Glue vs Backstage

By Arjun Mehta, Principal Engineer at Glue

The developer experience platform market has grown rapidly, with Cortex emerging as one of the leading players. If you are evaluating Cortex alongside Glue, the comparison requires understanding that these tools solve different problems for different audiences. Cortex helps engineering organizations manage service health and developer productivity. Glue helps product teams understand the codebase and bridge the gap between product decisions and engineering reality.

I have built the kind of systems that Cortex tracks and the kind that Glue analyzes. The distinction between managing services operationally and understanding code strategically is subtle but significant.

Cortex positions itself as the internal developer portal that helps engineering organizations manage service quality, track ownership, and enforce engineering standards. It competes primarily with Backstage (open source), Port, and OpsLevel. Its differentiator is ease of setup compared to Backstage and deeper out-of-the-box scorecards for measuring service maturity.

Glue positions itself as AI codebase intelligence for product teams. Rather than managing service health operationally, Glue provides strategic understanding of what the codebase contains and how it connects. The primary audience is different: Cortex serves platform engineering and engineering management. Glue serves product managers, engineering leaders, and CTOs who need to make decisions about software without reading its source code.

The overlap exists at the engineering leadership layer. An engineering manager might use Cortex to track whether services meet operational standards and Glue to understand the codebase deeply enough to have productive planning conversations with product. But the use cases, audiences, and data models are distinct.

Cortex has built a strong product for engineering operations and developer experience.

Service scorecards. Cortex's scorecard system defines and tracks standards for service health: documentation completeness, on-call rotation coverage, dependency freshness, security compliance. Engineering leaders can see at a glance which services meet standards and which need attention.

Ownership clarity. Cortex provides clear service ownership mapping. When something breaks at 2am, Cortex makes it immediately clear who is responsible. For large organizations with hundreds of services, this clarity prevents the "whose service is this?" scramble.

Developer experience metrics. Cortex tracks the indicators that affect engineering productivity: build times, deployment frequency, on-call burden, and developer satisfaction. This data helps platform teams identify and address friction points.

Initiative tracking. Cortex allows engineering leadership to define org-wide initiatives (migration to a new framework, security compliance improvements) and track adoption across teams. This is useful for driving organizational change at scale.

Cortex manages the operational health of services. Glue understands what the code inside those services does.

Depth of understanding. Cortex knows that your payment service exists, who owns it, and whether it meets your engineering standards. Glue knows how the payment service works: which functions process transactions, what database tables it queries, which other modules depend on it, and what the blast radius of a change would be. The difference is between a building directory and an architect's blueprint.

Audience accessibility. Cortex is built for engineers and engineering leaders. A product manager opening Cortex would see service health dashboards and compliance metrics that are not actionable from a product perspective. Glue presents codebase information in language that engineering leaders and product managers alike can use for strategic decisions.

Product-engineering bridge. Cortex improves the engineering experience. Glue bridges the gap between engineering and product. Feature discovery, effort estimation support, competitive gap analysis, and spec generation grounded in code are product-facing capabilities that Cortex does not provide.

Code-level analysis. Cortex works at the service level. Glue works at the code level. For organizations with monoliths or modular monoliths (not microservices), Cortex's service-level abstraction is less useful. Glue analyzes code regardless of architectural style. For more on the broader category, see our code intelligence platforms guide.

Choose Cortex when your primary challenge is engineering operational complexity. If you have hundreds of services, unclear ownership, inconsistent engineering standards, and platform teams responsible for developer experience, Cortex provides the management layer you need.

Cortex is the right choice when the audience is engineering leadership and platform engineering, and the goal is operational excellence across services.

Cortex is particularly valuable for organizations going through rapid scaling where service proliferation outpaces organizational knowledge. When you go from 20 to 200 services in two years, the ownership, standards, and operational health visibility that Cortex provides prevents the chaos that typically accompanies that growth. The scorecard system gives engineering leadership a way to set expectations and measure compliance without micromanaging individual teams.

If your primary concern is incidents stemming from operational gaps, such as services without on-call rotations, outdated dependencies, or missing documentation, Cortex addresses those risks systematically.

Choose Glue when your primary challenge is the gap between product planning and codebase reality. If PMs cannot see what the system contains, if estimates are based on guesswork rather than system knowledge, if tribal knowledge loss creates recurring friction, Glue addresses the information asymmetry.

Glue is the right choice when non-technical stakeholders need codebase visibility and when product decisions need to be grounded in code-level understanding.

Yes. Cortex manages service health and engineering standards. Glue provides code-level intelligence for product-engineering alignment. They serve different layers of the same organization: Cortex for operational management, Glue for strategic understanding.

An engineering organization might use Cortex to ensure services meet operational standards while using Glue to give product teams the codebase visibility they need for accurate planning. The tools complement each other without competing.

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What is the difference between a developer experience platform and codebase intelligence?

A developer experience platform (Cortex, Port, OpsLevel) focuses on engineering operational health: service catalogs, compliance scorecards, ownership tracking, and developer productivity metrics. Codebase intelligence (Glue) focuses on understanding what the code does and making that understanding accessible to non-technical stakeholders. Developer experience platforms manage services. Codebase intelligence explains code. The audiences and use cases overlap at engineering leadership but diverge for product teams.

Can Cortex give product managers codebase visibility?

Not effectively. Cortex is designed for engineering users and presents information at the service level: ownership, health metrics, compliance scores. Product managers need code-level understanding: what features exist, how modules interact, what a proposed change involves. Cortex does not parse or analyze code at the level of functions, files, and dependencies. For product team visibility, tools with natural language interfaces and AI-powered code understanding are more appropriate.

Do I need both a developer portal and codebase intelligence?

If your organization has both engineering operational complexity (many services, unclear ownership, inconsistent standards) and product-engineering alignment challenges (PMs flying blind, estimates wrong, roadmaps slipping), then yes. Cortex solves the engineering operations problem. Glue solves the product-engineering visibility problem. They address different root causes and serve different primary audiences.