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.

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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.

Further comparisons

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