Polarion ALM vs Rally Software comparison

Siemens and Broadcom are both solutions in the Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) Suites category. Siemens is ranked #6 with an average rating of 8.3, while Broadcom is ranked #10 with an average rating of 7.0. Siemens holds a 7.5% mindshare in ALM, compared to Broadcom’s 5.8% mindshare. Additionally, 88% of Siemens users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 91% of Broadcom users who would recommend it.

Polarion ALM

Read 23 Polarion ALM reviews

3,602 Views
3,350 Comparison Views

88% willing to recommend

Rally Software

Read 120 Rally Software reviews

3,558 Views
3,309 Comparison Views

91% willing to recommend

Polarion ALM

Rally Software

Comparison Buyer's Guide

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Dec 15, 2024

Rally Software and Polarion ALM both compete in the application lifecycle management solutions category. Rally Software appears to have an edge in pricing flexibility, while Polarion ALM provides comprehensive features that suit compliance-focused industries.

Features: Rally Software offers robust project management, release tracking, and scrum support. It enhances its functionality through flexibility and integration capabilities, especially with JIRA. User-friendly interfaces improve team interaction tracking and reporting. Polarion ALM provides high traceability and management of requirements, tests, and releases, advantageous for industries focusing on compliance.

Room for Improvement: Rally Software needs to improve Kanban support and performance, focusing on metrics and integration. It also requires more intuitive reporting and analytics. Polarion ALM can enhance user experience, ease integration with external tools, and improve its interface, as well as enrich its test management and reporting capabilities.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: Rally Software offers deployment in public cloud, on-premises, and hybrid cloud models. It is known for responsive customer service, although some users find initial navigation difficult. Polarion ALM provides diverse public and private cloud deployment options, with comprehensive but costly support.

Pricing and ROI: Rally Software is cost-effective for smaller teams with bulk purchasing discounts, showing significant ROI through streamlined processes. Though pricier, Polarion ALM justifies its cost for larger enterprises by offering features essential for traceability and compliance, balancing cost with functionality.

To learn more, read our detailed Polarion ALM vs. Rally Software Report (Updated: September 2025).

Buyer's Guide

Polarion ALM vs. Rally Software

September 2025

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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

Polarion ALM

Ranking in Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) Suites

6th

Ranking in Enterprise Agile Planning Tools

7th

Average Rating

7.8

Reviews Sentiment

6.2

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

Rally Software

Ranking in Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) Suites

10th

Ranking in Enterprise Agile Planning Tools

6th

Average Rating

8.0

Reviews Sentiment

6.9

Number of Reviews

120

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

Mindshare comparison

As of October 2025, in the Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) Suites category, the mindshare of Polarion ALM is 7.5%, up from 6.4% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Rally Software is 5.8%, down from 6.7% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) Suites Market Share Distribution
Product	Market Share (%)
Polarion ALM	7.5%
Rally Software	5.8%
Other	86.7%

Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) Suites

Featured Reviews

Dina Bindi

Information and Communication technology at CNH Industrial

Provides traceability and compliance with high flexibility

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. However, we don't use DevOps-related features, such as integration with tools like SVN or Git, because we use Azure DevOps. The aspects related to requirements, testing, changes, tasks, and agile methodology are excellent, which is why we've been using it for a long time.

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Rakhee Srivastava

Sr. Information Architect and Principal Consultant UX at Tech Mahindra Limited

Real-time dashboards provide clear insights into project progress and team velocity

Rally Software is easy to use for Agile project methodology because it follows Scrum and Kanban, helping with sprint planning and backlog management. Rally Software provides real-time dashboards for different kinds of stakeholders and governance, giving clear insights into project progress, team velocity, and potential risks. Backlog management is present in the product, allowing prioritization of tasks. The dashboards provide all types of insights through analytics. Capacity planning helps optimize resource allocation, ensuring balanced workload and realistic sprint commitments for our projects. The solution integrates with GitHub, and we can also integrate with Excel and CI/CD pipelines.

