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Jira vs Polarion ALM comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Jan 12, 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

Jira
Ranking in Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) Suites
1st
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
6.9
Number of Reviews
274
Ranking in other categories
Application Requirements Management (2nd), Project Management Software (3rd)
Polarion ALM
Ranking in Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) Suites
8th
Average Rating
7.8
Reviews Sentiment
6.6
Number of Reviews
20
Ranking in other categories
Enterprise Agile Planning Tools (7th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of February 2025, in the Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) Suites category, the mindshare of Jira is 22.6%, down from 23.3% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Polarion ALM is 7.4%, up from 5.2% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) Suites
 

Featured Reviews

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.
Dina Bindi - PeerSpot reviewer
Provides traceability and compliance with high flexibility
It's extremely flexible. Configuring items is straightforward and doesn't require involving the supplier each time. We find the requirement management, test management, documentation, and dashboards very effective. However, we don't use DevOps-related features, such as integration with tools like SVN or Git, because we use Azure DevOps. The aspects related to requirements, testing, changes, tasks, and agile methodology are excellent, which is why we've been using it for a long time.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"The most valuable feature of Jira is the project package for development."
"We use Jira for project management and tracking."
"The timeline management is great."
"Jira improved our team collaboration by providing visual visibility and transparency. Everyone could see what tasks were being worked on and the progress made. The development team updated task statuses, making tracking progress and planning sprints easy. If there were any impediments or challenges, we addressed them. This process helped us track our progress."
"The solution offers up great transparency that makes it possible for everyone inside the departmental organization to see what's happening."
"It allows you to do a lot of stuff, and the functionality is pretty rich. It integrates well with other products, like GitLab, that we are currently intensely using at the company."
"The most valuable feature of Jira is the reporting feature, which allows us to track our team's tasks."
"The most valuable feature of this solution is the source linking on the commit level to git."
"I am impressed with the solution’s stability."
"We had a nice experience with technical support."
"The best feature of Polarion ALM to me is its traceability link."
"It offers good performance."
"You can see the work ticket and you can circulate that within the teams. You can define your flows, customize according to your needs, and you can create dashboards and create the reports according to your needs."
"The technical support is quite good."
"The software is stable."
"Polarion ALM helps us better structure our customer requirements, and we can also validate the specs of our products against those. If anything changes on our side, we see the impact, and we can see the effect If a customer changes requirements."
 

Cons

"The challenge which I frequently see from Jira is the label. When you search for a label sometimes, it suddenly disappears. If there's a mismatch due to all-caps or lower case, you won't be able to find it. It won't even come up as a recommendation or suggestion. That's something that can be really frustrating, as people create labels in their own specific ways and then no one else can find anything."
"Jira is a project management tracking tool, and it would be great to see integration with the source front or Azure DevOps, etc."
"In JIRA, it's a bit complex in terms of what advanced search queries we use. Sharing them is also a problem. Because TFS is on the cloud, we can easily save that query and share it with our team members."
"Because I am a developer, I would like integration with Git Source Code Management so that for tickets, we can reference the code where the change has happened and where the issue is. This feature might be there, and I probably haven't discovered it."
"I also wish Jira had an indicator to tell you that you are approaching the limit for the story points that can be delivered during a sprint. I don't think there is an indicator like that, but such an indicator will be very helpful because then I will be easily able to see that we are approaching the limit."
"The user interface is very detailed right now. It could be simplified if they consider targeting the user experience."
"The reports in Jira can be improved, especially for test reports. I find it difficult to customize and integrate for different testing purposes."
"It would be very practical if you can more freely reach the information that is already inside the system. Currently, we have to buy add-ons for it. There is a lot of information in the Jira system that you can handle only through add-ons. You cannot reach such information on your own. If you want to use this information, which is already in the system, you have to buy some add-on to use. For example, information about how much time an assignee is spending on a ticket is there in the system, but you cannot access it without an add-on. JQL is a very good way to reach the data inside Jira. If we can reach more objects, even through JQL, it would be great."
"The solution needs to improve its user experience and graphics."
"One of Polarion's shortcomings would be planning. It can handle plans, but the planning feature is very basic."
"The user interface is not yet optimized."
"We use PTC Windchill, and Polarion ALM doesn't have native integration, so we had to purchase the connector to integrate it with Polarion ALM. We still haven't implemented it."
"Technical support needs some improvement."
"The weak point of Polarion ALM software is about reporting and time for extraction of the data...The quality of reporting needs to improve."
"The planning and task management aspects of the solution were not that easy."
"The ease-of-use could be improved a little."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Almost everybody uses JIRA nowadays because it is the most cost-effective solution."
"We are a regional research and education institute. We're using the free license provided for educational institutes."
"Compared to the value Jira provides, it’s not that expensive. It has an yearly licensing cost."
"I don't deal with licensing in my current consultant position."
"I rate the tool's pricing a five out of ten. It's paid yearly."
"When you get larger, the pricing becomes very, very steep."
"We have a corporate license, and it is probably based on the number of people."
"I am not sure about the pricing, but I know its licensing is on a yearly basis."
"It is an expensive product."
"If the pricing would come down and it was more affordable then we wouldn't have to switch."
"The solution is expensive."
"Our license for Polarion ALM is yearly. And it's not the cheapest tool that we've looked at. So if we had made our decision purely based on the licensing cost, we wouldn't have selected Polarion."
"You have to pay around 50-60 euros per user."
"The license model is okay for large companies but would be quite expensive for smaller enterprises."
"Software for medical devices is always expensive."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Educational Organization
53%
Manufacturing Company
7%
Financial Services Firm
6%
Computer Software Company
5%
Manufacturing Company
25%
Computer Software Company
15%
Healthcare Company
7%
Financial Services Firm
4%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
 

Questions from the Community

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.
What needs improvement with Polarion ALM?
I also recently suggested that CMS consider incorporating generative artificial intelligence into the system. This could greatly enhance requirement checking, improve form, content, and clarity, an...
What is your primary use case for Polarion ALM?
We use Polarion ALM for software development, including requirements management, testing, change requests, and task tracking. We set up the environment by configuring items and reports based on use...
 

Also Known As

Jira Software
No data available
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Square, Nasa, eBay, Cisco, SalesForce, Adobe, BNP Paribas, BMW and LinkedIn, Pfizer, Citi.
Engineering Ingegneria Informatica, IBS AG, Zumtobel Group
Find out what your peers are saying about Jira vs. Polarion ALM and other solutions. Updated: January 2025.
837,501 professionals have used our research since 2012.