Top 25 platform engineering tools to boost your development workflow

You're probably using more tools than you think, and still not moving fast enough.

As software teams scale and systems become more complex, managing infrastructure, deployments, and developer experience becomes challenging. Platform engineering has emerged as a response to this complexity, creating internal platforms that streamline development workflows and reduce engineers' cognitive load.

But with so many tools, how do you know which ones are worth your time?

According to a recent Gartner report, by 2026, 80% of large software engineering organisations will establish platform teams as internal providers of reusable services, components, and tools. That means staying ahead of the curve isn't just a competitive advantage; it's becoming essential.

What is platform engineering?

Platform engineering is focused on developing, deploying, and operating internal platforms to automate software delivery and enhance developer productivity in cloud-native businesses. It establishes reliable toolchains and self-service flows for engineering teams.

Streamlining Software Delivery with Platform Engineering

At the heart of platform engineering is the Internal Developer Platform (IDP) — a cohesive layer that abstracts infrastructure complexity while providing developers with everything they need to build, deploy, and operate applications independently.

The key aims of platform engineering are:

• Speed: Shorten development cycles and time-to-market through automation and reusable services.

• Safety: Minimise operational risk using standards and automating controls.

• Scalability: Increase productivity by introducing workstreams and infrastructure.

Ultimately, platform engineering empowers development teams to do their best work faster, safer, and at scale without being burdened by the underlying complexity of modern software systems.

Top 25 platform engineering tools

An effective developer platform requires effective tools. From containerisation to CI/CD, these 25 tools provide teams with a way to automate and scale their workflow.

Each one improves productivity, collaboration, and secure app delivery. To make exploration easier, we've grouped these tools into five broad categories, and they include:

Containerisation & orchestration tools

These tools help manage containers and their deployments, ensuring scalable and reliable applications in any cloud-native environment.

1. Kubernetes

Kubernetes is the most widely used container orchestration platform for deploying, scaling, and managing applications in containers. It offers high availability, fault tolerance, and resource optimisation, making it the most sought-after solution for managing large-scale cloud-native applications.

Kubernetes is critical to most internal developer platforms (IDPs). It provides teams with fine-grained control of infrastructure so that they can scale numerous components with ease and manage complex configurations. It supports shared environments, provides security, and finds services without being challenging.

2. Kratix

Kratix is an open-source platform framework that enables platform engineers to build and manage internal developer platforms (IDPs) on Kubernetes. It provides a structured way to offer infrastructure, security, and development tools as self-service capabilities. Platform teams use Kratix to define and expose these capabilities as APIs that developers can request and consume independently.

Central to Kratix is the concept of a Promise. A Promise defines the desired state of a service, the Kubernetes Custom Resource Definition (CRD) that represents it, and the logic to provision and manage it. This logic is executed through containerised workflows, allowing platform teams to automate service delivery while maintaining control, consistency, and compliance across environments.

Kratix embraces GitOps principles to manage resources declaratively and reproducibly across environments. This is core to managing your resources as a fleet. It allows organisations to scale their platform operations by automating infrastructure and application delivery through composable, reusable components. With Kratix, platform engineering shifts from manual provisioning to API-driven workflows that empower developers while standardising platform operations.

3. Docker

Docker is the go-to platform for containerising applications. It allows teams to bundle code, libraries, and dependencies into a single, portable unit. These containers ensure consistent behaviour across environments, whether on a developer's laptop or in production.

It simplifies onboarding, accelerates deployment cycles, and aligns development and operations teams by providing a uniform environment for testing, building, and running apps.

There are other container runtimes, such as containerd, CRI-O, etc. 

4. Helm

Helm is the package manager for Kubernetes, designed to streamline the deployment and management of Kubernetes applications through reusable YAML templates called "charts." By abstracting complex Kubernetes manifests into simplified, configurable charts, Helm allows teams to install, upgrade, and roll back applications effortlessly.

