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IBM Engineering Workflow Management vs Jira comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive Summary
 

Categories and Ranking

IBM Engineering Workflow Ma...
Average Rating
6.6
Number of Reviews
16
Ranking in other categories
Software Configuration Management (5th), Enterprise Agile Planning Tools (10th)
Jira
Average Rating
8.0
Number of Reviews
267
Ranking in other categories
Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) Suites (1st), Application Requirements Management (2nd), Project Management Software (4th)
 

Mindshare comparison

While both are Application Lifecycle Management solutions, they serve different purposes. IBM Engineering Workflow Management is designed for Enterprise Agile Planning Tools and holds a mindshare of 0.9%, up 0.9% compared to last year.
Jira, on the other hand, focuses on Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) Suites, holds 23.5% mindshare, down 23.9% since last year.
Enterprise Agile Planning Tools
Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) Suites
 

Featured Reviews

Suvajit Chakraborty - PeerSpot reviewer
Oct 31, 2023
Offers good traceability elements but UI needs improvement
There is room for improvement in the UI. The UI has to improve a lot compared to the competitive tools, like Atlassian Jira, for example. It's very easy to use. It is easy to manage and easy to use. Anybody can learn it right quickly and start with it. But IBM ELM is something where somebody has to have good knowledge, training, and understanding and then only start using it. But there's a big known knowledge curve for IBM ELM. But once that is there, it's normally; organizations do have their own internal team to basically manage it IBM ELM portfolio, the tool chain. So if they have internal teams who are doing it for quite some time, not something new, then it is definitely better. But if there's if somebody is starting new, definitely there is a knowledge curve time it can take at least a year or maybe a couple of years before they can start realizing the benefits.
Saroj Ekka - PeerSpot reviewer
Apr 10, 2024
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

"Traceability reporting is inbuilt and includes all your requirements."
"Good for managing stories, sprints, hydration and releases."
"The most valuable features of the solution are highly customizable reports and visibility for all the higher management."
"We can track the status of test cases (passed or saved) in a single view. Based on releases and other attributes, we generate various reports and extract metrics from the data."
"Work distribution among team members and accountability for completion with a clearer picture."
"Agile templates give us a standard methodology for every Agile project. Also, the ability to create our own object types and linkages to features/epics allows us to enhance the verification of feature readiness."
"It was an all-in-one solution for source code, integrated source control, defect tracking, and project planning."
"All of the features work together to provide a powerful holistic solution - from the dashboard all the way through to security."
"Jira is easy to use and there are a lot of tools that are integrated with it."
"Reports, analytics, and a ton of widgets, they are great and intuitive. Perfect for an agile team."
"Jira's most valuable features are ease of use, simple to understand, and highly flexible. Additionally, you can use kanban or scrum which is a benefit."
"It is user-friendly, and you can manage your project according to the methodology you want. It is also easy to configure."
"Offers great multiple reporting charts."
"The adaptability of the Scrum and Kanban boards for other uses, with careful use of the customization features."
"For QA, the most interesting for me are boards, backlog, and filters."
"We like team collaboration and cross-functional collaboration."
 

Cons

"It's becoming less relevant. For example, Maven has evolved, and in its later versions, there are plugins for integrating with source control systems, such as Git-based systems. Support for these plugins is diminishing."
"Lacks ability to customize and reporting can be slow."
"Some administrative tasks are difficult to perform. These could be simplified."
"The solution is very heavily vendor dependent."
"We have encountered issues with stability. We have seen where the entire system kind of goes for a toss when certain people use certain types of queries, which are very costly. Then the system kind of slows down a bit, and we have to monitor it."
"If you have multiple projects on one server, the tool becomes very slow, and some reports take longer to load."
"Teams need clearer pictures of resource availability in charts and dashboards along with plans."
"Performance is something that can always be improved upon in a feature release. Additionally, it would be a benefit to add Markdown in Jira because sometimes it might be better to describe everything in Markdown because it is a common language structure."
"Lacks field-level permission in the cloud version."
"The reporting needs to be improved."
"A more organized hierarchy is important. Reporting and JQL create issues for me. They do not completely cover the reporting part that I need to report in terms of my capacity to plan. In the same token, there is no record at this very moment to provide me with one export with epics story points, tasks, or issues and their sub-tasks at the same time."
"There needs to be a way to export a user story."
"They are not supporting in-house servers anymore and I think I've got until January to port this to something else."
"In Jira, sometimes developers are not getting alerts when Jira is moving out of the SLA to the product development team."
"Lacks some common building block approaches to certain things."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"I've heard IBM Engineering Workflow Management is more expensive than other tools."
"It is not a free tool. We use a token-based licensing model, which is specific to IBM. The cost per token is around $115-$120."
"It's an expensive investment to make, so the decision should be driven on individual requirements."
"Licensing: The solution cost is high and should be brought down to increase competition."
"The pricing is much higher than other similar solutions available in the market, and as such, the vendor should think about a price reduction to make this product more affordable."
"I think the starter pack of three users, up to five users, is free. So you can try it out."
"We are using the enterprise license which is nice because it ensures that we always have the latest versions of Jira software."
"To try this solution, use their cloud offering to get familiar. After that, it's in my view worth the money."
"The license is yearly. It is a large, long-running program."
"I don't feel that price is an issue."
"The price at the moment for Jira is okay. I'm absolutely not amused with the plans to try to drive us to the cloud or to other licensing models. For the very simple reason that we are a company in the defense sector where cloud is problematic in a number of the domains. We are now approximately 60 users and the new policy will actually confront us with an upscale to approximately 500 users. I find it unacceptable, and may potentially lead us to look for another solution."
"Licensing is on a monthly basis, and it is based on what you use."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Manufacturing Company
20%
Government
15%
Computer Software Company
11%
Healthcare Company
8%
Educational Organization
50%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Financial Services Firm
7%
Computer Software Company
6%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
 

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about IBM Engineering Workflow Management?
We can track the status of test cases (passed or saved) in a single view. Based on releases and other attributes, we generate various reports and extract metrics from the data.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for IBM Engineering Workflow Management?
I've heard IBM Engineering Workflow Management is more expensive than other tools. On a scale from one to ten, where one is cheap and ten is expensive, I rate the solution's pricing a six out of ten.
What needs improvement with IBM Engineering Workflow Management?
It's becoming less relevant for us, as we move to cloud-based and more contemporary cloud-based SCM systems such as GitHub. As new JDKs have been released over the years, tooling support in new rel...
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?
The product is quite expensive. It costs approximately 1.2 million rand per year. It's a fixed price, depending on the modules that you get. You have specific tools, that's what you pay for. I rate...
 

Also Known As

IBM Rational Team Concert (IBM ALM), IBM RTC
Jira Software
 

Learn More

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Overview

 

Sample Customers

Telstra Corporation, Visteon, Atos SE, Panasonic Automotive Systems, IBM Global Technology Services, CareCore National, JTEKT Corp., ItaÒ BBA, Avea, CACEIS, Danske Bank Group, APIS IT
Square, Nasa, eBay, Cisco, SalesForce, Adobe, BNP Paribas, BMW and LinkedIn, Pfizer, Citi.
Find out what your peers are saying about IBM Engineering Workflow Management vs. Jira and other solutions. Updated: March 2023.
814,649 professionals have used our research since 2012.