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IBM Engineering Workflow Management vs TFS 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:
 

ROI

Sentiment score
7.2
IBM Engineering Workflow Management boosts productivity by 30%, enhancing team efficiency and leadership insights with user-friendly tracking features.
Sentiment score
7.8
TFS enhances productivity, reduces costs, and integrates well with Microsoft tools, proving valuable for efficient software development.
Integrating TFS with Visual Studio and Azure Cloud has improved our development processes by providing better integration and reducing errors.
 

Customer Service

Sentiment score
6.1
IBM Engineering Workflow Management offers reliable, skilled support with effective local vendor assistance, though customization and forum support are limited.
Sentiment score
7.1
Most users find TFS support efficient, despite some wanting faster responses, with scores generally between 8 and 10.
as a Microsoft product, it might have limited global documentation or support options compared to GitLab.
 

Scalability Issues

Sentiment score
7.0
IBM Engineering Workflow Management is scalable and adaptable, with some integration challenges and performance improvement needs noted by users.
Sentiment score
7.5
TFS is scalable and integrates well with Microsoft apps, but faces challenges in large deployments with high user loads.
 

Stability Issues

Sentiment score
6.7
IBM Engineering Workflow Management's stability varies with customizations, server factors, and deployment planning, affecting performance for some users.
Sentiment score
7.8
TFS is stable and dependable, with minor concerns addressed through updates, but lacks agility compared to Jira.
Its stability is lacking as we have encountered security leaks and glitches.
 

Room For Improvement

IBM Engineering Workflow Management faces challenges in integration, customization, usability, vendor reliance, and requires enhanced tools and cloud adaptability.
TFS needs stability, interface, merging improvements, better integration, lower costs, simplified features, and enhanced agile and cloud support.
Improved graphics in terms of metrics and connectivity to SharePoint from Microsoft products would be beneficial.
TFS is not as fast, easy to use, or configurable as GitLab, despite moving into the cloud.
I am content with how TFS is structured now, particularly the Azure version.
 

Setup Cost

IBM Engineering Workflow Management offers flexible licensing with complex yet worthwhile pricing, yielding strong ROI and excellent support.
TFS pricing is competitive yet complex, favoring Microsoft's subscription for cost efficiency, especially beneficial for existing Microsoft users.
 

Valuable Features

IBM Engineering Workflow Management enhances software development with task linking, traceability, agile support, and seamless change management integration.
TFS offers versatile version control, seamless Visual Studio integration, robust lifecycle management, and efficient project and code management.
It provides more efficiencies for our scrum team, ensures everyone is on the same page, and offers leadership insight into progress.
The integration with Azure DevOps also offers seamless functionality for CI/CD processes.
Makes it easier for me to create builds and release pipelines without needing to program YAML files.
 

Categories and Ranking

IBM Engineering Workflow Ma...
Average Rating
6.8
Reviews Sentiment
6.3
Number of Reviews
17
Ranking in other categories
Software Configuration Management (4th), Enterprise Agile Planning Tools (10th)
TFS
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
7.1
Number of Reviews
98
Ranking in other categories
Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) Suites (4th), Test Management Tools (3rd)
 

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 0.8% compared to last year.
TFS, on the other hand, focuses on Test Management Tools, holds 8.6% mindshare, down 11.1% since last year.
Enterprise Agile Planning Tools
Test Management Tools
 

Featured Reviews

Suvajit Chakraborty - PeerSpot reviewer
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.
Pmurki@Micron.Com Praveen - PeerSpot reviewer
Version control is excellent and good for code review, branching, merging strategies and more
I've worked with TFS for source control and Agile project management. We also used TFS for seamless team collaboration and tracking.  I used TFS for a couple of years. Now, we use Azure DevOps. It's a wonderful tool for source control and CI/CD pipelines It's a really valuable tool for…
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Manufacturing Company
21%
Government
15%
Computer Software Company
12%
Financial Services Firm
8%
Educational Organization
63%
Computer Software Company
6%
Manufacturing Company
4%
Financial Services Firm
4%
 

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...
Which is better - TFS or Azure DevOps?
TFS and Azure DevOps are different in many ways. TFS was designed for admins, and only offers incremental improvements. In addition, TFS seems complicated to use and I don’t think it has a very fri...
What do you like most about TFS?
Microsoft's technical team is supportive.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for TFS?
There are many version control options available in the market. From a costing and licensing perspective, I would rate it around six out of ten. It is not the cheapest product, but it offers good v...
 

Also Known As

IBM Rational Team Concert (IBM ALM), IBM RTC
Team Foundation Server
 

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
Vendex KBB IT Services, Info Support, Fujitsu Consulting, TCSC, Airways New Zealand, HP
Find out what your peers are saying about IBM Engineering Workflow Management vs. TFS and other solutions. Updated: July 2019.
825,399 professionals have used our research since 2012.