Compass-Atlassian alternatives: Compare Compass to Port

Organizations that lean heavily on Atlassian may want to kickstart their internal developer portal with a basic offering called Atlasssian Compass. However, compared to Port and to other commercial internal developer portals, Compass is a lightweight solution that can serve as a starter IDP but doesn’t offer full portal functionality.

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Why look for Atlassian Compass alternatives?

Lack of integrations: While its integrations with Jira, Confluence and Bitbucket may prove useful; Compass provides very few other integrations and no extensibility framework. This limits the use case functionality and is a reason to look for a Compass replacement.

Lack of identity provider data meaning that assigning ownership information for service catalog entities is more complex.

Limited developer self-service: compass only provides a capability for scaffolding a new service, and doesn’t support day-2 operations.

A rigid data model: unlike Port, Compass relies on a rigid data model which does not allow for cloud resource data for example. It doesn’t support a whole host of features that Port does, such as: a Kubernetes catalog, automations, working with any backend, API-first, configuration changes using Infrastructure-as-Code, customizable dashboards or forms and personalisation using dynamic permissions. SImilarly, Compass has limited standards customization options.

Port

Compass

Software Catalog

Flexible data model

Fully customizable data model using blueprints

Enforce several fixed entity types that cannot be changed (such as services, libraries, and applications)

Accurate dependency reflection

Create dependencies between any data model element

Limited relationships between the fixed entity types

API based data ingestion

Rich properties

JSON schema, jq calculation, mirror properties (via relations), aggregations, objects, and more

Support for several basic data types. Custom properties aren't displayed in catalog tables and dashboards

Out of the box data ingestion

Real time software catalog (all changes are pushed to the catalog in real time)

Both software and resource data

Fully customizable integrations with the ability to map custom data into Port

Both software and resource data

Only basic "teams" data, without the ability to create a full organizational chart with teams hierarchy

Developer self-service

Scaffold

Supports any form of scaffolding, including any script or tool you already have

Supports specific technologies only, such as coockiecutter

custom self-service actions (inc day 2)

Spport for many ways to invocate any backend logic - webhook, GitHub actions, GitLab pipelines, Jenkins job, Bitbucket pipeline, Azure pieplines, reading from a dedicated Kafka topic, and more

Rich user inputs

Full support for JSON schema and many special inputs - catalog entity dropdown, secret, markdown, and more

Only text inputs

Customizable user form UI

Creating a fully customizable self-serivce experience by dynamically hide/display inputs, setting default values, filtering dropdown values, controling the inputs' order, and more

Permission & usage restriction policies

Dynamic permission controls such as ownership, organizational assignment, and custom roles

Multiple approvers support

Dynamic permission controls such as ownership, organizational assignment, and custom roles

Asyncrhonous actions

Allowing the execution of long runinng actions

Manual approval step for actions

Trigger actions with API

Only scaffolding

Kubernetes support

Visibility for K8S objects

(rigid dashboard, change requires coding)

Multi cluster support

CRD support (ArgoCD, Istio, etc)

Any type of CRD

Scorecards and iniatiatives

Custom scorecards

Custom views per manager

Creating multiple custom views for each role/manager

Fixed viewes for all managers with the ability to filter without the ability to customize

Live integration with tools such as DataDog, Jira, PagerDuty etc

Any data within the third-party API can be used for the scorecard

Scorecards can be based on a limited to set number of properties that can be imported

Native integration with CI/CD data

Grid report for managers

Automations

Trigger DevOps workflows

Trigger alerts and notifications

Customizable visualizations

Customizable dashboards

Many widgets support - pie chart, metrics, line chart, markdown, self-service actions, and more

Customizable catalog menu with folders

Homepage per developer

Customizable homepage with personlized widgets that display the relevant data for each developer

Fixed hompeage structure without ability to customize

RBAC

Granular permissions to all views

No granular permissions to specific catalog views/dashboards

Integrations & data query

Open source extensibility framework

Ability to extend Port to bring data from any datasource using the "Ocean" open source framework

Ability to extend Compass with the "Atlassian Forge" platform, which is not open source

Global search and query

Security

Data ingested in a "push" model, which don't require any secrets or credentials

Data ingested in a "pull" mode, which requires access to your infrastructure by providing secrets and API keys

General

API-first design

All Port's capabilities are avaiable using the API (configuration, data ingestion, data selection, and anything else)

Configure the Portal as code

The entire system can be configure as code (dashboards, data model, integration, and anything else)

Public roadmap

Techdocs

Developer portal usage analytics

Why teams choose Port

Bring your own data model

Port’s software catalog uses an API to populate with all the data you need to accurately model your data, in minutes, with zero coding.

Full developer self-service

From scaffolding to day-2 operations, provisioning ephemeral environments and more, Port does it all.

Workflow automation

Easily automate devops routines based on Port’s software catalog and event subscription mechanism.

Easy to set up

No coding, no complex deployments, ready in minutes.

Atlassian Compass emerged in April 2022, and moved to a general release in October 2023. It is a developer portal which began as a service catalog leveraging the Atlassian ecosystem of tools, especially as a complement to Jira.

Further comparisons

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