Helm makes it easy to maintain consistency across environments, whether deploying a single microservice or a full-stack application. For example, you can deploy a production-ready PostgreSQL database with a single command using the official Bitnami chart, modifying just a few values in a values.yaml file. This eliminates the need to craft intricate manifests manually for each environment.

5. KubeVela

KubeVela is a modern application delivery and management platform built on top of Kubernetes. It simplifies deploying and operating applications across hybrid and multi-cloud environments by abstracting away infrastructure complexities. With an application-centric API, KubeVela allows teams to consistently define, deploy, and manage microservices, cloud resources, and pipelines, regardless of where they run.

KubeVela stands out for its infrastructure-agnostic, programmable approach. Platform engineers can model reusable, composable workflows using a modern configuration language, tailoring application delivery to diverse scenarios. Whether deploying to Kubernetes clusters, cloud providers, or edge devices, KubeVela ensures reliable, repeatable, and scalable delivery.

Infrastructure as Code (IaC) tools

IaC tools automate infrastructure management, including provisioning, configuration, and deployment, making the process more predictable and repeatable.

6. Terraform

Terraform is an open-source IaC tool that automates the provisioning and management of cloud resources using a simple, declarative configuration language. It supports major cloud providers like AWS, Google Cloud, and Azure, allowing teams to manage everything from VMs and networking to Kubernetes clusters consistently across environments.

By treating infrastructure as code, Terraform ensures reliable, repeatable deployments with version control for collaboration and rollback. Platform teams create reusable modules so developers can self-serve pre-configured environments without handling underlying infrastructure.

7. Ansible

Ansible automates configuration management, application deployment, and system updates across your infrastructure using simple, agentless automation. With YAML-based playbooks, teams define the desired system state in a human-readable format. Ansible then ensures that all nodes, whether on-premises or in the cloud, match that configuration.

Ansible can automatically perform repetitive tasks in platform engineering, such as initialising development environments. For instance, a playbook can initialise and configure a pool of EC2 instances with the proper dependencies, and all are initiated from a self-service portal, minimising manual configuration and enforcing consistency.

8. Pulumi

Pulumi modernises infrastructure deployment using familiar programming languages like TypeScript, Python, Go, and C#. This bridges the gap between developers and operations teams, bringing infrastructure logic closer to the application code. Unlike traditional IaC tools that use YAML or DSLs, Pulumi offers full programming capabilities such as loops, conditionals, and reusable modules, while staying true to IaC best practices.

For instance, you can deploy a serverless backend with Pulumi and TypeScript, sharing one codebase for business logic and infrastructure configuration, all version-controlled and deployed through CI/CD.

9. Crossplane

Crossplane is an open-source framework that empowers platform teams to manage infrastructure the same way they manage Kubernetes apps—using declarative configuration and GitOps workflows. It extends Kubernetes with custom resources that represent external cloud infrastructure like databases, storage buckets, and VPCs.

Once installed, you can provision and manage multi-cloud resources, such as spinning up an RDS instance in AWS or a GKE cluster in GCP, without leaving your Kubernetes cluster. This approach simplifies operations by letting you use familiar tools like kubectl, enabling automation and policy enforcement at scale.

Crossplane integrates with Kratix, enabling you to abstract the use of Crossplane for developers, increasing developer productivity.

10. Bicep

Bicep is a domain-specific language (DSL) that streamlines Azure Resource Management (ARM) by offering a cleaner, more readable syntax than traditional JSON-based ARM templates. It retains all the power and flexibility of ARM, allowing developers and DevOps teams to define infrastructure declaratively without the complexity of verbose JSON.

Bicep compiles directly to ARM templates, making it easy to deploy and manage Azure resources while supporting best practices like modularity, code reuse, and integration with CI/CD pipelines.

Developer portals & productivity tools

These tools improve collaboration and developer experience by creating centralised platforms for accessing development resources and automating processes.

11. Backstage

Backstage is an open-source developer portal created by Spotify. It centralises tools, services, and documentation into a single, accessible interface. Developers can use Backstage to discover, manage, and optimise apps and infrastructure all from one place, simplifying workflows and lessening complexity.

