Top 6 Internal Developer Platforms for 2025

Your developers are losing hours every week switching between multiple tools and waiting for infrastructure requests.

Meanwhile, your ops team is buried in tickets, deployments are getting more complex, and shipping is slowing down instead of speeding up.

Internal Developer Platforms (IDPs) solve this by giving developers self-service access to infrastructure while maintaining security and governance.

This guide breaks down the top IDPs for 2025, comparing their strengths and helping you choose the right platform to boost your team's velocity without the operational complexity.

An Internal Developer Platform (IDP) is built by a platform team to create standardized workflows and enable developer self-service.

Instead of your developers waiting on ops teams for infrastructure requests, they can provision environments, deploy applications, and manage resources themselves through the IDP.

For example, when your developer needs a new staging environment, they can create one in minutes through a simple interface rather than filing a ticket and waiting days for approval.

The key difference between an IDP and traditional DevOps tooling is the focus on developer experience. Rather than requiring every developer to become a DevOps expert, IDPs provide pre-built workflows that enforce best practices by default while still giving developers the control they need.

Teams often confuse Internal Developer Platforms and Internal Developer Portals, but they serve different purposes:

1. Internal Developer Platform (IDP): The comprehensive backend system that actually provisions infrastructure, manages deployments, handles secrets, and orchestrates your entire software delivery lifecycle. This is the "engine" that does the actual work.
2. Internal Developer Portal: The user interface or dashboard that developers interact with, essentially the frontend to your platform. A portal without a robust platform underneath is like having a cockpit without an airplane. It looks good, but it can't actually do anything.

Many organizations start with portals for visibility but quickly realize they need the full platform capabilities for true developer self-service.

IDPs solve the core problems that slow down engineering teams and create friction between development and operations.

An IDP provides developers with a unified interface where they can access everything they need to build, test, and deploy applications. This removes context switching between multiple tools and reduces the cognitive load on your development teams.

With standardized workflows and automation, IDPs reduce deployment times from days to minutes, becoming the cornerstone of modern software delivery.

IDPs enforce security policies and governance frameworks at the platform level, ensuring that every deployment follows your organization's standards without requiring developers to remember complex security procedures.

By providing standardized environments and automated resource management, IDPs prevent infrastructure waste and optimize cloud spending across your organization.

IDPs remove most support tickets through self-service capabilities, freeing up your ops teams from constant interruptions and ticket overload.

The right IDP should solve your current problems while adapting to your future needs.

Look for platforms that provide true self-service provisioning, not just visibility. Your developers should be able to spin up environments, deploy applications, and manage resources without filing tickets.

If you've spent years building Terraform workflows, you likely don't want to discard them. Ensure the IDP can layer on top of your current investments without a complete rebuild.

Avoid vendor lock-in with platforms that support multiple cloud providers and on-premises infrastructure. Your needs will evolve, and your platform should evolve with you.

Security shouldn't be an afterthought. Choose platforms that implement security controls, secret management, and compliance monitoring as core features.

Whether you're a startup or enterprise, your IDP should grow with you. Look for platforms that can handle both simple use cases and complex enterprise requirements.

The best technical platform is useless if developers won't adopt it. Prioritize platforms that developers actually enjoy using, with intuitive interfaces and clear documentation.

Let's review the leading IDPs that are helping engineering teams ship faster while maintaining security and operational control.

Northflank solves the core challenge you're facing: getting the power of Kubernetes without the complexity. Instead of spending months building your own IDP or managing YAML manifests, you get a production-ready platform that your developers can use immediately.

