In this article, you can find the most outstanding developer portal examples and best practices we observed at the Developer Portal Awards since 2018. API documentation and developer experience are essential parts of the developer portals' evolution, and the presented list can serve as a benchmark study. Please note that this program is vendor- and techstack-neutral.
Every year, independent jurors with extensive knowledge of API programs, developer portals, and API documentation evaluate the nominees, and spotlight innovative teams and their exceptional work. Review past winners by clicking on the year you are interested in, and gain valuable insights.
Best Developer Portals by Year
Table of contents:
- DevPortal Awards 2025 Winners - Full Gala Video
- Best Onboarding Experience in a Developer Portal
- Best Unified Enterprise Developer Portal
- Best Solution Portal
- Best Developer Portal for Data Products
- Best API and Partner Apps Marketplace
- Best AI-Enabled Developer Portal
- Best (API) Microportal inside a Developer Portal
- Best Reference Documentation Beyond REST APIs
- Best Overall Developer Portal
- Best Written API Reference Topics: Secret Surprise Award 2025
We created the awards program to highlight what’s possible when documentation teams get it right: portals that combine clarity, usability, and innovation to truly enable their users. We bring you insights and inspiration on the emerging trends, to challenge and inspire the practices of interface documentation.
Developer portals have grown well beyond their origins as API documentation sites. Today, they serve as strategic platforms where organizations structure complex portfolios, guide diverse user journeys, and increasingly support collaboration between humans and AI-driven systems. For the 2025 Developer Portal Awards several categories were introduced or updated to reflect these changes, from data product portals to marketplaces, AI-enabled augmentations, solution portals, and more. Each category draws attention to practices that are both emerging and maturing, offering a view into where developer experience is heading.
We are grateful to Anthony Fabbricino, Bob Watson, Devendar Kasuvojula, Jennifer Rondeau, Marco Spinello, Mike Jang, Patricia Rogers, Prince Valluri, Renishya Jayan, Robert Delwood, and Ryan Clifford for your work and your dedication! The jury process is far more challenging than it looks. Each juror has to step back from personal preferences, reflect on the values they want to champion, and stand behind the panel’s final choices. They dive into portals across many industries, numerous domains. The eleven jurors on the panel this year are true experts who brought curiosity, empathy, and depth to their evaluations of the nominated developer portals.
[Editor's note: for brevity, we often refer to the nominated portals by the company's name. Of course, all remarks and evaluations are only about the developer portals as they were at the time of the evaluations, and we are never talking about the entire corporation.]
DevPortal Awards 2025 Winners - Full Gala Video
Best Onboarding Experience in a Developer Portal Category
Benchmark
Onboarding is the moment when developers first form an impression of your APIs. Clear pathways, actionable documentation, and just-enough guidance set the standard that nominees in this category are being compared against.
Challenges
Some nominees go further by addressing the hardest situations: helping integrators adapt to unfamiliar concepts, lowering steep learning curves, or designing accessible flows for developers with special needs. These approaches reveal how onboarding can become a differentiator rather than just a necessity.
Current Focus
As the jury works through the evaluations, they are examining how well nominees balance clarity and complexity, and how quickly new users can build confidence. The results will surface examples that push onboarding practices forward for everyone.
Winner: North Developer
We are delighted to name North Developer as the winner of the Best Onboarding Experience in a Developer Portal award. North Developer impressed the jury by achieving a remarkable balance: effectively handling extremely complex topics, particularly within the payments/FinTech domain, while ensuring users are never misled or overwhelmed. The jury noted that their approach guides developers through technical implementation and challenging banking security aspects without requiring incomplete shortcuts. The content organization and explanations cater exceptionally well to different audiences, making it easy for even complete newcomers to the domain to find orientation. North Developer demonstrated an outstanding and astounding job in transforming complex technical paths into a guided user journey. We offer them our warmest congratulations on setting a high bar for complexity management in developer onboarding.
Runner-up: Cloudinary Doc Portal
The Cloudinary Doc Portal excelled by providing documentation that is both richly interactive and highly polished. The jury recognized that Cloudinary's documentation serves as an excellent "cookbook" for experienced developers, providing tight, scoped examples for specific implementations. Furthermore, they included thoughtful user experience touches, such as progress bars and time estimates on kickstarters, and the ability to jump directly to specific points within video tutorials. These elements demonstrate a genuine consideration for the user's time and journey.
Special Spotlight: Vonage Developer Portal
We are pleased to shine a special spotlight on the Vonage API Developer Portal specifically for their exemplary tutorial work. The jury found their onboarding tutorials to be top-notch, allowing users (even those who are not technical) to achieve desired outcomes quickly and without glitches, such as getting to "hello in five minutes". This success demonstrates that the Vonage developer portal team has put significant work into crafting feasible, achievable, and valuable get-started paths. We believe the methods used in these practical, action-oriented tutorials are highly worthy of emulation.
Best Unified Enterprise Developer Portal
Benchmark
A unified enterprise developer portal gives shape to sprawling API portfolios, turning a patchwork of systems into a coherent experience. The benchmark lies in clarity, discoverability, and a consistently branded frame of reference.
Challenges
Nominees in this category often face complexity created by mergers, acquisitions, or rapid growth. The strongest solutions show how federated documentation, governance, and role-based access can come together without breaking the user journey.
Current Focus
In their evaluations, the jury is looking at how nominees represent domain models, sustain long-term support, and incorporate feedback into the system. The outcomes will point to what it really means to unify enterprise scale with developer experience.
Winner: Cloudflare Docs portal
The Cloudflare Docs Portal earned high praise from the jurors by demonstrating a high level of maturity and execution. The portal cemented foundational excellence by maintaining this consistency. A critical factor was their sophisticated simplicity in product naming, helping their users to find their way through the directory. Their success demonstrates that prioritizing fundamental organization, information architecture, and clarity is a fast path to value on a federated enterprise developer portal.
Runner-up: Worldpay Developer Hub
The Worldpay Developer Hub was recognized for its highly effective approach to organizing its platform, successfully allowing users to navigate both horizontally and vertically through the portal's substantial enterprise offerings. They also took notable steps in addressing the challenge of directing diverse user types to the correct solution, including those who may not be deeply technical. We must specifically commend their attempt to integrate advanced guidance, like their solution wizard, which we believe is a critical step toward the future of developer portals. This ambition is exactly what is needed to help new visitors navigate complex, federated enterprises.
Special Spotlight: J.P. Morgan Payments Developer Portal
In the Unified Enterprise Developer Portal category, we want to shine a spotlight to a portal that speaks to an emerging trend among large organizations. Namely, we want to draw attention to the elevated representation of a select group of APIs by the J.P. Morgan Payments Developer Portal. We observed this portal as an outstanding example of the growing trend of "forking toward intentions": the act of creating distinct, dedicated experiences. This separation is increasingly vital as enterprise complexity demands specialized interfaces, whether for high-level marketing content or differently paced technical documentation
Best Solution Portal
Benchmark
A solution portal has a set of user journeys to explore a company's offering, and often also takes advantage of AI to personalise this exploration. The benchmark is how clearly it guides users to the right path whether that’s a product, a service, or a combination, and communicates the value of APIs beyond the code.
Challenges
Nominees in this category are addressing the complexities of choice: offering multiple integration levels for the same use case, serving users with different technical skills, and framing solutions that align with specific industries or problem domains. The strongest portals bring cohesion to this variety, enabling informed decisions without friction.
Current Focus
As the jury reviews entries, attention is on how solution discovery is structured and presented. Clarity, accessibility, and the ability to connect both technical- and business-focused developers with the right digital assets are central to what will stand out in this year’s evaluations.
Winner: North Developer Portal
The portal North Developer was unanimously recognized by the jury group for its superior ability to provide a comprehensive, thoughtfully designed experience. Jurors noted that the portal felt "a little more soulful" and "alive," suggesting that significant thought had gone into the overall experience. North's developer portal excelled by offering superior content structuring, including explicit pricing transparency and centralization of success stories on the portal itself. Crucially, the jury found that the North Developer portal demonstrated a very thoughtful and comprehensive approach to mapping the user’s journey, successfully guiding all personas, from the developer to the executive, through the "what's next" question of adopting and implementing the solution.
Runner-Up: Mercedes-Benz Data Portal
The runner-up for this highly competitive category is the Mercedes-Benz Data Portal, recognized for its thought leadership and its strong focus on innovation in an emerging segment of data products. The portal excels at framing its APIs as tools for innovation, providing compelling success stories that focus on solving new industry B2B problems. The jury determined the portal offers an excellent directional indication of where solution portals should be heading, particularly in new segments.
Special Spotlight: Worldpay Developer Hub
The jury wants to give a special recognition to the Worldpay Developer Hub for its exceptionally strong overall performance and innovation. Worldpay's portal was highly praised for doing the "basics very well" and was specifically recognized for its innovative "Find Your Solution" tool. This feature, which guides users toward the correct APIs by having them answer simple business questions, was described as "very creative" and highly effective for mitigating complexity for business stakeholders. The Worldpay portal's exceptional organization ensures its standing as a outstanding and examplary portal in the payments solution space, although the jury noted that some elements of the holistic business picture, such as case studies, required navigation outside the developer portal.
Best Developer Portal for Data Products
Benchmark
Data products come with documentation needs that go well beyond describing endpoints and parameters. The benchmark here is how clearly a portal supports both data understanding and trust, thus helping users grasp not just how to call the API, but how to interpret and rely on the information it delivers.
Challenges
Nominees in this new category are tackling some of the hardest issues: surfacing “dark data” as tangible business value, balancing multiple formats, and communicating the nuances of data quality, provenance, and constraints. Outstanding entries bridge the worlds of API documentation and traditional data dictionaries in ways that empower analytics, modeling, and decision-making.
Current Focus
As the jury evaluates this category for the first time, they are looking at how nominees expose data products responsibly and transparently. Clarity around schema changes, licensing, pricing, and potential biases all play a role in shaping whether clients can truly trust and use these assets.
Winner: UP42 Documentation Hub
The highest honor for the Best Developer Portal for Data Products goes to the UP42 Documentation Hub. The UP42 portal was seen as tackling a very challenging and complicated data set, and they set a high standard for compliance and transparency. This portal excels at treating geospatial offerings as data products, with clear provenance for both provider and processing levels, strong interpretability, and a practical, centralized catalog. Discovery and persona coverage are top‑notch, and for every API exposed, they explicitly presented the End User Licensing Agreement. This comprehensive approach to data governance and transparency directly addressed the jury’s highest concern in this category: trust. By ensuring that every data consumer provides approval and understands usage limitations, the UP42 Documentation Hub has proven itself as the clear benchmark for responsible and accountable data product management.
Runner-Up: CDQ Developer Portal
The CDQ Developer Portal received this recognition for its admirable work in making complex, often localized, aggregated data sets accessible to developers. The jury specifically appreciated their rigorous approach to documentation, which accurately conveyed the limitations and complexity of the data. CDQ provides an excellent reference for how to document data integrity, doing a very fair job of presenting its offering and ensuring that developers know exactly what they are working with.
Special Spotlight: Mercedes-Benz Data
The jury wishes to recognize the Mercedes-Benz Data Portal for its clear commitment to making new forms of automotive data available. The portal was celebrated for its focus on driving business outcomes. It is pioneering efforts in demonstrating how this data can solve significant B2B challenges, such as assisting fleet maintainers in achieving their EV goals, or helping municipalities with road infrastructure planning. Mercedes-Benz is providing a valuable directional example by tackling a bigger problem with a newer approach.
Best API and Partner Apps Marketplace
Benchmark
An API and Partner Apps Marketplace extends the role of the developer portal by combining the provider’s APIs with applications built by others. The benchmark is a seamless experience that allows users to move from exploring APIs to discovering and/or publishing ready-made applications that bring those APIs to life.
Challenges
Nominees in this category often work at the intersection of curation and community. They need to balance a clear API catalog with a marketplace that highlights partner solutions, ensuring customers can quickly identify when an application already addresses their use case. Strong entries make this connection intuitive while keeping both sides visible and valuable.
Current Focus
Attention was on how effectively nominees have connected their developer portals with their partner marketplaces. The key considerations are clarity of navigation, the strength of discovery paths, and how well the platform supports both integration and visibility for contributors.
Winner: Canva Developers
Following a thorough review and adjustment of scoring that favored both integrator- and buyer-personas, the portal Canva Developers emerged as the preferred winner, demonstrating an exemplary direction for API and Partner Apps Marketplaces. Canva Developers' success was attributed to its modern design, vivid user experience, and clear support for developer workflows and personas. The portal has standout strengths in partner enablement and app presentation, often appearing to have been built from the ground up with a very clear illustration of the intended workflow and journey.
Runner-up: Sabre Central Marketplace
The jury is pleased to recognize the Sabre Central Marketplace as the Runner-up in this category. The portal was highly regarded by the jury for its maturity and complexity in dealing with numerous partners and applications, serving as an established, strong offering.
Special Spotlight: Salla Partners Portal
In this category, the jury wishes to pull a special spotlight to the following specifics on the Salla Partners Portal. The portal demonstrated strong developer capabilities, including a mock server, an AI chat assistant, a clear three-pane API layout, and video tutorials. Furthermore, the organization and presentation of the application tiles were praised for being very well done, allowing users to filter by price and clearly conveying the app's value with visible ratings.
Best AI-Enabled Developer Portal
Where AI-driven portals stand out is in the precision of their augmentations. Some teams deploy chatbots and adaptive onboarding flows that surface the right content at the right moment, while others experiment with automated code validation embedded in tutorials. These implementations show how intentional design choices determine whether AI serves as a novelty or as a structural enhancement to the developer experience.
Authoring workflows are also shifting. AI-assisted editing, content reviews, and automated translations reduce the bottlenecks that once slowed documentation teams. In several cases, we’ve seen dynamic help layers and AI-generated summaries reshape how authors think about granularity and reuse, opening new approaches to consistency across documentation sets.
