Try our new research platform with insights from 80,000+ expert users

IBM DOORS Next vs Jira comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive Summary

Review summaries and opinions

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Categories and Ranking

IBM DOORS Next
Ranking in Application Requirements Management
5th
Average Rating
7.6
Reviews Sentiment
6.2
Number of Reviews
13
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
Jira
Ranking in Application Requirements Management
2nd
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
6.9
Number of Reviews
274
Ranking in other categories
Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) Suites (1st), Project Management Software (2nd)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of March 2025, in the Application Requirements Management category, the mindshare of IBM DOORS Next is 8.6%, up from 7.8% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Jira is 15.8%, down from 16.7% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Application Requirements Management
 

Featured Reviews

Roger Trackwell - PeerSpot reviewer
An industry-leading tool to demonstrate traceability between requirements, with valuable features for tailoring modules and managing several thousand requirements
The biggest thing is that it shows cradle to grave traceability between the initial parent requirement and the lowest level, or what we call a CID, a critical item development spec. You can establish your verification plans in DOORS, and then as you get test results, you can put them in DOORS as a link or as a pointer to where that specific test resides on a company database. Then you can also write compliance rationale and add a column for coding, like pass, fail, green, yellow, red, meets, does not meet, partially meets, or whatever scoring criteria you want to use. Like I said, the best thing about it is that it provides you that visibility of your verification, allowing you to know how close you are to your pre-production activities, prototyping, go ahead, or whatever it is.
Saroj Ekka - PeerSpot reviewer
Offers good repository integration, sprint board and easy to set up
There are some features and reports we need that are not there. For example, if I have to find out the capacity of the current sprint by user and compare it with the previous sprint, that visibility isn't there. We can know the capacity and what happened with the whole sprint, but not for an individual person to see where it's falling and how it's tracking. Report and analytics capabilities are important for a product manager. That visibility is important, so we use Jira. Some of the features are there, and I use my own Excels or other data things to compensate for that.

Quotes from Members

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Pros

"The tool's most valuable feature is displaying requirements in a tabular format. This means you can see everything laid out in columns and rows. It is more aesthetic compared to other tools. The traceability matrix helps to view things better. It comes with different linking rules."
"The most valuable features are the versioning of requirements and the possibility to reuse them."
"My company contacts the solution's technical support, and they are good and responsive."
"There are many good features with DOORS. The solution has a concept of streams and baselines, as well as a concept of components. A component is a subproject inside a project."
"It's web-based, so you don't have anything to install."
"One of the most valuable features is how you can tailor the modules."
"IBM Rational DOORS Next Generation is easier to expand to build a backend with several servers, so you can also use it to scale up to several hundreds of users without major problems."
"As far as maintaining our requirements so that we can have copies of them, it's good. I can print it out if necessary."
"We like team collaboration and cross-functional collaboration."
"Offers a common language set so we can bring people into projects and get them up and running almost immediately."
"There are a couple of things that I find valuable about Jira, the first being its architecture. For instance, I like that you can create dashboards easily, which makes it very user-friendly. You don't need much training on that. You can just get right to it and people are able to use almost all of Jira's features with little training."
"Internally we use Jira for our own implementations and capturing requirements and our customers are using the whole tool for the whole software development life cycle. They're using it for the full life cycle of the product."
"It's easy to deploy."
"The most valuable feature of Jira is the project package for development."
"The customization and tailoring of the workflows have proven to be very useful."
"The scrum dashboard is the product's most important feature. It provides an overview of tasks, who is working on what, and the status of each task."
 

