While Port claims quick time-to-value, it’s typically limited to small segments of an organization sharing the same data model. In contrast, Cortex’s foundational differences in architecture, data integration, and platform extensibility enable a much broader and faster time-to-value across the entire organization.
Port’s “flexibility” requires you to build and manage every aspect, including entity models already defined elsewhere—leading to inconsistencies.
Cortex offers flexibility and customization with smart defaults for scalable, long-term use. Customize your UI, use plugins to tailor the developer experience, integrate data from any source, create new embeddable experiences, and track custom metrics.
While Port has recently announced a handful of beta ‘hosted integrations,’ those hosted integrations do not support live events. Only select integrations support live events, and your team is tasked with managing those integrations.
Cortex has 50+ integrations with auto-discovery are built and maintained by Cortex and are core to the product, with real-time data fetched through APIs.
Port lacks enterprise-grade functionality in many areas of the platform. For example, there's no scorecard builder for business users, no ability to manage rate limits across integrations, and no ability to filter metrics by group or teams.
Cortex was built to support the most complex customer environments. We are the most established player in the space, currently trusted by 100+ organizations like Adobe, Confluent, Docker, and SoFi.
Pre-built catalog with auto discovery.
Flexible and customizable, but you’re tasked with building and managing. ”Widgets” are limited to Port’s short list of visualization types.
Flexible and customizable, but with logical defaults for long-term scalability. UI Customization + plugins to customize your dev experience, bring in data from any source, build new embeddable experiences, and expose custom metrics.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
