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Atlassian ALM 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

Atlassian ALM
Ranking in Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) Suites
16th
Average Rating
7.4
Reviews Sentiment
5.8
Number of Reviews
8
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
Polarion ALM
Ranking in Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) Suites
6th
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
6.0
Number of Reviews
24
Ranking in other categories
Enterprise Agile Planning Tools (5th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of June 2026, in the Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) Suites category, the mindshare of Atlassian ALM is 2.4%, 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%
Atlassian ALM2.4%
Other93.0%
Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) Suites
 

Featured Reviews

BRIANJOHNSON2 - PeerSpot reviewer
Independant Consultant at B&H Designs Ltd
Long-term testing workflows have improved integration of test planning and defect tracking
The deployment depends on whether you are deploying it on your computer or across the program. Cloud-based system deployment takes some time, as it depends on your rights to your computer. I would rate the deployment as a seven on a scale of one to ten. It took a couple of hours to get it right. The IT department deploys it.
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

"If you can spend the little effort to configure Jira to support your more complex requirements management, then you can concentrate everything in one tool."
"As a general purpose tool, JIRA and Confluence are still ahead of the competition."
"In Bitbucket, the reviews are pretty good."
"This solution fits very well into our agile product management environment."
"The interface between the repository and test plan stands out as valuable, and I appreciate building the tests and scenarios in Test Lab and the ability to link defects throughout the system, which Atlassian ALM does better than any other testing products."
"The main power of this tool is the integration between the different products of the Atlassian suite, and we have good integration with work management and software build automation (Bamboo), which is the major strength from this provider."
"The Atlassian ALM suite consists at least of JIRA, Confluence, BitBucket and HipChat - just the tools you need for organizing your teams in a very efficient way."
"The most valuable feature is the Scrum board."
"The features I find the most valuable are requirement tracking and schematics."
"The best feature of Polarion ALM to me is its traceability link."
"Even though Polarion is quite expensive, it's quite a good solution for medical device development in general, especially for software development."
"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."
"We had a nice experience with technical support."
"The software is stable."
"The technical support is quite good."
"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."
 

Cons

"The reports are not really customizable, which is something that they should improve on."
"Frankly it's a really daunting exercise - challenging, problematic and very flaky."
"Confluence is just a super-inadequate tool for editing documents."
"All Atlassian products are based on JAVA which makes it a bit difficult to trace problems if you don't have much JAVA skilled staff around."
"Atlassian ALM is too expensive. The pricing is very expensive."
"There is room for improvement in the high-level project management."
"However, it is not really scalable, so if you want to use it for anything larger or plan to use it for product portfolios, then it starts to be problematic."
"The solution is stable but at times, the performance is poor. It takes time to load and the response time is not up to the mark."
"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's editing capabilities need improvement."
"Technical support needs some improvement."
"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 license model is okay for large companies but would be quite expensive for smaller enterprises."
"I also recently suggested that CMS consider incorporating generative artificial intelligence into the system."
"The tool needs to improve its planning. It also needs to add more integrations."
"The solution can be improved by making it more user-friendly, and a server-based application rather than client based."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"There is a community edition available, but if the price were lower for the addons then more people would use the full version."
"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."
"If the pricing would come down and it was more affordable then we wouldn't have to switch."
"The solution is 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."
"Software for medical devices is always expensive."
"It is an expensive product."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Manufacturing Company
21%
Financial Services Firm
9%
Educational Organization
9%
Construction Company
7%
Manufacturing Company
30%
Computer Software Company
8%
Healthcare Company
6%
Comms Service Provider
5%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business4
Midsize Enterprise2
Large Enterprise2
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business10
Midsize Enterprise3
Large Enterprise12
 

Questions from the Community

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Atlassian ALM?
Atlassian ALM is too expensive. The pricing is very expensive.
What needs improvement with Atlassian ALM?
I am still not satisfied with the requirements area of Atlassian ALM. Atlassian ALM has four parts: test plan, Test Lab, requirements, and reporting. The requirements portion continues to be an are...
What is your primary use case for Atlassian ALM?
I have been using Atlassian ALM for twenty-five years. It used to be called Quality Center, and I first used it in 2000 and 2001. The company changed, but the product remained. Atlassian ALM has no...
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...
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Facebook, NASA, Cisco, eBay, Redfin, Toyota, Kaiser Permanente, Gilt, CSIRO, Autodesk, The Daily Telegraph, CODE, Illumnia
Engineering Ingegneria Informatica, IBS AG, Zumtobel Group
Find out what your peers are saying about Atlassian ALM vs. Polarion ALM and other solutions. Updated: June 2026.
902,456 professionals have used our research since 2012.