The world’s first 100% browser-based ALM enterprise solution, which enables seamless collaboration across disparate teams, multi-directionally linked work items, full traceability, accelerated productivity and automated proof of compliance.
| Type | Title | Date | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Category | Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) Suites | Apr 29, 2025 | Download |
| Product | Reviews, tips, and advice from real users | Apr 29, 2025 | Download |
| Comparison | Polarion ALM vs Jira | Apr 29, 2025 | Download |
| Comparison | Polarion ALM vs Microsoft Azure DevOps | Apr 29, 2025 | Download |
| Comparison | Polarion ALM vs Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM) | Apr 29, 2025 | Download |
| Title | Rating | Mindshare | Recommending | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Microsoft Azure DevOps | 4.1 | 17.5% | 95% | 133 interviewsAdd to research |
| Jira | 4.1 | 21.9% | 91% | 274 interviewsAdd to research |
We use Polarion ALM for development to track requirements, tasks, anomalies, project and design documentation, and other things.
This one tool incorporates almost all engineering tasks we need to do for one project. However, it's still not a polished solution for how we deploy it. So we cannot use it as a single solution for everything. Also, there are still some uses for which it's not recommended. But this is one of the primary tools our engineering team uses to keep track of their documentation for the project.
Polarion ALM has some valuable tools for managing our targets and requirements. I think that's its best feature. All the other features are helpful, but a lot of them don't work out of the box. In terms of planning and management, they need some work.
One of Polarion's shortcomings would be planning. It can handle plans, but the planning feature is very basic. There are third-party solutions that could be easily incorporated or built into the license. They have plugins they developed only after many customers complained about Polarion's integration with third-party repositories. Some of the repositories aren't working all the time. So it works when you set it up, but it stops working after a while, and there is nothing you can do except reset the whole server and try it again. So it's not a convenient way to deal with those issues because the solution should be up 99.9% of the time.
Another issue is Polarion's integration with external tools, including repositories for source code, mechanical design, electrical designs, etc. There should be out-of-the-box integration with different tools like Jira or things of that nature. Some of this functionality exists, but it's not so easy to set up. Polarion ALM needs more integration with external repositories, especially for source code. Most of these tools don't recommend using Polarion ALM as a repository, so you have to use Search Party or a different tool for that. And integration is not straightforward or not easy to do.
We started with Polarion ALM over a year and a half ago.
In terms of stability, Polarion ALM is okay. Some highly stable features work and integrate with other tools out of the box. Then some are not so stable, so you have to wait for the bugs to be fixed in the new releases. The stability of other features depends entirely on the IT infrastructure because they use a lot of resources. Then again, I don't know if that's necessarily Polarion's problem or how it's deployed.
But overall, I would say Polarion is reasonably stable. We haven't had any downtime. However, there were times when we had to look for alternatives because some of the things we expect from the tool's administrative functions are not there. So you have to use specific plug-ins to be able to achieve what you need. That limits the way you can interact with the tool.
It looks like Polarion ALM is highly scalable. However, you might need to scale the team managing the tools. That's not something that most organizations are willing to do. Polarion's scalability depends on whether you have enough people to support it, so it's not necessarily the best option. It would be great if you could scale it up while easily managing and deploying it with a relatively small team. Right now, scaling up Polarion means you might need extra resources. As I said, most of the administration capabilities are not too user-friendly. It's not easy to deploy it across all projects quickly. Keep in mind that in this field, you deploy it once you have the database with everything. You cannot switch it off and then move to another server and another version with a new database next year.
And you'll have to preserve everything for, let's say, 15 years or so. So that means you have to do in-place upgrades then scale to support different templates and configurations for various projects. You'll start some projects one way and take a different approach for others. And when you change something, you'll have to support all those configurations still. You don't just apply the new configuration to everything. Sometimes, you need to apply things that are not available in the tool itself with too many projects. So you can scale, but you need lots of people to help you deploy that very fast. It's not that easy to scale once you've been working with it for a while.
I would say Polarion's support is average.
We had some older solutions that we were using in several design centers across the globe, but the solutions were running out of support. Even the vendor was switching to something else, and what they offered didn't integrate well with other tools, so we had to find a new solution. Polarion ALM was one of the solutions that the other design centers were considering. In the end, we went with it, and the local ones were phased out as the projects started using Polarion. We never planned to migrate all the old stuff because that involves extra effort and cost and might not work 100 percent. So the old solutions are still around just for the legacy projects while all new projects are on this new system.
Polarion ALM is an administration tool that is very complex. Customizing the out-of-the-box configuration for our use case requires more work administration-wise than other tools we had in the past. For some tools, one person can administer all the projects in that tool. It's a bit more complex also because it allows you to make more mistakes. And you have to manually trickle down the configuration from one item to another — it doesn't have a way to automate this administrative work easily. So you have to know your way around and pick the right thing then duplicate the same setting somewhere else. Otherwise, it is not user-friendly from the administration's point of view.
We were switching everything over from our previous solution, so initial deployment took about a little more than six months, but now many projects are using it. But we're constantly reconfiguring Polarion ALM for new projects because some things didn't work out of the box or work as expected when we started using it. So when we implemented a tool and found a bug, we had to look for alternative solutions.
Our license for Polarion ALM is yearly. And it's not the cheapest tool that we've looked at. So if we had made our decision purely based on the licensing cost, we wouldn't have selected Polarion. Like most tools of this kind, there are maintenance costs and support contracts, etc. We're also looking to purchase a different license for other plugins that add features Polarion doesn't support or do right. If the vendor doesn't plan to improve on those features, we'll look for a third-party solution for that. So all of these costs are added on top of it.
We were looking at a few options, and we all evaluated each based on what was available out of the box. But, of course, some things don't work the same when you're using them on a project as they do when you're evaluating a product. Most evaluations don't last very long, and sometimes you realize faults with a product after the review. So we had a few products that we evaluated. In the end, Polarion turned out to be a little bit better than the other tools. I can't say whether those other tools have developed more since to overtake Polarion.
Overall, I would rate Polarion ALM eight out of 10, but it depends on your intended use. If you are limiting the scope to just a few uses, it can go all the way to 10. But if you want to use it for all the aspects of the development process, my rating would go down to six. I would also point out that some other tools are easier to administer. For example, there are tools where the administrator has to do very little. In Polarion, the admin needs to make some configuration changes and modify access rights at every level. But in other tools, these configuration changes trickle down automatically on their own without the need to double-check several places before you can finally say it's all done. So administration-wise, they can improve. And the out-of-the-box features should all work as needed without a lot of tinkering.
To people considering Polarion, I would say that you need to do a thorough, extended evaluation. Make sure that you have an initial team of at least 10 or so people before moving ahead with a company-wide deployment. Of course, this depends on your company's scale and how many projects you want to support. If you're working on one project at a time, then one person can handle most of the stuff.
