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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 (2nd), 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 (6th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of January 2026, in the Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) Suites category, the mindshare of Jira is 13.3%, down from 22.9% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Polarion ALM is 6.4%, down from 7.1% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) Suites Market Share Distribution
ProductMarket Share (%)
Jira13.3%
Polarion ALM6.4%
Other80.3%
Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) Suites
 

Featured Reviews

Akhil Viswam - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Consultant at a consultancy with 10,001+ employees
Agile workflows have streamlined sprint planning and tracking for faster feature delivery
Jira has a very good interface and it is very easy to manage sprints, tasks, and epics. The main feature is the hierarchy, as features can be converted into epics and topics, allowing bigger tasks to be partitioned into smaller ones. The hierarchy feature in Jira helps the team significantly compared to other tools that have been used, such as Trello, which is mainly useful only for a waterfall model. For modern Agile practices, Jira is the most adapted tool in the industry. Another valuable feature is that Jira APIs have been used for data science projects to analyze tasks and get insights. This has also been very helpful in the project.
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

"Great for tracking my development team's productivity."
"Scaling the product wouldn't be difficult."
"I have found the most valuable features of Jira to be ticketing, life cycle workflow, definition, and creation. Many of the features are useful."
"I have found Jira to be scalable."
"The most valuable feature is the Burndown Chart to see work that is outstanding."
"Has a good dashboard with good tracking features."
"It's a very complete product overall."
"We like team collaboration and cross-functional collaboration."
"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."
"The tool helped us to more effectively and efficiently gather and structure the information (requirements, test plans, project management data, etc.), and share it with the involved stakeholders in a safe and change-controlled manner."
"Polarion ALM's integration is very good and easy to use."
"It meets with everybody's needs without having to grab plugins."
"The features I find the most valuable are requirement tracking and schematics."
"The software is stable."
"It offers good performance."
"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."
 

Cons

"There's been the odd amount of JIRA downtime (not self hosted) and sometimes tickets that can't be accessed."
"I do know the initial setup was pretty complicated. The user interface could be better organized and easier. ​"
"One major issue that I, and even our business stakeholders, have noticed is related to Epic Link. When Epic Link's background color is a dark color, it effectively becomes unreadable. I wish there was a way for us to change the text color of Epic Link in the Issue Navigator view."
"I don't know if it's the way it's deployed in the organization, but the interface we are provided is not as customizable as other tools. The multi-language report is not enabled in our installation. I don't really know if it's something related to the tool or our installation."
"Test case management could be more user-friendly. When we add or update test cases, there should be a better way to organize them within the dashboard."
"Lacks field-level permission in the cloud version."
"Its UI can be improved a little bit. I know this a business tool and not a commercial tool, but it could be a little bit more interactive like the HP ALM/Quality Center, which provides you the results of graphs and gives you a lot of visual representations. I feel Jira lacks a little bit in this aspect."
"One thing that I don't like about Jira is that when you do an export, it only allows a thousand issues. So the export feature needs to be better."
"The user interface is not yet optimized."
"Based on my understanding, the tool's integration capabilities with multiple tools is an area of concern that Polarion needs to focus on more."
"The tool needs to improve its planning. It also needs to add more integrations."
"One of Polarion's shortcomings would be planning. It can handle plans, but the planning feature is very basic."
"The most important thing for them to improve should be platform-independent features. They should also provide extensive pipelines and release pipelines that we can define and we can work on."
"The configuration aspect of the solution is not easy. A person needs a lot of programming knowledge in order to successfully handle the job."
"The solution can be improved by making it more user-friendly, and a server-based application rather than client based."
"The user interface of Polarion ALM needs improvement as it can experience changes that disrupt workflows, especially during major updates."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"If you are using just Jira, it is cheap, but if you start to use it and you feel you need some more services or more functions, then you have to buy add-ons, which can make it expensive."
"We have a corporate license, and it is probably based on the number of people."
"We make use of the solution free of charge."
"The price of the solution could be less expensive. We pay annually for the solution."
"I think the starter pack of three users, up to five users, is free. So you can try it out."
"It is not too expensive. It is just comparative to other tools like Microsoft Teams."
"We are a regional research and education institute. We're using the free license provided for educational institutes."
"Worth the extra cost."
"The license model is okay for large companies but would be quite expensive for smaller enterprises."
"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."
"Software for medical devices is always expensive."
"If the pricing would come down and it was more affordable then we wouldn't have to switch."
"You have to pay around 50-60 euros per user."
"It is an expensive product."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Manufacturing Company
18%
Financial Services Firm
10%
Computer Software Company
9%
Government
8%
Manufacturing Company
29%
Computer Software Company
11%
Healthcare Company
6%
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...
What advice do you have for others considering Polarion ALM?
The pricing of Polarion ALM and IBM ELM is pretty much aligned. They are not at the same level, but I would say aligned according to the capabilities of the tools, with DOORS being more expensive b...
 

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.
881,176 professionals have used our research since 2012.