The scope of these augmentations matters. The strongest contenders frame clear boundaries as to where AI intervenes, where human review anchors the process, and how the resulting hybrid system improves accessibility and inclusivity. These choices define not just efficiency gains but a benchmark for trust and maintainability in AI-enabled developer portals.
Winner: Cloudinary Doc Portal
The Cloudinary Doc Portal excelled by offering genuine and profound structural enhancement. Their solution was lauded for superior foundational AI technologies and sophisticated LLM client support, including multiple MCP servers. This deep integration allows developers to wire up their environments and work directly with their code. By providing these tools, the portal functions as the authoritative "system of records and the system of context", ensuring consistency and reliability at the source of truth. The portal's success at the awards evaluation lies not only in technological depth but also in its profound sense of user empathy. They achieved excellence in cognitive inclusivity by providing dedicated documentation and suggested prompts for interacting with their LLM clients. This handholding approach ensures that users who may not know "what to ask from the chatbot" can still harness its power, effectively lowering the cognitive load. Cloudinary demonstrates that the strongest hybrid systems successfully improve accessibility and inclusivity, while fundamentally transforming the way developers engage with documentation.
Runner-Up: Canva Developers
The portal Canva Developers demonstrated a powerful precision of AI-augmentation. The jury noted the portal’s ability to deliver high-quality, automated translations for quick starts and code examples, addressing the goal of reducing bottlenecks in authoring workflows. Furthermore, the portal offers sophisticated integrated LLM tools, providing the necessary server integrations and client support that allow developers to build applications using their AI implementations. This integration places them among the leaders in driving new developer efficiencies.
Special Spotlight: BNY Treasury Services API Developer Portal
The jury established that for an AI-augmented portal to truly succeed, compliancy with data usage and privacy laws is critical, foundational effort, a non-negotiable standard: the BNY Treasury Services API portal. This recipient earns recognition for setting an essential benchmark for trust and maintainability. BNY Treasury Services API portal was one of the few portals to provide explicit, plain-language caveats upfront. They clearly communicate confidence levels and data policies, actively framing clear boundaries as to where AI intervenes. This foundational commitment defines how a responsible hybrid system must prioritize the end-user’s need to know what happens to their data. This practice is a profound statement: transparency must be guaranteed and made accessible before engagement. The BNY Treasury Services API Developer Portal provides an essential roadmap for ethical engagement in this space, proving that foundational trust must accompany technical innovation.
Best (API) Microportal inside a Developer Portal
Benchmark
A product microportal offers a tailored experience within the larger developer portal, designed to showcase a specific API product or a closely related set of APIs. The benchmark is how clearly it frames that product experience, while still remaining easy to discover and connected to the broader ecosystem.
Challenges
Nominees in this category face the task of balancing focus with integration. A strong microportal provides a high-quality, self-contained journey for both technical and business users, while avoiding isolation from the larger portfolio. It’s not about cataloging everything, it’s about giving a distinct group of APIs the clarity and prominence they need.
Current Focus
While the original ideal expected a product microportal to provide a self-contained, frictionless path from exploration all the way to adoption, the jury noted that making this path self-contained is often not straightforward or even possible in complex B2B integrations, for example when dealing with B2B payments or financial services that require initial setup and/or a conversation with sales. Therefore, the jury evaluated against the expectation that the content be "comprehensive enough for a user to make a decision" regarding integration or adoption, and that the portal must effectively "contribute to the larger organizational decision-making process".
Winner: Shell Developer Portal
The Shell Developer Portal excelled in providing the technical enablement that developers seek while maintaining focus on the crucial product narrative. In a definite big win for implementers, the jury was particularly impressed by their technical resource offering, providing both the standard OAS definition and a Postman collection for their APIs. Furthermore, the demo confirmed the promise of functional sample REST calls inside the documentation flow, assuring developers of ease of integration, even if API keys are required. While organizing such an extensive API portfolio is an inherently challenging task, Shell's commitment to packaging essential product information alongside robust, enabling technical resources made them the standout choice in this evolving category.
Runner-up: Monite Docs portal
The jury was thoroughly impressed by how the sophisticated structural approach of the Monite Docs portal treats their platform as a series of self-contained product modules, such as Accounts Payable and Accounts Receivable, that effectively function as individual microportals. Monite Docs successfully learned from and applied industry best practices, setting a high bar for integrated documentation. They were praised for their usability features, particularly the exceptionally nice search functionality that provides clear results with helpful filters and breadcrumbs. Furthermore, they demonstrated a highly commendable integration approach, offering first-class support for guides, APIs, and direct access to GitHub code all at the same level.
Special Spotlight: BNY Treasury Services API Developer Portal
Lauded for its exceptional flow and clarity, the BNY Treasury Services API Developer Portal demonstrates an overall sense of integration flow that the jury found highly effective and exemplary. Their documentation was greatly appreciated for its upfront clarity, explicitly detailing that their offering is B2B, with implementation tailored away from consumer concerns. This transparency is invaluable for technical implementers and decision-makers alike.
Best Reference Documentation Beyond REST APIs
Benchmark
RESTful became the most widely used API type over the past decade, setting expectations for clarity, usability, and strong tooling support. That does not mean alternatives were less trusted, but their adoption was slower. For GraphQL, the specification was available early, but the ecosystem and best practices took time to mature. For asynchronous APIs, the absence of a widely adopted specification until the emergence of AsyncAPI delayed broader uptake.
Challenges
Now that these API styles are established, developer portals face the challenge of presenting them with the same ease and reliability REST made familiar. Nominees in this category are showing how to guide developers across different integration styles without fragmentation, while providing enhancements like interactive documentation, language-specific examples, and clear change tracking to speed adoption.
Current Focus
In this category, the jury was appreciated how reference documentation moves beyond the basics. Navigation, usability, and completeness are essential. However, the standouts are be those portals that make GraphQL, asynchronous APIs, and other non-REST approaches approachable, trustworthy, and seamlessly integrated into a cohesive portfolio.
Winner: Mappedin Developer Portal
We are thrilled to recognize the Mappedin Developer Portal as an award recipient, particularly for their highly innovative and visually focused approach to API documentation. The Mappedin Developer Portal offers a unique and compelling way of visualizing the potential applications of their API, which serves as an immediate draw for beginners and experts alike. The jury was highly impressed by their commitment to the developer experience, particularly visible in their amazing Building Manager and their highly appropriate sandbox environment. This environment truly functions as a sandbox, giving users the experience necessary to build their own solution for production, we celebrate the portal for providing such an amazing playground experience that advances the category’s definition.
Winner: Pismo Developers Portal
We also celebrate Pismo Developers Portal docs as an award winner for their truly impressive achievements in events documentation practices that advance the field. The jury was deeply impressed by the Pismo’s team's ability to move beyond simple technical attributes, utilizing comprehensive guides to put complex properties into various contexts. The documentation provides a good presentation of JSON schemas, making it easy for users to understand them and connect them directly to corresponding APIs. A specialized area of exceptional focus that sets Pismo apart is their comprehensive documentation of events. This sophisticated, high-quality technical content, that significantly elevates the practice of events documentation, and their overall content provides clear explanations that serve as a positive example.
Best Overall Developer Portal Award 2025
The portals that are already category award winners are the ones in consideration for the best overall award each year. This year we are not awards a separate enterprise and small business portal each, but calling out the one portal the jury ultimately agreed to choose as best overall award winner portal. This choice was the result of a very long discussion about outstanding contenders full of magic skills and olympic achievements... stay tuned to the long form article we will publish with some more details and considerations.
Winner: North Developer
Operating in the highly crowded and complex payment processing space, North Developer distinguished itself through its mastery of foundational design and storytelling. The portal achieves the remarkable feat of providing a "clean story in a complicated space". Jurors specifically celebrated how the portal brilliantly hides all the complexity (such as for example PCI compliance and security concerns) until the user explicitly needs it, ensuring an exceptionally smooth initial experience. This commitment to foundational clarity and a well thought through solution pathway ensures that the visitor recognizes the solid tech and expertise "under the hood". After a detailed review of their robust SDKs and various guides, the jury confirmed that North provides an extraordinarily really well done experience, setting a universal example for excellence in a business-critical domain.
Best Written API Reference Topics: Secret Surprise Award 2025
Up until the gala event, we kept this surprise awards category a complete secret from everyone including the nominees! All of the nominated portals' reference documentation were first inspected by the esteemed jury panel member Robert Delwood, who did an incredible effort to evaluate these documentation sets against two dozen written, and another dozen or so implicit criteria. From among the shortlist, with yet another passionate discussion where the jury group talked for hours until we came to a consensus on which excellent docs among the many should we highlight with an award.
After decades of community effort going into first figuring out, then perfecting the documentation best practices for web APIs, it was such an absurdly exhilarating moment to formally celebrate this specific, thoughtful aspect of content writing, reference topics, its quality often taken for granted. It is non-trivial to get to excellence, nor to find the right arrangement.
To quote from one of the jury group conversations, " People would often say, 'Oh, those are just reference topics... we can just auto-generate those.' And it's like... 'Or Not !?' "
Winner: UPS Developer Portal
The UPS Developer Portal is remarkable in its exceptional content architecture and page design. It successfully integrates the progressive disclosure model by placing the entire endpoint conversation—from the value proposition to the comprehensive field definitions—on a single page, yet maintains easy navigation through effective internal linking. The jury awards the portal this surprise award for the delightful surprise they had, and as a recommendation as a good model for API reference topics in a large enterprise.
This execution, which balances complex requirements with elegant simplicity, is a significant achievement. In the words of the jury panel: "It looks very simple, but we can tell from our experience it's not very easy to make such a huge documentation set look so flowing... there’s a lot of thought which went behind that. Also to make a scalable information architecture is non-trivial." The content excels in clarity, providing highly clarifying descriptions, particularly the very thorough error handling.
In 2025, forty-four developer portal teams stepped forward to contend in nine categories of the Developer Portal Awards. The choice for awards in each category balances innovation and excellence at the service of user needs. Some aspects are to this day underserved, clearly the economic motivation is not there to pressure the point yet. Some other category evaluations felt like comparing the Olympians. As one of the jurors stated before, not winning in an awards competition doesn't indicate lack of success at the box office! However, user experience that is today considered to be on an award-winning level, will soon become the base expectation.
2024 brought exciting innovations and best practices in the field of developer portals and API documentation. What are the best developer portals this year? The DevPortal Awards searches for the answer, year by year the results challenge and inspire portal teams to go from good to great.
Congratulations to all participants! We at Pronovix are honoured and proud to host the DevPortal Awards (ca 2018), and as always delighted and excited by the expertise and innovation in the developer portal space.
We are grateful to Alvaro Navarro, Anila Zaidi, Bob Watson, Dan Grabski, Daria Lutchenko, Ellis Pratt, James Noes, Marco Spinello, Michael Meng, Mike Jang, Patricia Rogers, Rachel Lee Nabors, Renishya Jayan, Robert Delwood, Ruby Batallones, and Swapnil Sapar! They invested as jurors so much effort, empathy and curiosity, and their expertise into evaluating the awards nominees.
In the following article, you can read category by category the final evaluations and remarks from the Jury Panel. You can read the following to celebrate the winners and special call-outs, but also as inspiration and as a benchmark study. In addition, you will find highlights and various suggestions for further improvements.
[Editor's note: for brevity, we often refer to the nominated portals by the company's name. Of course, all remarks and evaluations are only about the developer portals as they were at the time of the evaluations, and we are never talking about the entire corporation.]
Table of contents:
- DevPortal Awards 2024 Winners - Video
- Best Accessible Multimodal Documentation Category
- Best Served Integration Solutions in a Developer Portal Category
- Best Unified Enterprise Developer Portal Category
- Best Served API Business Model Category
- Best Use of Analytics in a Developer Portal Category
- Best AI-augmented User Experience Category
- Best Reference Documentation Beyond REST APIs Category
- Best Findability of Products in a Developer Portal Category
- Best Onboarding Experience in a Developer Portal Category
- Best Overall Developer Portals
DevPortal Awards 2024 Winners - Video
The choice for awards in each category balances innovation and excellence at the service of user needs. The following video showcases the categories and the winners’ insights.
Best Accessible Multimodal Documentation Category
Multimodal documentation includes different learning styles, text, images, videos, and interactive elements, allowing users to understand complex concepts quickly. This approach boosts developers' engagement and satisfaction, reduces support needs, and meets legal and ethical standards for accessibility.
Accessible multimodal documentation is essential because it ensures that all users can access and understand content through various formats, regardless of their abilities.
The jury firmly believes that accessibility should never be just a nice-to-have feature in a developer portal. It’s an absolute must. It’s 2024, and it’s disheartening that accessibility still isn’t a priority for many companies.
There is still hope, as some basic features, such as screen reader support or dark/light modes, are becoming standard in most portals.
Winner: Rootstock developer portal
After careful consideration, the jury was pleased to announce the Rootstock developer portal as the winner of the Best Accessible Multimodal Documentation category. The portal not only scored perfect in all accessibility checkers but also provides a convenient widget that allows users to customize their experience when using the developer portal.
Time of screenshot: 19 November 2024.
Back to the table of contents »
Best Served Integration Solutions in a Developer Portal Category
The jurors were impressed by the nominees’ commitment to delivering a smooth, consistent user experience. For instance, if users can create an instance of a product through a dashboard or toolkit but aren’t guided to relevant tutorials, the integration experience can feel incomplete.
It’s these nuances that the jurors considered carefully across all evaluation criteria.
Winner: Dynatrace Developer
Dynatrace Developer emerged as the clear winner. Dynatrace is an AI-powered application monitoring platform that optimizes performance, infrastructure, and user experience in real-time. What sets their platform apart is their seamless user experience across all evaluation criteria. This consistency is essential for users when integrating a product with their applications. And Dynatrace ensures that the integration experience is both smooth and comprehensive.
For example, Dynatrace offers two low-code solutions: a CLI App Toolkit and a VSCode extension. Both are offered from their developer portal and the Dynatrace platform once a user account is created. This brings us to some general thoughts on user accounts:
- Creating an account should be simple, especially if it's required to integrate a product.