Some of the features that stand out:

• Quickcloud setup: Get running in your cloud of choice in 30 minutes or less. Northflank seamlessly integrates with EKS, GKE, AKS, and other Kubernetes services.
• Bring Your Own Cloud (BYOC): Deploy to AWS, GCP, Azure, Oracle, or Civo while maintaining control over your data residency and security.
• Built-in CI/CD and automation: Git-based deployment workflows with automatic builds, testing, and deployments triggered by code changes.
• AI and GPU workloads: Native support for NVIDIA GPUs including A100, H100, and B200 for ML training, inference, and LLM deployments.
• Enterprise security: Built-in secrets management, RBAC, network policies, and compliance controls for regulated environments.
• Secure runtimes: Isolated container execution environments with advanced security for sensitive workloads.
• Cost optimization: Real-time cost monitoring, automatic scaling, and transparent pricing with no hidden fees or cloud markups.
• Developer-focused experience: Northflank gets rid of the learning curve of Kubernetes and YAML manifests, so you can focus on coding.

Battle-tested at scale: Northflank has grown to empower tens of thousands of developers to deploy production workloads across more than six cloud providers, deploying over a million containers monthly. Used by companies like Weights, Sentry, Writer, and Clock for production workloads.

Best for: Teams that need production-ready infrastructure now, not in 12 months. Especially valuable if you're dealing with Kubernetes complexity, managing multiple cloud providers, or need your platform team to deliver value quickly without months of custom development.

Learn more about Northflank's IDP capabilities and read How to build an Internal Developer Platform (and why you might not want to) or listen to our discussion on IDPs and developer experience.

Originally created by Spotify and now a CNCF project, Backstage is an open-source framework for building developer portals. You'll get a centralized platform for managing software catalogs, documentation, and developer workflows, but you'll need to build and maintain it yourself.

Key features:

• Extensive plugin ecosystem for customization
• Service catalog and documentation management
• Template scaffolding for new projects
• Community support and CNCF backing

Best for: Organizations with dedicated platform teams who want maximum customization and have the engineering resources to build and maintain their own solution.

Considerations: Requires significant upfront engineering investment and ongoing maintenance.

Harness provides a comprehensive software delivery platform that includes IDP capabilities alongside CI/CD, feature flags, and cloud cost management. Their focus is on automation and AI-powered delivery pipelines.

Key features:

• AI-powered deployment automation
• Comprehensive CI/CD with advanced deployment strategies
• Built-in security and policy governance
• Cloud cost optimization and FinOps capabilities

Best suited for: Enterprise teams seeking an all-in-one software delivery platform with robust governance and compliance features.

See “Top alternatives to Harness for CI/CD and DevOps”

Porter simplifies Kubernetes management by connecting directly to your cloud account and automating infrastructure provisioning. You get the power of Kubernetes without having to manage the underlying complexity.

Key features:

• One-click Kubernetes cluster setup
• Git-based deployment workflows
• Support for AWS, GCP, and Azure
• Template-based application deployment

Best for: Teams that want Kubernetes capabilities without the operational complexity, particularly those already committed to containerized workflows.

See “Best Porter alternatives for scalable deployments”

Humanitec focuses on enabling self-service infrastructure through its Platform Orchestrator, which standardizes configurations and workflows across your development teams.

Key features:

• Platform Orchestrator for standardizing configurations
• Focus on reducing cognitive load for developers
• Integration with existing CI/CD pipelines
• Enterprise-grade security and compliance controls

Best for: Large enterprises with complex, distributed systems that need standardization across multiple teams and environments.

Port provides a no-code approach to building internal developer portals with comprehensive software catalogs and self-service capabilities. The focus is on flexibility and quick setup.

Key features:

• No-code portal builder with drag-and-drop workflows
• Comprehensive software catalog with custom data models
• Real-time scorecards and maturity tracking
• Integration with existing automation and workflows

Best for: Teams that want flexibility in designing their developer experience with minimal engineering investment and quick time-to-value.

Start with Northflank if you want to move fast without sacrificing control. Our platform removes the complexity of building your own IDP while providing the flexibility to customize as you grow. You'll get production-ready infrastructure in days, not months.

The key is to start with your pain points. Are your developers spending too much time on infrastructure? Are security and compliance slowing down deployments? Is tool management creating inefficiencies?

Choose a platform that lets your team focus on building great products, not maintaining infrastructure.