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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
5.7
Number of Reviews
7
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 (7th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of November 2025, in the Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) Suites category, the mindshare of Atlassian ALM is 2.3%, up from 1.2% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Polarion ALM is 7.2%, up from 6.8% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) Suites Market Share Distribution
ProductMarket Share (%)
Polarion ALM7.2%
Atlassian ALM2.3%
Other90.5%
Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) Suites
 

Featured Reviews

LasseMikkonen - PeerSpot reviewer
Has supported unified project documentation and traceability but needs better structuring for advanced requirement management
For sure, that is the thing with Atlassian ALM: you just go to the marketplace and put the plugins and you are integrated, whatever. If I need to give it a grade on requirement management especially, I would put it at six or seven, probably six. Limited features and scalability are the reason I give Atlassian ALM a six or seven out of ten. They could have proper structure so that you can have document type structuring of the requirement and reuse of requirements and linking. You can do links in Jira, but you cannot manage them as in other tools. I would put Atlassian ALM at six because then you could get seven if you put all possible plugins and configure it for about one month. Out of the box, it is something around six. It is getting higher all the time with Atlassian ALM, but it is relatively much lower than the competitors still. They have AI features already built in and many other things. They have open pricing, and you can see the prices on the website. That is good; I would say that is how it should be with Atlassian ALM. It is not super fast, but it is constant. They have so much documentation out there that it is quite rare that you need to contact support because you know the answer already by searching online. This is totally missing from IBM because they have hidden their documentation mostly, and then online searches do not give you any answers.
Dina Bindi - PeerSpot reviewer
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.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"This solution fits very well into our agile product management environment."
"The most valuable feature is the Scrum board."
"The main power of this tool is the integration between the different products of the Atlassian suite. We have good integration with work management with Java. This is the major strength from this provider."
"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."
"We had a nice experience with technical support."
"Polarion ALM delivers both document views and table views simultaneously and organizes configurations according to norms and standards."
"The features I find the most valuable are requirement tracking and schematics."
"Polarion ALM's integration is very good and easy to use."
"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."
"Polarion ALM is excellent for tracking who is working on what and how many people are involved in a project."
"When it comes to functionalities like a real-time collaboration feature and traceability capabilities, Polarion ALM has had those basic features for the past five years already, and they are pretty mature products that have all the needed requirements management features, such as traceability and reporting, and even configuration management or version controlling."
"The technical support is quite good."
 

Cons

"The automation for scheduling software and doing software tests should be simplified because it's complex and too rigid."
"There is room for improvement in the high-level project management."
"The reports are not really customizable, which is something that they should improve on."
"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."
"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."
"The solution's editing capabilities need improvement."
"Test management lacks an automated process."
"The most important thing for them to improve should be platform-independent features. They should also provide extensive pipelines and release pipelines that we can define and we can work on."
"The system’s technology is not the most current, leading to missing features that are common in web-based applications."
"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 configuration aspect of the solution is not easy. A person needs a lot of programming knowledge in order to successfully handle the job."
 

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."
"You have to pay around 50-60 euros per user."
"It is an expensive product."
"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 model is okay for large companies but would be quite expensive for smaller enterprises."
"Software for medical devices is always expensive."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Manufacturing Company
17%
Educational Organization
10%
Financial Services Firm
9%
Government
8%
Manufacturing Company
28%
Computer Software Company
12%
Healthcare Company
6%
Educational Organization
4%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business3
Midsize Enterprise2
Large Enterprise2
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business10
Midsize Enterprise3
Large Enterprise12
 

Questions from the Community

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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...
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...
 

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: November 2025.
873,085 professionals have used our research since 2012.