- The user dashboard should streamline product integration, particularly for new users.
- The user dashboard should offer guidance and support; for both new and experienced users.
Dynatrace Developer excels in these areas. Creating an account is effortless, and upon logging in, the dashboard clearly presents the App Toolkit and the VSCode extension, along with links to how-to guides and tutorials on the developer portal, and community support. From account creation to multiple integration options and concise guides on their developer portal, Dynatrace offers a seamless, cohesive user experience that supports integration from start to finish.
Time of screenshot: 19 November 2024.
Although Dynatrace Developer is this year’s winner, some of the other nominees matched or even outperformed Dynatrace in specific criteria. This was surprising, as it highlights the importance of a consistent user experience. For example, if you visit Publiq’s developer portal, their no-code solution (Widgets) is immediate and clear; however, creating a user account to use Widgets could be less difficult for a better user experience for new visitors.
In comparison, on the Dynatrace developer portal, the "Write your first app" call-to-action leads you to a get started guide that isn’t for their low-code solutions (AppToolKit and VSCode extension). This confused the jurors, though they were pleased when they saw a card for the App Toolkit after a scroll on the same landing page. To ensure the user experience was consistent, the jurors clicked on the card and were presented with options to get started with the toolkit. Both options led them to guides which embed user login. In this way, Dynatrace ensures the integration experience for the user is seamless.
As the jury members highlighted, they hope these insights help not only the other nominees improve their platforms but also serve as guidance for others in the industry.
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Best Unified Enterprise Developer Portal Category
In this category, the jury assessed how effectively the entrants presented a clear, unified API experience across a large offering. The jury especially looked for developer portals that were able to demonstrate strong digital governance through the consistency of the user experience across different APIs.
While it is difficult from the outside to understand how unified a company’s offerings may be in implementation, the jury can see the evidence of strong content governance. If the documentation and behavior of an API are consistently in sync, they can feel confident that content governance is working. Something as simple as consistent variable naming schemes can show the evidence of a unified developer portal experience.
The jury specifically called out Postman collections offered as part of developer portals, to create a straightforward set of example documentation that allows the end user to see how a unified set of APIs work together.
Winner: Mapbox Docs
Innovation on APIs in a domain as well established as mapping is a unique challenge. The use cases for a mapping and navigation API are well understood, they could also be presented in a Postman collection. However, Mapbox Docs was able to present their offerings in a clean, easy to use, and consistent way.
The jury felt that Mapbox Docs went above and beyond to educate the user in the possibilities presented by their offerings. The developer cheat sheet was specifically called out by the jury as an exceptional example of tying all their offerings together.
The developer documentation did not make assumptions about the end user’s knowledge, while also avoiding being condescending. The unified approach to educating the end user tied in with their unified APIs.
An API offering for mapping, location search, and navigation could easily feel disjointed without intentional work to create a unified offering. Mapbox Docs showed strong content governance, while consistently showing their innovation.
Time of screenshot: 19 November 2024.
Special Commendation: UPS Developer Portal
The jury decided that while the UPS Developer Portal did not win this category, it deserved a special commendation as an exceptional example of a unified enterprise developer portal.
The UPS Developer Portal was able to connect use cases, API offerings, and Postman collections in a clean way that demonstrated strong content governance. A company as large as UPS could easily have a developer portal offering that is too large to present a consistent developer experience, yet the UPS developer portal was consistently clear and helpful. Everything a developer could want was within just a few clicks, showing a strong understanding of what their end users needed.
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Best Served API Business Model Category
In this category, the jury assessed how effectively entrants presented their business, platform, and API offerings from the main landing page of their Developer Portal. The evaluation focused on how well the portal conveyed the key elements of the solution, including solving user problems and providing clear information within a 15-20 minute review.
Could a prospective user easily find all necessary details to understand if the API offering would solve their business challenges?
The jury sought to comprehend each entrant’s unique business problem, their target users, and the critical information these users needed. While many entrants provided useful information, few had everything readily available from the main landing page. The challenge lay in presenting the offering clearly while allowing users to explore API libraries, use cases, pricing, testimonials, and technical documentation, all while avoiding information overload.
The best portals focused on delivering a clear, concise narrative about their business without too many marketing superlatives. Portals that could describe the company’s capabilities in one or two sentences stood out.
A well-structured Developer Portal includes concise descriptions, meaningful tags, visual elements, and API documentation that come together to narrate the offering effectively. This approach enables users to quickly identify how the API offering addresses their specific business problems. Portals that buried vital information deep within documentation or blog posts did not receive a top score.
Empathy for the user’s journey was critical, with the jury favoring portals that guided users through a product overview, examples of business problems the product solves, and workflows connecting solutions to APIs. The goal was for users to easily locate relevant APIs, quickly perform a successful test API call, and confidently determine that the offering met their needs.
The jury observed that entrants with complex or vast offerings faced challenges in conveying how their APIs work together to solve business problems.
Entrants with smaller offerings sometimes had an advantage, as their limited scope made it easier to clearly describe their entire offering. The jury theorized that some entrants are in industries with few competitors and other entrants have many competitors.
For large-scale platforms, complexity was a significant issue. It was challenging to show how multiple APIs work together to solve various use cases. This required a sophisticated translation between business products and their associated APIs. Some portals handled this complexity better than others, providing a clearer link between products, APIs, and the problems they solved.
The jury also emphasized that release notes, status pages, changelogs, last change timestamps, all communicated that products are well maintained.
Finally, video content was sometimes useful for quickly bridging information gaps, but it was often challenging to execute effectively. The jury found that videos and animated content, when done well, could provide fast, compelling communication, but they were often difficult to reference and did not always meet the needs of users seeking detailed information.
Winner: Postcoder Admin Area
The Postcoder Admin Area scored the highest across the judging criteria. Jurors called out the concise descriptions, focus on use cases, quickstart guides and pricing details which made their offering easy to understand and assess as a prospective user.
Time of screenshot: 19 November 2024.
Honorable Mentions:
- Sabre Dev Studio: Their documentation handled complexity well and described how their multiple APIs come together to deliver a solution to a business problem.
- UPS Developer Portal: Included video of their customer’s use case. Several of the jury members thought this format served as a powerful testimonial and brought their business offering to life.
- DHL API Developer Portal: The jury liked to see developer principles featured front and center.
- Pismo Developers Portal: Kudos for a very clean layout.
- Klaviyo Developers: Clear wayfinding, clear entrypoint.
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Best Use of Analytics in a Developer Portal Category
This award category showcases developer portals that provide dashboards or analytics to enhance the developer experience or business value of operating with the documented APIs. For example, with metrics, transparent pricing, and an overview of API keys.
Some examples of metrics are a measure of performance, time to first API call, uptime/availability, usability, calls made to the API, response success rate, issues logged/resolved, number of subscribers/accounts, monetization, and usage statistics.
Winners: Cloudinary Docs and Miro Developer Platform
The term “Analytics” means a lot of things to a lot of people as evidenced by the diversity of the nominees. To evaluate devportals with such diversity, the jurors focused on how each devportal’s Analytics features served their target audiences.
The jurors found that two of the nominees tied for first place in their evaluations: Cloudinary Docs and Miro Developer Platform. While these nominees both placed first, they approached their Analytics solutions differently to focus on what was important to their target users.
Cloudinary Docs provides services that support cloud-based, programmable media assets. They’ve instrumented those assets to provide information that helps their customers monitor and manage the delivery and performance of those assets. It was clear to the judges that Cloudinary was in touch with their customers’ use-cases. The analytics displays were clearly useful to their customers and designed for growth. However, without instrumentation, there can be no analytics. By including the instrumentation that enables their analytics displays, Cloudinary demonstrates that it has had customer success in mind from the beginning.
Time of screenshot: 19 November 2024.
Miro Developer Platform provides a cloud-based, collaboration tool and app developers use Miro’s Developer Portal to create and manage third-party apps. Miro’s customer-focus shone through in their focused selection of metrics and their presentation. Their analytics offering provides data that app developers need to track the success of their apps. That information is easy to read so developers can manage and improve their apps.
Each award winner demonstrated how to meet their customers’ needs for analytics by understanding their customers’ use cases from the beginning in order to provide the most useful and meaningful data to their audiences. They serve as excellent examples to model.
Time of screenshot: 19 November 2024.
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Best AI-augmented User Experience Category
As part of this year's Developer Portal Awards, the jury evaluated submissions in the Best AI-Augmented User Experience category. This category celebrates developer portals that have effectively integrated AI to enhance user interactions, streamline access to information, and improve the overall developer experience.
After careful evaluation, the jury chose not to name a definitive winner for this category. Although several entries presented promising ideas, none fully met the criteria to stand out as a clear frontrunner. A recurring shortcoming across submissions was the lack of explicit communication about data usage in AI training, which is a critical factor for transparency and building user trust. However, jurors would like to acknowledge and commend the noteworthy efforts of Redpanda Docs and Empathy Platform Docs, where they saw significant strides in this evolving field.
Redpanda Docs
Redpanda Docs offers the most ready-to-use solution from among the category entries. The AI search works in tandem with the traditional search functionality, effectively supporting both novice and experienced developers. The docs portal's AI solution reliably responds to user queries and enhances the user experience.
Empathy Platform Docs
Empathy Platform Docs impressed the jury with a thoughtfully designed user experience that felt intuitive and engaging. The AI search provided tabs alongside summaries, enhancing information findability. The portal showed a forward-thinking approach that aims to create a delightful user experience.
This year's entries reflect the complexities and evolving nature of integrating artificial intelligence into developer portals. As a key takeaway, the jury emphasizes the need for transparency around data usage and privacy and a strong foundation of well-structured documentation to support AI functionalities and good user experience.
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Best Reference Documentation Beyond REST APIs Category
API references are essential in any developer portal. A good reference improves the developer experience by reducing the time it takes for developers to understand and integrate your API and minimizing the need for support requests.
This category recognizes the efforts of the nominees in designing, implementing, and documenting API references for non-REST APIs. Creating high-quality references for these APIs is particularly challenging, as they often involve more complex protocols, real-time communication requirements, or serialization formats beyond the standard JSON or XML.
Winner: XRP Ledger Developer Resources
The jury is excited to announce XRP Ledger Developer Resources as the winner of the Best Reference Documentation beyond REST APIs category. The portal offers an exceptional developer experience when it comes to understanding JSON-RPC and Websockets APIs. It also features Devtools, an intuitive tool for live API testing directly within the portal.
Time of screenshot: 19 November 2024.
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Best Findability of Products in a Developer Portal Category
Given that almost every portal had CTAs for product on the homepage and a clear link to a catalog, the jury identified several themes that played a critical role in their determination:
- Missing the “Why” - In terms of findability, it is essential to guide potential customers to the relevant product with minimal friction. While many portals included independent sections for use cases, these were often disconnected from the actual products, forcing users to navigate multiple pages and piece together information. Portals that included the “why” behind the product on the same page as the technical information made it much easier for users to find and assess the product, ultimately leading to quicker conversions.
- Simplicity Improves Findability - The assessment revealed that many portals had overly complex user experiences, presenting users with numerous flows to choose from. While this can be a strength when executed well, it can quickly become a weakness if the flows are not well-designed to guide users toward their goals. Additionally, overcomplicating the UI with excessive graphics and pages with minimal content can force users to work harder to find the resources they need.
- Relevant Search Results - It was noted that many portals commonly returned hundreds of search results for a single term, often lacking clear relevance or additional capabilities to refine the results. In such cases, users often abandon the search and resort to manually navigating the experience to find the desired product. With the increased reliance on search in larger portals with extensive content, providing relevant results is critical to findability. Generally, the more content and pages within an experience, the more essential relevant search becomes to complement the materials.
- Differentiation in Catalogs - Many product catalogs appeared identical in terms of features and product displays, regardless of the number of products offered. This indicated a lack of innovation in the catalog experience, with a tendency to follow common conventions. The few portals that introduced new and unique features in their product catalogs stood out as user-centric, as they clearly considered what would best serve their particular audience.
Winners: US Bank Developer Portal and Worldpay Developer Hub
After careful consideration, the jury has decided to announce two winners in the Best Findability of Products category:
US Bank Developer Portal - They have done an excellent job of creating an experience around their products, ensuring that they are readily accessible throughout the entire journey. The jury was particularly impressed with the detailed descriptions for each product, which clearly articulate the use cases and answer the question, “Why would I use this product?” Additionally, their search functionality stood out among the rest, featuring advanced filtering options and relevant results that further enhanced findability.
Time of screenshot: 19 November 2024.
Worldpay Developer Hub - They have developed a simple yet effective experience that clearly highlights their products and catalog. The jury was extremely impressed that they not only provided an excellent catalog experience but also demonstrated innovation with their Solution Finder feature, which helps users from diverse audiences find the solution that best meets their use cases. Furthermore, their thoughtful use of filters ensures that users from around the globe can find solutions that work for them.
Time of screenshot: 19 November 2024.
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Best Onboarding Experience in a Developer Portal Category
The jury had limited time to complete the assessments for all candidate portals. They looked for quick results, as they didn’t have time for sales calls or scheduled demos. The best developer portals support self-service. Jury members were impressed when they saw:
- A clear value proposition.
- Quick and engaging onboarding processes or getting started guides.
- It’s then OK to follow up with more complex use cases.
- Simple and effective interactions, especially those we can copy/paste to our own code and command lines.
- Ease of navigation. Breadcrumbs help understand the context.
- Portals with easy-to-find elements, such as SDKs.
- Tools that were easy to install in the command line and an IDE. Bonus points for “Postman” collections.
- Frictionless registration processes which promoted interactivity.
While jury members love portals with good use cases, they also looked for portals with excellent documentation. They don’t have the time or the mental bandwidth to read through “walls of text.” Good documentation is “opinionated” on the “best” way to do things. In some contexts, good developer documentation should be like an API “contract.” After all, readers look to official documentation as the main source of expertise.
