Platform engineering is the process of building internal tools and processes that grant developers more autonomy in their work. Developers can use provided services to perform self-service actions that simplify complex tasks, such as provisioning staging infrastructure or promoting a deployment to a live environment.
The platform team’s main responsibility is to build and maintain an internal developer platform (IDP) that automates and unifies the software delivery lifecycle. A portal interface within the IDP allows developers to find and discover available services without being exposed to the details of how they’re implemented. Not only does this improve developer productivity, but it also ensures the platform team can centrally enforce security and compliance guardrails that keep infrastructure protected.
Building your own IDP usually requires the integration of several different tools, including CI/CD, IaC, and observability solutions, in addition to the control plane that underpins the platform itself. In this article, we’re going to explore 20 top platform engineering tools to help you accelerate your IDP delivery.
What we will cover:
Platform engineering is an emerging discipline that focuses on the use of centralized tooling to implement DevOps best practices. It promotes developer autonomy through the creation of self-service actions that are created and maintained by the platform team, but used by developers to simplify their workflows.
Platform engineering teams need to integrate several different types of tools to produce an effective platform. They’re responsible for evaluating the DevOps landscape, identifying facilities that the platform should provide to developers, and then implementing solutions that deliver the required functionality.
The platform’s scope should span the entire DevOps lifecycle, from infrastructure provisioning and configuration through to app deployment, monitoring, and infrastructure management.
Platform engineering is a rapidly growing space, and there are plenty of powerful tools to choose from. This can make it challenging to decide which options best fit your workflows, but a good way to get started is to assess the following key characteristics:
- Seamless integration with other platforms: Platforms are used to connect different tools and services, so your IDP’s components should be easy to integrate with each other using APIs and webhooks.
- Simple user experience: Internal developer platforms are designed to simplify and accelerate DevOps workflows and enable developer self-service. To achieve this, tools need to offer a clear UX that’s approachable for developers and straightforward for the platform team to manage.
- Easily extensible by platform teams: Tools that can be extended with new capabilities add flexibility to your workflows and can help prevent the risks of vendor lock-in and data siloing.
- Clear security and compliance controls: Choosing tools with built-in security and compliance management features helps you protect your infrastructure and reduce your risk exposure.
It’s also important to check your chosen tools will actually contribute to your platform engineering aims. Set clear success criteria so you know whether your investment is paying off, such as by measuring changes to deployment frequency, change lead times, and developer satisfaction or retention rates. Tools that aren’t specifically designed to form part of an IDP may not produce the positive effects you expected.
Here’s our guide to 20 of the top platform engineering tools to know right now. This list is a selection of our favorites and popular or influential choices from around the web, but remember, there are many more options out there if you don’t find what you’re looking for.
The best platform engineering tools include:
Spacelift orchestrates your IaC tools, including Terraform, OpenTofu, and Ansible so you can deliver secure, cost-effective, and scalable infrastructure fast. It’s designed to grant developers safe self-service access to infrastructure resources while enabling platform teams to take precise control of security, compliance, and configuration management.
Spacelift allows you to unify all of your IaC tools in one automated workflow. You can manage infrastructure changes directly from your Git pull requests, letting everyone contribute even if they’re unfamiliar with concepts such as CI/CD, IaC, and cloud deployment. The platform team can use Spacelift to configure precise security policies that limit what developers can do, providing a flexible balance between autonomy, convenience, and control.
- Pricing: Free tier for individual and small teams. Starter, Business, and Enterprise tiers starting at $399 per month.
- Website: https://spacelift.io
- Use case example: How to improve your infrastructure orchestration with Spacelift
Backstage is a popular framework for building self-service portals that form the basis of your IDP. It lets you create a service catalog that developers can independently discover and use via a single centralized interface.
Originally developed by Spotify, Backstage is an open-source solution with deep extensibility. You can easily write new components, include them in your service catalog, and add community plugins to integrate Backstage with other systems. However, the initial setup is relatively complex as you need to deploy and configure the framework yourself.
- License: Open-source
- Website: https://backstage.io
Kubernetes is the most popular container orchestration platform. It allows you to deploy, scale, and operate containerized apps in production with dependable fault tolerance.
Kubernetes is the ideal platform for hosting an IDP. It lets you individually scale your platform’s components and manage service discovery and load balancing for the entire fleet. A Kubernetes cluster can also be used to operate your app environments with features including RBAC, multi-tenant namespaces, and policy-driven security controls making it possible to safely enable developer access.
- License: Open-source
- Website: https://kubernetes.io
- Use case example: How to deploy Kubernetes resources with Terraform
Crossplane is an open-source CNCF-supported framework for creating cloud-native platform control planes. It allows you to orchestrate your apps and their infrastructure using a declarative API and configurable frontend without having to write complex custom code.
