How to choose an internal developer platform

Start from criteria, not demos

Platform demos are designed to look great. That is their job. The way to avoid buying the demo instead of the platform is to decide your evaluation criteria before you sit through a single one, then score every option against the same list.

Here is a checklist built from what actually separates platforms once they are in production. It is vendor-neutral. Use it against everyone, including us.

The criteria that matter

1. Tool-agnostic, or rip-and-replace?

The single biggest predictor of whether a platform rollout succeeds is whether it lets you keep the tools you already run. A platform that expects you to standardize on its CI, its registry, and its scanner is asking for a migration on top of an adoption. A control plane that sits on top of your existing CI, registries, scanners, and clouds gives you governance and golden paths without the rip-and-replace.

Ask: does this connect to what we already run, or does it replace it?

2. Governance built in, or bolted on?

Some platforms give you self-service and treat security and compliance as something you add later. For a regulated team that is backwards. Policy gates, tenant isolation, and audit trails should be properties of the platform, not plugins you assemble.

Ask: is a policy gate a first-class feature, or a webhook I have to wire and maintain?

3. Can it run on your infrastructure?

Even if you are cloud-happy today, requirements change, and sovereignty rules are getting stricter, not looser. Confirm whether a self-hosted, and ideally air-gapped, option exists before you commit, even if you do not need it yet.

Ask: if we had to run this fully on-prem or air-gapped next year, could we?

4. Is the audit trail real?

In a regulated environment the evidence is the product. A platform should record what shipped, who approved it, and which checks ran, in a way that resists after-the-fact editing, and it should produce that automatically. If gathering audit evidence is still a manual project, the platform has not solved your hardest problem.

Ask: is the audit trail tamper-evident, and is it a byproduct of every run?

5. Golden paths that actually template the hard parts

Self-service is table stakes. The question is what the golden path includes. A new service should start with CI, security scanning, and deploy already wired, plus the policy gates, not a blank pipeline with a nice UI.

Ask: what does "create a new service" actually give me on day one?

6. AI governance

AI is entering every pipeline. A platform that ignores this is already behind. The right answer is that AI-authored changes run through the same scans, gates, and record as human changes, on infrastructure you control.

Ask: how does this govern AI-authored changes, and where does the AI run?

7. Pricing model

Watch for pricing that punishes success: per-seat models that tax every developer, or per-pipeline-run models that make you ration the platform you just bought. Understand what scales your bill before you sign.

Ask: what makes this bill go up, and is that aligned with our growth?

A simple scoring approach

Score each option 0 to 2 on all seven criteria: 0 = no, 1 = partial, 2 = yes. Weight the ones that are hard constraints for you (for a regulated team, self-host and audit trail might be double-weighted). The point is not a perfect number. It is forcing an honest, consistent comparison instead of a vibe from a demo.

Red flags

• "Certified compliant out of the box." No platform certifies you. The honest claim is built-in controls and evidence. See through the wording.
• Rip-and-replace disguised as "opinionated." Opinions are fine. Forcing a full tool migration to adopt the platform is a cost they are hiding.
• No self-host story. If they cannot answer the on-prem question, assume the answer is no.
• Audit as a manual project. If evidence is not automatic, your audits will not get easier.
• Pricing that scales with usage of the platform itself. You will end up rationing it.

Where IntegraCI lands on its own checklist

To be consistent, here is where we sit: IntegraCI is a control plane that connects to the tools you already run rather than replacing them. Governance, policy gates, tenant isolation, and a tamper-evident audit trail are built in, not bolted on. It runs on your infrastructure, including air-gapped. Golden paths template CI, scanning, deploy, and the gates together. AI-authored changes run through the same controls, on your own model and infrastructure. Score us against everyone else on the same seven criteria.

Free guide: The IDP Buyer's Guide turns this checklist into a scorecard you can bring to your evaluation, in one PDF.

Compare approaches or scope your own case.