The jury noticed a number of portals that integrate AI. They recognize that the industry has been trained by ChatGPT to use prompt engineering, and were disappointed by portals which did not respond accordingly.
Jurors also noticed a few portals which included video demos. When they did not include captions or transcripts, that was a disappointment.
As the jury members highlighted, they wonder about the avalanche of emails that come after signing up. By the time you've sent a reminder email, they've already moved on. If that information is valuable, it should already be part of the developer portal.
Winner: Dynatrace Developer
After careful consideration, the winner is Dynatrace Developer. The onboarding on their portal offers a smooth and effective path to success. It features enough documentation to get started, it supports by providing the right tools (IDE extension), and everything is easy to find.
Time of screenshot: 19 November 2024.
Honorable Mentions:
As it was close the jury also selected three “honorable mention” portals:
- Klaviyo Developers: thanks to the many interactive elements, the onboarding was engaging.
- Cloudinary Docs: many customized tutorials and engaging videos.
- Skyflow Docs: the quality of the documentation stood out, it’s very well written. The portal has a tidy layout, and it’s easy to navigate.
Back to the table of contents »
Best Overall Developer Portals
Best Enterprise Portal: Worldpay Developer Hub
Six portals were the highest scoring nominees for the Best Enterprise Developer Portal award: Dynatrace Developer, Mapbox Docs, Miro Developer Platform, UPS Developer Portal, U.S. Bank Developer Portal, and Worldpay Developer Hub.
The jury elevated Worldpay Developer Hub from among the three strongest contenders as the Best Overall Enterprise Developer Portal, in large part due to its innovative and well done Solution Finder.
The user experience is exceptional with the solution finder and point-of-sale solutions that utilize interactive images. The portal loads fast, navigation is very good, the design is functional, and the catalog is innovative. Docs are well written, images are used effectively. The portal gives a strong framework and gives good support for use cases. On a small note to the makers, the user navigation experience at the reference docs level could still use a little attention.
On the request of the jury, even though it did not happen to win an award this year, we would like to strongly highlight the following about the excellent UPS Developer Portal:
It does very well for a large portal. Combines marketing pages and comprehensive API reference documentation well. The clear use case approach helps you locate what you need easily. Additionally, the detailed "Getting Started" guide, along with the steps leading up to production and the "Run in Postman" option, provides significant value to users. The API integration paths are clearly defined for users. The sign-in point, as it is with every other portal, was a problem for discoverability.
Time of screenshot: 19 November 2024.
”The UI copy, content, and navigation are so intuitive; immediately I know where to go to integrate with their API and why it may benefit me. I didn't have to 'poke' around as much to understand the software.”
Best SME Portal: Cloudinary Docs
Who were the strongest nominees for the Best SME Developer Portal Award?
Cloudinary Doc Portal, Postcoder Admin Area, Redpanda Docs, and the XRP Ledger Developer Resources. We suggest you give them all a good look to see well-structured, helpful, exceptionally good documentation.
The jury panel chose the Cloudinary Docs as winner for the 2024 Best SME Developer Portal Awards, for its excellent onboarding experience, good examples and resources for a variety of uses cases, its well designed and well-structured content-rich offering, the nice set of customized tutorials, as well as helpful visualizations and demo videos. Overall an exceptionally well done portal.
Time of screenshot: 19 November 2024.
"Wow; between the clear navigation, content, and context, I know exactly what Cloudinary is and how it could benefit me. The guides can be verbose at times, but I don't mind reading them because I understand them."
In 2023, 57 developer portals were nominated across 11 categories: Best Served API Business Model, Best International and Localized DevPortal, Best New DX Innovation, Best Community Outreach and Support, Best Use of Analytics in a DevPortal, Best Visual Design, Best Accessible DevPortal, Best API Reference Documentation, Best Findability of Products in a DevPortal, Best Onboarding, and Best Interface Developer Portal.
Table of contents:
- Final results: first gala event
- Final results: second gala event
- Interviews with the jury panel
Final results: first gala event
After thorough consideration, the jury panel announced the awarded portals and runners-up in each category. We are happy to share the results, and hopefully, the jury’s remarks will give a better understanding of the state-of-the-art of developer experience, operational excellence, and business alignment.
First Gala Recording
Best Served API Business Model
Mature developer experience begins before the user writes a code or generates an API key: it is essential to establish a clear relationship between the developer and the vendor.
Awarded devportal: MasterCard Developers
MasterCard Developers has to consider the complexity of their target audiences, from existing partners to established fintechs and early-stage startups: they have to serve many needs on the same portal with a broad scope of products.
As Andrew Cataldo (Manager of Product Development and Innovation, API) highlighted, ‘being a company as big as MasterCard, we are almost playing an internal service provider to the many products that live within MasterCard.’
Finalist: NatWest Bank of APIs
The jury panel highlighted NatWest Bank of APIs’ value proposition and product context, and specifically called out the choice of URL (‘bankofapis.com’). According to the jurors, breaking from ‘developer.[YOUR CORPORATION NAME HERE].com’ worked well. The portal also provides the right content for the right audience.
Best International and Localized DevPortal
The jury panel underlined that ‘our technical world still expects a good grasp of the English language to collaborate with others. So even if your technical skills are excellent, you may feel at a disadvantage if you cannot engage with a developer portal in your country’s language. We were happy to see the entrants in this category and encourage portal owners and portal fans to consider submitting their favorites in this category. That said, it was difficult to choose a winner.‘
Awarded devportal: Bank Negara Indonesia API Portal
The total number of non-Bahasa-speaking visitors to the developer portal is a little less than 20%, so BNI’s decision to localize their developer portal to English is remarkable. The initiative demonstrates BNI’s dedication to better serve the international developer audience and to cater to the needs of developers in a language they’re more familiar with.
This achievement showcases BNI’s commitment to encouraging inclusivity and nurturing user satisfaction.
Best New DX Innovation
The jurors had to ask themselves what innovation means and how to evaluate products that offer very different developer experiences fairly. In 2023, two nominees were awarded. Both presented similarly innovative solutions for interactive code samples, with different audiences and goals, each deserving recognition for the outstanding level of execution and integration with their docs.
Awarded devportals: Miro Developer Platform and React.dev
Miro Developer Platform added interactive code snippets that seamlessly integrate with their documentation and their products, offering unparalleled levels of interactivity and experimentation.
As Mira Balani (Staff Technical Writer) shared with the audience, their developer portal ‘provides both web SDK and REST APIs, which empowers developers to create powerful apps, that in turn, again, empowers their users to collaborate and create the next best thing.’
React.dev does an impressive job at demonstrating the features of the language using the language itself while providing users with a sandbox they can download, fork, and reset at will.
React.dev - as they highlighted on their nomination page - introduced interactive example code at a scale previously unseen in documentation in the frontend library space using CodeSandbox.
All 600+ code examples are manipulable, and in each section’s "code challenges," learners are encouraged to fix broken examples by following clues left by the core team.
The Pronovix UX Research team is specialized in finding out how users in a specific situation think and behave, and what they expect. If you feel that you could benefit from user insights, contact us to find out how we could help!
Best Community Outreach and Support
Developer portals in this category use creative solutions or initiatives to show developers that their work is appreciated. In the downstream developer journey, community and engagement are very important – this is where one helps developers troubleshoot, provide and find solutions, share knowledge and build connections.
Awarded devportal: RingCentral Developers
RingCentral Developers’ community site presents an engaging and easy-to-navigate experience. The “Community” menu option provides developers with several different ways to engage with the community. In addition, RingCentral Developers’ “Game Changers” program rewards top contributors with reputation points and encourages new contributors to participate through challenges that reward accomplishments. They also offer a way to earn prizes.
‘Just building a platform is one thing, but it really depends upon you infusing it with all of that content to keep people engaged’ - Byrne Reese (Product and Platform Specialist).
Special call-out: Miro Developer Platform
The jurors gave Miro’s community site a special mention for linking their product roadmap directly from the developer portal. They appreciated and admired the commitment to transparency that this demonstrates.
Best Use of Analytics in a DevPortal
This category showcases developer portals that provide dashboards or analytics to enhance the developer experience or business value of operating with the documented APIs. Some examples of metrics are a measure of performance, time to first API call, uptime/availability, usability, calls made to the API, issues logged/resolved, number of subscribers/accounts, monetization, and usage statistics.
Awarded devportal: PandaDoc for Developers
PandaDoc boasts a robust feature set for data analysis that sets it apart from its competitors. While it is integrated with the dashboard and not the portal, the analytics use cases are clearly explained in both the support and learning material for PandaDoc with clear annotated screenshots.
Customization helped this Developer Dashboard stand out since it enabled resizing the dashboard and the ability to remove columns to make for a simpler data display. A CSV export function lets you go beyond what is provided by the built-in dashboards and further analyze your data. The chart with Status transition time provides ways to look for efficiencies in the system on both the sender’s processes and the receiver’s time spent signing a document. The data itself aided the jurors’ understanding of the value proposition of the platform.
Best Visual Design
Excellent visual design is more than the platform’s aesthetics: one needs to consider how every aspect of it – design elements, content, navigation – is structured for clarity, usability, and centers support for a great user experience.
Awarded devportal: Viam Documentation Developer Portal
The pages are well organized and consistent in layout and with clear, intuitive navigation. The jurors also noted that the 404 page was very elaborate and actionable in helping guide users back to the catalog.
This award celebrates the intentionality, design effort, vision, and execution in giving developers a smoothly guided journey around the portal. The Viam DevPortal stands out with this. The jurors are sure that it was done with lots of love for Viam’s developers.
Finalist: VTEX Developer Portal
In the case of VTEX, the jurors found the portal's simple, smooth, and clean design to be very elegant and commendable. They also liked the progressive disclosure of the visual journey.
Special call-outs: Spotify for Developers, React.dev, Cloudinary Docs
The jurors enjoyed and found very pleasant the colorful visuals and playfulness of Spotify for Developers.
The jury panel commend the developer portal’s interactivity and community focus. They highlighted that it is perfect for the target audience.
As the jurors underlined, Cloudinary Docs deserves a special call out for its well-structured and detailed guides.
Final results: second gala event
At the second gala, we revealed the finalists and the awarded developer portals in the remaining seven categories, including the two Best Overall awards: SME and Enterprise.
Second Gala Recording
Best Accessible Devportal
An accessible developer portal follows specific, rigorous guidelines and practices in order to cater to all users, with consideration for permanent and situational limitations. The best way to reach this level of inclusivity is to permeate accessibility design principles through every element of the developer portal, instead of treating it as an afterthought.
Awarded devportal: Spotify for Developers
Spotify has a dedicated internal accessibility team, and the DevRel team running the devportal has their integral assistance. When the existing developer portal was revamped, this a11y team helped to improve the user experience. The team behind Spotify for Developers also collaborated with makeitfable.com: the service helps connect to people living with permanent disabilities to engage them to run tests on the developer portal, mimic real-life scenarios, and remark if something needs to be changed.
Spotify for Developers’ accessibility statement is much more than a list of requirements, it is clearly a mindset.
Finalist: Nationwide Partner Portal
As the jurors highlighted, the Nationwide Partner Portal team clearly has an ambition to be accessible, and this is particularly seen in the extra effort on visual feedback for keyboard users.
Special call-out: Chase Developer Portal
In the case of Chase Developer Portal, the demo pages are excellent examples of multimodality - they use a combination of illustrations, instructions and code to communicate efficiently with users with a wide variety of abilities.
Best API Reference Documentation
Success in this category means that a user is experiencing no obstacles when integrating, finding extras to speed up their work, learning how to find support if needed, and figuring out how to maintain an API integration.
These developer portals serve their audience well with an engaging design, reference topics, and being creative in making the API reference documentation journey easy and discoverable. Evaluation includes navigation, appearance, utility, how easy to use, and completeness.
Awarded devportal: React.dev
Combining clarity, strong examples, and a confident leading of the reader along most likely paths, this is both a great site to use, and impressively slick. It teaches well, and doesn’t fall down by getting in the way: snags have been rounded off all along the user journey.
Individual mentions could be made of the “Get Started” section - with its nicely-paced intro, interactive tutorial, and well-considered “Thinking in React” sections; of the well laid out reference, covering use cases, troubleshooting, and clear demonstrations of various UI elements; and the quality of the explanations - but it is the completeness of the package that puts React’s portal ahead in a very strong field.
Special call-out: Spotify for Developers
The jurors praised Spotify for Developers for the quick intro tutorial: users click to run the code sample pre-populated with authorized access to their account, and see their top 5 songs.
Best Findability of Products in a Devportal
In assessing the nominees for Best Findability of Products, the jurors were looking for developer portals which found a way to provide technical depth without compromising the ease of navigation to finding the right product, considering technical and business users.
Awarded devportal: FactSet Developer
FactSet’s developer portal provides a comprehensive experience to discover and find the right product. The jurors believe there is no one golden pathway: users should have the option of multiple navigation paths to find the right outcome.
FactSet embodied that really well with great extra features like connecting solution pages to specific APIs and recipes, along with calling out trending APIs, and having a strong product catalog with filtering and searching.
‘We developed the idea of showcasing the APIs and the context of large solutions, and workflows, making it easy for users to navigate and discover the right product’ - Veni Paladagu (Digital Infrastructure & API Product Manager).
Finalist: Mercedes-Benz / developers
The jurors liked Mercedes-Benz for their strong findability of product across their developer portal. The site is very clean and the product catalog does a great job of displaying the product suite. Not only is the filtering easy to understand, it’s very performant and allows for filtering based on payment packages. Inspiration pages also link nicely to specific APIs, alongside tailored content for developers vs business audiences.
Best Onboarding
Good onboarding in a developer portal gets started with transparent steps to registration and granting access that show what the APIs are about, how they work, how developers can start integrating, and where they can find additional resources. It is important to give just the right amount of information as this is the first impression the users experience.
Awarded devportal: Miro Developer Platform
Miro Developer Platform went above and beyond with an onboarding flow that is clear, simple, and fun. The experience matches the Miro brand and sense of collaboration quite aptly.