Once installed in a Kubernetes cluster, Crossplane provides a set of custom resource definitions for managing infrastructure resources in your other cloud accounts and services. This means you can use the familiar Kubernetes experience to control components outside your cluster, simplifying the platform management experience.
- License: Open-source
- Website: https://www.crossplane.io
- Use case example: Crossplane vs Terraform – IaC tools comparison
Terraform and open-source fork OpenTofu represent the leading approach to Infrastructure-as-Code (IaC). Using a simple declarative config language, you can provision and manage infrastructure resources across all major cloud providers, hosting platforms, and container orchestration solutions.
In the context of an IDP, Terraform is most likely to be used internally by the platform team to implement infrastructure management workflows. For example, you could create a self-service action that lets developers press a button to start a new staging server instance based on a predefined Terraform configuration.
- License: BSL
- Website: https://www.terraform.io
- Use case example: Terraform on AWS – deploying AWS resources & Getting started with OpenTofu
Humanitec is a popular SaaS solution for building internal developer platforms at an enterprise scale. The service includes a full set of capabilities for operating IDPs, including a graph-based backend that connects your tools and an approachable developer-facing portal interface that enables access to your service catalog.
Humanitec also includes a strong suite of security, governance, cost control, and reporting features, ensuring platform engineers can maintain tight control of developer activity.
- Pricing: Team and Enterprise plans starting at $999 per month; free trial available
- Website: https://humanitec.com
Port is an internal developer portal service that provides a simple interface for hosting self-service actions, automations, dashboards, and forms. Platform teams can use Port to grant developers easy access to prebuilt automated workflows with everything available in one place.
Port is an extensible platform that includes a wide selection of integrations with other DevOps solutions. It also features built-in reporting and analysis capabilities that provide visibility into service adoption and utilization, allowing platform engineers to understand which services are benefitting developers the most.
- Pricing: Free tier for up to 15 seats. Team and Enterprise plans starting at $30 per month per dev
- Website: https://www.getport.io
Kubiya is an operations platform that utilizes AI to automate workflows and give developers more independence. Devs can use Kubiya to launch tasks and request help via plain text prompts. It’s designed to provide devs with an AI “teammate” that supports their interactions with platform services.
Kubiya includes built-in audit logs and security policies that help ensure continual compliance. It can be deployed to your own Kubernetes cluster, giving you full control over your platform and environments.
- Pricing: Startup, SMB, and Enterprise plans starting at $1,500 per month
- Website: https://www.kubiya.ai
Qovery is a DevOps automation platform designed to facilitate self-service developer access to environments. Devs can easily start deployments, create clones of existing environments, and interact with resources such as databases and API gateways.
Qovery supports a full range of different interface types—including a web UI, CLI, API, and programming language client libraries—and over 100 native integrations with other tools and services. It’s a good choice when you’re Kubernetes-centric and want to manage all developer tasks using one platform.
- Pricing: Free tier available; Team and Enterprise tiers starting at $29 per user per month
- Website: https://www.qovery.com
GitPod is an open-source tool for standardizing your developer environment configurations. It automates the process of starting environments to build and test changes, allowing developers to productively work from any machine.
Including GitPod in your IDP simplifies the developer experience by removing the need for new contributors to manually set up an environment before they can be productive.
The tool is open-source, can be self-hosted in your own cloud account, and supports safe integration with other platforms to let devs efficiently interact with resources such as Kubernetes clusters, databases, and infrastructure components.
- Pricing: Free, Flex and Enterprise tiers
- Website: https://www.gitpod.io
Kratix is an open-source framework specifically designed to fulfill the requirements of platform engineers creating IDPs. It has a composable architecture that simplifies the process of exposing self-service access to developer resources. Kratix also automates lifecycle management tasks for platform components and includes a pipeline-driven workflow system.
Kratix forms the foundation of your IDP by letting you easily implement the internal processes that developers interact with. Because it’s a framework, it requires significant customization to get started, but offers a compelling combination of flexibility and power. You can connect popular developer portal solutions such as Backstage and Port to expose your Kratix services to developers.
- License: Open-source
- Website: https://www.kratix.io
OpsLevel is an internal developer portal solution that allows you to connect your other tools to form a cohesive service catalog. It enables self-service access to standardized resources based on templates and one-click action buttons.
OpsLevel minimizes setup time by automatically detecting the components used in your existing tech stack, minimizing the amount of manual work needed to publish your services.
- Pricing: Custom pricing plans
- Website: https://www.opslevel.com
Argonaut focuses on simplifying end-to-end app deployments to Kubernetes clusters and cloud providers. Developers can easily launch new apps from a Git repository, then monitor operations within the centralized dashboard.
Argonaut includes support for autoscaling, health checks, and reusable pipelines that can be replayed across environments, while platform teams benefit from integrated monitoring and cost management capabilities.
