Port requires significant internal resources to build and maintain. You have to define everything—from what a service is to what data to pull from every integration. It lacks the basics, like always-up-to-date ownership and scorecards with rolled-up team views, making scorecards useless for leadership. Port claims they are more “flexible.” With Cortex, get both clear, consistent logic and complete flexibility to define things your way.
Port is ‘Open and flexible’? Manually managing every relationship quickly turns into a nightmare of one-off configs and constant upkeep.
Cortex gives you real extensibility—a fully customizable plugin system, internal tool integrations, and Relationship Types that combine crystal-clear logic with total control. No mess, no maintenance hell—just an IDP built to make progress easy.
Without clear ownership, there’s no accountability, no action, and no progress. Port leaves it up to you—manual updates, brittle automations, and inevitable gaps.
Cortex is the only IDP that solves service ownership at the core—automatically syncing from trusted sources. No more guesswork. No more orphaned services. Just clean, reliable ownership you can build on.
Golden paths help devs go fast with your standards baked-in. Port’s workflows are surface-level—no conditional logic, no custom user input, no manual approvals or real orchestration.
Cortex Workflows are powerful and flexible. The Action Library makes it quick and easy to build new workflows. Chain together approvals, branching logic, and cross-tool actions—from scaffolding services to spinning up repos and setting PagerDuty rotations.
You’re building a fragile catalog by hand, and every new integration or change becomes a manual task.
Pre-built catalog with auto discovery. Cortex has already done the work of mapping 50+ integrations, and you can bring in data from anywhere.
Flexible and customizable, but you’re tasked with building and managing.
Configure relationship names and configurations exactly as you want—be it parent/child, dependency, team alignment, or any terminology that fits your domain. Cortex combines structure and flexibility: Clear, consistent relationships—customized to fit your domain.
Touts an ‘unopinionated’ catalog, and ‘bring your own data model’; Like open source IDPs, Port lets you build whatever you want, but also requires you to build everything you want, including entity models already defined elsewhere—which creates inconsistencies.
Cortex’s architecture and logical defaults are built for scale, allowing you to add new components seamlessly without redoing foundational work; more efficient for complex organizations.
Port’s workflows don’t support custom user input, manual approvals, data transformations, and Slack messages.
Cortex lets you orchestrate multiple steps within the platform including provisioning infrastructure and scaffolding new code within the same workflow.
Port is not available on-prem.
Whether you’re heavily regulated today or want to ensure flexibility for future business needs, with SaaS or on-prem, Cortex supports your evolving regulatory requirements.
When pulling custom data into Port, you have to manually define the data model first.
If you need an integration beyond the 50+ Cortex provides out-of-the-box, you can easily extend the metadata using custom data.
Able to make queries across your architecture, but results from multiple integration points will not be live. Port is not able to do live queries such as arbitrary JQL queries in Jira, or a file contents search in your git provider, because the data isn’t live.
Able to make live queries across your architecture. Ask questions, measure performance, and explore your software ecosystem in a matter of seconds. Cortex is the only IDP that enables multi-source querying with Cortex Query Language (CQL).
Plugins let you build apps that can be embedded in the Cortex UI and fed from any data source, including homegrown solutions, to bring everything developers need all into one place.
Cortex is the only IDP that solves service ownership—the foundation of an effective IDP.
Ownership drives accountability, and is the foundation for making progress against your goals. If ownership isn’t always-on and up-to-date, detected vulnerabilities don’t route to the right teams, incidents impact downstream services, and progress against goals takes longer than it should.
Port's approach to ownership:
Requires that you manage teams manually in Port—meaning it will almost certainly fall out of date.
“Automatic creation of teams” isn’t quite true... Port uses OIDC which is the protocol Cortex uses for SSO (login). This protocol only gives you the teams that a user is a part of as of the time of login. To get the full org, each person needs to log in once. And if someone leaves the company, you’re left with no visibility and orphaned services.
Port has no concept of hierarchies, so leadership cannot view or leverage team rollups in reporting.
Cortex syncs teams and membership automatically from your source of truth. This is usually an Identity Provider (Okta, Azure Active Directory, Google Groups), HRIS (BambooHR, Workday), or eng platform of some sort (GitHub teams, Opsgenie teams). The result? Ownership is always-on and up-to-date.
And, Cortex is the only IDP with Service Ownership Predictions—a service ownership prediction model that quickly identifies who owns what across your organization.
