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Jama Connect vs OpenText ALM Octane comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Dec 15, 2024

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

Jama Connect
Ranking in Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) Suites
12th
Average Rating
7.6
Reviews Sentiment
6.6
Number of Reviews
15
Ranking in other categories
Application Requirements Management (4th)
OpenText ALM Octane
Ranking in Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) Suites
8th
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
7.0
Number of Reviews
41
Ranking in other categories
Enterprise Agile Planning Tools (8th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of April 2025, in the Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) Suites category, the mindshare of Jama Connect is 3.3%, up from 2.3% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of OpenText ALM Octane is 6.1%, up from 5.6% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) Suites
 

Featured Reviews

Lasse Mikkonen - PeerSpot reviewer
Traceability has improved documentation for auditors and regulators
The collaboration feature in Jama Connect could be improved because it is only used by a limited number of people within an organization due to license costs. For broader collaboration that includes departments like marketing and engineering, many still rely on tools like Slack ( /products/slack-reviews ) or Confluence ( /products/atlassian-confluence-reviews ). Additionally, there are areas where usability and configurability could be enhanced.
GeorgNauerz - PeerSpot reviewer
Makes team collaboration between IT and non-IT users easier with more transparency
The user experience is a lot better than any tool that I have used before. Overall, it is great. It has a smooth interface, which is very user-friendly. It makes it easier to work together and have more transparency and customization, which is very good. There are a lot of features where you can add fields, input individual fields, and input rules, like templated rule-based interaction between entities. The Backlog management is really interesting, because it is all in one place. You don't have a feature here and a feature there, instead you have the Backlog and testing using different backup items, like user storage features and tasks, all in one place. In addition, we are able to write documents, which we can transfer to backup items. Then, we can test them in the same solution without switching tools, or even switching from one part of the tool to another part, because it is all in one place. We use the solution’s Backlog and Team Backlog capabilities. They make our DevOps processes easier through transparency and asset collaboration.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"I like Jama Connect because it's easy to use and understand. The widgets are great, and linking is straightforward. The solution is not complex compared to its competitors."
"Jama Connect is a good tool for the entire software development cycle."
"The user experience is better than the competition."
"Technical support answers fairly quickly compared to others like IBM or Atlassian. They also offer quite a good knowledge base for advanced cases and how to plan it, etc. via videos that they provide. They are quite useful."
"We use Jama Connect mainly for requirements management."
"The most valuable feature is the single identity provider capability, which simplifies the integration with various platforms, like Google App Store and Microsoft Azure, for providing user access."
"In Jama Connect, users have the capability to view and manage all test cases directly within the platform and execute them. The entire product specification, spanning various domains such as electrical, mechanical, software, and testing, is consolidated within Jama Connect."
"It is good at requirements management and test management."
"With an Octane project, we have our automation, our requirements, our tests, our pipeline into build-and-deploy, and the ability to identify problem areas. It makes things quicker because it's more along the lines of an automated process."
"The defect management gives us full-fledged capabilities for handling defects, including capturing the details of the defects and even screenshotting the defect cases. The defect management is comprehensive."
"The interface is user-friendly."
"The most valuable features of the solution are its ability to manage test scenarios, test results, and test automation, which are its primary functionalities."
"The dashboards and metric reporting are valuable features."
"The key feature is the usability. It is fast to learn and easy to use. It's very intuitive to work with. Most of the important functions are available via a few clicks, compared to other tools where I have to open a sub-menu and then a sub-menu and another sub-menu, and then press a button."
"Its end-to-end traceability is one of the big advantages. Most of our agile projects work in a closed team structure. We are seeing what is the flow, where we are, and what is the project milestone. So, it provides end-to-end traceability and good visibility of project milestones."
"A valuable feature is the pipeline, so that we can now connect to Jenkins and then have all the results from testing, from external, in the tool, so that we can see the whole approach from there. Also, We can work with labels so we have better filtering solutions than in ALM. And it's much smarter and leaner to use than ALM."
 