- Pricing: Free Startup plan; Pro and Enterprise plans starting at $30 per month per user
- Website: https://www.argonaut.dev
BunnyShell is a platform for automating the development process by allowing devs to spin up new preconfigured cloud environments on-demand. It also simplifies the process of creating ephemeral test environments, including integration with Git providers to preview changes before they’re merged in a pull request.
BunnyShell tracks the costs associated with your environments and produces metrics, audit logs, and reports that reveal engineering performance. The platform is available in both cloud-hosted and on-premises flavors.
- Pricing: Free Developer plan; Pay-as-you-go and Enterprise plans starting at $0.007 per minute per environment
- Website: https://www.bunnyshell.com
Jenkins is a venerable automation server often used to host CI/CD pipelines. It has a robust distributed architecture and a flexible plugin system that facilitates simple integration with other DevOps tools and services.
Jenkins gives platform teams the ability to build powerful processes using a simple configuration language. Your IDP could use Jenkins to implement the workflows that devs access through your portal, such as an action that starts a Jenkins pipeline to test, build, and release code changes.
- License: Open-source
- Website: https://www.jenkins.io
- Use case example: How to Manage Terraform Workflows with Jenkins
Rancher is a Kubernetes management solution that provides a complete platform for interacting with your clusters and their workloads. It helps you implement a Kubernetes-centric IDP with fewer administration overheads.
You can use Rancher to manage your cluster fleet and grant developers safe access to deploy apps, test changes, and access production environments. Rancher supports full multi-cluster management with centralized user identities and security policies, making it much easier to ensure all clusters are configured correctly.
- License: Open-source with Prime and Prime Hosted paid plans
- Website: https://www.rancher.com
Cortex is an internal developer portal solution that gives developers a complete view of all the resources that are relevant to them. The Cortex dashboard includes a service catalog, one-click action items, and visibility into work assigned to each developer, such as GitHub issues and pull requests.
Cortex provides platform engineers with comprehensive visibility into platform utilization and developer performance. You can configure visual scorecards to track alignment with your KPIs and identify potential risks. Detailed reports let you aggregate data from different sources, then track trends and drill down to investigate root causes.
- License: Custom pricing plans
- Website: https://www.cortex.io
Prometheus is one of the most popular observability platforms. It’s a distributed time-series database for storing and analyzing metrics data. It includes a powerful built-in query language and supports Grafana integration so you can visualize your data on graphical dashboards.
Prometheus metrics exports are supported by many popular platform engineering tools and services. Integrating Prometheus with your IDP allows you to easily collect data from your stack so you can monitor operations more effectively. You could also use Prometheus to instrument the services you create within your IDP, providing insights into developer adoption and utilization rates.
- License: Open-source
- Website: https://prometheus.io
- Use case example: Prometheus Monitoring for Kubernetes Cluster
Logstash, part of the Elastic Stack alongside Elasticsearch and Kibana, is a data ingest and transformation pipeline that’s commonly used to process log files. It’s another component that’s worth including in your IDP so developers and platform teams can efficiently work with the logs that are written by your apps, services, and infrastructure components, enabling more efficient debugging of reported problems.
- License: Open-source
- Website: https://www.elastic.co/logstash
Argo Workflows is a workflow execution engine that lets you run parallel jobs and processes inside a Kubernetes cluster. You can use it to implement complex IDP workflows that consist of multiple steps, where the output of one job becomes the input to the next. Workflows also support dependency modeling as a directed acyclic dependency (DAG) to optimize when jobs start.
Using Argo Workflows makes it easier to automate development processes such as batch data processing, machine learning model training, and multi-step infrastructure provisioning sequences. You can run workflows on a schedule or integrate Argo with a developer portal solution to let engineers trigger workflows on-demand.
- License: Open-source
- Website: https://argoproj.github.io/workflows
- Use case example: Argo Workflows Tutorial
Platform engineering refers to the creation of internal developer platforms (IDPs) that unify, standardize, and automate the software delivery lifecycle. It integrates different tools and processes to provide developers with access to self-service actions that increase autonomy, enabling an improvement in delivery throughput.
In this article, we’ve reviewed 20 top tools for building your IDP and the developer services it contains. You’ll likely want to combine several tools to implement all the platform capabilities you require, such as a developer portal, CI/CD server, IaC tool, and observability suite. This will give your platform complete coverage of the end-to-end DevOps workflow.
Looking for a simple way to provision, configure, and govern your infrastructure? Check out Spacelift, our platform for orchestrating resources using Terraform, OpenTofu, Ansible, and more. You can use Spacelift to create an IDP that gives devs easy access to infrastructure while continually enforcing compliance policies set by the platform team. Get started for free today, or book a demo with one of our engineers.
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