Catalog

Most Internal Developer Portals force your teams to work around rigid schemas or invest months in customization. What if your IDP finally adapted to your unique engineering reality instead of the other way around?

See how to build customized integrations with YAML & jq.

As modern engineering organizations scale, keeping an accurate inventory of every service, tool, and dependency is critical for reliability, compliance, and speed. Automated software cataloging with a platform like OpsLevel helps teams maintain a single source of truth and reduce manual overhead.

As engineering organizations scale, developers waste valuable hours hunting through scattered tools, docs, and dashboards—internal developer portals solve this by bringing service catalogs, workflows, and live data into a single, self-service home base.

There’s been a notable uptick in engineering teams' adoption of Internal Developer Portals (IDPs) to streamline developer workflows, manage services, and enforce software standards. Two popular options, Cortex and Backstage, offer intriguing approaches to solving these challenges. But as many teams discover, the complexity and limitations of these platforms can outweigh their benefits, especially when scalability, flexibility, and speed are priorities. That’s where OpsLevel comes in. In this article, we’ll explore the pros and cons of Cortex and Backstage, and explain why OpsLevel is the best alternative for engineering teams that want to move quickly, maintain high standards, and minimize operational overhead.

OpsLevel's AI-powered developer portal unlocks unparalleled team velocity by transforming messy knowledge into actionable insights and real-time context, revolutionizing how you build and ship software.

AI is writing your code; are you ready?

Get a quick look at how OpsLevel works.

Evaluating developer portals? See how the top 4 Backstage alternatives stack up in terms of setup, extensibility, service catalogs, and team adoption.