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Jira vs Polarion ALM comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Nov 2, 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
6.8
Number of Reviews
277
Ranking in other categories
Application Requirements Management (1st), Project Management Software (1st)
Polarion ALM
Ranking in Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) Suites
5th
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
6.0
Number of Reviews
24
Ranking in other categories
Enterprise Agile Planning Tools (7th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of December 2025, in the Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) Suites category, the mindshare of Jira is 14.7%, down from 23.1% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Polarion ALM is 6.9%, down from 7.0% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) Suites Market Share Distribution
ProductMarket Share (%)
Jira14.7%
Polarion ALM6.9%
Other78.4%
Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) Suites
 

Featured Reviews

Nathan Akimoff - PeerSpot reviewer
CEO at 2Help
Has customized workflows to fit internal processes and improved overall team organization
I don't have a particular customization or integration that's been especially valuable for my team, but I experienced integrating Jira and QuickBooks, which was very challenging, but it really impacted the efficiency of the whole company. I have been working with Jira for over 12 years, and I've seen it grow every year. It's a powerful product, but lately, I think Atlassian has been adding too many simplified features that look nice but don't offer the same level of flexibility, and made some fields not available through the API, which is kind of frustrating. If I could make one suggestion, it would be to focus more on improving API integration and automation tools, not just the design.
LasseMikkonen - PeerSpot reviewer
Principal Consultant at byte
Has provided mature traceability and configuration features while supporting complex product development for mid-to-large companies
Polarion ALM can learn from Atlassian tools a lot, as the usability is not the best, and it is really narrowly focused on requirements management only. For example, if you want to do testing and test result management with it, it is very limited. Jama Connect has similar limitations, and both should really focus on developing the integrations and extendability. For example, Jama Connect does not even have an extension marketplace, whereas Polarion has a small one. However, compared to the Atlassian Marketplace where you can get whatever applications for whatever price, it is a totally different ballgame. I would highly recommend Polarion ALM add more AI features to it. I know they have started to do something, but for example, I have been developing widgets for IBM DOORS Next, AI widgets, so that you can write and analyze requirements with the AI, and I have also done the same for Jira, creating a couple of Jira applications in the marketplace as well.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"This product provides you a good view of the status of your projects."
"It provides very good visibility and traceability. You can clearly see each and every part of a process. It is also user-friendly and robust. It is working well, and there are a lot of add-ons or plug-ins out there that you can use."
"The scrum dashboard is the product's most important feature. It provides an overview of tasks, who is working on what, and the status of each task."
"The most useful features are the Kanban dashboard, the ability to create tasks, bugs, epics with child issues, time estimation, and Jira reports."
"It is very flexible, so we can do pretty much what we want with it."
"It is a good defect tracking tool. It has a lot of capabilities and functionalities. There are a lot of graphs and a lot of tracking. It can be sprint-driven if you want."
"The most valuable feature of Jira is that it's a well-known tool that many people are familiar with."
"I enjoy working with (and can recommend) Jira for a number of reasons. The best features are that it is friendly and provides good visibility. It's to the point and very effective."
"The solution offers good integration."
"The features I find the most valuable are requirement tracking and schematics."
"When it comes to functionalities like a real-time collaboration feature and traceability capabilities, Polarion ALM has had those basic features for the past five years already, and they are pretty mature products that have all the needed requirements management features, such as traceability and reporting, and even configuration management or version controlling."
"Polarion ALM's integration is very good and easy to use."
"Polarion ALM delivers both document views and table views simultaneously and organizes configurations according to norms and standards."
"It is a very stable solution."
"The best feature of Polarion ALM to me is its traceability link."
"Polarion ALM has some valuable tools for managing our targets and requirements. I think that's its best feature."
 

Cons

"We haven't seen Jira's progressive area so far, and we are not sure what it might do in the future."
"It is a bit harder for management or the business partners. I used to search the Atlassian Community online for some troubleshooting issues and I think there were some issues that seemed to not be a big problem for other similar applications, like Microsoft Teams, that were not considered by Jira."
"From an automation perspective, there are more aspects that could be needed, especially regarding natural language reporting in the generative AI context."
"We'd like to see more collaboration tools implemented within the product itself."
"It is not intuitive."
"It would be very useful to have drag and drop time tracking."
"It would be ideal if the solution could be available as a mobile application."
"There could be an improvement in loading files and images for more than 50 MB. It would be good if it allowed more than 100 MB."
"The user interface is not yet optimized."
"The system’s technology is not the most current, leading to missing features that are common in web-based applications."
"Nowadays, the dashboard is too complex to be created."
"As Polarion ALM is a development-oriented tool, easy support or easy access is provided by default, but if I want to use detailed features, I need to write the script, particularly the VM script, and this is its area for improvement. I want Polarion ALM to have a graphical user interface that doesn't need scripting. In the next release of the tool, I'd like for it to not require scripting and programming because needing to run script language is time-consuming."
"The user interface of Polarion ALM needs improvement as it can experience changes that disrupt workflows, especially during major updates."
"I also recently suggested that CMS consider incorporating generative artificial intelligence into the system."
"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."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The price seems reasonable to me. It's very similar to Splunk."
"I don't deal with licensing in my current consultant position."
"There is a need to make yearly payments towards the licensing costs attached to the solution. The product offers flexibility in pricing since it depends on the memory bits you have used."
"The standard package of Jira is for 100 users. They should offer more packages for other increments, such as 500 or 2,000. In my previous company, there was a free package that provided a minimal number of users."
"Our client handles the licensing aspect. They have not yet purchased the premium version."
"We have an enterprise license that includes cloud service and support."
"The tool is expensive."
"If I compare Jira's licensing model with that of other products, I think that the other products have a much better licensing model."
"It is an expensive product."
"If the pricing would come down and it was more affordable then we wouldn't have to switch."
"The license model is okay for large companies but would be quite expensive for smaller enterprises."
"You have to pay around 50-60 euros per user."
"The solution is expensive."
"Software for medical devices is always 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."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Manufacturing Company
18%
Financial Services Firm
11%
Computer Software Company
9%
Government
8%
Manufacturing Company
28%
Computer Software Company
11%
Healthcare Company
7%
Financial Services Firm
4%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business105
Midsize Enterprise56
Large Enterprise150
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business10
Midsize Enterprise3
Large Enterprise12
 

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?
Jira itself is fairly priced for the features it provides, but pricing is a bit higher than some alternatives, mostly because many plugins and add-ons are paid and licensed per user. So even if onl...
What needs improvement with Polarion ALM?
Polarion ALM can learn from Atlassian tools a lot, as the usability is not the best, and it is really narrowly focused on requirements management only. For example, if you want to do testing and te...
What is your primary use case for Polarion ALM?
We are in our product development using Polarion ALM's functionalities. I am a power user, partly responsible for configuring the tool. We are using it for many things. The idea was to go for a req...
 

Comparisons

 

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: December 2025.
879,259 professionals have used our research since 2012.