Best Platform Engineering Software

Platform Engineering is the discipline of designing and building toolchains and workflows that enable self-service capabilities for software engineering teams. A platform engineering team creates an Internal Developer Platform (IDP) that abstracts infrastructure complexity, provides golden paths, and enforces organizational standards while enabling developer velocity.

Platform engineering software typically provides: a unified developer portal, software catalog for service discovery, self-service actions for infrastructure provisioning, scorecards and governance policies, environment management, cost visibility, and integration with existing DevOps tools. The goal is reducing cognitive load on developers while maintaining platform team control.

Organizations face a build-vs-buy decision for platform engineering. Building on Backstage offers maximum customization but requires significant engineering investment. Commercial platforms like Port and Cortex provide faster time-to-value with polished interfaces and dedicated support. Many organizations start with a commercial platform and gradually customize as their platform maturity grows.

Platform engineering is evolving rapidly. Key trends include: AI-assisted developer portals, unified GitOps and IaC workflows, platform cost optimization, and convergence of developer portals with infrastructure control planes. Crossplane exemplifies this convergence by bringing infrastructure management under Kubernetes-native APIs.