In 2025, Internal Developer Platforms (IDPs) are no longer a “nice-to-have”—they're a competitive advantage. For modern engineering organizations, IDPs streamline developer workflows, abstract infrastructure complexity, and enable fast, secure software delivery. From startups to large enterprises, platform teams are designing developer-first experiences that accelerate innovation while reducing toil. But with so many tools out there, which ones are worth your attention?
This guide covers the best IDP tools for 2025, handpicked for their ecosystem maturity, developer experience, extensibility, and enterprise adoption. Whether you're just beginning to build your platform or scaling an existing one, these tools—and the partners supporting them—can help your teams ship faster and smarter.
Why These Tools Made the List
We chose these IDP tools based on five key pillars: maturity of ecosystem, ease of developer onboarding, integrations with cloud-native tooling, quality of community support, and availability of commercial expertise. These tools are designed not only to improve developer productivity but also to align with enterprise-grade security, governance, and scalability.
The Top IDP Tools in 2025
Here are our top picks for 2025 to help you kickstart your IDP journey:
- Backstage
- Port
- Crossplane
1. Backstage
Backstage is an open-source platform for building developer portals. Originally built at Spotify, it allows you to unify your infrastructure tooling, services, and documentation into a single pane of glass. It's a go-to for companies aiming to standardize developer experience and accelerate onboarding.
- Distinguishing features: Plugin architecture, scaffolding templates, tech docs, cataloging of services.
- Open source or commercial: Open source (CNCF Incubating)
- Website & Socials: Website, GitHub, LinkedIn
- GitHub stars: 30.2k+
- Contributors: 1600+
- Release rate: Weekly
- Languages: TypeScript, CSS, MDX, JavaScript, Handlebars
- Integrations: GitHub, GitLab, Kubernetes, Jenkins, PagerDuty, more
- Business use case: Create a unified developer portal to centralize services and documentation
- OSS community: Discord community | Bi-weekly community sessions
- Commercial support partners: Spotify, InfraCloud, Roadie, Frontside
- Notable end users: Spotify, Netflix, American Airlines, Expedia
2. Port
Port is a powerful Internal Developer Portal that focuses on visibility and control. It provides developers with golden paths and enables platform teams to enforce governance using blueprints and self-service actions. Port is low-code, visual-first, and integrates deeply into CI/CD workflows.
- Distinguishing features: Blueprints, software catalog, self-service actions, scorecards, extensibility
- Open source or commercial: Commercial with OSS SDKs
- Website & Socials: Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, Twitter
- GitHub stars: 1.2k+
- Contributors: 30+
- Release rate: Weekly
- Languages: Python, TypeScript, HCL, Shell, Go Integrations: GitHub, Argo CD, Kubernetes, Terraform, Jenkins, Datadog Business use case: Enable self-service environments, golden paths, and service catalogs
- OSS community: Slack | Community calls via Port's community page
- Notable end users: Firebolt, Lightrun, Riskified
3. Crossplane
Crossplane brings infrastructure as code into the Kubernetes control plane. It's a cloud-native alternative to Terraform that allows platform teams to build IDPs that expose APIs for infrastructure provisioning, enabling true platform engineering. Its claim to fame: using Kubernetes CRDs to provision infrastructure like S3 buckets or databases.
- Distinguishing features: Composition-based infrastructure modeling, GitOps-native, K8s-native APIs
- Open source or commercial: Open source (CNCF Incubating)
- Website & Socials: Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, Twitter
- GitHub stars: 10.2k+
- Contributors: 300+
- Release rate: Monthly
- Languages: Go, Other
- Integrations: AWS, Azure, GCP, Helm, Terraform, Vault
- Business use case: Offer infrastructure-as-a-service via internal APIs built on Kubernetes
- OSS community: Slack | Weekly community meetings
- Commercial support partners: Upbound, VSHN
- Notable end users: Accenture, Deutsche Bahn, Nokia, JPMorgan Chase
Notable Mention: IDP Implementation Experts
While choosing the right tools is a big part of the puzzle, successful adoption of Internal Developer Platforms (IDPs) depends even more on how you implement them, how well they align with your developer experience (DevEx), and whether your team has the infrastructure expertise to scale it securely and reliably. IDPs aren't plug-and-play—they’re foundational platforms that need to be deeply embedded into your engineering culture and workflow.
That’s why working with expert partners who live and breathe platform engineering can be the difference between a stalled experiment and a platform your developers love to use. These companies bring a combination of domain knowledge, open source contributions, proven playbooks, and hands-on support to help teams design, implement, and evolve their IDP journey.
Here are some standout companies offering expert consulting, developer enablement, and enterprise support for Internal Developer Platforms:
- InfraCloud – A pioneer in platform engineering services, InfraCloud helps companies design and build custom IDPs using Backstage, Crossplane, and Port. They specialize in Kubernetes, GitOps, and developer experience consulting.
- Roadie – Offers a fully managed Backstage service that enables fast adoption, plugin support, and secure hosting for developer portals.
- Upbound – The commercial force behind Crossplane, offering support, platform extensions, and enterprise-grade control planes.
- Giant Swarm – Offers managed Kubernetes and platform engineering services, including integrations with IDP tools.
- Humanitec – While also offering their own IDP product, they advise large organizations on platform orchestration and DevOps maturity.
These partners go beyond installation and setup. They help you define workflows, reduce cognitive load for developers, set up golden paths, and integrate with your existing CI/CD and cloud infrastructure—which is where the real value of an IDP comes to life.
Conclusion
Internal Developer Platforms are no longer experimental—they’re the new normal. In 2025, organizations that prioritize developer experience, operational efficiency, and scalable governance are investing in IDPs that align teams and accelerate software delivery. Tools like Backstage, Port, and Crossplane offer battle-tested solutions for building internal platforms with developer delight and operational rigor.
But tools are only part of the puzzle. Successful IDP adoption also hinges on the right expertise, a thoughtful rollout strategy, and buy-in from devs and leadership alike. Whether you’re scaling Kubernetes infrastructure, enabling golden paths, or introducing GitOps-first workflows, these platforms—and the companies supporting them—can help turn your developer experience vision into a reality.