Internal Developer Platform vs. Portal: What’s the Difference and Why You Need Both
- Adil Sameer Shaikh
- Oct 17
- 9 min read
Updated: Oct 31
Platform teams aim to simplify development, but as organisations scale and delivery demands rise, complexity increases fast.
Balancing speed, security, and scalability presents a challenge, prompting teams to consider whether they need an internal developer platform, an internal developer portal, or both. This confusion gets even worse because many teams use the terms interchangeably, often referring to both as “IDP”.
However, an internal developer platform and an internal developer portal are distinct tools with different purposes.
In a nutshell, an internal developer platform is a set of tools and processes that standardise and automate service and infrastructure management for developers. In contrast, an internal developer portal is a centralised interface that provides developers with self-service access to tools, resources, and documentation.
The goal of this article is to draw a clear line between the two. We’ll explain what an internal developer platform and an internal developer portal are, how they differ, and where they overlap. We’ll also demonstrate how they can work together to support developer self-service, compliance, and streamlined workflows.
What is an internal developer platform?
An internal developer platform is an internal system built and maintained by a platform team to make developers’ work easier. It provides streamlined workflows, often called “golden paths”, that guide development teams through best practices for building, testing, and deploying software.
Rather than having developers manually manage infrastructure, the platform automates tasks such as provisioning environments, configuring CI/CD pipelines, and managing secrets. This automation reduces operational overhead and improves consistency across teams.
Core technical components of internal developer platforms
Modern internal developer platforms are built on eight foundational components that work together to create a comprehensive platform engineering solution.
These components address the full spectrum of developer needs while maintaining enterprise-grade governance and scalability:
1. Self-service infrastructure provisioning: On-demand provisioning of infrastructure resources is essential for developer productivity. Internal developer platforms offer self-service access to computational resources, storage, networks, databases, and other assets via web consoles or CLI tools. This eliminates ticket-based workflows and approval delays.
2. Unified deployment and orchestration: Standardising deployments through containers and orchestrating them across shared and partially isolated environments enables rapid, reliable releases. Technologies like Docker and Kubernetes provide portability and automation for deployment workflows. At the same time, Infrastructure-as-Code (IaC) tools like Terraform allow teams to define entire application stacks as code, creating a seamless path from code commit to production deployment.
3. Centralised configuration management: Managing application configurations and secrets across environments is critical for streamlined deployments. Internal developer platforms utilise version-controlled settings stored in source control systems to establish a single source of truth, identify configuration drift, and automate secret management through secure vaults. They also enforce policies to ensure configurations stay compliant across all environments.
4. Automated CI/CD pipelines: Automating continuous integration and delivery processes enables safe, rapid releases through codified, reproducible workflows that trigger automatically from code commits. These pipelines include automated testing, security scanning, and progressive deployment strategies while integrating with existing development workflows and providing extensibility for future requirements.
5. Monitoring and logging: Comprehensive observability is essential for production systems, with internal developer platforms auto-collecting metrics from applications to provide intuitive dashboards and alerting capabilities. Advanced implementations include distributed tracing, log aggregation, and automated anomaly detection, giving developers the data and insights needed to debug issues and optimise systems proactively.
6. Security and compliance automation: Implementing security and compliance policies consistently across dynamic environments requires automation. Internal developer platforms automate and codify controls for infrastructure and application security, including SAST, DAST, and secret scanning. They enforce access control and compliance with standards such as SOC 2, ISO 27001, and PCI DSS.
7. Developer experience and collaboration tools: Effective software delivery requires coordination between multiple teams. Internal developer platforms enable seamless collaboration through ChatOps integrations, GitOps workflows, and shared services. Self-service access to environments, infrastructure, and databases removes traditional bottlenecks, allowing teams to resolve issues quickly without organisational roadblocks.
8. Platform extensibility: Future-proofing an internal developer platform requires extensibility. This enables teams to tailor the platform to their evolving requirements without excessive vendor lock-in or rebuild costs, allowing the internal developer platform to grow organically over time.
What is an internal developer portal?
An internal developer portal is a user-friendly interface that enables development teams to access and utilise platform tools and resources. Unlike an internal developer platform, which focuses on automating services and infrastructure, a portal improves the developer experience by organising information and integrating workflows.
Core technical components of internal developer portals
A robust internal developer portal is built on seven foundational technical components that work together to create a unified development experience.
1. Service catalogue architecture: Modern portals maintain a real-time inventory of services, APIs, and infrastructure using graph databases or Elasticsearch for complex queries and relationship mapping. They support flexible data models with customisable blueprints and logical dependencies between assets.
2. Integration ecosystem: Portals unify the view of the development toolchain through bi-directional synchronisation with version control, CI/CD platforms, project management tools, observability platforms, and communication systems.
3. Self-service action engine: Guided forms and wizards enable developers to perform routine operations like infrastructure provisioning and service deployment. Actions include approval workflows and role-based permissions that maintain security guardrails while providing developer autonomy.
4. Scorecard and metrics framework: Comprehensive scoring systems assess service health, security posture, and operational maturity by aggregating data from multiple sources. They track production readiness, documentation health, and compliance metrics to provide actionable insights for improvement.
5. Customisable interface layer: Configurable dashboards, widgets, and navigation adapt to organisational needs through personalised homepages, branded experiences, and role-specific views that surface relevant information for different user types.
6. Automation and orchestration engine: Workflow systems tie together portal components, enabling multi-step processes that respond to events, enforce policies, and reduce manual intervention through automated notifications and cross-tool coordination (but beware of the “portals and pipelines” antipattern!).
7. Access control and security framework: Role-based access control (RBAC) manages permissions across all portal functions with dynamic permissions based on catalogue relationships and fine-grained controls, ensuring appropriate resource access.
