Cortex is an internal developer portal that centralizes service catalogs, scorecards, and documentation to help engineering teams manage microservices.
Category
Developer Tools
Pricing
Freemium / Per-Developer Subscription, from Free (up to 20 services)
Verified
Not yet
Last updated
July 18, 2026
Founded
2019
Headquarters
San Francisco, California, USA
Free PlanWeb AppAPIAIFreemium
Overview
Cortex (cortex.io) is a San Francisco-based internal developer portal founded in 2019 by Anish Dhar, Ganesh Datta, and Nikhil Unni. It centralizes service ownership, documentation, and engineering standards for organizations running complex microservices architectures.
This company is distinct from the unrelated open-source Cortex project maintained by the Cloud Native Computing Foundation, which provides long-term storage for Prometheus metrics. The two products share a name but serve entirely different purposes.
Key Features
The core of Cortex is a service catalog that ingests metadata from GitHub, Kubernetes, AWS, CI/CD pipelines, and on-call tools to give a unified view of every service, its owner, and its operational status.
Scorecards let platform teams define and automatically track engineering standards, such as test coverage, on-call readiness, or documentation completeness, across every service in the catalog, alongside self-service scaffolding templates and engineering analytics dashboards.
Pricing
Cortex offers a free tier for up to 20 services with basic catalog functionality. A Team plan is reported to start around $25 per developer per month with unlimited services, scorecards, and advanced integrations.
Enterprise pricing is custom and negotiated directly with Cortex's sales team, adding SSO, advanced security controls, custom SLAs, and dedicated customer success management.
Key Features
Service Catalog — A centralized, auto-populated catalog of services, APIs, and infrastructure resources pulled from GitHub, Kubernetes, AWS, and CI/CD tools.
Scorecards — Configurable engineering-standards tracking that scores every service against criteria like test coverage, security patching, and documentation completeness.
Ownership and On-Call Mapping — Links each service to its owning team and on-call schedule, often synced from tools like PagerDuty.
Self-Service Actions and Templates — Lets developers scaffold new services according to organizational best practices without manual setup.
Engineering Intelligence and Analytics — Dashboards give engineering leadership visibility into service health and maturity across the portfolio.
Broad Integration Ecosystem — Connects with GitHub, Kubernetes, PagerDuty, AWS, and other common engineering tools to keep catalog data current.
Custom Workflows — Supports configurable workflows for governance processes like service onboarding and deprecation.
Enterprise Access Controls — SSO and role-based access controls are available on higher-tier plans for larger organizations.
Pros & Cons
Pros
Purpose-built for tracking service ownership and engineering standards at scale, not just documentation
Well-capitalized (roughly $198M raised) with a large enterprise customer base signaling product stability
Scorecards provide a measurable way to drive adoption of engineering best practices across teams
Broad integration ecosystem connects with common engineering and on-call tooling
Cons
Detailed pricing beyond the free tier is not fully public, requiring sales conversations for most plans
Per-developer pricing can become expensive for large engineering organizations
Overkill for small teams or organizations running only a handful of services
Name collision with the unrelated open-source Cortex project for Prometheus long-term storage can cause search and vendor confusion
Pricing
Free Free N/A
Team From $25/developer/month Monthly or Annual
Enterprise Custom Contact Sales
Frequently Asked Questions
What is Cortex used for?
Cortex is used as an internal developer portal that centralizes service ownership, documentation, and engineering standards tracking for organizations managing microservices.
Is there a free tier?
Yes. Cortex offers a free tier supporting up to 20 services with basic service catalog functionality.
How is Cortex priced?
Cortex uses a freemium, per-developer subscription model. A Team plan is reported to start around $25 per developer per month, with custom Enterprise pricing for larger organizations.
Is Cortex the same as the open-source Cortex project for Prometheus?
No. cortex.io is a commercial internal developer portal company, entirely separate from the CNCF's open-source Cortex project, which provides long-term storage for Prometheus metrics.
Who founded Cortex?
Cortex was founded in 2019 by Anish Dhar, Ganesh Datta, and Nikhil Unni, and is headquartered in San Francisco, California.
What integrations does Cortex support?
Cortex integrates with tools including GitHub, Kubernetes, AWS, CI/CD pipelines, and on-call platforms like PagerDuty to keep its service catalog current.