Developer Tools · head to head
Cortex vs Delinea
Cortex
Developer Tools
Internal developer portal that scores service ownership and maturity rather than just cataloguing services
- From
- On request
- Free plan
- No
Delinea
Cybersecurity
Privileged access management from the merged Thycotic and Centrify
- From
- On request
- Free plan
- No
The short version
- Each has a real cost: Cortex pricing is quote only, so a platform team cannot build a business case or compare against the true cost of self-hosted Backstage without entering a sales cycle first.; Delinea the Thycotic and Centrify lineages are integrated unevenly, so buying the full portfolio means running consoles and agents that do not share one administrative model as cleanly as the marketing suggests.
- They diverge on capability: Cortex covers Service catalogue, Delinea covers Secret Server.
- Prices and features above were last checked on 1 September 2026.
Where they differ
Only the attributes on which Cortex and Delinea actually diverge.
Identical on both: starting price (On request), pricing model (quote), free tier (No), user rating (Not yet rated).
What each one covers
Drawn from each product's published feature list. An absence here means we hold no record of it - not that the product lacks it.
Only in Cortex
- Service catalogue
- Scorecards
- Initiatives
- Self-service templates
- Query language
- Eng intelligence
- Integrations layer
- On-call and ownership mapping
Only in Delinea
- Secret Server
- Privileged session recording
- Privilege Manager
- Server PAM
- Discovery
- DevOps secrets
- Behaviour analytics
What people use each for
The jobs each tool is most often brought in to do.
Cortex
- A platform team that needs to prove to leadership how far a Kubernetes or framework migration has actually progressed across hundreds of servicesnot Delinea
- An organisation where ownership of production services is genuinely unknown after reorganisations or acquisitionsnot Delinea
- Enforcing production readiness standards on new services at creation time rather than at incident reviewnot Delinea
- Replacing a self-hosted Backstage that is consuming a full-time engineer or two just to stay upgradednot Delinea
Delinea
- An organisation whose cyber insurer now requires privileged credentials to be vaulted and rotatednot Cortex
- A mid-market IT team that abandoned a heavier PAM rollout and needs a vault that can be in production in weeksnot Cortex
- A company removing local administrator rights from every workstation after a ransomware incidentnot Cortex
- An audit finding that shared service account passwords are stored in a spreadsheet and used by contractorsnot Cortex
Where each one falls short
Documented limitations, not opinions. Every one is a constraint you would hit in normal use.
Cortex
- Pricing is quote only, so a platform team cannot build a business case or compare against the true cost of self-hosted Backstage without entering a sales cycle first.
- The catalogue is only as accurate as the metadata you supply, so an organisation with inconsistent repository conventions spends its first quarter cleaning data before any scorecard means anything.
- Scorecards create political friction: publishing a per-team grade turns an engineering standard into a performance metric, and teams will game the rules rather than fix the underlying issue.
- It is closed source and hosted, so organisations with strict data residency or air-gap requirements have limited options compared with running Backstage themselves.
- Value scales with organisation size, so a company with fifty engineers and thirty services will find the catalogue tells them nothing they did not already know while still paying an enterprise contract.
Delinea
- The Thycotic and Centrify lineages are integrated unevenly, so buying the full portfolio means running consoles and agents that do not share one administrative model as cleanly as the marketing suggests.
- Modules are licensed separately by different units, per privileged user for the vault and per endpoint for privilege management, which makes total cost hard to model and easy to underestimate at scale.
- Delinea does not publish rates, so buyers benchmark against third party and public sector listings; expect list prices to be negotiable by a wide margin, which means the first quote is not the price.
- Thoma Bravo ownership since 2021 has coincided with firmer renewal pricing, and buyers with a single-vendor PAM estate have little leverage once credentials are inside the vault.
- Migrating out of a privileged access vault is a genuinely hard project because every automated process that fetches a secret has to be repointed, so the switching cost is real and the vendor knows it.
Pricing, plan by plan
Cortex
On request- Cortex$undefined/year
- Service catalogue and ownership mapping
- Scorecards and initiatives
- Self-service templates
Delinea
On request- Secret Server$undefined/year
- Priced per privileged user, tiered by edition
- Cloud or on premises deployment
- Session recording in higher editions
- Privilege Manager$undefined/year
- Priced per endpoint
- Local admin rights removal and application elevation
- Licensed separately from Secret Server
- Server PAM$undefined/year
- Priced per managed server or per privileged user
- Just-in-time server access
- Licensed separately
Which should you pick?
Choose Cortex if
- You need service catalogue.
- You work on Web, API.
- You also want scorecards.
Choose Delinea if
- You need secret server.
- You work on Web, Windows, Linux, macOS.
- You also want privileged session recording.
Questions people ask
- Is Cortex or Delinea better?
- Neither clearly leads. Cortex starts at On request and Delinea at On request, and user ratings are close enough to be indistinguishable. Choose on capability and platform support.
- Which is cheaper, Cortex or Delinea?
- Cortex starts at On request and Delinea at On request.
- Does Cortex or Delinea run on more platforms?
- Cortex runs on Web, API. Delinea runs on Web, Windows, Linux, macOS.
- What is Cortex best used for?
- Cortex is most often used for a platform team that needs to prove to leadership how far a kubernetes or framework migration has actually progressed across hundreds of services, an organisation where ownership of production services is genuinely unknown after reorganisations or acquisitions, enforcing production readiness standards on new services at creation time rather than at incident review, replacing a self-hosted backstage that is consuming a full-time engineer or two just to stay upgraded. Of those, a platform team that needs to prove to leadership how far a kubernetes or framework migration has actually progressed across hundreds of services and an organisation where ownership of production services is genuinely unknown after reorganisations or acquisitions are not what Delinea is typically brought in for.
- What can Cortex do that Delinea cannot?
- Cortex covers Service catalogue, Scorecards, Initiatives, Self-service templates. Delinea covers Secret Server, Privileged session recording, Privilege Manager, Server PAM.
Answered from the vendors’ own pages
Cortex: How is Cortex different from Backstage?
Backstage is an open source framework you build and staff. Cortex is a hosted product with scorecards and initiatives out of the box and no platform team required to keep it running.
Delinea: Is Delinea the same as Thycotic?
Delinea is the merged company formed from Thycotic and Centrify in 2021. Secret Server is the former Thycotic product; the server access products come from Centrify.
Cortex: Is pricing published?
No. Cortex requires a sales conversation and prepares a custom proposal.
Delinea: Is pricing published?
Not by Delinea. Public sector frameworks have listed Secret Server Cloud around 348 GBP per user per year, which is a reference point, not a quote.
Cortex: Can it self-host?
It is offered as a hosted product; on-premise arrangements are handled through sales rather than published.
Delinea: Does one licence cover endpoints and servers?
No. Secret Server, Privilege Manager and Server PAM are separately licensed on different units. Scope all three if your requirement spans them.
Cortex: What is the main adoption risk?
Bad or missing service metadata. The catalogue and every scorecard on top of it inherit whatever quality your repositories already have.
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