OpsLevel vs. Cortex: What’s the best internal developer portal?

Automated Software Catalog vs. Manual Overhead

Cortex: A Manual Process

One of the primary pain points with Cortex is the manual effort required to maintain its catalog. While Cortex offers integrations, it relies heavily on webhook-based connections that often require developers to manually configure and update services. This process introduces operational overhead and increases the risk of out-of-date information across your catalog.

Organizations using Cortex report that keeping their service catalog current often demands significant hands-on involvement, slowing down operations and making it harder to trust the accuracy of their service data.

OpsLevel: Fully Automated Catalog Maintenance

OpsLevel, by contrast, automates the entire process of software discovery and catalog maintenance. With OpsLevel, software components are detected automatically from repositories, CI/CD pipelines, and other integrations, ensuring your catalog is always up to date without manual intervention. This reduces the operational burden on your engineering team and provides accurate, real-time visibility into your service ecosystem.

OpsLevel’s approach is especially beneficial for fast-moving organizations where components are frequently created, updated, or deprecated. By automating catalog updates, OpsLevel allows developers to focus on building and maintaining their services, rather than spending time on administrative tasks.

Standards Enforcement: Flexibility vs. Limitations

Cortex: Rigid, Undifferentiated Scorecards

Cortex offers scorecards as a way to enforce standards across services, but the lack of flexibility is a significant drawback. Every scorecard in Cortex applies the same baseline standards to all services, with no real ability to tailor these standards based on service maturity or criticality. 

This “one-size-fits-all” approach can quickly lead to frustration, as different teams and services often require standards that reflect their unique needs.

Initiative Creation

In Cortex, initiatives must be based on a single selected scorecard, restricting teams from creating broader, multi-faceted initiatives with flexibility.

Limited Context

Cortex initiatives lack the ability to share any additional context beyond the name—unlike OpsLevel, which provides a project brief section for detailed context to help teams stay aligned.

Restricted Notifications

Cortex notifies entity owners only through the Cortex Developer Homepage. In contrast, OpsLevel enables notifications to impact owners via Slack or email, with options for customized reminders to ensure critical updates reach the right people.

Immediate Start Date

Cortex’s initiatives take effect immediately upon saving, with no option to set a future start date, limiting teams’ ability to plan or phase in new standards effectively.

OpsLevel: Tailored Standards for Every Software Component

OpsLevel’s scorecards offer far more customization and flexibility. With OpsLevel, you can create scoped scorecards that apply different rules and checks based on software maturity, criticality, or the needs of specific teams. This granular control allows organizations to enforce the right standards for each service, whether it’s a production-critical application or an internal development tool.

OpsLevel also supports custom campaigns that go beyond scorecards, allowing you to drive specific initiatives—such as improving security posture or migrating services to newer technologies—across your entire organization or a targeted subset of components. These campaigns come with built-in notifications, reminders, and reporting, making it easier to ensure compliance and track progress.

Implementation Speed: Fast Setup vs. Lengthy Rollout

Cortex: Long Implementation Timelines

Organizations looking to implement Cortex often face a long and complex setup process. Full deployments can take six months or longer, with significant engineering resources required to configure the catalog, set up integrations, and establish scorecards. This lengthy timeline can delay time to value, particularly for teams that need to improve visibility and enforce standards quickly.

OpsLevel: Up and Running in Weeks

OpsLevel, on the other hand, prides itself on being fast and easy to implement. Most OpsLevel customers are fully deployed within 30 to 45 days, thanks to the platform’s streamlined setup process and automated cataloging features. This means you can start realizing value from OpsLevel in a fraction of the time it would take to implement Cortex, giving your teams faster access to improved visibility and better standards enforcement.

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OpsLevel’s intuitive user interface and comprehensive onboarding support further reduce the time and effort needed to get started. For organizations that need quick wins, OpsLevel offers a far more efficient path to implementation and value.

Cost-Effectiveness: Value for Investment

Cortex: High Costs and Ongoing Maintenance

Cortex’s pricing can be a barrier for many organizations, especially as its costs are compounded by the manual effort required for ongoing maintenance. Keeping the catalog up to date, configuring webhook integrations, and managing scorecards all add to the total cost of ownership (TCO), making Cortex an expensive option for teams that need flexibility and efficiency.

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OpsLevel: Competitive Pricing Without Cutting Corners

OpsLevel provides better value for investment, thanks to its automated features and lower operational overhead. By reducing manual tasks like catalog maintenance and scorecard configuration, OpsLevel lowers TCO while still offering powerful features like customizable standards enforcement, deep reporting, and built-in notifications.

OpsLevel’s pricing is designed to be more accessible (nearly half the price of Cortex), particularly for mid-sized organizations and growing engineering teams that need to scale without being weighed down by excessive costs.

Developer Adoption: Engagement and Ease of Use

Cortex: Adoption Challenges

Cortex offers several developer-focused features, such as targeted alerts and service health metrics, but the platform’s complexity can hinder adoption. The manual processes required for catalog updates and the rigid scorecards can create friction for developers, leading to lower engagement.

Cortex forces you into rigid, binary choices that can increase developer toil, especially when it comes to managing configurations:

YAML or UI

When creating or updating entities in Cortex, it’s all or nothing: either you’re locked into the UI, requiring field-by-field updates, or committed to managing everything in YAML. OpsLevel, on the other hand, offers flexibility—you can work across both UI and YAML, editing specific fields wherever it makes the most sense, without the hassle of rigid limitations.

Scorecards as Code? Not Quite

Cortex promotes “scorecards as code” but with a major caveat: enabling code-based scorecards means disabling the Scorecard UI editor across the entire workspace. This lack of flexibility can be restrictive, as it forces teams into a one-size-fits-all approach to scorecard management, reducing productivity and adaptability. (ref)

Exemptions: All-or-Nothing

While Cortex allows users to request exemptions to scorecard rules, these requests apply to the entire scorecard, enabling exemptions for any rule within it, rather than allowing nuanced, rule-specific requests. To make matters more complicated, exemption requests are sent to administrators, rather than to the specific team or group responsible for the rule, which adds unnecessary friction and delays for developers seeking targeted exceptions.

OpsLevel: Intuitive and Developer-Friendly

OpsLevel is designed with developer adoption in mind. By automating catalog updates and providing intuitive, customizable scorecards, OpsLevel reduces the friction that typically hampers developer engagement. The platform integrates seamlessly with tools developers already use, such as GitHub, GitLab, and CI/CD pipelines, making it easy for them to stay on top of their software standards and production readiness.

Additionally, OpsLevel’s self-service capabilities like Actions and Component Templates empower developers to take control of their own services, improving productivity and autonomy while reducing the burden on operations teams.

Why OpsLevel is the Better Choice

While Cortex offers some useful features for managing service catalogs and enforcing standards, its limitations—particularly around manual processes, rigid scorecards, and high costs—make it a less efficient choice for many organizations. 

OpsLevel, with its automated catalog maintenance, flexible scorecards, and faster implementation, provides a more scalable, cost-effective solution for engineering teams looking to streamline their software ownership.

If you’re ready to experience a faster, smarter way to manage your software and enforce standards, schedule a demo with OpsLevel today and see how our internal developer portal can help your teams succeed.