

Actions are a single step – cannot encode logic or call multiple systems.

Out-of-the-box steps to call third party integrations

YES

Over 200 out of the box steps for actions from Git, CI, ServiceNow, PagerDuty, and more that use your existing connected integrations.

NO

Native code scaffolder for service bootstrapping

YES
YES

Inline code execution for complex logic

YES

Sandboxed JavaScript can be run in-line in a self-service workflow.

NO
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Step 5

Extend the IDP and make it your own

Why it matters

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.

Requirements
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Ingest data from custom sources

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Consume data from the API, including Scorecards

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Build custom UI plugins to reduce tool spraw

TL;DR

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Cortex supports custom plugins with React, similar to Backstage. OpsLevel provides widgets and custom layouts in-app. Cortex and OpsLevel both support ingesting data from homegrown tools.

Full comparison
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Standard framework to ingest data from custom sources

YES
PARTIAL

Custom integrations API & CLI, but no framework for managing cron data ingestion jobs

API for CRUD operations including Catalog and Scorecards

YES
YES

Build custom plugins for the UI

YES
NO

Widget-based layouts and pages

PARTIAL
YES

No plugins which limits the extent of customization, but supports custom page layouts with native widgets for certain pages, like the user dashboard.

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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
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Create an initiative with a deadline based on your Scorecard

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Create items in issue management system

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Send notifications and reminders to ensure completion

TL;DR

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Cortex helps you drive org-wide initiatives with deadlines, reminders, and ticket management. Cortex automates ticket creation and closure. OpsLevel also supports campaigns with notifications but ticket management is not automated.

Full comparison
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Define requirement-scoped initiative with a clear deadline

YES
YES

Send notifications and reminders to ensure completion

YES
YES

Create backlog items and auto-close when completed

YES

Automatically create tickets in JIRA, ClickUp, and more and place them in the appropriate team’s backlog.

PARTIAL

Automatically create tickets in Jira. Tickets are not automatically updated based on campaign progress.

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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
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Visualize engineering metrics, including productivity and DORA

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Drill down into metrics across multiple dimensions (org chart, product, system, etc)

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Handle mapping of identities across multiple systems (git, on-call, project management, etc)

TL;DR

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Cortex provides a full fledged Software Engineering Intelligence platform natively, including velocity, incident, and issue related metrics. OpsLevel 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
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Out of the box dashboards

YES

Cortex automatically calculates and tracks velocity, incidents, issue, deploy, and other metrics.

NO

OpsLevel does not provide an SEI platform.

Roll up metrics in multiple dimensions, such as developer seniority

YES
NO

Roll up metrics across the org chart

YES

Supports complex organizational structures

NO

Custom metrics

YES

Supports timeseries data ingestion, as well as CQL based queries to generate timeseries metrics based on catalog data.

NO

Map users across multiple systems for metrics tracking

YES

A single user can be mapped to their representations across VCS, Issue tracking, and more.

NO
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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
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Use your IDP in core meetings, like operational excellence reviews and quarterly planning.

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Show users clear benefits through self-service, improved initiative tracking, and more.

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Drive adoption across your organizations.

TL;DR

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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.

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

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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

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

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

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

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

Amanda Jackson

Technical Program Manager, Rapid7

Begin your Engineering Excellence journey today