The Internal Developer Portal (IDP) market, while still in its early stages, has seen rapid growth, with Gartner predicting that 80% of platform engineering teams will use IDPs by 2026.

Three main types of IDPs have emerged:

• Open-source IDPs, where you host and maintain the code yourself.
• Proprietary IDPs, typically offered as software-as-a-service.
• Hybrid IDPs, built on open-source foundations but enhanced with commercial support and proprietary features.

This article explores the pros and cons of each type, and explains why we at Roadie believe the Hybrid model offers the best of both worlds, and is ultimately poised to win.

Open-source

Discussions about open-source IDPs often center around Backstage. Although it’s technically a framework for building an IDP rather than an IDP itself, Backstage is by far the most significant player in the space. Open-sourced by Spotify in early 2020, it is a version of their own internal developer portal, which they had been using for years to good effect.

Statistics about frequent Backstage users at Spotify: https://backstage.spotify.com/discover/blog/how-spotify-measures-backstage-roi/

Benefits of the open-source model for IDPs

IDPs act as a window into all of the tools that developers use. It is the venerable “single pane of glass”. Developers use a lot of tools though, and the developer tool landscape is thousands of tools strong and growing.

So how can any single IDP integrate with and plug in to all these tools? By leveraging the power of the open-source community, which brings us to the first major benefit of going open-source for your IDP: the community.