Read full review

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"Scalability is good...The integration is quite good."

"The best feature of Polarion ALM to me is its traceability link."

"The tool's most valuable feature is its browser experience. I rate its traceability feature a ten out of ten. From the initial stage to the release, you can manage everything through a single point."

"It offers good performance."

"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 is excellent for tracking who is working on what and how many people are involved in a project."

"You can see the work ticket and you can circulate that within the teams. You can define your flows, customize according to your needs, and you can create dashboards and create the reports according to your needs."

"Polarion ALM has some valuable tools for managing our targets and requirements. I think that's its best feature."

More Polarion ALM pros

"The effect of these kind of tools drives the way you organize things. It helps you shape the way you flow."

"It has allowed the quality assurance team to keep all information in sync with the application requirements and user stories for our general development."

"Tech support is very responsive, helpful, and available."

"It helps with getting the alignment between strategy and execution for the product teams, all the way down to the delivery teams."

"The main ways that I used it when I was in it day to day was keeping up with the burn rate within the teams. Also, to track at the feature level too, as far as how we were doing with actually being able to deliver that feature."

"The transparency it allows us to provide, both from the team level all the way through the executive level within the company and the work that we are doing."

"We use the roadmap features, and we're getting better at using dates to use the roadmap so that we can see if we're on target for work."

"My teams uses it for their daily agile management. They describe their user stories and track the progress of their projects."

More Rally Software pros

Cons

"The solution's editing capabilities need 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 solution needs to improve its user experience and graphics."

"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."

"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 planning and task management aspects of the solution were not that easy."

"The tool needs to improve its planning. It also needs to add more integrations."

More Polarion ALM cons

"The product itself seems to have a lot of bugs. One issue is that it sometimes allows people to modify data inappropriately. For example, team members can change numbers at will. While we have a mechanism to track changes, people can still alter numbers, create or delete tasks, and create or delete high-level activities without proper controls."

"The product needs to have more integration capabilities."

"It's a bit cumbersome to manage the Project Picker. As we sunset teams or projects close out - but we still have test cases tied to those teams or projects that are being used in other spaces - we have this monstrous list in the Project Picker that becomes really difficult to manage and find, and we can't clean that up ourselves. It would be nice if it was easier to do that and not lose your history."

"There's a lot of support for Scrum and Agile, but it needs something for the Kanban side."

"I'd like the ability to customize reports without having to incur Professional Services, or having to write my own code GitHub and then implement that as a custom report. That's untenable. It's not sustainable."

"I would like to see more Kanban support. As it stands, it doesn't seem to have the features or the layouts that the teams really need to be able to execute their tasks. It almost tries to force you into more of a Scrum style."

"More customization capabilities would be helpful. Providing a little bit more structure around how the system should be set up in terms of the hierarchy structure might be helpful as well."

"What I don't like about it is that it is really hard to find old work to reference information and use the reporting section of the application in terms of trying to analyze trends. If I am trying to find out which interfaces took this long and I want to compare and measure improvement from one quarter to another quarter, the reporting mechanism within Rally is very troublesome. They have an Excel plugin that you're supposed to use, but you literally have to pull the raw data out before you can do the analysis. You can't do it within Rally, and if you can, it is a secret, and I don't know how to do it. It should have better, easier, and user-friendly reporting without having to use the Excel add-in. It is very clunky. There is a lot of data in there, but it is not organized in such a way that makes it intuitive. You really have to kind of look for where do you put your documentation or dates. Some customization is available, but it is not plug-and-play like Jira. When I switched from TFS to Jira, I just went and started using Jira, whereas with Rally, you kind of have to really get in and figure out what you need to do before you set stuff up, or you're going to get yourself stuck. You can just start using Jira and be successful."

More Rally Software cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"It is an expensive product."

"Software for medical devices is always expensive."

"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."

"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 license costs are fairly high as compared to some of the other solutions out there."

