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Atlassian ALM vs Rally Software 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
Rally Software
Ranking in Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) Suites
8th
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
6.9
Number of Reviews
120
Ranking in other categories
Enterprise Agile Planning Tools (7th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of March 2026, in the Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) Suites category, the mindshare of Atlassian ALM is 2.4%, up from 1.3% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Rally Software is 5.3%, down from 6.8% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) Suites Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Rally Software5.3%
Atlassian ALM2.4%
Other92.3%
Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) Suites
 

Featured Reviews

BRIANJOHNSON2 - PeerSpot reviewer
Independant Consultant at Reckitt
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.
Rakhee Srivastava - PeerSpot reviewer
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.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"As a general purpose tool, JIRA and Confluence are still ahead of the competition."
"This solution fits very well into our agile product management environment."
"The most valuable feature is the Scrum board."
"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."
"In Bitbucket, the reviews are pretty good."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"The most useful part is how it breaks down tasks into parents and children, manageable tasks. It has a whole project as an initiative, and then it breaks it down further and further. And then you get to actual user stories and tasks that you can sit and develop."
"Its ability to scale."
"Another notable feature is reporting at Portfolio level, and an organised business area which is set up from scratch with this tool can benefit from this feature."
"Having that view into features and roadmap from product to delivery teams, and where they are going, then execute on."
"The reporting, and being able to roll that up across the verticals, was an important selling point for us."
"I would tell colleagues looking for a similar solution that Agile Central is very easy to use, and it's easy to build dashboards."
"It really does help everything just flow through the cycle better; everybody just worrying about their small piece of the pie, and then the project managers can have a bigger overview of it."
"The portfolio tracker tool is phenomenal, giving us the opportunity to look at our features holistically across the entire landscape of the solution, apply them to the DevOps model, and pinpoint exactly when each feature is going to be delivered, which is a huge value to our client, Cisco."
 

Cons

"Atlassian ALM is too expensive. The pricing is very expensive."
"There is room for improvement in the high-level project management."
"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."
"Confluence is just a super-inadequate tool for editing documents."
"The automation for scheduling software and doing software tests should be simplified because it's complex and too rigid."
"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 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."
"Frankly, pricing is expensive and needs to be carefully planned for when budgeting."
"Sometimes it's hard for them to quickly search for a user story."
"It's a partial solution. It's a big problem for us right now."
"Customization features may not be exposed or unavailable, so people may be looking for them. So, customization is an area people have told me is more desirable."
"CA Agile Central does not have a workflow tool included."
"I would like for workspace admins to be able to hide projects in the Project Picker and not lose any historical data; make them invisible to certain users, visible to certain users, depending on permission sets. That would be lovely."
"It takes a very long time to load and, if you make some small changes, then the whole page has to reload."
"I think that the product use of the user-story-split feature that creates child user stories can be abused by users for being so easy to do."
 

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."
"It is expensive and may not be worthwhile for a small company."
"I understand it's a little more expensive. That is why many people prefer Jira."
"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."
"Rally Software costs $50 a month, and for a base account, that price is acceptable."
"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."
"From a price point, it's a cost effective solution for our needs."
"The license costs are fairly high as compared to some of the other solutions out there."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Manufacturing Company
19%
Educational Organization
10%
Healthcare Company
8%
Government
8%
Manufacturing Company
15%
Financial Services Firm
10%
Insurance Company
9%
Healthcare Company
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business3
Midsize Enterprise2
Large Enterprise3
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business13
Midsize Enterprise14
Large Enterprise110
 

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 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...
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.
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...
 

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

 

Sample Customers

Facebook, NASA, Cisco, eBay, Redfin, Toyota, Kaiser Permanente, Gilt, CSIRO, Autodesk, The Daily Telegraph, CODE, Illumnia
Physicians Mutual, Harvard Pilgrim HealthCare, Editora Abril, Tata Communications, Level 3 Communications, Seagate, TomTom, Philips, Hiscox, Physicians Mutual, MYOB
Find out what your peers are saying about Atlassian ALM vs. Rally Software and other solutions. Updated: March 2026.
884,933 professionals have used our research since 2012.