Cons

"Be very careful how you load your DNG server. There are limits to the number of artifacts a server can handle."
"When you are not working on it every day it is not very intuitive."
"IBM Rational DOORS Next Generation has room for improvement compared to other tools like Polaris and Jama Connect. These tools offer more flexibility and options for developers, which IBM Rational DOORS Next Generation lacks. For example, you can define your link rules in Jama Connect, but you can't do that in IBM Rational DOORS Next Generation."
"As a web tool, DNG can be difficult to use if the server is loaded or your network connection to it is saturated."
"It does have a tendency to condense the requirements. It kind of puts them in a tree format. Sometimes those trees are a little difficult."
"It offers a bad user experience and the usability is poor."
"The only additional feature would be if it had dynamic linking to other MBSE tool sets or industry-leading tools."
"I have come to the conclusion that if you are considering migrating from DOORS to DNG, don't! Instead of spending 100's to 1000's of hours doing migrations, invest those hours in a DXL programmer to make DOORS do what it isn't doing for you now."
"The tool should improve its pricing."
"I'm really new to Jira and I haven't used all of the features. However, it is quite difficult to use and manipulate. It was a little complicated for me and I don't know if it's difficult globally for others, but I had a difficult time understanding it at first. I used it for issues, epics, stories, tasks, and sub-tasks. For first-time users, Jira could be made better to help them understand."
"So at one point in time, they did a huge UI upgrade. At that time, I felt like they had changed something, so it was hard to figure out. Now that we are habituated, it's not an issue now."
"Its search and reporting can be improved. They are already nice, but they can be further improved."
"There is a difference between their cloud and their server versions. The next-gen project, which is an advanced feature that allows you to visualize the road map of your delivery over multiple products and over time, is not available yet for the sever version. It appears there in the list, but it's still not right. I've tried to use it many times and I am watching the device show their tracker, but it seems they intentionally want this to increase the utilization of the cloud instead of the server. It is really a nice feature and it's a shame that we don't have it."
"The thing I don't like is that it is hard to decide which dropdown options should be selected. When we try and submit it, it will state that there are certain mandates in place. It won't allow us to submit the form unless we fill out all the details."
"My main concern is the administration of projects, especially user groups, and this requires root access rights but there is no concept of layered admin rights."
"The solution lacks integration with visualization tools like Power BI or Tableau, which would be beneficial for better insights."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Users can buy a three-year license for about 12,000 Euros."
"The price of this solution is very high, and it increases year after year."
"If the product price were not reasonable enough, our company would not use IBM Rational DOORS Next Generation."
"You are going to need a beefy server and a fat network pipe to it in order to make DNG and its companion tools work well for users."
"The cost of maintenance is €20,000 to €30,000 ($22,000 to $33,000 USD) and there are no additional fees."
"As a company, we get a subsidized price, and it's lower than what's quoted on their website."
"Jira is expensive and a lot of people are choosing DevOps because they are cheaper, open-source, easy to use, and have basic licenses. Jira should decrease its price to be more competitive."
"The basic price of Jira is reasonable, but for each plugin, we have to keep paying more. When you add it all up, it can be expensive. The main problem we face is we are forced to purchases plugin licenses for users who are not going to use them. For example, we have Jira licenses for approximately 450 people but if we only want a purchase a plugin for few people it is mandatory to buy the license for the 450 people who have Jira licensees. This is a problem because sometimes we need plugins for the product manager or for people in charge of the report, not everyone. For us, it can be very expensive in the end, they should alter this policy to allow plugins for only a set number of licenses."
"The price of the solution could be less expensive. We pay annually for the solution."
"The pricing for Jira is reasonable, although I think they can bring it down because the plugins cost extra."
"I don't have the number, but I sure wish Jira was less expensive. Its price point should be a little lower, and it should be more flexible for users who are just ticket viewers."
"It is not too expensive. It is just comparative to other tools like Microsoft Teams."
"We currently have ten users, and it is free for ten users."
report
Use our free recommendation engine to learn which Application Requirements Management solutions are best for your needs.
842,592 professionals have used our research since 2012.
 

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Manufacturing Company
23%
Aerospace/Defense Firm
9%
Government
7%
Computer Software Company
7%
Educational Organization
53%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Financial Services Firm
6%
Computer Software Company
5%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
 

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about IBM Rational DOORS Next Generation?
The tool's most valuable feature is displaying requirements in a tabular format. This means you can see everything laid out in columns and rows. It is more aesthetic compared to other tools. The tr...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for IBM Rational DOORS Next Generation?
The pricing is considered unreasonable, and there is speculation that IBM may not be putting much effort into further development, possibly treating it as a cash cow.
What needs improvement with IBM Rational DOORS Next Generation?
There is a need for improvement in user experience, as the UI is too complex and outdated. Updates should be more frequent to ensure security and functionality, especially in addressing vulnerabili...
Is Jira better or would you go with Micro Focus ALM Octane?
Hi Netanya, Basically , it all depends on the use cases for your environment and the business needs. Hope the below data may be relevant to you for identifying your needs and deciding on the approp...
Which is better - Jira or Microsoft Azure DevOps?
Jira is a great centralized tool for just about everything, from local team management to keeping track of products and work logs. It is easy to implement and navigate, and it is stable and scalabl...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Jira?
We operate under a nonlimited license with Jira, allowing a number of users to access it with a single enterprise license.
 

Comparisons

 

Also Known As

Rational DOORS Next Generation, RDNG, Rational Requirements Composer and IBM RRC
Jira Software
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Major health insurer
Square, Nasa, eBay, Cisco, SalesForce, Adobe, BNP Paribas, BMW and LinkedIn, Pfizer, Citi.
Find out what your peers are saying about IBM DOORS Next vs. Jira and other solutions. Updated: March 2025.
842,592 professionals have used our research since 2012.