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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.
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.