We performed a comparison between IBM Rational ALM and Planview AgilePlace based on real PeerSpot user reviews.
Find out what your peers are saying about Microsoft, Atlassian, Nutanix and others in Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) Suites."IBM Rational ALM is a very good tool. I like the management and traceability features and the test management tool. The latter is not linked with the stories and fixed management. It is really useful, and we can create test plans. We can also test some metrics related to QA."
"The tools for requirement capture we have found very useful."
"The planning feature is rich with Scrum concepts: Sprint, Sprint retrospective, the rules in the Scrum framework."
"We have something called the GC (global configuration), which is a unique feature compared to any other competitor we have in the ALM space."
"The integration with Git works well."
"At the same time, if you're working from the architect or the designing team you, it's quite easy to manage the resources online."
"Everyone in a team can work on the same platform and share the same information."
"The solution is customizable."
"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."
"My team specifically uses our board for all of our Remedy tickets that come in. We had a card for every ticket that we get, and we're able to add the link to that specific ticket there.If I'm out of office, for example, and someone else needs to work a ticket or someone is being contacted to work on a ticket, I don't have to sign on it. Someone else can easily access that ticket because I put the link in there. It's nice. It has a lot of great functionality in there."
"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. It is a highly functional, but pretty simple tool. That is hard to find: A tool that has a lot of functions, but is also simple."
"LeanKit is amazing when it comes to getting answers about a given card's status. That's one of the biggest takeaways that we've had. The status is right there on the board. Everybody can see it. You just click on it and it gives you everything that you need to know, especially the comments feature because it gives us a timeline of updates. We use that a lot where we write a comment on the card and then we can see and track progress as we move it across the board."
"People found the ability to set up different lanes and the ability to see where they're within the progress most valuable. They can use different colored cards or sticky notes, and then they can separate out which cards belong to a department or the initiative they're working on. They can filter who's working on it, and I've got good feedback about that."
"It makes work visible, so everybody knows where everything is. It uses Kanban, and that makes work visible."
"I would say it's highly scalable. LeanKit can scale across the enterprise easily. Every business could probably find a use case for leveraging LeanKit."
"The "Blocking" feature has helped our scrum masters track impediments and share them at the program level to stakeholders with accountability and detail so that they understand and the action items which can be noted easily."
"The features should be more intuitive. If I'm looking for something, its location should be easy to locate."
"The product must be more user-friendly."
"There is not enough beginner support material in the form of FAQs or simple training to help you get started."
"The interconnectivity between packages is a major support problem and can be improved."
"The GUI is a little bit outdated."
"The solution can improve in the development area and the customized applications."
"The stability of IBM Rational ALM could be improved."
"Some improvements to the user interface (UI) would be helpful, such as exposing more services to make it easier to customize to the needs of each customer."
"There's room for improvement with the Instant Coffee feature. There are other businesses that have been interested in leveraging a virtual whiteboard or sticky note capability and how Instant Coffee was developed has not met the mark."
"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."
"The integration with the Enterprise One product is probably an area for improvement. It's not really broken. It's just that it is such a handy tool and a great way to visually manage things. There is a very limited hookup/integration between Enterprise One, which is the master Planview tool, and LeanKit. While they are looking at this on their roadmap, it definitely needs to happen. There is a lot of opportunity there."
"We are a 750-employee company, so we got lucky that our board approved the kind of funding we needed for the solution. But, LeanKit probably needs to reduce its pricing."
"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."
"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."
"It is a pretty good product. It is really hard to think of things that I'd want to be improved. Sometimes, we use it for project management lessons learned. So, we have three columns, such as Could be Improved, Keep Doing, and Works Really Well. It would be helpful if there was a template set up for something like that because we code different cards based on the category. For example, if something belongs to the Could be Improved category, we may have those cards as yellow, but then I have to change the color of them and put a header. It is not as smooth, but it still works fine. To be honest, I don't have a lot of complaints about it."
"Our overall impression of Leankit has been very positive, however, our experience with the JIRA integration into our Leankit boards was much harder than we anticipated and that could be improved by simplifying it somehow."
Earn 20 points
IBM Rational ALM is ranked 10th in Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) Suites with 17 reviews while Planview AgilePlace is ranked 17th in Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) Suites. IBM Rational ALM is rated 7.2, while Planview AgilePlace is rated 9.0. The top reviewer of IBM Rational ALM writes "A complex deployment that is not stable, but is cloud-based". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Planview AgilePlace writes "Gives us visibility into projects and enables users to leave comments on different projects". IBM Rational ALM is most compared with Jira, Codebeamer, Microsoft Azure DevOps, Polarion ALM and PTC Integrity, whereas Planview AgilePlace is most compared with Jira, Microsoft Azure DevOps, Jira Align, Rally Software and JIRA Portfolio.
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