Cortex vs Building in-house
Deciding whether to build or buy comes down to more than just initial investment. It's about understanding the long-term implications for your engineering team's productivity, scalability, and adoption.
Ready to adopt Cortex?
Launch-ready from day one
Building tooling in-house gives you full control over your Engineering Operations Platform. If you’re confident you have a strong vision and have the time and resources to invest in building something high quality, this option could work for you.
The benefit of using Cortex is that we provide a platform that's ready to go, built based on years of experience working with world-class engineering teams.
With Cortex
Pre-built templates, best practices, and structured guidance from the get go.
Quick adoption by teams, enabling faster time-to-value.
Guided by a dedicated CS team, enablement programs, and Cortex Academy.
Driving adoption and engagement
Cortex works for your whole engineering team. We help:
Engineering leaders
Understand productivity and bottlenecks
Platform teams
Deliver self-service experiences for developers
SRE teams
Enforce production readiness and operational standards
Developers
Reduce context switching and get information directly in your IDE
With Cortex
Built for immediate ease of use, driving rapid adoption.
Demonstrable value across different teams and roles.
Sustained engagement through intuitive user experience.
Understanding true costs: Monetary vs. Opportunity
Whilst you pay to use Cortex, you should bear in mind that there is an opportunity cost to building tooling in-house. Not only is there an upfront time investment (which is likely to be substantial if you want to build something that is polished and withstands the test of time), but there are ongoing costs in terms of maintenance and training.
We’ve helped customers like Xero & Skyscanner deprecate their internally built tools that they’d invested in for years in favor of Cortex.
With Cortex
Predictable costs and clear ROI metrics.
Minimal maintenance and operational overhead.
Engineering resources remain dedicated to core product innovation.
Scalability matters
If your company is fast-growing, building in-house tooling could present challenges in the future. Onboarding takes time, and ensuring continuity if the employees who built the tool leave can present challenges.
What Forrester report says about Cortex’s impact
224%
Return on investment (ROI)
$6.38M
Benefits PV
$4.41M
Net present value (NPV)
<6 months
Payback
With Cortex, you can scale your business rapidly with confidence that we are simple to use, and you will be supported by a team of experts to guide as needed.
With Cortex
Proven to scale seamlessly for global enterprises and fast-growing teams.
Regular, automated updates and feature expansions.
Integration with new tools and services without extra overhead.
Empowering world-class engineering teams
Join leading teams improving their operational maturity and reducing developer friction
Amanda Jackson
Technical Program Manager, Rapid7
“Walk away from a spreadsheet for a minute, and it’s already stale. With Cortex, we never have that issue. I can just trust that information is always up to date, and we can leave devs alone that have already done what they need to do.”
Mark Dunlop
Head of Engineering Experience
Egor Kalinichev
Engineering Manager
"This is the angle we look at Cortex from right now. We can utilize it so much more and improve the developer experience so much more. So that's what we're going for."
Hariprasad Babu
Manager Technology
“Cortex gets rid of the repetitive manual work so you can focus on the innovative feature development that drives real value.”
Joshua Marble
Manager of Developer Experience
“Cortex shaped how we deliver software. It gave us a foundation to move faster and build the right way from day one.”
Shaun McCormick
Principal Software Engineer
“We know if an engineer gets pulled out of what they’re doing, it takes 30 minutes to re-engage, Cortex lets us reduce noise and keep our team focused on the highest priority work.”
Javier de Vega Ruiz
Chief Software Engineer
"One of the biggest improvements we've seen since implementing Cortex is in our Mean Time to Restore- which we reduced by 67%. Being able to quickly find service information is a small operational change that has enormous impact."
Amanda Jackson
Technical Program Manager, Rapid7
“Walk away from a spreadsheet for a minute, and it’s already stale. With Cortex, we never have that issue. I can just trust that information is always up to date, and we can leave devs alone that have already done what they need to do.”
Mark Dunlop
Head of Engineering Experience
Egor Kalinichev
Engineering Manager
"This is the angle we look at Cortex from right now. We can utilize it so much more and improve the developer experience so much more. So that's what we're going for."
Hariprasad Babu
Manager Technology
“Cortex gets rid of the repetitive manual work so you can focus on the innovative feature development that drives real value.”
Joshua Marble
Manager of Developer Experience
“Cortex shaped how we deliver software. It gave us a foundation to move faster and build the right way from day one.”
Shaun McCormick
Principal Software Engineer
“We know if an engineer gets pulled out of what they’re doing, it takes 30 minutes to re-engage, Cortex lets us reduce noise and keep our team focused on the highest priority work.”
Javier de Vega Ruiz
Chief Software Engineer
"One of the biggest improvements we've seen since implementing Cortex is in our Mean Time to Restore- which we reduced by 67%. Being able to quickly find service information is a small operational change that has enormous impact."
