What is a developer portal and why do you need one?

Editor’s note: This post was updated on 28 March 2025 to address changes in the evolution of internal developer portals. Port updates posts regularly to provide the highest-quality information possible to our readers.

Introduction

If you've heard the term “developer portal” before and wondered what all the fuss was about, this article is for you. As the co-founder and CEO of Port, I’m here to run you through everything you need to know about internal developer portals and why you’ll need one as software engineering becomes more complex.

What is a developer portal?

An internal developer portal is the platform engineer’s response to the increasing complexity of software architectures and delivery. Internal developer portals initially emerged to improve developer experience by giving devs easy access to the tools they need without the constant need to context-switch. 

There are as many use cases for the portal as you can count steps in software development. But the foundation of the portal is the software catalog, which enables all users to find services, service owners, environments, dependencies, and more in one place. This makes it easier for developers to get the information they need without having to ask colleagues in DevOps for permissions, defines and keeps them on golden paths through your software development pipeline, and keeps them in the flow state. 

Developers can access the underlying systems through a product-like interface that provides a clear UX, or golden path, through underlying DevOps tools. Using this interface, developers can do things like:

• Spin up new environments
• Request permissions
• Scaffold microservices

Who is an internal developer portal for?

While “developer” is in its name, the developer portal goes far beyond developers. The portal enables:

• SREs to make frameworks to better manage incidents
• Security leaders to keep track of teams that are adhering to security requirements, via scorecards
• Engineering leaders to track DORA metrics, the impact of GenAI usage across teams, and set initiatives for engineers to comply with standards

The internal developer portal is for everyone involved in making quality software. 

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Why do you need a developer portal?

You need an internal developer portal to overcome the complexities of DevOps and assist developers who are juggling many responsibilities that go beyond their core expertise. While DevOps transformed software development for the better, the “you build it, you run it” philosophy introduced new complexities — mainly that developers also had to manage incidents, provision cloud resources, security, compliance, and more, in addition to writing code. 

This shift created a paradox: while DevOps aimed to improve productivity and software quality, the increasing complexity of modern development environments is actually slowing developers down. The challenges manifest in several key ways, according to our 2025 State of Internal Developer Portals report:

• Lower productivity: 78% of engineering teams wait a day or more for SRE and DevOps assistance. TicketOps — approvals and requests — are slowing down the entire software development lifecycle (SDLC).
  
  
• Lack of autonomy and golden paths: Even existing self-service tools (such as CI/CD tools) introduce cognitive load, causing inefficiencies — and that’s perhaps why 94% of developers experience dissatisfaction with the self-service tools they’re currently using.
  
  
• Lack of a central source of truth:
  Many organizations lack an up-to-date repository of metadata related to DevOps and SDLC assets, making it difficult to answer critical questions — such as which production services have security vulnerabilities or are not production-ready. A staggering 50% of engineering teams lack trust in the data quality of their central metadata repository — and only 3% feel like the data that they’re supposed to rely on is completely trustworthy.
  
  
• Lack of clarity and enforcement of standards: Managing distributed services and dependencies in modern architectures like microservices makes it harder to uphold standards in AppSec, cost management, and production readiness. Only 15% of developers say they understand the standards required by different domain owners — meaning there’s a lack of clarity about how standards are defined and enforced.
  
  
• Inefficient onboarding: The growing number of tools and processes a new engineer must learn when joining a team creates a steep learning curve. The average engineering team uses 7.4 tools, with 43% of engineers using 8 or more tools. Challenges with developer onboarding can impact developer experience, deliverability targets, and retention.
  
  
• Incident management complexity: With multiple potential failure points and no streamlined way to diagnose issues, resolving incidents becomes time-consuming and error-prone.

In response to these challenges, companies like Spotify, Netflix, and Lyft pioneered the use of internal developer portals to bring order to their engineering chaos, and sparked a revolution in platform engineering. Having the right internal developer portal that supports and streamlines your existing SDLC enables teams to be productive without being bogged down by complexity, and fosters alignment between developers, platform teams, security, and SREs.

What happens when you don’t have an internal developer portal?