When first arriving at the developer portal, they offer a clear path to the initial tutorials. These tutorials are bite-size in scope and require no local setup. There’s a sandbox embedded in the tutorial page itself. The pre-written sample code can be executed with a single click but it can also be modified, allowing experimentation with a rapid feedback loop.
The platform tracks the individual progress as one completes each tutorial, including a tasteful celebratory animation. By completing tutorials, users can earn a series of badges, recognizing the progress on the platform.
Special call-out: Viam Documentation Developer Portal
Viam Documentation Developer Portal received a special mention for providing a robot that could be controlled by a new user within minutes. This is a great example of a low barrier to entry and this can be very attractive to customers who want to try before they commit.
Best Interface Developer Portal
This year, we merged the Best Devportal Beyond REST Platforms & Best Devportal for Citizen Developers categories.
Interface portals are external (business) developer portals that broker a cooperative AND competitive value exchange between an organization and the communities they interact with. Where possible they help developers use technology assets that provide shortcuts around custom API integration (e.g. SDK, app, widget, QR code).
Awarded devportal: VTEX Developer Portal
VTEX Developer Portal packed in a lot of information without compromising whitespace. The site has many areas to explore but does not feel cramped or claustrophobic. They effectively use icons on the left overarching menu to categorize site use cases. Search is a delight to use, which is especially important with so much information.
VTEX delighted the jurors with the human touch: names and profile pictures of the contributors are visible to each page (via GitHub). The pencil icon on each page invites editors to contribute.
Best Overall Developer Portal - SME
Awarded portal: Viam Documentation Developer Portal
The jurors particularly like the aesthetics of this site, in the words of one juror, ‘It reminds me of my early days of programming in the 90's, of terminals where everything was all about the information.’ It's not just about being flashy, but more about presentation.
In a world dominated by pure software products, it’s unique and refreshing to encounter a developer portal bridging the gap to robotics.
It’s one thing to change a few pixels on the screen or a value in some database, it’s another thing entirely to use software to interact with the physical world. The ability to remotely control a robot within minutes of signing-up is undeniably cool.
Best Overall Developer Portal - Enterprise
Awarded devportal: React.dev
The jury put additional emphasis on the following aspects: ‘the cleanness and ease of navigation, of finding information. The portal shows the result of good–and hard to make–decisions on what to present to developers and what to leave out.’
The portal has no login, which of course comes with the territory of the React framework being documented, nevertheless the jury panel celebrates how this instant access contributes to the ease of use.
The "Learn" section being part of the top menu, where new users can get to "hello world!" examples and then build upon that. The makers did a tremendous job in tailoring to audiences at different starting points, breaking down the barriers to early success.
The portal has very good substance, and is built in a way that it is also easy for artificial intelligence to consume.
Most importantly, the jurors' decided to award the Best Enterprise Developer Portal Award to React.dev, because beyond all these aspects, the content is technically very well-written. The jury commented on how the level of technical writing craftsmanship carried this portal to the leading edge, and they would like to see more of such excellent writing in the future. Technical writing is a craft that should be taken seriously.
Improve your developer onboarding and technical documentation, and bring your developer portal to the next level with our Technical Writing services.
Special call-out: Miro Developer Platform
The Miro Developer Platform executes on a very high difficulty score with a great design and an outstanding developer experience component. After onboarding, the user immediately gets the in-the-workspace experience–see the SaaS tool in action on one of their own boards. This embedded interactive experience, which the jurors believe was technically very hard to pull off, was done brilliantly.
The tutorials offer excellent gamification, creating a fun, rewarding experience that builds on itself. The Mironeer community is a holistic proposition with changelog, roadmap, testing out features, going way beyond the basics.
We are deeply thankful to the Jurors for their enthusiastic support and contribution to the community! Their remarks can be an indicator of 2023’s state-of-the-art.
In 2023, API The Docs conference hosted 16 teams of the nominated devportals, who showcased their processes and practices. We collected some of the main takeaways in two articles.
Developer Experience Best Practices »
DevPortal Awards seeks to recognize the most outstanding solutions available today and push the boundaries of what we believe to be the key components of a developer portal for tomorrow. Subscribe to the DevPortal Awards Newsletter to get notifications about nomination, voting, gala event details, and DevPortal Awards winners.
Go back to the Best Developer Portals article
All Pronovix publications are the fruit of a team effort, enabled by the research and collective knowledge of the entire Pronovix team. Our ideas and experiences are greatly shaped by our clients and the communities we participate in.
DevPortal Awards 2022 brought us 43 inspiring and incredible nominees who showcased the best API documentation and interface solutions. They could choose from 13 award categories that have been reviewed based on the lessons that we learned in 2021: Best Visual Design, Best International & Localized Devportal, Best Accessible Devportal, Best Use of Analytics in a Devportal, Best New DX Innovation, Best Community Outreach & Support, Best DevPortal Beyond Rest Platforms, Best Served API Business Model, Best DevPortal for Citizen Developers (Low/No-code), Best Use of Monetization, Best API Reference Documentation, Best Findability of Products in a DevPortal, Best Onboarding.
The jury panel went through the nominated developer portals, ensured a fair evaluation for everyone, and provided feedback. As a result, we are now gratefully sharing what we hope gives you a better view of the state-of-the-art of API documentation and developer experience in 2022.
DevPortal Awards 2022 - First Gala (recording)
The first cohort of finalists and the jury’s feedback
Special call-outs from the jury:
- Best Visual Design: Chase Developer
The jury wanted to call out the astonishing API use case implementation from the Chase Developer portal. The 3-panel API demo page gave a “Wow!” moment to all the jury members. The combination of the visual demo, with the documentation and the code is fantastic and a great way to learn step-by-step. These pages are very well designed, easy to navigate, and immediately understandable.
- Best Accessible Devportal: Chase Developer
The jurors would like to call out the great work done by the Chase Developer team, especially regarding the accessible UX of the portal.
- Best New DX Innovation: ABN Amro Developer Portal, Fiserv Developer Studio
The jurors also want to highlight the Developer Portal of ABN Amro for the API live demos that allow discovering their APIs by playing with embedded demos on the developer portal!
Fiserv Developer Studio’s great work in offering an anonymous sandbox. This allows developers to try their APIs without creating an account. It is a very powerful tool that drastically reduces the time to the first hello world and makes the discovery journey enjoyable.
Runner-ups:
- Best Visual Design: TomTom, Mercedes-Benz/Developers
TomTom has built a great developer portal. The visual design is very pleasant to look at and the clean design matches perfectly with the company brand. The design includes nice visual elements like maps and animations that help developers to better understand both their product offerings and APIs and SDKs. Even the bullet points were customized as waypoints to stick with a mapping theme and match the brand.
The Mercedes-Benz Developers Portal pages are clear and easy to navigate, the UI makes the portal intuitive. The team has put a real effort into building a design that supports the journey and the design is consistent on all pages of the portal. The technical docs are clean and easy to understand. Swagger UI has been successfully integrated within the portal and may be a best practice example for that integration. The jury loved the way the different tiers are presented offering to even test the SDK with your own car. The design really helped to understand the various way of testing the product and made the experience enjoyable.
- Best Community Outreach & Support: Visa Developer Center
The jury felt that the Visa Developer Center was a very strong entry in this category. The site was well designed with a landing page that serves a range of customer engagement. The jury appreciates their active social media presence, the numerous (guest) blogs and tutorials, and an attempt to incentivize developers who would provide the most contributions.
Winners:
- Best Visual Design: Empathy Platform Docs
Seeing the Empathy Platform Docs portal, the jury really liked the product and its visual identity. The architecture of the portal is original, the onboarding journey is simple and great and the overall visual design is delightful. They found the right balance between content and visual support through images and animations. Animated visuals are simply awesome and fit perfectly within the portal content. The document index along with the progress bar (right side) are handy and very well designed. The jury also appreciated the 404 page and the cookie-freeness of the portal: “This is a cookie-free area. Who needs cookies when you can have trust? Feel free to browse our site and the only cookies you need to worry about are the edible kind.” These docs are true to their product name: showing empathy in many ways, shapes, and forms.
- Best Accessible Devportal: platformOs Developer Portal
From the jury’s notes: “We have been pleasantly surprised to see that the PlatformOS Developer Portal team has taken so much care in the accessibility of their portal: from their wonderful Style Guide to the meticulous care of the contrast level in the images. They are the winners of this category, congratulations!”
- Best International & Localized Devportal: BNI Digital Services
BNI Digital Services had localized videos, a chatbot, and tutorials, and the jury felt that there was good coverage for the developers in the region served the most by the portal. The jury also noted the smart implementation of the Google Translator API and they saw some nice examples in the collection of submissions. The BNI Digital Services portal did a nice job with the selection of which pages to translate, focusing on certain pages, such as an FAQ, perhaps for support reasons which indicated deep knowledge or empathy for the audience. The jury enjoyed learning about regional government digital initiatives as well as various integrations going on around the world. It’s exciting to see that developers are playing an active role in both integrations and transformations. These devportals are certain to lead the way to clear communication and education around the globe.
- Best New DX Innovation: platformOs Developer Portal
After creating an account, their guided onboarding process allows developers to set up a demo site in a single click, without having to validate your email address. This removes most of the onboarding friction and allows developers to discover and test their product in a few minutes.
- Best DevPortal Beyond Rest Platforms: Aiven Developer and platformOs Developer Portal
These two portals matched the jurors’ expectations of delivering a great “Beyond REST Platforms” developer portal in a complementary fashion.
Surveying the Aiven Developer, we encountered no page that made the visitor feel less understanding than before. The jury especially liked content design, how the portal talks about things and explain it in one sentence on the current page, with lots of illustrations. The generous use of typography and design elements, the content design makes all the information work well together.
The jury appreciated the PlatformOS portal offering for developer flexibility, the open explanation of the offered 3rd party API integrations.
- Best Community Outreach & Support: RingCentral Developers
The RingCentral Developers site made it easy to access the community features and those features provided a positive user experience. The portal shows active and up-to-date social media accounts that support their community engagement as well. The jury especially liked how they tracked community engagement and recognized and rewarded participation. From one of the jurors: “RingCentral Developers seems to have robust community support. I think features like their Game Changer program could be more visible.”
Eleven jurors contributed many many hours of their focus to ensure a fair evaluation for all 43 nominees and highlight 2022's most outstanding API developer portal solutions. Their expertise in API programs, developer portals, and API documentation has helped to point out best practices and what it would be better to say farewell to.
DevPortal Awards 2022 - Second Gala (recording)
The second cohort of finalists
Special call-outs from the jury:
- Best API Reference Documentation: Plaid’s Developer Documentation
The Jury gave a special call-out to Plaid’s Developer Documentation for its unique style, which is consistent with their overall brand image, and the portal serving up extensive information on various API aspects.
- Best Findability of Products in a DevPortal: Fiserv Developer Studio, NationWide Partner Portal, FIS Developer Engine
The Fiserv Developer Studio has great findability, albeit “below the fold”. It highlights big services up front, and a very clear product categorization is carried throughout the site.
The NationWide Partner Portal got a special mention for its very clear use cases to guide the user by type.
The jury gave a special call-out to FIS Developer Engine for its impressive solution finder.
- Best Onboarding: Hazelcast Developer Docs
The jury gave a special call-out to the Hazelcast Developer Docs, for it provides a very comprehensive set of tutorials that can be filtered by programming language, product and use case.
Runner-ups:
- Best Served API Business Model: NatWest Bank of APIs, Mercedes-Benz/Developers
The Jury was particularly struck by NatWest’s Bank of APIs’ developer portal. Like many banks, NatWest offers a mix of free and paid-for APIs. Banking regulations also mean that they must limit some APIs only to licensed operators. NatWest makes it clear which API products are paid for and which are restricted, while offering very clear use case explanations for every part of their offering.
Mercedes-Benz caught the jury’s attention with their highly polished API product pages that provide shortcuts to understanding the value of each product, alongside the black and white facts of what’s on offer.
- Best API Reference Documentation: Katana Developer Portal
The API reference on the Katana developer portal is applauded for providing: well detailed explanations of any additional API concepts and for its comprehensive API reference pages for all API resources.
- Best Findability of Products in a DevPortal: KBC
KBC has an outstanding portal in terms of findability. It has superior categorization with something “extra,” starting with product tags. Differentiates business personas, offering ‘business solutions’ in the top navigation and the product catalog. Though ‘coming soon,’ takes into consideration no-code audience, a rising trend in the industry. Very easy to navigate around the site using “you are here” breadcrumbs.
- Best Onboarding: Contrast Security Developer Central
The Contrast Security Developer Central presents onboarding resources in a fresh and dynamic way that tries to pull developers in. The portal provides a rich set of onboarding resources that consider different uses cases.
Winners:
- Best Served API Business Model: High Mobility
The Jury said they were delighted by High Mobility’s pricing transparency. In an industry where ‘Call now for pricing’ is often the norm, High Mobility states in bold text the starting prices for each API call. Perhaps even more importantly, High Mobility puts the company’s products into context through high level use case explanations and low level explanations of each item of data they make available.
- Best API Reference Documentation: Fiserv Developer Portal
The EMEA region developer portal from Fiserv is notable because: it has complete API reference docs with detailed navigation at every stage and cross-linking to other interactive elements and recipes, and for its ability to make authorized API calls within the same user interface. The portal also gives access to other developer experience assets, like Postman collections and OpenAPI contracts.
Fiserv enable merchants to accept payments. The developer portal is where customers can discover, understand and integrate with Fiserv developer tools and APIs. The portal is designed to make it simple for developers to understand the products fiserv offers. Easily test them within their browser and subsequently integrate with them. Onboarding only takes a few seconds and the user is set up with sandbox access immediately. The site also offers Android Point of Sale which is an industry first.