Key features are a single Software Catalogue to monitor all software parts and who owns them, TechDocs for centralised documentation, and Software Templates to spin up new projects with best practices. The plugin system in Backstage lets teams plug in many different tools and services, making it very customisable to any organisation's requirements.

While portals were all the rage last year, there's a growing realisation that they are not the be-all and end-all of platform engineering; Backstage is not your platform. Portals are the front end of the platform, a UI that allows developers (and executives) to discover and access the platform’s underlying capabilities.

This is where Kratix comes in. It can upgrade Backstage from a portal to a true internal platform.

12. Port

Port is a developer portal that allows developers to easily leverage self-service actions, dashboards, automated workflows, and forms. It makes it simple for platform teams to deliver resources to developers by bringing everything together in one place so that developers can discover and utilise the tools at their fingertips.

Port is simple to scale and integrates well with top DevOps tools. This allows companies to customise and configure Port to suit their processes. In addition, Port provides built-in reporting and analytics that give platform teams valuable information about how developers are consuming the services offered and which tools are most useful.

Port also integrates nicely with Kratix and provides additional fleet management and day two operations support.

13. Humanitec

Humanitec offers an application developer-focused management platform. It simplifies self-service developer workflows, allowing platform teams to automate and manage infrastructure easily.

This platform offers a customisable graph-based workflow interface that can interact with DevOps tools, making it easy for developers to obtain the necessary resources effectively.

Humanitec aims to reduce repetitive work and improve the developer experience. Developers code more rather than infrastructure management, and platform teams are in charge and more efficient. 

Humanitec can be used alongside other platform-focused orchestrators, such as Kratix or KusionStack, to provide another method for developers to interact with the platform services and infrastructure.

14. Qovery

Qovery is a DevOps automation platform that simplifies cloud access for developers by automating deployment, environment management, and resource provisioning. It supports quick deployments, easy environment cloning, and streamlined resource management—all accessible via web UI, CLI, API, or client libraries for flexibility.

With over 100 native integrations and strong Kubernetes support, Qovery is aimed at teams aiming for efficient and scalable deployments. Developers can focus on building features, as Qovery handles the infrastructure details, enabling faster delivery with fewer setup hassles.

15. Cortex

Cortex is a developer portal focused on service management and operational visibility. It helps developers and platform teams track ownership, service health, and performance through a centralised, easy-to-navigate dashboard. Cortex offers a Software Catalogue that lists all services and their owners, along with integrations for GitHub, CI/CD tools, and incident management platforms. 

Cortex also provides visual scorecards to measure operational readiness and track key performance indicators (KPIs), helping teams stay aligned with reliability and compliance goals. By offering insights into how services are performing and how teams are engaging with the platform, Cortex enables organisations to improve engineering productivity, reduce risk, and build better software faster.

CI/CD & deployment tools

Continuous Integration and Continuous Deployment (CI/CD) tools automate and streamline code testing, integration, and delivery into production environments.

16. GitLab

GitLab is an all-in-one DevOps platform that streamlines the entire software development lifecycle, from planning and coding to testing and deployment. It's built-in CI/CD pipelines let teams automate their workflows, ensuring faster and more reliable software delivery.

With GitLab CI/CD, developers can run tests, build artefacts, and deploy to various environments using YAML-based configurations. It supports cloud-native practices, integrates well with Kubernetes, and offers auto DevOps features to get started quickly with minimal setup.

17. Jenkins

Jenkins is an open-source automation server that is used to implement continuous integration (CI) and continuous delivery (CD) pipelines. It helps teams build and operate sophisticated pipelines that automate software development, testing, and deployment across different environments and technology stacks.

Jenkins is very extensible, with many plugins, and can be significantly customised. It plays well with container platforms, cloud providers, and infrastructure tools. You can use it to handle small microservices and large monolithic applications. Jenkins lets you modify pipelines to fit any project.