If you work in software engineering, you may not immediately see why or how an internal developer portal can mitigate your frustrations with slow deployments, onboarding bottlenecks, and constant tool-hopping. But some of the biggest time-sinks for developers are finding the right information, getting access to the right tools, and dealing with manual approvals just to get basic work done — 75% of developers lose between 6–15 hours a week to these tasks instead of coding. That’s because they’re juggling an average of seven tools daily.

Without a central hub to provide developers access to all of these tools and information in one place, this time-sink adds up to nearly $1m in lost productivity every year based on data from the US Bureau of Labor Statistics.

Our report also found that 50% of engineers don’t trust the data they’re meant to rely on, and 94% of developers are frustrated with the complexity of their current self-service options. 

Top engineering teams solve these challenges with an internal developer portal — a central hub that streamlines access to tools, documentation and automation, helping developers (and others in the SDLC) move faster with self-service workflows instead of waiting on tickets. Teams can deploy, provision, and troubleshoot faster — without security or compliance risks.

For instance, rather than working through ten steps to scaffold a microservice, a developer uses the portal to easily fill out a self-service form and scaffold the service themselves. A platform engineer, who is responsible for building the portal, has already ensured the form is compliant with organizational standards, eliminating developers’ need to reinvent the wheel, duplicate work, or ask DevOps for assistance. 

Companies using a portal see developers spend more time coding and less time on tedious busywork. It also ensures standards compliance by enforcing compliance checks automatically, and speeds up onboarding by giving devs instant access to what they need. Overall, portals can help reduce costs, improve developer autonomy and efficiency, and increase productivity.

Portals in the real world:

Many Port customers have made productivity improvements and seen cost savings since implementing their developer portals:

• Checkmarx saved hundreds of thousands of dollars by creating and managing developer environments in a portal
• Xceptor increased average customer deployment frequency by 24x, decreased running costs per tenant by 46%, and reduced the time in new tenant/deployment instances from one day to just minutes. 
• Space International saved two hours per day per developer. 

Benefits of an internal developer portal

Working with a developer portal unites many different aspects of your organization into:

• One platform: The portal concentrates the organization's assets and tasks in one place and provides an end-to-end experience for everyone involved in making quality software, thus helping all involved parties to stay on the same page throughout. Imagine a world where the developer only has one tab on their browser — their internal developer portal!
  
  
• One experience: Instead of many DevOps tools and automations, YAML files, and GitOps processes,  developers just access the portal, where all available actions have a similar product-like experience. Platform engineers can bake in custom guardrails inside each self-service action and everything is abstracted away.
  
  
• One source of truth for software and resources: At the heart of the developer portal lies the service catalog, which lists all software, services, cloud environments, dependencies, APIs, and more, and is continuously updated in real time. The portal creates one source of truth, service as the  one place you need to reference to understand the current state of your services and infrastructure.
  
  
• One central repository for DevOps: The previous point means that DevOps too can use the developer portal as their central record for everything — and make changes to those automations simply and easily as needed. This central repository can be used for audits, reporting and scorecards for developer and DevOps metrics, as well as service and infrastructure health monitoring. You can also define and manage RBAC controls from the portal, which makes sharing and provisioning seats in tools easier.
  
  
• Baked-in documentation: A developer portal automatically documents all actions performed within it, thus keeping all company records in an orderly fashion for easy future review and providing a unified place for everyone to learn accurate information about your SDLC.

How to create a developer portal for your team — to Backstage or not to Backstage?

A lot of the momentum behind the interest in platform engineering and internal developer portals comes from Spotify’s Backstage project. Initially, Backstage was a project designed to bring order to engineering infrastructure through the use of an internal developer portal that provides access to DevOps tools, data, microservices, APIs and more. In 2020, Backstage was released under an open source license, and in 2022 it was accepted as an incubating project into the Cloud Native Computing Foundation. 

After you decide to build and adopt an internal developer portal, one of your first decisions will be whether to use Backstage, or not to use Backstage.