- Best Findability of Products in a DevPortal: Visa Developer Center
About the Visa Developer Center, one of the jurors said: ‘If I could design a template for best product findability, it would be based off of this portal. Very clear strategies starting from the home page to orient the user, clear click affordance, and superior product catalog to aid findability. Though sitewide search needs improvement and top-level “you are here” navigation aids.’
- Best Onboarding: Fastly Developer Hub
The Fastly Developer Hub offers many ways to onboard tailored to the needs of different target audiences and supporting different strategies to learn: by studying core concepts, setting up a test environment, playing with code examples, demos and starter kits or watching a demo. The portal provides an impressively comprehensive set of example apps and demos which cover a broad range of different use cases. “Try it out” functionality is built in, accessible immediately and even available from the start page. The guides and tutorials are written clearly and consider different levels of expertise, e.g. by linking to other resources.
- Best SME Developer Portal: platformOs Developer Portal
- Best Overall Enterprise: Empathy Platform Docs
- Public voting: BNI Digital Services
Our most heartfelt congratulations to everyone!
The DevPortal Awards seeks to recognize the most outstanding solutions available today and push the boundaries of what we believe to be the key components of a developer portal for tomorrow. Subscribe to the DevPortal Awards Newsletter to get notifications about nomination, voting, gala event details, and DevPortal Awards winners.
We are deeply thankful to the Jurors for their enthusiastic support and contribution to the community. What do the jurors see as developer portals state-of-the-art in 2022?
Go back to the Best Developer Portals article
All Pronovix publications are the fruit of a team effort, enabled by the research and collective knowledge of the entire Pronovix team. Our ideas and experiences are greatly shaped by our clients and the communities we participate in.
The 2021 DevPortal Awards saw 49 independent developer portals nominated for 18 award categories. Here are the winners, runners-up and notable mentions for 2021!
For more information on the process behind the jury’s selection for each category, please check out DevPortal Awards 2021 jury interview.
2021 DevPortal Award Winners
Focus on Developer Experience
- Best International & Localized Devportal
- Best New DX Innovation
- Best Accessible Devportal
- Best Community Spotlight & Outreach
- Best Developer Dashboard
- Best Onboarding
- Best Findability of Products in a Devportal
- Best API Reference Documentation & Support
- Best Design
Focus on Operational Excellence
- Best Developer Portal for Alternatives to REST-APIs
- Best Use of Monetization
- Best Use of API Gateway Integration
- Best Editorial Experience in a Devportal
Focus on Business Alignment
Results of the Public Vote
Best Overall Developer Portal
- Final Selection for Best Overall Developer Portal 2021
- Best Overall SME Developer Portal of 2021
- Best Overall Enterprise Developer Portal of 2021
More Information about the DevPortal Awards 2021
- About the DevPortal Awards
- Demo/Q&A with some nominees
- Full List of DevPortal Awards Nominees for 2021
Best International & Localized Devportal
An international & localized developer portal addresses audiences — in various regions — with specific expectations. They pay special attention to cultural diversity, language capabilities, local legal requirements, and regional expectations, all in order to drive engagement.
In 2021, there were 3 developer portals nominated for this DevPortal Award category. Read more about the criteria and see past winners.For precise details of what goes into a great international & localized developer portal check out the Jury interview. As a quick summary:
- Is there an option to switch languages? Do localized versions kick in automatically?
- What is not translated, is it in plain English, easy to use and understand?
- Is the payment method or API available in my region? Can I filter the available options to my locale?
- What has been done differently to prevent misunderstandings during translation?
Winner of Best International & Localized Devportal for 2021
Xsolla Developer Documentation was selected for its easy (automatic) adaptation of the portal to the visitor’s context/locale and the sheer number of supported languages. The language supported by context was also for user guides. The jury noted they even found a partial API reference in Chinese. The 6 supported languages have a professional translation (“natural read’). As each Juror was located in a different region, they were able to see how quickly Xsolla adapted (for example, to German).
For more information, Olga Baybakova, Documentation & Localization Engineer, from Xsolla presented at APIdays LIVE Paris 2021 on Localizing OpenAPI Specification.
Runner-up for Best International & Localized Devportal for 2021
BNI API Digital Services supported a relatively complete translation of their portal in Indonesian.
Best New DX Innovation
Developer experience (DX) is the inverse of API friction. In the eyes of your users, the value of your API(s) will grow if they experience as few obstacles as possible from start to finish.
In 2021, there were 7 developer portals nominated for this DevPortal Award category. Read more about the criteria and see past winners.
Paraphrased from the Jury interview:
- Selecting a candidate in this category was difficult because innovation is moving. What is innovative today will possibly be the standard tomorrow.
- This year the jurors often found innovation in the onboarding journey. As an example, where the onboarding journey automatically recognized a juror’s company address and details, with a background check. The judges also noticed innovation in e-learnings integrated into the developer portal.
- Innovation is lead by the interesting challenges, information needs, and different goals that your audience brings to your developer portal.
Winner of Best New DX Innovation for 2021
ThingWorx Developer Portal’s combination of an outstanding onboarding journey and very sophisticated e-learnings contributed to their success as winner this year.
Runner-up for New DX Innovation for 2021
Reonomy Technical Documentation is very easy to understand and well designed with information architecture. The drop-down fields to select use cases are easy to understand even as a first time visitor. The Demo feature was good however at the time of judging, at least one juror received an authorization issue in the response sandbox and could not find a way to enter credentials.
Best Accessible Devportal
Accessibility is the practice of making your websites usable by as many people as possible. We traditionally think of this as being about people with disabilities, but the practice of making sites accessible also benefits other groups such as those using mobile devices, or those with slow network connections.
In 2021, there were 12 developer portals nominated for this DevPortal Award category. Read more about the criteria and see past winners.
“Many nominees understood the category to be about general findability, […] only some about a11y.’’ - 2021 DevPortal Awards Jury
Winner of Best Accessible DevPortal for 2021
Barclays API Exchange has a very structured approach (content is very easy to understand) and due to features such as dark mode or localisation selection, which show commitment to adapting to different groups of end users. Technical analysis with Google lighthouse, wave and achecker also showed great performance of the site in terms of contrast ratio etc.
Barclays API Exchange demo with Liam Gallagher (UX Design Lead) and Jake Eastham (Frontend Developer)
Runners-Up for Best Accessible DevPortal for 2021
Both of the runners-up also scored 100% for Accessibility on Google Lighthouse, and AChecker. This was a very close race between the winner, Barclays, and Platform OS.
PlatformOS has a clean and clear structure, uses a larger font than usual and a good balance of white space. Code examples were instantly attractive and welcoming.
SmartCar received great results from a11y checkers and with screen readers. They could improve on their rendered pictures but the annotations were well done to the benefit of some disability groups.
Best Community Spotlight & Outreach
Community Spotlight & Outreach in a developer portal builds trust and engages users to find solutions, share knowledge & build connections.
In 2021, there were 5 developer portals nominated for this DevPortal Award category. Read more about the criteria and see past winners.
Candidates in this category presented many interesting and inspirational ideas that benefit many in the developer portal space.
Winner of Best Community Spotlight & Outreach for 2021
Twitter Developer Platform was chosen for the sheer number of community features such as labs, local communities, and the encouragement of people to create their own self-organizing communities. The developer portal experience went above and beyond regular best practices for blogs. Community engagement is driven from the bottom up and seeks to connect people and make it easier to meet and exchange ideas via local developer groups. Twitter being a globally adopted company makes it easier to have local communities. Early adopter initiative of the Twitter lab was also impressive. This is definitely an example of a company having a wide and successful developer reach.
Runner-up for Best Community Spotlight & Outreach for 2021
Ringcentral performed well with nicely structured communities, integration of stackoverflow, and an incentives program for developers that goes beyond just implementation. Ringcentral showcases expertise and gamifies the collection of points and allows these points to be redeemed. Community offerings according to goals have an active and nurtured community on stack overflow. The jury liked how separate items can be found on the mega menu (e.g. if you want to talk).
Best Developer Dashboard
In this category, we are looking for the additional resources, analytics, and experience that developer portals provide for registered and logged in users.
In 2021, there were 2 developer portals nominated for this DevPortal Award category. Read more about the criteria and see past winners.
Winner of Best Developer Dashboard for 2021
Tink Console is celebrated for their professional and attractive UI. Their dashboard integrates with an abundance of help content. Tink Console provides a clear starting point, clean navigation structure, a detailed description of configuration, a clear separation of account and app settings, and a useful checklist.
Runner-up for Best Developer Dashboard for 2021
Plaid’s Developer Portal and Documentation dashboard has a seamless UI, good navigation, and use of whitespace. Plaid provides a clear starting point and excellent process and conceptual information. An example of this is the differences between free and other plans, and the sandbox/dev account paths.
Best Onboarding
For this category, developer portals show the transparent steps to registration and granting access while providing information on what their APIs are about, how they work, how developers can start integrating and where to find additional resources.
In 2021, there were 19 developer portals nominated for this DevPortal Award category. Read more about the criteria and see past winners.
Winner of Best Onboarding for 2021
platformOS Documentation takes the award for delivery of getting started tutorials that have sufficient detail to be instructive while also helping users become familiar with PlatformOS’s products. A prominent Try Now button leads to a clear page with video instruction and well-explained options for getting started. Signup is simple and straightforward, with a well-defined user journey. Example apps allow for working in code at a variety of levels.
platformOS Developer Portal demo and Q&A with Diana Lakatos (Director of Documentation) and Adam Broadway (CEO)
Runner-up for Best Onboarding for 2021
Smartcar starts with a clear value proposition on their home page and then connects users with good tutorials for various scenarios and languages. The signup process is minimal and various SDKs are available for users to get started in their preferred language. A checklist-style dashboard for getting credentials and testing API requests is provided. Getting started seems relatively painless, and there are clear steps to follow with more progressive detail if needed.
Best Findability of Products in a Devportal
A landing page with entry points for the main audiences, a catalog, a basic search, a faceted search, and suggestive discoverability are all examples of ways in which an API consumer can find your APIs.
In 2021, there were 22 developer portals nominated for this DevPortal Award category. Read more about the criteria and see past winners.
“We had a lot of candidates in this category and some really raised the bar. Even though a few portals had only one API, they made sure you could easily find the ins and outs of that one. However, as this category is on findability of products, we as a jury decided to focus on portals with more than one API. We looked for a good and easy search, filtering options, relevant categorization and an easy entry point to a top notch service catalog. And of course, it’s always nice when it’s visually appealing as well. A few portals charmed all the jury members.” - From the 2021 Jury notes on Best Findability of Products in a DevPortal category
Winner of Best Findability of Products in a Devportal for 2021
Finastra’s FusionCreator Developer Portal sets itself apart through its consistency. Wherever you are on the portal, the frame of reference they use makes sure you get information in the same way. The site looks as though it was developed with a strong UX designer on board. The flow visualized on the home page is aimed at quickly and easily finding what you need. Of greatest value to a visitor is that you can easily re-find something with their consistent framework: browsing back- and forth, even coming back the next day or week, it is easy to find your way back to something you previously found when you want to find it again.
Runners-up for Best Findability of Products in a Devportal for 2021
There were two runners-up for this category, Algolia and Barclays API Exchange.
Algolia Developer Platform receives special mention for showing thoughtfulness and focus on the developer audience with every aspect of onboarding. Their nurture campaign is not too salesy but instead also focuses on the developer’s experience. Once you find what you’re looking for, the experience is great.
Barclays API Exchange utilizes SEO optimization that helps for findability.
Best API Reference Documentation & Support
Success in this category means that a user is experiencing no obstacles when integrating, finding extras to speed up their work, learning how to find support if needed, and figuring out how to maintain an API integration.
In 2021, there were 26 developer portals nominated for this DevPortal Award category. Read more about the criteria and see past winners.
Winner of Best API Reference Documentation & Support for 2021
Plaid’s Developer Portal and Documentation was clear and well structured. Visually the site makes good use of white space. Content is easy to quickly understand in great part due to many code examples. The site performs smoothly with an interactive navigation model contributing to a seamless experience of content delivery.
Runners-up for Best API Reference Documentation & Support for 2021
There were two runners-up for this category, ABN Amro Developer Portal and RingCentral Developers. Of note is the Codat Portal. All of these developer portals were able to manage the complexity of their content well.
The ABN Amro Developer Portal is a clear and well structured portal with lots of examples. The integration between the reference and conceptual topics is seamless. Reference topics provide a good blend of marketing and technical content.
RingCentral Developers is noteworthy for its attractive visual design and extensive collection of sample code.
The Codat Portal is also noteworthy for their cross-linking between conceptual and reference topics.
Best Design
The award for Best Design is given to the developer portal that inspires trust while presenting every aspect of the APIs in a well-structured and understandable way.
In 2021, there were 21 developer portals nominated for this DevPortal Award category. Read more about the criteria and see past winners.
It was a very close race between 4 excellent devportal finalists. - 2021 DevPortal Awards Jury
Winner of Best Design for 2021
Plaid’s Developer Portal and Documentation showed strong consistency and clarity of its UI and design. This was also consistent with their corporate website. The information necessary for implementing their APIs were easy to access. Information architecture, version control, and API key provisioning was all easy to follow. The design supports the processes. Functional design elements such as tables were also well executed. Content, choice of words, contributed to getting tasks as a developer done. First question asked is “What is this API about” and answered as a developer or as any visitor with examples.
Runners-up for Best Design for 2021
There were three runners-up in this category: Twitter Developer Platform, FusionCreator Developer Portal, and ThingWorx Developer Portal. As this was a very close race it came down to a side-by-side comparison between the four finalists. Focus was on consistency of experience for a new user encountering and registering to the site for the first time.
Best Developer Portal for Alternatives to REST-APIs
This award looks at the application of good documentation practices to non-Rest-API integrations.
In 2021, there were 3 developer portals nominated for this DevPortal Award category. Read more about the criteria and see past winners.
Winner of Best Developer Portal for Alternatives to REST-APIs for 2021
This year there was a tie win for this award between KBC Developer Portal and platformOS Developer Portal.
