What is an Internal Developer Portal?

2025-12-19

An Internal Developer Portal (IDP) is a platform designed to improve the developer experience within an organization.

OK, so what is “Developer Experience”?

Developer Experience (DevEx or DX) is the holistic view of a developer’s environment, tools, processes, and culture, focusing on making their work efficient, satisfying, and productive, much like User Experience (UX) but for builders of software, encompassing everything from IDEs and APIs to team workflows and onboarding.
What is Developer Experience?

How does an IDP improve DevEx? A good IDP provides a single place where developers can access everything they need for their day to work. Easy access to the tools they use, the location of software sources, documentation on how it all fits together. In other words, the resources they need to build, test, deploy, and monitor the software systems they create.

Even though the information is available, it is often scattered across multiple locations, making it difficult to find. The raw data may need processing to extract out valuable information.

It needs to be automated. Manually collecting scattered data, analyzing it for useful insights, and recording everything centrally can be a futile activity, since the information can quickly become outdated by subsequent changes. Worse, it will be wrong. To earn the trust of developers, that hub needs to be dependable and correct. The best way to achieve that is to automate updating it when things change.

What are the key features of an IDP?

1. Centralized Information Hub
   • It provides a central location for exploring the libraries, apps, services, APIs, infrastructure, tools and so forth used within a team or organization.
   • It provides a searchable catalog of software and infrastructure components.
     
     
2. Conformance with good practice
   • It provides a means of scoring code, components, and services against “best practices” around security, standardization, licenses, and the like.
     
     
3. Developer Onboarding
   • It provides access to the tools, and documentation needed to get a new developer up and running quickly.
     
     
4. Team Collaboration
   • It enables team collaboration through easy access to documentation, resources, and discussion forums.
     
     
5. Automation
   • It provides automatic updating of resources and information when things change, such as when new code is committed to main in git.
     
     
6. Monitoring and reporting
   • It can generate reports about the catalog, its compliance, and key performance indicators like the classic DORA metrics. This facilitates supplying teams outside of development with metrics reports.
     

How much does all that cost?
Many existing IDPs charge $100s/year per developer for such features. The Silverfish IDP will be different as we want all developers to have access to such features. Our prices range from completely free for public repos on Github up to $59.90/year per developer for established businesses. Head over to the pricing page for more info.