Abstract We consider the application of three performance-portable programming models in the context of a high-order spectral element, implicit time-stepping solver for the Navier–Stokes equations. We aim to evaluate whether the use of these models allows code developers to deliver high-performance solvers for computational fluid dynamics simulations that are capable of effectively utilising both many-core CPU and GPU architectures. Using the core elliptic solver for the Navier–Stokes equations as a benchmarking guide, we evaluate the performance of these models on a range of unstructured meshes and give guidelines for the translation of existing codebases and their data structures to these models.