Comparing developer platforms and developer portals
As mentioned previously, internal developer platforms and internal developer portals are often confused because both are commonly referred to by the same acronym, “IDP.” However, despite this overlap, they serve distinct purposes in platform engineering.
In this section, we’ll break down their core differences. However, before we go any further, let’s first take a look at how they work together.
Although the image above omits an essential aspect of platform architecture — the orchestration layer — it reflects how many teams think about internal platforms, where the developer portal sits between developers and the platform.
Developers don’t have to interact directly with the infrastructure tools or scripts. Instead, they use the portal to perform tasks like spinning up environments, requesting database instances, or deploying applications. The portal passes those requests to the platform, which then executes them using its automation and orchestration capabilities.
This layered approach enables platform teams to enforce consistency behind the scenes while still providing developers with a smooth and intuitive experience.
Together, developer platforms and developer portals support developer productivity, governance, and scale, with each playing a distinct but complementary role in the internal developer experience.
Now that’s out of the way, below is a table that summarises the key differences between internal developer platforms and internal developer portals:
Key use cases and business benefits
Choosing between an internal developer platform, an internal developer portal, or both depends on what your team needs most right now.
Some organisations are looking for stronger automation and consistency. Others are trying to simplify access to tools and improve the developer experience. And some just need both.
When to use a developer platform
An internal developer platform is a good fit when your organisation needs to automate service and infrastructure provisioning and lifecycle, enforce compliance, and maintain consistency at scale.
For example, teams often use platforms to simplify provisioning across environments. Instead of developers setting up servers, databases, or clusters and creating tickets for the Ops team to do so, the platform enables users to request and manage resources through consistent APIs and lifecycle management workflows. This reduces errors and speeds up the delivery process.
Platforms are also valuable in industries where compliance is critical. By directly encoding policies into pipelines and automating enforcement, they reduce audit burdens and ensure teams consistently follow the same rules.
And for organisations operating in multi-cloud or large-scale environments, platforms help maintain consistency across different clusters, regions, or cloud providers, ensuring everything is set up correctly, every time.
When to use a developer portal
An internal developer portal makes more sense when the main challenge is developer experience, especially when tools are fragmented or there’s too much reliance on tribal knowledge.
Portals help by creating a central place where developers can access services, tools, documentation, and support without needing to know what’s happening behind the scenes.
They’re particularly helpful when onboarding new developers. Rather than spending weeks figuring out which tools to use or who owns what, developers can quickly get up to speed by exploring the portal.
Even when teams have automation in place, it’s often hidden or hard to access. Portals address this by exposing platform capabilities through a simple and intuitive interface.
They also help clarify service ownership by showing who’s responsible for what, reducing the friction that often comes with handoffs and support questions.
When to combine both
Most mature organisations benefit from using both a platform and a portal. The platform handles infrastructure, automation, and policy enforcement in the background, while the portal sits on top and exposes those capabilities to developers through guided, self-service experiences.
Combining the two effectively often requires an orchestration layer, as highlighted earlier, which is a missing middle that ensures requests from the portal are translated into managed, compliant, and observable resources on the platform. Without it, you risk the portal becoming just a “pretty front-end” that triggers pipelines without proper lifecycle management, ownership boundaries, or upgrade paths.
When used in conjunction with orchestration, the combination of platforms and portals creates a seamless workflow. Developers don’t need to understand how infrastructure is provisioned or where secrets are stored; they simply click a button or fill in a form in the portal. The orchestration layer coordinates the request, and the platform takes care of the rest. This approach enforces standards without slowing down development and gives platform teams control without becoming blockers.
The business impact
When developer platforms, portals, and an orchestration layer work together, teams ship faster and spend less time on internal support. Common benefits include:
Improved developer productivity through fewer bottlenecks, less waiting, and guided “golden paths” from idea to production
Stronger governance by embedding policies directly into workflows and making them visible at every stage of the service lifecycle
Faster time to market with high-confidence automation that handles provisioning, upgrades, and compliance without manual intervention
Reduced support load on platform teams, who can focus on strategic work instead of handling repeated setup requests
In the end, it’s not a question of platform or portal; it’s about using each where it makes sense, and letting them work together to support both speed and control.
How an Orchestration layer bridges platforms and portals
In the previous sections, we highlighted how an orchestration layer is crucial for platforms and portals to work together seamlessly. This is exactly where an open source framework like Kratix comes in.
Kratix is a platform engineering orchestration framework designed to sit between your internal developer platform and portal.
While portals provide access and platforms handle automation, Kratix ensures those capabilities are delivered with lifecycle management, policy enforcement, upgrade paths, and clear ownership.
It provides a way to codify tribal knowledge that would often require weeks of back-and-forth between teams, resulting in developers being able to use a high-level abstraction, such as a developer portal, to click a button, which translates to a resource, such as a database being provisioned.
Kratix delivers all this via its Promise-based model, which allows teams to define and deliver platform capabilities as reusable building blocks, complete with the necessary infrastructure, policies, and operational logic to maintain consistency.
And because Kratix is Kubernetes-native and integrates with developer portals like Backstage, Port, amongst others, teams don’t have to choose between backend control and frontend usability.
With Kratix, you can expose powerful platform capabilities through intuitive developer experiences, without sacrificing policy enforcement or consistency.
Building developer-centric platforms that work
In this article, we explored the distinct roles of internal developer platforms and portals.
Platform orchestrators such as Kratix automate services and infrastructure lifecycles behind the scenes, while portals surface these capabilities in a developer-friendly way. Together, they form the foundation of a modern, scalable developer experience.
Looking to bring both together? Kratix helps teams build composable platforms that integrate cleanly with your existing tools and workflows. Send us a message, and let’s talk about how we can help.
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