"Rally Software costs $50 a month, and for a base account, that price is acceptable."

"From a price point, it's a cost effective solution for our needs."

"I understand it's a little more expensive. That is why many people prefer Jira."

"Frankly, pricing is expensive and needs to be carefully planned for when budgeting."

"We are always looking for a discount, if the solution was less expensive it would be a benefit."

"I don't know the exact pricing, but I think the tool is priced high. They provide quality workmanship, good software, regular upgrades, and they're always attentive and listen to users. Everything comes with a price. I think it's an expensive solution compared to Jira or other competitors, but it's a complete package."

"It is expensive and may not be worthwhile for a small company."

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Manufacturing Company

28%

Computer Software Company

11%

Healthcare Company

Educational Organization

Manufacturing Company

16%

Financial Services Firm

11%

Insurance Company

Computer Software Company

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	9
Midsize Enterprise	3
Large Enterprise	12

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	13
Midsize Enterprise	13
Large Enterprise	110

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about Polarion ALM?

It is a very stable solution.

See all answers

What needs improvement with Polarion ALM?

The backlog management for Agile in Polarion ALM could be improved or enhanced in future releases. What is missing is that if you have a hierarchy in your backlog with epics, features, and user sto...

See all answers

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...

See all answers

What do you like most about Rally Software?

Rally offers many features that help the management of activities, coordination, alignment and reports, which applies agility across the organization. If I were to highlight a particular feature, i...

See all answers

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Rally Software?

Rally Software is affordable because our customers also prefer it, and I have never heard concerns about pricing preventing us from using this tool.

See all answers

What needs improvement with Rally Software?

While I'm not heavily involved in project management tools, I am familiar with these tools. One area for improvement might be the rigidity in role and access configurations, which require many proc...

See all answers

Comparisons

Codebeamer vs Polarion ALM

Compared 30% of the time

Jira vs Polarion ALM

Compared 17% of the time

Microsoft Azure DevOps vs Polarion ALM

Compared 13% of the time

Jama Connect vs Polarion ALM

Compared 7% of the time

TFS vs Polarion ALM

Compared 3% of the time

More Polarion ALM Competitors

Microsoft Azure DevOps vs Rally Software

Compared 29% of the time

Jira vs Rally Software

Compared 27% of the time

OpenText Software Delivery Management vs Rally Software

Compared 5% of the time

Jira Align vs Rally Software

Compared 5% of the time

Kovair Intelligent DevOps vs Rally Software

Compared 3% of the time

More Rally Software Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Polarion ALM

October 2025

Download Polarion ALM product report

Buyer's Guide

Rally Software

October 2025

Download Rally Software product report

Also Known As

No data available

CA Agile Central, Rally Enterprise, CA Agile Training, CA Agile Coaching, CA Agile Academy, CA Agile Management , CA ALM

Overview

The world’s first 100% browser-based ALM enterprise solution, which enables seamless collaboration across disparate teams, multi-directionally linked work items, full traceability, accelerated productivity and automated proof of compliance.

Siemens

With Rally Software, you can plan, prioritize, manage, track, and continuously improve your work so that you can deliver the value that your customers need with speed, quality, and efficiency. Our enterprise-class Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) SaaS platform provides visibility into progress, roadblocks, and dependencies across multiple teams, projects, and programs. This allows you to align to your strategic goals and create better business results, and to do it all in a single system of record.

Broadcom

Sample Customers

Engineering Ingegneria Informatica, IBS AG, Zumtobel Group

Physicians Mutual, Harvard Pilgrim HealthCare, Editora Abril, Tata Communications, Level 3 Communications, Seagate, TomTom, Philips, Hiscox, Physicians Mutual, MYOB

Buyer's Guide

Polarion ALM vs. Rally Software

September 2025

Free Report: Polarion ALM vs. Rally Software

Find out what your peers are saying about Polarion ALM vs. Rally Software and other solutions. Updated: September 2025.

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