Buddhism has a great many divine beings and no god at the top, and its most distinctive structural claim is a denial. Brahma, in an early text, believes himself to be the creator and the tradition treats this as a mistake, produced by his having arrived first in a world-system that was reassembling itself anyway. There is no creator. That single position separates this pantheon from almost every other in the atlas.
The devas are real and they are not the point. They live long, pleasant, powerful lives and they remain within the round of rebirth, subject to death and to the consequences of action, and so they are in a worse position than a human being who can practise. Worship of them secures worldly benefit and not liberation.
What is venerated instead is a state and those who reached it. Buddhas, and in the Mahayana the bodhisattvas who postpone their own liberation, occupy the position other traditions give to gods, and they arrived there by practice. The door is open to anyone. This is not apotheosis granted from above but attainment, and it is why the atlas records the route into this pantheon under its own heading.
Vajrayana adds a further layer, arranging buddhas in families and generating an immense iconography of figures understood as aspects rather than as separate persons.
Wherever Buddhism travelled it absorbed local gods as protectors of the teaching rather than displacing them.