In the construction of the Northeast Land Sea Corridor, it is an urgent need to enhance the driving force of Liaoning Province’s radiation belt towards the sea and land by leveraging the synergistic effect of the Liaoning Port Group. Taking six ports within the province as the research object, panel data from 2019 to 2022 were selected to evaluate the contribution of each port to the coordinated development of the port cluster using entropy weight method. The dynamic qualitive comparative analysis (QCA) method was used to find a feasible driving path to effectively promote the high level of coordinated development of the Liaoning port cluster. The results indicate that the level of coordinated development of ports is influenced by multiple conditional variables. There are three configuration paths that affect the level of coordinated development of ports, with potential substitution relationships between configurations and no significant time or individual effects found.