Over the past few years, we’ve seen Internal Developer Portals (IDPs) gain traction in many of the most forward thinking engineering organizations, appearing on Gartner’s famous Hype Cycle for Emerging Technologies in 2024. These portals serve as centralized hubs for engineering teams to collaborate more effectively, streamline workflows, and manage the complexity that naturally arises as teams and services grow.

But what exactly is an Internal Developer Portal? Why has it become so popular? And how do you know if your organization needs one?

What Is an Internal Developer Portal?

At its core, an Internal Developer Portal acts as the single source of truth for your engineering teams. Much like Salesforce became the central place for sales teams to manage their sales activities, contacts, and deals, an Internal Developer Portal acts as a one-stop shop for documentation, best practices, code repositories, microservice catalogs, and basic self-service.

As engineering teams grow, they accumulate a mix of homegrown tools, documentation sites, spreadsheets, and tribal knowledge. Over time, these disparate systems make it difficult for developers to find what they need, resulting in slower onboarding, duplicated efforts, and siloed knowledge. And as teams scale, these pains grow into critical points of failure for business, leading to higher incident rates, missed deadlines, and slower time to market.

Internal Developer Portals emerged to solve these pain points by:

1. Centralizing information: Bringing all the relevant docs, service details and owners, and runbooks into one place.

2. Ensuring discoverability: Making it easier for dev teams to locate existing services and code, preventing rework.

3. Enabling self-service: Letting teams perform common tasks (like spinning up a new service) without waiting on bottlenecks.

How is it different from an Internal Developer Platform?

In conversations about Internal Developer Portals, you’ll often hear mention of Internal Developer Platforms. While they may sound similar, there’s a key distinction:

Internal Developer Platforms provide a layer of abstraction and automation on top of existing infrastructure operations. They offer everything an engineering team needs to deploy, manage, and maintain applications without having to dive into the operational complexities. This setup empowers development teams to self-serve all the resources they need, like CI/CD pipelines, testing environments, observability tools, and more, without having to go through an ops bottleneck.

Internal Developer Portals provide a surface that centralizes services, documentation, and technologies, making them easily discoverable. The main goal is to provide teams with better visibility and a single interface to access the resources they need. In many organizations, the portal is the main entry point through which developers interact with the underlying platform.

In practice, however, we’ve seen the lines between portal and platform blur. For example, some portal products are starting to incorporate more expansive self-service actions (like deploying a new microservice from a template), edging closer to platform functionalities. And some platform products like Tempest might build in portal features so teams can get both the platform and portal benefits in one solution.

If you want to learn more about the benefits of a platform and how to find the best solution for your organization, check out our 2025 Platform Buyers Guide.

Benefits of an Internal Developer Portal

An Internal Developer Portal solves a range of issues that arise as engineering organizations scale. Here are some of the main benefits:

1. Centralized Discovery

   All critical information related to your software, including documentation, tooling, and services, live in one place, cutting down on search time.
   
   

2. Faster Onboarding

   New hires can quickly familiarize themselves with the organization’s services, workflows, and owners, reducing the ramp-up period.
   
   

3. Reduced Knowledge Silos

   Portals break down communication barriers by making cross-team knowledge accessible and transparent, enabling more effective collaboration.
   
   

4. Improved Developer Productivity

   Engineers can self-serve common tasks, reducing wait times for approvals or technical guidance. This boosts overall velocity and keeps projects moving.
   
   

5. Enhanced Service Governance

   A portal provides visibility into what’s running, who owns it, and its status. This makes compliance, auditing, and incident management more manageable.
   
   

6. Culture of Improvement

   Portals help cultivate a culture of improvement by giving a means to benchmark and measure service health against standards and proactively address any issues before they become incidents.

When do you need an Internal Developer Portal?

While there’s no hard and fast rule for when an organization should invest in an Internal Developer Portal, certain signs can indicate that its time to explore options.

For example, engineering organizations start to see communication issues or duplication of efforts when they cross 50 or more developers. At around 100 microservices, keeping track of everything in individual spreadsheets or wiki pages become unwieldy and information starts to go outdated faster than a single person or team can keep them updated. This gets even further exacerbated when teams are distributed across offices, product areas, or time zones.

Typically, missed deadlines, dropping velocity, and higher incident rates with slower resolution times are key symptoms that it might be time to look for a Developer Portal solution.

And while these problems become more pressing the larger an engineering organization is, even smaller teams can benefit from setting up good service hygiene early. Out-of-the-box portals that are free (or low-cost) to set up—like Tempest’s free tier—allow you to implement a centralized hub without the overhead of maintaining a separate platform or portal team.

When should I build vs. buy a Developer Portal?

Organizations today have more choices than ever when it comes to finding an Internal Developer Portal that works for them. While open-source projects like Backstage (pioneered by Spotify) offer a robust starting point to build upon, commercial platforms like Tempest or Opslevel provide out-of-the-box functionality with dedicated support.

When to Build

1. Specific Customization Requirements: If your organization requires unique workflows, integrations, or compliance constraints, building atop an open-source framework gives you total control. You can tailor every aspect of the portal to match your internal processes, and change it on your own team’s timeline.

2. Engineering Bandwidth and Expertise: Creating and maintaining a homegrown portal demands dedicated resources with specific skillsets. For example, to build Backstage, your team needs to have Typescript experience. Building your developer portal could be the right choice if you have the time to invest and a team with the required skill set.

When to Buy

1. Faster Time to Value: If having your portal up and running is a pressing need and your organization doesn’t have the time to invest, a full-featured off-the-shelf solution could help teams realize benefits within weeks, rather than months or years, of development.

2. Reduced Maintenance Overhead: Commercial portals handle bug fixes, security patches, and feature updates as part of their offering. You can free up your engineering teams to focus on product innovations instead of portal upkeep.

3. Built-in Best Practices and Support: Commercial portals typically have best practices, including standardized templates and pre-built workflows, built in from day 1. And for anything that doesn’t, teams can benefit from support teams that have the expertise to support your implementation and answer questions.

Build and Buy

It’s worth noting that the line between build and buy can blur. You may want to extend a commercial solution with custom integrations or combine an open-source core with premium add-ons. This allows you to leverage existing assets without sacrificing your unique requirements or timeline constraints. For example, Tempest’s robust developer ecosystem lets you build your own extensions on top of the existing platform via API and SDK.

Ultimately, the right approach depends on your organization’s goals, budget, and internal resources. Some teams thrive with the creative freedom and flexibility of a custom solution, while others prioritize a rapid launch and ongoing vendor support. By weighing these considerations, you can chart the best path to an Internal Developer Portal that meets your current needs and scales for the future.