Cortex vs. Port: Which is right for you?

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.

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With Cortex, it’s easy to catalog anything. Create any catalog category, and tag it to any type, bring in any entity type along with their characteristics, and group any type of entity into the master navigation category of your choosing.

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Additionally, with the Cortex plugin framework plus UI customization, users can:

• Bring data from anywhere including homegrown tools or databases to ensure a comprehensive system of record
• Expose custom metrics like cost insights or security posture
• Reduce “clicks to value” with shortcuts to adjacent systems. e.g. deploy to Jenkins from the Cortex UI
• Customize the Cortex UI to match workflows from other tools your devs love. Embed plugin widgets on the homepage, catalog entity pages, or sidebar navigation, and change the order of existing tabs

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Cortex provides baseline scaffolding to help you avoid rewriting data relationships that you’ve already defined elsewhere. We rely on deep integrations that pull in the info you need, but still let you configure it however you want. Plus, plugins let you add data from any source, and build new embeddable experiences.

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You can define any entity in Cortex. The difference is logical hierarchies which make working with data and understanding dependencies much easier. Port doesn’t have a “core primitive“ like Cortex (services and resources) which means everything is treated equally—causing a lot of clutter in your model, slowing next steps.

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When it comes to mapping data, Cortex has already done that work for 50+ integrations. For example, Cortex knows what SonarQube is, what fields matter during incident management, and how this data relates to other data in your ecosystem. And, if you don’t like how we’ve mapped it, you can build a plugin for any use case and define everything yourself.

Cortex integrations are built and maintained by Cortex and are core to the product. Port relies on the external “Ocean Framework” to push data into the catalog. Beyond it being your responsibility to manage those integrations, there is no real-time data interaction, preventing live querying, dynamic data interactions, and real-time reporting. Whether Cortex runs a particular scorecard every 4 hours or you come in and request an update, Cortex fetches real-time data through the APIs.

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The data in Port only includes what the Ocean framework has pushed, so it’s only as recent as the last time Ocean pulled and pushed the data.

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For example: The Ocean Framework might collect data about incidents from a system like PagerDuty, but only during its scheduled runs. If an incident is resolved or escalated in between these runs, the updated status wouldn't be immediately available in Port, potentially leading to delays in response or redundant actions.

Cortex offers 50+ out-of-the-box, rich integrations that span your development ecosystem, so you can easily connect and analyze all your data - all in one place. Cortex has pre-built and managed integrations with Datadog, Pagerduty, AWS, Jira, GitHub, Okta, ServiceNow, and much, much more.

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View all integrations we have today, and if you’d like to connect to a homegrown tool, you can leverage the Cortex plugin framework.

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Cortex plugins provide a versatile way to bring in data from different sources, whether it’s from your own systems or external integrations. Plugins allow you to expand the platform’s capabilities, consolidate vital information, and personalize the user interface to better suit your team’s workflows. With Cortex plugins, you can create a cohesive system of record, improving efficiency and usability for your developers without having to switch between multiple tools.

Cortex offers a scaffolder to help developers bootstrap new entities quickly and in line with established best practice, which allows developers to self-serve and reduces time to code. Beyond scaffolder, Cortex also provides a unique developer homepage, pulling all of your data into a single place so developers can quickly assess where to invest their time. Assign action items to priority Initiatives in Cortex, so devs know exactly what to do and when to meet their company’s ever-evolving standards of service maturity and security.

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With Cortex, devs can self-serve with  centralized critical info from favorite tools, they see prioritized action items by severity and impact, and they can deploy via golden paths with custom templates. And, devs can build and execute sophisticated, multi-step workflows inside of Cortex, that are based on all of the contextual information that lives inside your workspace.

Cortex is typically more expensive than Port. Here’s why:

• Fast ramp: 50+ out-of-the-box integrations and auto-discovery means faster setup and time to value for the most foundational part of an IDP—your catalog, with the ability to catalog anything, and customize based on your unique business needs.
• Less overhead and maintenance: Maintaining all integrations with Port’s Ocean Framework requires internal resources and support. Cortex integrations are core to the product, so when an integration requires an update, we manage that for you. Beyond integrations, out-of-the-box cataloging, scorecards, initiatives, and more, mean you can do more with less resources.
• Greater functionality:  Cortex has far greater functionality in many areas of the platform. For example,
  • Live querying, dynamic data interactions, and real-time reporting
  • Continuous monitoring Scorecards topped by an Initiatives & Notifications framework to drive action against short and long-term projects
  • The ability to build and execute sophisticated workflows inside of Cortex, that are based on all of the contextual information that lives inside your workspace
• More tools for developer productivity: Developers love Cortex for information discovery, onboarding, self-services, software scaffolding, and more.
  • Centralized data: 50+ integrations feed live catalogs, and devs can use Cortex Query Language to quickly answer questions like “what’s the full event history of this API?” or, “Which of my services are using a deprecated package?”
  • Self-serve actions: Workflows make it easy for devs to build and deploy using pre-approved templates, boilerplate code, and one-click actions. No more waiting on multi-week approvals.
  • On-call assistant: Devs can view prioritized tasks in their Dev Homepage, or get Slack/Teams alerts that package up all of the incident context they need to act fast.
• Proven: Over 40 of our recent customers evaluated Port and still chose Cortex. We work with a significant number of public companies like Workday, Xero, Adobe, Confluent, SoFi, and more. We have successfully deployed Cortex for 100+ enterprise customers. Port has a significantly smaller post-sales team and engineering team than Cortex.
• Long-term success: The developer portal you pick is going to be part of your system for the next 10+ years of your engineering team. Cortex is the only IDP that has raised their series B (over $50M total raised from sequoia, IVP, ycombinator). Port has only raised their series A. The funding market has significantly changed in recent months, and most companies have been failing to raise additional rounds of funding. It's an extremely risky bet to take a chance on a Series A company, especially on a product that you are going to place in the center of your engineering systems.

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At Cortex, we view Port similarly to open-source IDPs (like Backstage), which are frameworks to begin building an IDP, and require significant internal resources and support, with major gaps in functionality—like scorecards, live-data interaction, and chained actions—which we believe are core tenets of a true internal developer portal that your organization will rely on for years to come.