KBC Developer Portal was selected for providing use cases such as QR code, SDK, and widget. All APIs are REST based but they look at ‘alternatives to rest API’s’ from a partner/business perspective to accommodate the less tech-savvy customers who don’t want to do an investment right away. They provide business solutions: flyers with QR codes, widgets, the KBC Partner Hub (of which a demo is available). They provide solutions to their partners that fit the distribution channel (digital, physical, or a combination). From a developer perspective, developers can use Postman, Insomnia, or SoapUI to send requests to the Sandbox given that the developer attached the signed certificate and private key with all API requests. KBC provides simulations and customization capability/OEM. Sandbox environment uses Postman collections. Builds trust with mutual SSL for shared responsibility.
KBC Developer Portal demo and Q&A with Katrien Van Gijsel (Team Lead) and Machteld Swillen (Product Owner)
platformOS was awarded for their extensive documentation with videos and tutorials with several scenarios for GraphQL and CLI. On the other hand, it has a very steep learning curve. PlatformOS explains how to try out their product according to the developer’s level of technical expertise and setting proper expectations about different deployment methods. 1-Click / no code install is still dependent on being able to set up the staging environment, current npm, and other dependencies. They provide several clear implementation examples including migration from major eCommerce platforms that require more robust content, community, and marketplace capability. Kudos to platformOS for reaching front end developers in addition to back end integrators.
platformOS Developer Portal demo and Q&A with Diana Lakatos (Director of Documentation) and Adam Broadway (CEO)
Best Use of Monetization
In this category, the jury evaluated developer portals that use their developer portal for generating revenue through direct monetization of their APIs.
In 2021, there were 3 developer portals nominated for this DevPortal Award category. Read more about the criteria and see past winners.
Winner of Best Use of Monetization for 2021
Algolia’s open pricing models do not require a login to access. They have a “Subscribe for free, pay based on your usage” transparency and recommendations to help developers choose. At the time when Algolia was evaluated, there was a simulator that allowed prospective customers to have clear expectations and a flexible configuration. Pricing and usage of visualizations, paired with the detailed Pricing FAQ page, makes it easy to help better understand everything included in their usage packages.
Runner-up for Best Use of Monetization for 2021
BT API Developer Portal mentions their pricing however pricing is only visible to BT customers or account managers. Login is required to see promotions and pricing. This may be due to the types of pricing packages BT has available such as sport packages, mobile, broadband, landline, etc. The jury noted BT’s countdown feature for promotions and calling out whether or not the offer is available for the app. For example, a great deal is app only: £25 a month with Rolling contract | No upfront fee compared to others that require a longer commitment. The score is based on the variety of packages available and the granularity of controls that BT has to accommodate both self-service AND high touch sales. Integrations with NOW, Netflix, Amazon Prime Video, BritBox and many other media platforms. Calls to sign up to and create an account to learn more about pricing could be more explicit.
Best Use of API Gateway Integration
Not all developer portals require gateway integration or management. This award goes to developer portals that have a clever or unique way of integrating that hides complexity, provides a clean onboarding journey, mature controls, and dashboards.
In 2021, there were 14 developer portals nominated for this DevPortal Award category. Read more about the criteria and see past winners.
Winner of Best Use of API Gateway Integration for 2021
Ably Developer Platform was selected on the basis of “their relentless focus” on developer experience. The use of the tools & seamless gateway integration is as a means to an end for contributing to the focus on the customer’s journey. Ably appears to be API-type agnostic. The developer portal seems automated, keys are available immediately and examples work. There is no difference between sandbox or production. One is using the production environment from the start — providing for an amazing experience as a developer user. Ably claims to be able to accommodate an unlimited number of users. Their system is scalable, real-time, and rest-based.
Runners-up for Best Use of API Gateway Integration for 2021
There were two runners-up for this award category: Deutsche Boerse Digital Business Platform and BT API Developer Portal.
Deutsche Boerse Digital Business Platform provides access to a variety of gateways that can be deployed locally. All integration and support for the different gateways is managed centrally via the developer portal. The complexity of this integration is exponential but within the developer portal is seamless. Expectations are managed upfront — to overcome shortcomings — contributing to a decent developer experience.
BT API Developer Portal manages multiple business units behind one developer portal. A single login and user interface hides the complexity of a multitude of backend systems including internal, external (revenue earning), external usage, retail, & wholesale distribution. The developer portal serves a function for sales as a lead generation tool and CRM system.
Best Editorial Experience in a Devportal
In this category, developer portals were evaluated for the easy or frictionless experience provided to upstream developers, documentarians, and editorial reviewers for adding, documenting, and maintaining content within the developer portal.
In 2021, there were 7 developer portals nominated for this DevPortal Award category. Read more about the criteria and see past winners.
Winner of Best Editorial Experience in a Devportal for 2021
platformOS takes this year’s award for excellence having built an outstanding docs-as-code workflow that leverages Git repositories to collaborate on content and manage and track changes. Their publishing process includes automated testing of the documentation. On top of that, they have documented their process well and provide style guides and clear instructions to their writers.
platformOS Developer Portal demo and Q&A with Diana Lakatos (Director of Documentation) and Adam Broadway (CEO)
Runner-up for Best Editorial Experience in a Devportal for 2021
Mercedes Benz Developers uses a content management system with templates and highly structured content types for their documentation to enforce consistency. Through the CMS editor, they cater to the needs of less technical contributors. At the same time, they allow developer teams to plug into the portal via an API to automate documentation steps.
Best Internal Devportal
Internal developer portals seek to engage developers behind the corporate firewall. While there is a lot of information about publicly available developer portals, many of the best practices of public developer portals also apply to internal developer portals.
In 2021, there were 7 developer portals nominated. Additional information to help in the jury evaluation was collected — but not limited by — voluntary response to a questionnaire and participation in the API The Docs Showcase your devportal series. Read more about the criteria and see past winners.
Winner of Best Internal Devportal for 2021
BT API Developer Portal has a complete and well-organized developer portal that covers their internal and external API products and has everything expected for a great developer portal, such as sample code and sandbox features. The portal also contains an abundance of useful information for internal developers. BT has a streamlined process to approve API access internally.
BT API Developer Portal demo and Q&A with John Daffern (API Platform Senior Product Manager), Abhijit Dasgupta (Principal Solution Architect APIs and Microservices) and Sunin Shah (Solution Design and Documentation Standards Specialist)
Runner-up for Best Internal Devportal for 2021
Equinix has a combined portal that showcases both external and internal APIs based on user rights. All API products have thorough documentation and they’re searchable through their API catalog.
Best API Business Model
This award celebrates excellence in how clearly a business model is expressed within a developer portal. Developer portals are more than just a documentation portal. Customers can perceive the real intent your business has towards them through the value they receive from your developer portal.
In 2021, there were 13 developer portals nominated for this DevPortal Award category. Read more about the criteria and see past winners.
Winner of Best API Business Model for 2021
Ably Developer Platform delivered the best developer portal business model for 2021. The platform has clear pricing plans, feature charts, and illustrates the advantages of joining Ably. They provide analytics data to show how responsive they are as a business providing to customer needs (3m Messages per month, 100 Peak Connections, 100 Peak Channels). Sandbox and production documentation are not just low level fields. They even offer all types of documentation from overviews, guides, tutorials, and documentation to understand concepts and patterns including implementation, SDK, client library, MQTT, Server-Sent Events.
Runners-up for Best API Business Model for 2021
There were two runners-up for this category: Codat Portal and Smartcar. Of note is the Bol.com Developer Portal.
Codat Portal is very accessible to new users through its offer of a free trial and a test environment. Once logged in, besides legal language that is helpful, there are also Vimeo videos and primers for non-technical users. Codat Portal has three pricing tiers and promotes that it makes >22M API calls/mo and takes one day to get started.
Smartcar presents a clear business model and great data visualization to showcase what’s in each plan.
Noteworthy: Bol.com Developer portal makes it much easier to automate adding products, manage fulfillment, and manage the commerce life cycle by using their developer portal, its APIs, and documentation. Documentation spans key concepts and common workflows to detailed documentation for an eCommerce scenario.
DevPortal Awards 2021 Community Prize
All nominated developer portals are eligible to be considered for the community prize. Public voting for this year’s prize took place between the 1st of September and the 7th of November.
The results of the community vote are a tribute to how a developer portal can be recognized through its reach even outside the developer community — visibility to the wider customer community, social media influence, family members, and friends. Not every nominee advertised themselves for the public vote but for the ones that did there was an incredible turnout of votes with a total of 10,506 votes cast for 49 developer portals in 2021.
Winner of the DevPortal Awards 2021 Community Prize
BNI API Digital Services takes home the prize for the 2nd year in a row! They received a record 5895 votes.
Runners-up for the DevPortal Awards 2021 Community Prize
The top five community voted developer portals for 2021 were:
Finalist Selection for Best Overall Developer Portal 2021
The temptation is to award the developer portal with the most wins or runner-up status for Best Overall. However, developer portals should be considered for their overall ability to meet the criteria of as many of the best-in-class criteria independent of the number of awards won — nominees could only officially nominate themselves to a limited number of (4) award categories. The jury considered a shortlist of developer portals with at least one Best-In-Class win —independently— of the total number of wins or status as runner-up.
Criteria used to select the final winner
- Evaluation based on juror’s background expertise (e.g. API reference documentation, design, business alignment, onboarding, information architecture, discoverability, and more);
- Intuitive, cohesive, look & feel, ability to rapidly evaluate APIs and developer portal;
- Jurors were asked to compare these mature and successful sites into a score or ordered ranking;
- Decision made by consensus of the jury on the respective winners.
To learn more about the Jury’s expertise and process for evaluating developer portals, see the Interview with the Jury 2021.
Best Overall SME Developer Portal for 2021
The final shortlist of candidates for the Best Overall SME award were:
- Ably Developer Platform,
- Algolia Developer Platform,
- Plaid’s Developer Portal and Documentation,
- platformOS Developer Portal,
- Twitter Developer Platform, and
- Xsolla Developers.
Winner of Best Overall SME Developer Portal for 2021
The jury chose Ably Developer Platform as the winner for Best Overall SME Developer Portal in 2021.
Ably Developer Platform is overall a simple site, easy to understand what they have and how to use it. The onboarding process is a good starting point with API key and code samples in different languages, test environments. The onboarding flow was the best: they provide good explanations in writing and a good balance between visuals and detail to understand the product and grab your attention. The site does not assume that the visitor/user knows all the details. They didn’t just jump into the technical details of the product. Last year they were a runner-up and returning jurors were able to recognize the improvements that have built up over the years with this developer portal. Overall, they have a relentless focus on developer experience and have tried to do everything possible to create a superior developer experience. They are customer/developer-centric. Discovery within the site is beautiful, proactive, and easy. The jury found a talking point in the right sidebar which is considered non-standard but does not get in the way of anyone’s experience.
Best Overall Enterprise Developer Portal for 2021
The final shortlist of candidates for the Best Overall SME award were:
- Barclays API Exchange,
- BT API Developer Portal,
- Finastra FusionCreator Developer Portal,
- KBC Developer Portal,
- ThingWorx Developer Portal, and
- Tink Console.
Winner of Best Overall Enterprise Developer Portal for 2021
The jury chose Finastra’s FusionCreator Developer Portal as the winner for Best Overall Enterprise Developer Portal in 2021.
Fusion Creator Developer Portal offers a lot of video content on the site, detailed reference documentation, good getting started tutorial, how to use the portal and how to get started with APIs. The information provided was consistently structured with many products, high complexity, and fit a structure that built predictability into the UX. Design-wise the developer portal follows the same color palette in all diagrams and is consistent. Finastra handles challenges well with managing many product APIs. The navigation with filtration experience is great. Icons are used and there is a good semantic structure. It is, however, one of the slower sites to load. They offer users to use their design system which they use. Finastra manages complexity in a way that makes it simple for a new site visitor to understand what it’s about and find something that appeals to them. They can click and try. Finastra offers three different types of navigation, API, solution and dataset by tags. There are lots of ways to whittle down the information. They also bundle their APIs into premade solutions to make it easier to understand (e.g. loan management). With so much complexity it’s a good use of bundled APIs. Starting documentation and all the videos, sections to get started and example videos so it’s easy to approach such a complex environment. Jurors were interested in how they may use taxonomy behind the scenes to build their data hierarchy.
About the DevPortal Awards
- Nominations were open from May 10th through July 30th with public voting for the community prize from Sept 1st to November 7th.
- Each nominee was limited to run for a total of four award categories.
- The winners of the 2021 DevPortal Awards were announced in 2 separate Gala events held November 10th and December 15th.
- Learn more about the DevPortal Awards.
Demo/Q&A with some nominees
During the Showcase Your DevPortal Series at the API the Docs Virtual for 2021, several nominated teams gave us a public look inside their devportals, shared challenges they faced, and showcased their solutions. The links below are to the demo/Q&A.
- FourKites Developer Portal
- Wultra Developer Portal
- Yoti Developer Portal
- RingCentral Developers
- KBC Developer Portal
- Euler Hermes Developer Portal
- Amadeus for Developers
- Reonomy Technical Documentation
- ABN AMRO Developer Portal
- G+D Convego® Connect APIs
- platformOS Developer Portal
- Onfido Developer Portal
- BT API Developer Portal
- Barclays API Exchange
- Codat Portal
- Smartcar Developer Platform
Full List of DevPortal Awards Nominees for 2021
Finally, as organizers we would like to give a massive thank you to all the nominees and participants of the 2021 DevPortal Awards. These participants were involved in answering initial questionnaires that contributed to juror knowledge & understanding in the context of the award category, some demonstrated their developer portal (see links above), and also responded to jurors’ specific questions during deliberations (via email). All of these developer portals are examples built with a dedication to developer experience, operational excellence, and business alignment.