Cons

"The solution is expensive."
"I think there's room for improvement, especially with the review process. Reviews should be integrated with requirement evaluation instead of being separate from it. The review should not run parallel to the requirement."
"I have inquired about pricing for this solution but have not yet heard anything, so their response time in this regard is something that should be improved."
"I believe one of the weak points is the reporting side. You must export inter-readable reports from Jama if you do not use the system as a repository for your design history file. Jama is great if you keep it in Jama, but reporting out requires some customization to get it right."
"t is rather slow, so the speed of the process and consuming information should be improved. It doesn't have a nice way of viewing information. We would like to see better interfaces for consuming information."
"There are some security concerns with Jama Connect, including two-factor enablement."
"More automation could speed up workflows, flag errors more timely, and eliminate manual steps."
"The solution is very software-centric, and its validation piece is not time-efficient at all."
"They don't support all IDEs yet. We have Visual Studio code, which is not supported, and loved by our developers. This integration is missing. We also had to do our own in-house integration with the Confluence. That is also something that they could add."
"It could use just some small improvements. I would like additional features, like planning features, user story mapping, or connection to collaboration tools."
"The product's requirements management feature needs enhancement in terms of functionality."
"Documentation is not clear."
"The cluster architecture that we implemented was server to server communication: Octane application to Elasticsearch and Elasticsearch to another Elasticsearch service. Recently, we found this is a security gap. The Octane application is interacting with Elasticsearch server, but that was missing from the requirements and prerequisites in the setup. The Micro Focus team has not given advice on how to implement authentication-based communication between Octane to Elasticsearch, and we found it as a gap later, then our security team asked us to fix that gap. So, there was a lot of time spent on rework."
"We have some requests to beef up the manual testing abilities and the ability to report on testing progress. All the basics are there, but there's an issue of maintainability. For example... once you plan a test and it creates a run, more particularly a suite run, you can't edit the suite run afterward... That that is not realistic with how people work. Mistakes are made and people are humans and we change our minds about things. So the tool needs to allow for a bit more flexibility in that testing area, as well as some better widgets to report on progress."
"What could be improved in Micro Focus ALM Octane is its integration with Jira."
"The Requirements Module could be better, to build up a better requirements process. There's a huge improvement from ALM.NET to Octane, but it's still not really facilitating all the needs of the product owners, to set up their requirements in Octane."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"To have a single source for all the requirements and all the change requests our company gets is the most valuable feature. It has also helped us to keep track of reviews."
"Jama Connect is a little pricy."
"The cost seems very competitive with other offerings."
"If you want to have creative licenses, pricing may be an issue with the licenses, as it can become quite expensive over time to serve many people."
"For what it does, it's very reasonably priced. I like the licensing model as well, because it's very flexible. You can scale licenses up and down for short periods of time."
"The solution has reduced our testing costs."
"There is a conversion fee for changing licenses."
"I rate the product price an eight on a scale of one to ten, where one is cheap, and ten is expensive. The product is neither cheap nor expensive."
"It's pretty pricey, one of the most expensive ones on the market... The value depends on if you use all the features that it has. It comes with a lot of features. The difference between the license structure of ALM and Octane versus JIRA, is that you get everything with ALM and Octane... For JIRA, you buy the pieces one piece at a time."
"I would say that it is an affordable product. There is an annual service fee, which is one of the additional payments to be made apart from the standard licensing costs attached to the solution."
"In my opinion, it's good value for the price that you pay."
"The tool's price is extremely high."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Manufacturing Company
27%
Healthcare Company
9%
Computer Software Company
7%
Aerospace/Defense Firm
7%
Financial Services Firm
26%
Manufacturing Company
12%
Computer Software Company
11%
Government
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
 

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about Jama Connect?
I like Jama Connect because it's easy to use and understand. The widgets are great, and linking is straightforward. The solution is not complex compared to its competitors.
What needs improvement with Jama Connect?
The collaboration feature in Jama Connect could be improved because it is only used by a limited number of people within an organization due to license costs. For broader collaboration that include...
What is your primary use case for Jama Connect?
I primarily work with Jama Connect ( /products/jama-connect-reviews ) for requirements management.
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...
What do you like most about Micro Focus ALM Octane?
The platform's most valuable feature is pipeline integration or continuous integration services.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Micro Focus ALM Octane?
OpenText ALM Octane is an expensive product. However, it offsets costs by saving time and money, thus creating a balance between expenses and benefits. Our organization with over 1500 users sees sa...
 

Also Known As

No data available
Micro Focus ALM Octane, Micro Focus Octane
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Deloitte, SpaceX, Omnigon, Delft University
Orange, Airbus, Haufe Group, Kellogg's, Claro, Bon Secours, World Wide Technology
Find out what your peers are saying about Jama Connect vs. OpenText ALM Octane and other solutions. Updated: March 2025.
845,040 professionals have used our research since 2012.