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Planview AgilePlace vs Polarion ALM comparison

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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

Planview AgilePlace
Ranking in Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) Suites
19th
Ranking in Enterprise Agile Planning Tools
13th
Average Rating
9.0
Reviews Sentiment
7.2
Number of Reviews
11
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
Polarion ALM
Ranking in Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) Suites
8th
Ranking in Enterprise Agile Planning Tools
6th
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
6.0
Number of Reviews
24
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of November 2026, in the Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) Suites category, the mindshare of Planview AgilePlace is 1.7%, down from 1.7% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Polarion ALM is 4.2%, down from 7.2% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) Suites Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Polarion ALM4.2%
Planview AgilePlace1.7%
Other94.1%
Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) Suites
 

Featured Reviews

it_user1695321 - PeerSpot reviewer
Business Consultant at a financial services firm with 501-1,000 employees
Adoption across stakeholders, visibility, and reporting make the solution a success
The most valuable features for us are resource management and financial. Before LeanKit, we were doing project management in Microsoft Project. We were able to plan and schedule in it, but we were not tracking resource allotment or the availability of the resources. We have started to track them now. We are able to do this because the reports that go out to stakeholders and the executive leadership team are richer. This helps us prioritize our entire portfolio and decide which projects we can take and which we need to decrease in priority in order to reassign resources to new, priority projects. LeanKit helps us a lot not just in terms of planning internally but also with making outside people understand why a project is getting delayed or postponed or is going on hold. Because LeanKit is so flexible, our ability to make predictions comes down to educating stakeholders on how the cards work. The card's health feature lets us know whether we need to make adjustments. It gives us an idea if, for example, someone has taken up too many tasks.
LasseMikkonen - PeerSpot reviewer
CEO 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

"What it does, it does well."
"The "Blocking" feature has helped our scrum masters track impediments and share them at the program level to stakeholders with accountability and detail so that they understand and the action items which can be noted easily."
"We use the board and card hierarchies in terms of sprints so that we can see if we have cross-functional teams that are working on the same projects together, especially when projects have dependencies. The parent-child relationship within cards is really nice so that we can see what kind of dependencies there are when we're trying to get projects finished."
"The usability of it and the readability of it is so much better than what JIRA is."
"LeanKit is amazing when it comes to getting answers about a given card's status. That's one of the biggest takeaways that we've had. The status is right there on the board. Everybody can see it. You just click on it and it gives you everything that you need to know, especially the comments feature because it gives us a timeline of updates. We use that a lot where we write a comment on the card and then we can see and track progress as we move it across the board."
"From having a whiteboard or sticky notes in their office that only they could see, people now have been able to go to a place where anybody can see it, and moving those things that were traditionally on a physical wall into a shareable place is a big benefit."
"Every feature is valuable. LeanKit is a Kanban-based tool where you have a visual interface that you can use to create various cards and to create boards to house those cards. You can create a board for managing project work. You can create a board to do PI planning. It is pretty close to the agile way of doing business."
"LeanKit has also reduced our cycle times."
"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."
"It's all in one place, where every department can utilize the same tool."
"The most valuable feature is the function of the ALM system."
"It meets with everybody's needs without having to grab plugins."
"It offers good performance."
"Polarion ALM is powerful in easily creating your own workflows for completely different kinds of things."
"Polarion ALM's integration is very good and easy to use."
"This one tool incorporates almost all engineering tasks we need to do for one project."
 

Cons

"The ability to report on customizable fields and third-party extensions needs improvement."
"I do not know what it can do in the area of scrum. Maybe it has that functionality. I have never tried to set it up. You think of LeanKit from the perspective of Kanban. I don't know if there is a template for scrum, a scaled agile framework, or any of those scaling frameworks."
"Being able to track actual time on cards or sprints, instead of using just the planned start and stop date, would also be useful. I would like to see something like JIRA has with actual sprint starts and stops."
"The ability to report on customizable fields and third-party extensions needs improvement. I'd like to see more of those being able to be used. I don't know how that works for Planview, but just getting a little bit more added there would be nice."
"Sometimes, we use it for project management lessons learned, and it would be helpful if there was a template set up for something like that because we code different cards based on the category."
"Some aspects of the reporting and dashboard could be improved."
"They have a feature called Instant Coffee. It was in the beta phase. They released it from beta, and now, it is a legit thing. We were in the pilot here. I liked the idea of Instant Coffee, and I like how it is integrated, to some degree, with LeanKit, but I have two big rocks to throw at them on this. The first one is that Instant Coffee does not save your work very well in terms of saving it in formats that you can then go back and edit as Visio would. It leads to the next point, which is, we're not really clear on what they're trying to do with Instant Coffee. I feel that they're trying not to reinvent Visio, Miro, and other software programs out there that do mapping, visual diagrams, etc. Miro is fantastic in that regard. I gather they're not trying to reinvent Miro, but it sure would be nice if it had more aspects of Miro in it, such as being able to draw arrows and write on them on the top."
"Within the current features, if they can give some ability to show more icons on the card, it would be helpful. It would help us in showing more data on the cards."
"The system’s technology is not the most current, leading to missing features that are common in web-based applications."
"The weak point of Polarion ALM software is about reporting and time for extraction of the data...The quality of reporting needs to improve."
"Integration requires a lot of effort. You typically need to work with an implementation partner to get it done. Most connectors available for Polarion ALM are paid. Unlike other vendors offering several standard connectors for free, integrating third-party software with Polarion ALM involves discussing and coordinating with the third-party software providers, which requires effort."
"The interface for this solution needs to be made more user-friendly to provide a better user experience."
"The user interface is not yet optimized."
"The solution is not easy to use. The configuration aspect of the solution is not easy."
"The planning and task management aspects of the solution were not that easy."
"I also recently suggested that CMS consider incorporating generative artificial intelligence into the system."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"I don't know what it would be on its own. It was basically included with what we were already paying or using. So, it was a no-brainer. It wasn't like we had to sell the company on making a purchase or anything like that. There weren't any costs that came in after implementing it."
"In general, Planview's cost structure is reasonable. You get quite a lot of functionality for the license cost that you get."
"I don't believe there are any costs in addition to the standard licensing fees."
"As far as I understand, it is not an expensive application."
"Software for medical devices is always expensive."
"You have to pay around 50-60 euros per user."
"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."
"It is an expensive product."
"The license model is okay for large companies but would be quite expensive for smaller enterprises."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Manufacturing Company
13%
Financial Services Firm
12%
Insurance Company
9%
Outsourcing Company
9%
Manufacturing Company
32%
Comms Service Provider
6%
Outsourcing Company
6%
Healthcare Company
6%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business2
Midsize Enterprise3
Large Enterprise7
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business9
Midsize Enterprise3
Large Enterprise13
 

Questions from the Community

Ask a question
Earn 20 points
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...
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

Planview LeanKit, LeanKit
No data available
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

REA Group, Thompson Reuters
Engineering Ingegneria Informatica, IBS AG, Zumtobel Group
Find out what your peers are saying about Planview AgilePlace vs. Polarion ALM and other solutions. Updated: October 2026.
921,523 professionals have used our research since 2012.