There is a strong initial appeal for engineers to use Spotify’s Backstage; the theory is that you can build what you’d like with unlimited customization, and you can do this without significant buy-in required from the VP of engineering or equivalent. But this is a misconception.

Gartner’s own research has found that Backstage requires more time, effort, and development skills than many platform engineering leaders expect.

Backstage requires significant resources — to maintain an on-premise implementation, to develop the plugin architecture, to support self-service actions, to update code when upgrades and updates and breaking changes occur, and to align projects with objectives. This means Backstage’s time-to-value is slower and ROI is lower than commercial portal alternatives.

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Who interacts with a developer portal? 

The portal is initially built by platform engineers for developers, but this is only the start; engineering managers, SREs, security, FinOps teams, and even business users can benefit from an internal developer portal.

Here are how specific roles can benefit from an internal developer portal:

• Platform engineers: Design and maintain the portal's infrastructure, ensuring it meets the organization's engineering standards and supports developer autonomy through self-service capabilities.
  
  Platform engineers will be judged by engineering leaders on areas such as system reliability and performance (including mean time to recovery (MTTR) and mean time between failures (MTBF). Other KPIs may include developer onboarding time, developer productivity (e.g., time to first commit), and developer experience and satisfaction (through NPS, user surveys). They will also be judged on platform (and portal) adoption rate, and the overall efficiency of the software development lifecycle (SDLC). 

An internal developer portal supports platform engineers in meeting and exceeding their targets with performance across all of these metrics and KPIs.

• Developers: Developers are the primary portal users, using self-service actions to do things such as deploying services, accessing resources, and managing configurations, thereby reducing their dependence on other teams. The software catalog supports this further by increasing the visibility of services, APIs, and other resources. Meanwhile, scorecards can help developers to better understand and comply with organizational standards without micromanaging or needing to follow intensive documentation. A portal also supports the developer experience by providing autonomy and keeping developers in a flow state.
  
  
• Engineering managers: Managers need a better view of everything around them to communicate better with everyone else in the SDLC, and to liaise with business leadership. They can use scorecards and dashboards within the portal to monitor compliance with engineering standards, metrics to track team performance, and surveys to query devs and drive continuous improvement initiatives. They can also use these dashboards and information to better translate how engineering affects business outcomes.
  
  
• DevOps engineers: DevOps engineers can make their workflows more efficient by integrating automation and continuous integration/continuous deployment (CI/CD) pipelines within the portal. The reduction in TicketOps practices will also help DevOps to focus on their main priorities.
  
  
• Site reliability engineers (SREs): SREs can use a unified service catalog within the portal to monitor system reliability, manage incidents, and implement reliability improvements, facilitating a shift-left approach. They can also implement frameworks for incident management, making the process seamless for on-call engineers.

Components of a developer portal 

Here are the key components of a developer portal:

• Software catalog: Organizes and reflects the entire SDLC to help developers navigate their tech stack, ownership, and documentation. It streamlines onboarding and incident management, and standardizes workflows.
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• Developer self-service actions: Enables developers to perform tasks without waiting on DevOps or navigating multiple tools. Customizable forms with built-in guardrails simplify workflows, reducing friction and improving efficiency.
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• Scorecards: Assess production readiness, code quality, and compliance. They help organizations define standards, track performance, and drive improvements in developer productivity and security.
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• Insights: Provides real-time engineering metrics, helping teams identify bottlenecks, track adoption, and optimize workflows. Insights drive continuous improvement by turning data into action.
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• Dashboards: Centralized data visualization for engineers and managers. Dashboards integrate relevant scorecards, self-service actions, and priorities, enabling quick decision-making and streamlined operations.
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• Automations: Orchestrate workflows, enforce policies, and minimize manual effort. Automations enhance efficiency by handling repetitive tasks and ensuring reliable alerts and notifications.

Next steps

As platform engineering continues to evolve, companies that implement a well-designed developer portal will significantly improve developer experience, security compliance, and operational performance. The key is to prioritize usability, automation, and a product-driven approach.

At Port, we’re committed to helping teams better understand how they can get the most value out of a portal. Whether you’re just starting or looking to optimize your existing setup, our team is here to support your journey. 

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