18. Flux

Flux is a lightweight and powerful GitOps tool that automates the deployment of applications and infrastructure in Kubernetes. It continuously monitors your Git repositories and ensures that the desired state defined in version control is reflected in your cluster.

Using Kubernetes-native principles, Flux supports progressive delivery, automated image updates, and multi-environment deployment strategies. It integrates well with Helm, Kustomize, and other Kubernetes tools, making it ideal for platform teams adopting GitOps practices. 

19. Argo CD

Argo CD is a declarative, GitOps-based continuous delivery tool for Kubernetes that streamlines application deployment and lifecycle management. It connects your Git repositories with your Kubernetes clusters, automatically syncing desired states defined in version control with the actual cluster state.

With Argo CD, platform teams can automate and enforce deployment processes across environments. It provides a visual dashboard, role-based access control, and support for multi-cluster management, making it easy to audit, monitor, and roll back changes when needed.

20. GitHub Actions

GitHub Actions enables engineers to define automated workflows directly in their GitHub repo, so every push, pull request, or release can automatically trigger builds, tests, or deployments.

These workflows are powered by event triggers and defined using simple YAML configuration. Teams can automate container builds, infrastructure provisioning, security scans, and more. GitHub Actions has thousands of community-contributed actions.

Monitoring & observability tools

These tools help monitor performance, trace errors, and collect critical metrics across your system, ensuring visibility for stakeholders and the smooth operation of your applications.

21. Prometheus

Prometheus is a robust open-source monitoring and alerting toolkit designed for reliability at scale. It collects and stores time-series metrics, making it ideal for observing everything from infrastructure to application-level performance.

With its built-in query language (PromQL), your team can define custom metrics, visualise trends, and trigger automated alerts when thresholds are crossed. It integrates seamlessly with Grafana for rich, customisable dashboards and supports data exports from various modern DevOps tools.

22. Grafana toolsets (Loki, Mimir, etc)

Grafana is a widely adopted observability platform that integrates metrics, logs and traces into a unified, customisable dashboard experience. It empowers teams to visualise data from multiple sources, making tracking performance, identifying anomalies, and driving data-informed decisions easier.

Beyond dashboards, the Grafana stack includes powerful open-source tools: Loki for scalable, cost-effective log aggregation, Mimir for long-term metrics storage, and Tempo for distributed tracing. Together, they provide a full observability suite that integrates seamlessly with Prometheus and other monitoring systems. 

23. New Relic

New Relic is an integrated observability platform that offers real-time performance insights across customer experiences, infrastructure, and applications. It aggregates metrics, logs, and traces to enable teams to monitor and debug systems efficiently.

With AI-based anomaly detection, New Relic aids in early problem detection and performance improvement. The platform integrates cloud services, container management software, and other applications.

24. Datadog

Datadog is an observability platform that integrates metrics, logs, and traces to give end-to-end visibility into applications and infrastructure. It enables teams to observe the health of their systems through real-time dashboards, anomaly detection, and powerful querying.

Datadog supports cloud providers, containers, and other technologies, making it ideal for hybrid cloud environments. Users can create alerts and utilise machine learning to predict and correct potential problems before they affect performance.

25. Dynatrace

Dynatrace provides an AI-powered observability platform that delivers full-stack monitoring for applications, infrastructure, and user experiences. Its automation and deep analytics capabilities make it easy for teams to detect, diagnose, and resolve issues faster.

Dynatrace’s platform integrates with cloud-native technologies, CI/CD pipelines, and microservices architectures, offering real-time insights and root-cause analysis. It uses AI to correlate data and provide precise insights without manual configuration.

Empowering developers with a seamless platform ecosystem

Platform engineering increases developers' productivity and automates processes in today's rapidly changing world. With the integration of the tools mentioned above, you can provide a reliable internal developer platform (IDP) that speeds up business and provides self-service capabilities.

Want to take your platform engineering to the next level? Syntasso provides solutions and assistance for a customised IDP that boosts efficiency and innovation. Let's schedule a demo to see how we can improve your developer experience.