Backstage, Port, Cortex etc.

Developer portals like Backstage, Port, Cortex etc. enable developers to self-serve key actions in the software lifecycle in a way that good practices and standards are baked into everything from the start. They often provide a service or software catalog for discovery, and offer scaffolding or software templating functionality to get a service or project started quickly.

They do this be integrating with other tools and data sources, such as a VCS, a CI/CD system, or a Platform Orchestrator, and usually have a plugin framework for easy extensibility.

A developer portal as a self-service go-to place used in tandem with the Humanitec Platform Orchestrator as a backend make a powerful combination. As it is, there are pluggable integrations with the Orchestrator for Backstage and Port already.

You may generally choose to expose any subset of the Humanitec Platform Orchestrator functionality in your developer portal tool by providing a plugin that is tapping into the Orchestrator API as its backend. The off-the-shelf integrations named above are doing just that.

The Humanitec Portal is an offering specialized for working with the Humanitec Platform Orchestrator only. You can use the Humanitec Portal in parallel with a more generalized developer portal to handle the use cases you do not want to, or need not, expose to all developers, including those focused at platform engineering teams.