No more typing reviews! Try our Samantha, our new voice AI agent.

Planview AgilePlace vs Polarion ALM comparison

 

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
18th
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
6th
Ranking in Enterprise Agile Planning Tools
5th
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 June 2026, in the Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) Suites category, the mindshare of Planview AgilePlace is 1.9%, up from 1.7% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Polarion ALM is 4.6%, down from 8.2% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) Suites Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Polarion ALM4.6%
Planview AgilePlace1.9%
Other93.5%
Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) Suites
 

Featured Reviews

it_user1684173 - PeerSpot reviewer
PM Systems Analyst at a insurance company with 5,001-10,000 employees
Simple and intuitive, useful for agile management, and helpful for planning based on our capacity and meeting our deadlines
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. The Board Layout Editor is excellent in terms of flexibility. They have been improving its usability. Their development is very much agile, so for any feedback that we give them, they let us know if and when they would act on our request for enhancements or change, and then they make those changes. They are responsive.
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

"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."
"Our cycle times have reduced by 50%; they are now half as long as they used to be."
"What it does, it does well."
"The transparency that it brings is valuable. I like to look at things from all angles, and sometimes, flip chart paper on a wall and sticky notes are better than something on a screen, but the way they've made it accessible from all points for anyone within an organization is great. As a project management guy, sometimes, you have to force people into new environments where they have to see what you're talking about. Any screen is a barrier, and people got to get into the screen. How do you know they do? You don't necessarily know, but you are getting around that barrier with a countermeasure of making it accessible to as many as possible. So, everyone can jump in there and see everything. It is fully transparent, and I like that. This is one thing that helps."
"Using the tool seems to save time versus trying to do things in a regular manner; it is highly collaborative, everybody can see things in one place, and it is a highly functional but pretty simple tool, which is hard to find in a tool that has a lot of functions but is also simple."
"Adoption across stakeholders and visibility have been the biggest success for us with LeanKit."
"Leankit has made it much easier for us to visualize our progress across our entire portfolio, which consists of 22 Scrum Teams, and it is now our single source of truth, given the integration with JIRA and near real-time updates."
"LeanKit has also reduced our cycle times."
"It's all in one place, where every department can utilize the same tool."
"The best feature of Polarion ALM to me is its traceability link."
"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."
"Polarion ALM has some valuable tools for managing our targets and requirements. I think that's its best feature."
"I am impressed with the solution’s stability."
"The technical support is quite good."
"It offers good performance."
"Polarion ALM is excellent for tracking who is working on what and how many people are involved in a project."
 

Cons

"Some aspects of the reporting and dashboard could be improved."
"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."
"The ability to report on customizable fields and third-party extensions needs improvement."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"Nowadays, the dashboard is too complex to be created."
"The weak point of Polarion ALM software is about reporting and time for extraction of the data...The quality of reporting needs to improve."
"Test management lacks an automated process."
"Technical support needs some improvement."
"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 is not yet optimized."
"If you were to say that everything is integrated and it's a complete solution, I would say it's not."
"The license model is okay for large companies but would be quite expensive for smaller enterprises."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"As far as I understand, it is not an expensive application."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"The solution is expensive."
"Software for medical devices is always expensive."
"It is an expensive product."
"The license model is okay for large companies but would be quite expensive for smaller enterprises."
report
Use our free recommendation engine to learn which Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) Suites solutions are best for your needs.
896,942 professionals have used our research since 2012.
 

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
18%
Manufacturing Company
13%
Insurance Company
8%
Marketing Services Firm
7%
Manufacturing Company
30%
Computer Software Company
9%
Healthcare Company
6%
Comms Service Provider
5%
 

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 Business10
Midsize Enterprise3
Large Enterprise12
 

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 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

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: May 2026.
896,942 professionals have used our research since 2012.