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IBM DOORS Next vs Jira comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Apr 6, 2025

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
6.3
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 April 2025, in the Application Requirements Management category, the mindshare of IBM DOORS Next is 8.5%, up from 7.8% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Jira is 15.7%, down from 16.4% 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

"One of the most valuable features is how you can tailor the modules."
"It's web-based, so you don't have anything to install."
"The "Link by Attribute" feature is useful for making links without needing to use the web interface manually."
"My company contacts the solution's technical support, and they are good and responsive."
"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."
"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 baselines and links."
"The most valuable features are the versioning of requirements and the possibility to reuse them."
"Jira has a good reporting system. It also has an API, so we can do all sorts of reporting."
"The flexibility to create different flows is most valuable."
"It also works well with all the integrated tools that you buy."
"The most valuable feature is project management."
"The solution offers up great transparency that makes it possible for everyone inside the departmental organization to see what's happening."
"It handles all of the issues that we need it to do."
"Transparency of development projects, as well as approval processes for some business projects, has improved massively."
"The most valuable feature of this solution is the source linking on the commit level to git."
 

Cons

"IBM Rational DOORS Next Generation is not a very user-friendly product."
"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."
"When you are not working on it every day it is not very intuitive."
"As a web tool, DNG can be difficult to use if the server is loaded or your network connection to it is saturated."
"Be very careful how you load your DNG server. There are limits to the number of artifacts a server can handle."
"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."
"Both the data storage and reporting for this solution need improvement."
"We would like to see integration between Tempo and Jira."
"There are no fields to search or to filter by, mainly the ones which use a data around a date and time when something changes."
"There should be a way to integrate the mobile application or in some way, make it more clear because at first instance, I didn't understand how to use it."
"When you first start to use the interface, it is confusing."
"If Jira would be interested in offering a SharePoint version, it would be beneficial."
"This solution would be improved with the inclusion of integration with SVN, and auto-sync with the build release number."
"From a very software-centric or a lead developer standpoint, there should be the ability to work at multiple levels. You have epic stories and use cases or epic stories and tasks. It would be nice to be able to have multiple levels of stories and multiple levels of epics work with it. It's lacking a little bit there, and this is the big thing for me because it makes it difficult to do a real sprint when you're limited to one story per epic. It's really hard to isolate tasks at multiple levels to match the type of use cases you normally do. That's the biggest difficulty. Other than that, they've been improving year to year, and every version seems to have a level of improvement."
"Improvements in Jira for the next release could include adding AI tools for dashboarding, making it easier to report insights, and enhancing business intelligence capabilities. It should also improve on-prem support. As far as I know, Jira's on-premise support is being discontinued. From last year onward, they stopped providing on-premise licenses and now only offer cloud support. This shift happened gradually, and I believe they now only offer cloud licenses."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"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."
"The price of this solution is very high, and it increases year after year."
"Users can buy a three-year license for about 12,000 Euros."
"If the product price were not reasonable enough, our company would not use IBM Rational DOORS Next Generation."
"We are on an annual license and could be less expensive."
"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."
"Licensing is on a monthly basis, and it is based on what you use."
"The price of Jira is reasonable."
"Almost everybody uses JIRA nowadays because it is the most cost-effective solution."
"The license is yearly. It is a large, long-running program."
"It does not cost that much."
"There are no additional costs to the standard licensing."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Manufacturing Company
23%
Aerospace/Defense Firm
9%
Government
7%
Computer Software Company
7%
Educational Organization
51%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Financial Services Firm
7%
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: April 2025.
848,207 professionals have used our research since 2012.