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Opslevel alternatives: Compare OpsLevel to Port
Opslevel is a commercial internal developer portal. Unlike backstage it is easy and quick to set up. Its drawbacks are its rigidity, which effectively limits the number of use cases and developer experiences OpsLevel can support. Port, by nature of its unopinionated data model and strong self-service capabilities offers a portal that covers more use cases and is therefore more usable and future proof.
Why look for OpsLevel alternatives?
OpsLevel is rigid and doesn’t offer many customization options. This results in an opinionated data model with fixed entities, meaning that some use cases (K8s visibility for example), aren’t possible. In many cases, this alone is a reason for OpsLevel replacement.
OpsLevel does not support visualizations and customizable views or forms. As a result it is difficult to create simple and usable dashboards and abstractions for developers and managers. Additionally, it offers limited permission-based personalization, exacerbating the problem.
OpsLevel has limited support for developer self-service. It only supports synchronous self-service actions with HTTP webhooks, requiring endpoint setup and lacking API-triggered actions, TTL support, and manual approvals. These actions demand significant effort for full integration and there is no workflow automation support for portal updates or machine interactions with CI.
The absence of an extensibility framework means users cannot integrate data from various environments seamlessly, leading to potential reliability issues. This overhead, along with metadata saved using YAML, can erode user trust and impact adoption.
Port
OpsLevel
Software Catalog
Flexible data model
Fully customizable data model using blueprints
Enforce several fixed entity types that cannot be changed (such as services, infrastructure, teams)
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
Basic json schema only. 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)
Catalog can't be updated in real-time, which means the data can't be used for programatic workflows such as CI/CD
Both software and resource data
Fully customizable integrations with the ability to map custom data into Port
Integrations are limited to set list of properties that can be imported
Ownership & organizational chart data
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
Only webhook support
Rich user inputs
Full support for JSON schema and many special inputs - catalog entity dropdown, secret, markdown, and more
Only basic properties such as dropdown, text, and toggle
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
Basic permissions according to role of the user
Multiple approvers support
Asyncrhonous actions
Allowing the execution of long runinng actions
Manual approval step for actions
Trigger actions with API
Kubernetes support
Visibility for K8S objects
(rigid dashboard, change requires coding)
Ability to visualize your entire K8s runtime and link it to your services
Multi cluster support
CRD support (ArgoCD, Istio, etc)
Any type of CRD
Only ArgoCD
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
Set number of integrations without the ability to develop new ones
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.
About Opslevel: OpsLevel is an internal developer portal platform, with a strong techdocs feature. It is one of the first commercial providers of internal developer portals. It was founded by John Laban and Kenneth Rose, who worked at PagerDuty and AWS before creating the company.