- Ably
- ABN AMRO Developer Portal
- Accor Developer Portal
- Algolia
- Amadeus for Developers
- Barclays API Exchange
- BNI API Digital Services
- Bol.com Development Center
- BRIAPI
- BT API Developer Portal
- Charles Schwab Developer Portal
- Codat Portal via Code Connect
- Code Connect
- Deutsche Bank
- Developer Engine
- Developer Portal by VTB
- Digital Business Platform
- Equinix Developer Platform
- Euler Hermes developer portal
- FactSet Developer Portal
- FourKites Developer Portal
- FusionCreator
- G+D Convego® Connect APIs
- Hazelcast documentation
- KBC Developer Portal
- Mercedes-Benz /developers
- Onfido Developer Hub
- Plaid’s developer documentation
- platformOS Developer Portal
- R3 Developers
- Rapyd Developer Portal
- Reonomy Technical Documentation
- RingCentral Developers
- SEON Docs
- Sikka ONE API
- Smartcar
- Tapix Developers portal
- TCS Cubo Marketplace
- ThingWorx Developer Portal
- Tink Console
- Tokopedia Seller API
- Twitter Developer Platform
- UnifyID (Acquired by Prove) Developer Portal
- Wathq
- Worldpay Developer
- Wultra Developer Portal
- Xsolla Developers
- Yoti developer documentation
- YTS API Portal
If you have reached the end of this long article, please be sure to nominate your developer portal in 2022 when the DevPortal Awards return for its next season. Stay tuned for the call for nominations in May 2022.
More on accessibility
- Best Accessible Devportal
- Digital Accessibility for Developer Portals
- Designing Developer Portals for Digital Accessibility
- Cognitive accessibility for developer portals
- Cognitive Accessibility For Developer Portals: Accessible Content For Every User
Go back to the Best Developer Portals article
All Pronovix publications are the fruit of a team effort, enabled by the research and collective knowledge of the entire Pronovix team. Our ideas and experiences are greatly shaped by our clients and the communities we participate in.
What makes your API references good? How can you boost developer experience? What docs do decision makers need? What ensures accessibility?
A handful of leaders in the API space are developing DX innovations for their API products and developer portals, but it is difficult to see clear trends in the API docs space. With the DevPortal Awards, Pronovix aims at creating an opportunity to celebrate the best developer portals, their API documentation components and inclusive characteristics, so that the API industry as a whole can accelerate its own learning.
This year, the DevPortal Awards counted 11 categories. Nominated portals automatically ran for the Best Overall DevPortal. The jury (Bob Watson, Anne Gentle and Lukas Rosenstock) chose the finalists and winners in each category. Furthermore, the community also casted votes for the Best Overall DevPortal. Two categories (Best Policies & Terms of Use; Best Localized & International DevPortal) only counted one nominee each —the jury decided to withdraw the respective prizes this year.
Best API Business Model: TomTom for Developers
In the “API business model” category we were looking for portals that have innovative business models, such as API pricing model innovations and new ways to monetize APIs. In addition, we were looking for portals that have found an efficient way to present these.
The jury found that Postman provided a unique offering of APIs with well explained pricing models that are accessible for a large audience. While TomTom created a very well-explained and easily understandable pay-as-you-grow model. The jury also mentioned that a nice-to-have feature was the popup feedback widget which asks if the pricing model is clear to the user.
Best API Reference Documentation: Adyen API Explorer
In the “API reference documentation” category we were looking for portals that improve on API reference documentation.
This means how they integrate with “try it out”, and sandbox functionality: the heart of developer experience.
A few extras that were appreciated are highlighted code, ability to comment, copy buttons, collapsible columns, a programming language selector, interactive links, and easy switching between testing and production.
This was the toughest category for the Jury. The jury members pointed out that it’s difficult to “differentiate among the best because “best” is pretty broad and product-specific […..] while bad is objectively bad, good is very subjective and context-specific.”
The DevPortal Awards Jury acknowledged Mercedes-Benz / developers for their easy-to-read and easy-to-find reference docs.
The jury valued Shutterstock’s references because they are easily reachable, well-written and explanatory with different language examples.
The Adyen docs were praised for being innovative, and interactive. They are easy to use and easy to navigate, and support multiple API versions.
Best New DX Innovation: NBG Technology Hub
In the “Developer Experience Innovation” category we were looking for portals that lead the way in boosting developer experience through Developer eXperience innovations or well executed existing technologies.
Among the criteria we can mention various tools for user engagement, such as pay for work, innovative testing, API explorer, and visuals.
The jury highlighted NBG’s try-it-out and take-the-tour functions and recognized Adyen for its dropdown list with actual use cases that show corresponding examples that are editable and runnable.
Best Design: Mercedes-Benz / developers
In the “Design” category we were looking for portals that found the perfect harmony of usability, content and aesthetics and present every aspect of the APIs in a well-structured, understandable way. In short: developer portals that inspire trust through superior production quality.
In all four cases, the jury highlighted the words clean, consistent and usable.
ABN Amro was celebrated for its matching aesthetics and attention to detail, Deutsche Bank for its dark-light mode function and its modern and unique design.
The jury praised Aevi for the meaningful illustrations on the home page, and Mercedes-Benz / developers for keeping up UI design expectations throughout the whole portal.
Best Onboarding: Nexmo Developer
In the “Best onboarding” category we were looking for portals that clearly show what their APIs are about, how they work, and how developers can start integrating and where they can find resources.
The jury liked Nexmo Developer’s narrative tutorials, step-by-step guide, error documentation and clear use cases.
ThingWorx was appreciated for its clear Getting Started guide and its transparent onboarding process.
While Amadeus was applauded for its straightforwardness, and self-service instructions.
Best Decision Maker Documentation: Adyen documentation
In the “Decision maker documentation” category we were looking for portals that could increase the perceived value of their API through spot-on and clear business descriptions.
Adyen is all about APIs, and dedicated their homepage to decision makers that would like to evaluate what the company offers.
The jury therefore recommends Adyen as a model for their use cases and case studies.
Best Community Spotlight & Outreach: Visa Developer Center
In the “Community spotlight and outreach” category we were looking for portals with creative solutions or initiatives to show developers that their work is appreciated.
These are the Portals with great community sections where developers can share knowledge and build connections.
Postman’s strong points were its Community Showcase, Jobs Board and Events Board, plus the many examples on the forum and the case studies available on the blog.
Visa’s partner showcase features lots of use cases. Furthermore, the jury mentioned the monthly developer spotlights and community newsletter.
Regarding ThingWorx, the jury pointed out that the company praises authors and blog posts.
Best Post-Integration & Maintenance Support: Nexmo Developer
In the “Post-integration and maintenance support” category we were looking for portals that do an exceptional job in creating trust towards their APIs by clearly, yet innovatively indicating their availability and reliability.
Portals that make it easy to maintain an API integration through great release notes and other maintenance support.
The jury highlighted Amadeus’s FAQ and changelog, and Nexmo’s comprehensive status page, active community, and support knowledge base.
Best Accessible DevPortal: Barclays API Exhange
In this category, we were looking for devportals that take the initiative to make their APIs and documentation accessible to all possible users, regardless of disability type or severity of impairment.
The jury praised Barclays for having an accessible site without losing interface or interaction quality.
Best Overall DevPortal, Jury Prize: TomTom for Developers
In this category, the jury selected four finalists: TomTom for Developers, HERE, Genesys and ThingWorx.
TomTom won because, according to the jury, they (1) scored very well in more than one category, and (2) made huge progress compared to last year.
Best Overall DevPortal, Community Prize: Visa Developer Center
On a total of 2213 votes in August and September 2019, Visa received 366!
Are you building a developer portal? Interested in a shortcut? Talk with us to learn how our MVP package can accelerate and simplify your devportal launch.
Read the article where we had a Q&A with the awarded teams.
What are the world’s best devportals? What do they do differently? Are there any best practices that everybody could and/or should be doing? Our primary aim with the Devportal Awards was to answer these questions - or at least trigger a discussion about them.
For three years now Pronovix has been researching what makes a devportal tick and to get analytical insights about the different aspects of portals. We’ve seen that there are a handful of leaders in the API space who are developing Developer eXperience innovations for their API products and developer portals, but we haven’t seen any coordination between these efforts, and it is difficult to see clear trends in the API docs space.
We created nine categories for the award, and if a portal was nominated in any of these, it was automatically in race for the Best Overall Developer Portal Jury and Community Prize. Our aim with these categories is to expand the vocabulary the industry uses to talk about DX, so that the conversation becomes about actual experiences instead of brand recognition.
Our main goal is to create an opportunity to celebrate the best developer portals and their API documentation components, so that this could become a learning tool for the API industry.
Great names from the field of developer portals and documentation agreed to form the jury of the Awards and make sure that the best nominees win in the nine categories and the Best Overall Developer Portal Jury Prize. Thank you Anne Gentle, Michael Meng, Lukas Rosenstock, Ashley Hathaway and Jenny Wanger.
Also big thank you to the community, everyone who voted for the Best Overall Developer Portal Community Prize.
The very first DevPortal Awards Gala, where we announced the winners of the categories was held on 9th of November in London. The API the Docs Conference set the perfect atmosphere for celebrating the teams behind the best portals.
Let’s see now the winners and finalists of each category with a short summary of the jury’s justification.
Best New DX Innovation: Cisco DevNet
In this category we were looking for portals that lead the way in boosting developer experience through DX innovations or well executed existing technologies. Among the criteria we can mention various tools for user engagement, such as pay for work, innovative testing, API explorer, visuals.
Erste was praised for the visuals and animation while in the case of Cisco the jury highlighted the fact that they strive to address developers with different aims and they also offer a variety of tools - testing options, tool integration and a strong community focus.
Best API Business Model: Shopify Developers
In this category we were looking for portals that have innovative business models, such as API pricing model innovations and new ways to monetize APIs, and that have found an efficient way to present these.
TomTom has a very well-explained and easily understandable pay-as-you-grow model and some useful extras such as the possibility to compare prices in US dollars and euros. Shopify offers two possibilities for developers to make money: app development and custom development, which means multiple opportunities for developers to make money. There are clear explanations and charts to help users decide.
Best API Reference Documentation: Nexmo Developer
In this category we were looking for portals that improve on API reference documentation and how they integrate with “try it out”, and sandbox functionality: the heart of developer experience. Little extras that were appreciated are highlighted code, commenting possibility, copy buttons, collapsible columns, programming language selector, interactive links, easy switch between testing and production.
In this category the race was very close. According to the DevPortal Awards Jury Nexmo’s reference docs are a good example to follow for the numerous explanations it offers, the great structure, layout and texts. KPN’s reference docs were praised for being code centered but still containing lots of descriptive information and offering a try out option.
Best Design: Mapbox
In this category we were looking for portals that found the perfect harmony of usability, content and aesthetics and present every aspect of the APIs in a well-structured, understandable way. Developer portals that inspire trust through superior production quality.
The two adjectives that were most often used by the jury to describe all of the finalists were clean and consistent, which can be understood as synonyms of good design. In case of Mapbox the jury emphasized as a positive feature that the portal feels spacious, and it is very easy to navigate. Typeform was praised for the way it uses colors consistently throughout the sections. The jury also liked the way Cisco uses the colors, and the portal was also celebrated for its clear structure.
Best Post-integration & Maintenance Support: Nexmo Developer
In this category we were looking for portals that do an exceptional job in creating trust towards their APIs by clearly, yet innovatively indicating their availability and reliability. Portals that make it easy to maintain an API integration through great release notes and other maintenance support.
The jury highlighted that Orange is very active both in its blog and Twitter. From its blog, Twitter and the latest news Dailymotion also seems to be actively monitoring what’s going on. They have many channels for support and use them actively. Nexmo was pointed out for its separate status page and also for its active Stack Overflow page and blog and for the fact that the team regularly attends conferences, which also shows that they care.
Best Onboarding: Nexmo Developer
In this category we were looking for portals that clearly show what their APIs are about, how they work, how developers can start integrating and where they can find resources.
The jury liked Nexmo’s tutorials a lot - they are numerous and understandable. SendGrid was praised for highlighting its Get started documentation, which also has a nice, and easy to follow step-by-step structure.
Best Community Spotlight & Outreach: Cisco DevNet
In this category we were looking for portals with creative solutions or initiatives to show developers that their work is appreciated. Portals with great community sections where developers can share knowledge and build connections.
Shopify’s main strength in this category was that they seem to pay great attention to events and webinars, which shows that education is very important for them. The jury found that Cisco provides a great example of an engaging landing page, and it manages to give a taste of everything that might be important for community building: blogs, code intent, access to repositories, learning events, etc.
Best Devportal Policies & Terms of Use: Ticketmaster Developer Portal
In this category we were looking for portals that build trust through a genuine approach even in the seemingly unglamorous topic of policies and terms of use. These dry and boring texts can be made more consumable by giving a human friendly summary or by highlighting the most recent changes.
The jury found the terms on KPN’s portal well-structured and easy to scan with a reasonable length. Ticketmaster was also praised for using a clear language with headings to make scanning easier. They also liked that Ticketmaster created separate terms for partner APIs and the way it emphasizes what users shall and shall not do.
Best Decision Maker Documentation: Deutsche Bank Developer Portal
In this category we were looking for portals that could increase the perceived value of their API through spot-on and clear business descriptions.
The jury liked that Orange provides clear and detailed product descriptions that are targeted at non technical audiences. Deutsche Bank was also praised for having a marketing focused API overview and providing entry points for decision makers with short teasers which then lead to detailed descriptions. The jury found Shopify’s main strength in the use cases it offers and how it describes different opportunities for different developers.
Best Overall Developer Portal Jury Prize: Cisco DevNet
The race was very close for the Best Overall developer Portal Jury price. The decisive argument for Cisco DevNet was that they had an unbelievably complex problem to solve with their numerous products and content types, and they could meet this challenge in a truly convincing way.
Best Overall Developer Portal Community Prize: Dailymotion Developer Portal
The community voting opened on 20th September and closed on 31st October. The winner got an amazing 1060 votes.
Congratulations to the winners!
Read our interviews with the winning teams about their experience with the award and their plans.
Go back to the Best Developer Portals article
