OpenText ALM / Quality Center vs OpenText Silk Test comparison

"The most valuable feature of Micro Focus ALM Quality Center is the alignment of the test to the execution and the linking of the defects to the two. It automatically links any issues you have to the test."

"Easily integrates with Oracle e-Business Suite."

"The product can scale."

"Ability to customize modules, particularly Defect Tracking module on company specific needs"

"It is a tool, and it works. It has got good linkage and good traceability between the test cases and the defects. It has got lots of features for testing."

"We were able to manage test cases effectively when we were using it. It worked well for us."

"We are able to use Micro Focus ALM Quality Center for test management, defect management, test process, test governance activities, and requirement management. We are able to achieve all of this, the solution is very useful."

"I personally found the defect tracking feature very useful in my ongoing project."

"Scripting is the most valuable. We are able to record and then go in and modify the script that it creates. It has a lot of generative scripts."

"The feature I like most is the ease of reporting."

"A good automation tool that supports SAP functional testing."

"The major thing it has helped with is to reduce the workload on testing activities."

"The ability to develop scripts in Visual Studio, Visual Studio integration, is the most valuable feature."

"The scalability of the solution is quite good. You can easily expand the product if you need to."

"The statistics that are available are very good."

"It's easy to automate and accelerate testing."

"We cannot rearrange the Grid in the Test Lab. It is in alphabetical order right now. But sometimes a user will want to see, for example, the X column next to the B column. If they came out with that it would be useful for us. They are working on that, as we have raised that request with Micro Focus."

"There are always new features and more support for new and legacy technology architectures with each release. But the bad news is a growing list of long-standing issues with the product rarely gets addressed."

"The product is good, it's great, but when compared to other products with the latest methodologies, or when rating it as a software development tool, then I'll have to rate it with a lower score because there's a lot of other great tools where you can interconnect them, use them, scale them, and leverage. It all depends on the cost."

"I'd like to be able to improve how our QA department uses the tool, by getting better educational resources, documentation to help with competencies for my testers."

"The reporting feature could be improved. It would be better if they simplified some things."

"An area for improvement in Micro Focus ALM Quality Center is not being able to update the Excel sheet where I wrote the test cases. Whenever I update some test cases, I'm unsuccessful because there is overlapping data or missing cases from the sheet."

"HP-QC does not support Agile. It is designed for Waterfall. This is the number one issue that we're facing right now, which is why we want to look for another tool. We're a pharmaceutical services company, so we require electronic signatures in a tool, but this functionality isn't available in HP-QC. We don't have 21 CFR, Part 11, electronic signatures, and we need compliant electronic signatures. Some of the ALM tools can toggle between tabular format and document format for requirements, but the same feature is not available in this solution. There is also no concept of base-lining or versioning. It doesn't exist."

"The QA needs improvement."

"They should extend some of the functions that are a bit clunky and improve the integration."

"The solution has a lack of compatibility with newer technologies."

"Could be more user-friendly on the installation and configuration side."

"The pricing is an issue, the program is very expensive. That is something that can improve."

"The support for automation with iOS applications can be better."

"Everything is very manual. It's up to us to find out exactly what the issues are."

"The pricing could be improved."

"We moved to Ranorex because the solution did not easily scale, and we could not find good and short term third-party help. We needed to have a bigger pool of third-party contractors that we could draw on for specific implementations. Silk didn't have that, and we found what we needed for Ranorex here in the Houston area. It would be good if there is more community support. I don't know if Silk runs a user conference once a year and how they set up partners. We need to be able to talk to somebody more than just on the phone. It really comes right down to that. The generated automated script was highly dependent upon screen position and other keys that were not as robust as we wanted. We found the automated script generated by Ranorex and the other key information about a specific data point to be more robust. It handled the transition better when we moved from computer to computer and from one size of the application to the other size. When we restarted Silk, we typically had to recalibrate screen elements within the script. Ranorex also has some of these same issues, but when we restart, it typically is faster, which is important."

"ALM Quality Center is a little bit costly."

"The full ALM license lets you use the requirements tab, along with test automation and the Performance Center. You can also just buy the Quality Center edition (Manual testing only), or the Performance Center version (Performance Testing only)."

"This is an expensive solution."

"It is an expensive tool. I think one needs to pay 10,000 USD towards the perpetual licensing model."

"Depending on the volume, the annual maintenance costs vary on a percentage but it's around $300 a year per license for maintenance. It's at 18% of the total cost of the license."

"The solution has the ability to handle a large number of projects and users in an enterprise environment with the correct license."

"Seat and concurrent licensing models exist; the latter is recommended if a large number of different users will be utilizing the product."

"Compared to the market, the price is high."

"Our licensing fees are on a yearly basis, and while I think that the price is quite reasonable I am not allowed to share those details."

"We paid annually. There is a purchase cost, and then there is an ongoing maintenance fee."