Jira Align vs OpenText ALM Octane comparison

Atlassian and OpenText are both solutions in the Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) Suites category. Atlassian is ranked #8 with an average rating of 7.8, while OpenText is ranked #7 with an average rating of 8.3. Atlassian holds a 1.5% mindshare in ALM, compared to OpenText’s 6.2% mindshare. Additionally, 92% of Atlassian users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 92% of OpenText users who would recommend it.

Jira Align

Read 41 Jira Align reviews

1,090 Views
685 Comparison Views

92% willing to recommend

OpenText ALM Octane

Read 41 OpenText ALM Octane reviews

4,313 Views
2,408 Comparison Views

92% willing to recommend

Jira Align

OpenText ALM Octane

Comparison Buyer's Guide

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Dec 15, 2024

OpenText ALM Octane and Jira Align compete in Agile project management tools category. OpenText ALM Octane holds a competitive edge through its robust CI/CD integration and Agile frameworks support, enhancing Agile deliveries more effectively.

Features: OpenText ALM Octane offers extensive end-to-end traceability and integrates multiple management systems on a single platform. It incorporates strong Agile frameworks like SAFe and supports CI/CD pipelines. Jira Align provides strategic control views, integrates seamlessly with Jira, and offers comprehensive PI planning and roadmap features.

Room for Improvement: OpenText ALM Octane could benefit from better integration of testing practices across methodologies, enhanced flexibility in reporting, and improved user management. Users express the need for more adaptable dashboards and simplified licensing. Jira Align users desire better customization, enhanced Jira synchronization, and greater pricing transparency along with improved mobile friendliness.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: OpenText ALM Octane is typically deployed on-premises and is complemented by strong customer support with direct developer consultations. Jira Align provides diverse deployment options, mainly on public cloud, offering ease in deployment and responsive customer service through user feedback integration.

Pricing and ROI: OpenText ALM Octane is considered expensive, justified by its rich features, and offers ROI through reduced manual testing and integration costs. Jira Align is also seen as costly, especially for smaller companies, but its pricing is deemed reasonable for large enterprises due to its extensive feature set, making it suitable for enterprise-level Agile management solutions.

To learn more, read our detailed Jira Align vs. OpenText ALM Octane Report (Updated: April 2025).

Buyer's Guide

Jira Align vs. OpenText ALM Octane

April 2025

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Helped 850,236 peers since 2012

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

Jira Align

Ranking in Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) Suites

8th

Ranking in Enterprise Agile Planning Tools

3rd

Average Rating

8.0

Reviews Sentiment

7.0

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

Value Stream Management Software (1st)

OpenText ALM Octane

Ranking in Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) Suites

7th

Ranking in Enterprise Agile Planning Tools

7th

Average Rating

8.2

Reviews Sentiment

7.0

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

Mindshare comparison

As of May 2025, in the Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) Suites category, the mindshare of Jira Align is 1.5%, down from 1.7% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of OpenText ALM Octane is 6.2%, up from 5.5% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) Suites

Featured Reviews

Tonia Spight-Sokoya

Program Support for Third Party External SPM Lead Business Execution Consultant/PMP PM at Wells Fargo

User-friendly with good documentation and the ability to integrate with other third arty vendors

I am really focused on identity access management and getting access to the vendors. Right now, I'm setting up vendor access through Azure. You can do that or with the IAM. Sometimes we have to create several different types of access because we have vaulted databases. We have the Unix databases, I have MySQL, and we have Mongo, where I get access to those user classes or to the databases in the host group. Those are all different access scenario forms that I submit after I do the configuration in the form with the security team. I need clarity on the IAM. I'm not clear on PAM eighter. Is there a form that they have to submit to get access to the internal cyber-risk teams to get their access for people to be able to use the tool on the Confluence side? Do they have to send some kind of form to the operation's security or enterprise security? To be able to get the access for privileged access, do they need to be working on projects that have vaulted databases? I still need to figure out how that works. Other companies that are competitors of Jira and Confluence, are able to create their active directories for the vendors that don't come in internally. They only do access through the cloud and through third-party, two-factor identification. That's something I was wondering if that was already implemented in the packages, the package for Confluence. It would be nice to have that right in the solution.

Read full review

GeorgNauerz

Managing Partner at Georg Nauerz Consulting

Makes team collaboration between IT and non-IT users easier with more transparency

The user experience is a lot better than any tool that I have used before. Overall, it is great. It has a smooth interface, which is very user-friendly. It makes it easier to work together and have more transparency and customization, which is very good. There are a lot of features where you can add fields, input individual fields, and input rules, like templated rule-based interaction between entities. The Backlog management is really interesting, because it is all in one place. You don't have a feature here and a feature there, instead you have the Backlog and testing using different backup items, like user storage features and tasks, all in one place. In addition, we are able to write documents, which we can transfer to backup items. Then, we can test them in the same solution without switching tools, or even switching from one part of the tool to another part, because it is all in one place. We use the solution’s Backlog and Team Backlog capabilities. They make our DevOps processes easier through transparency and asset collaboration.

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

"I found Confluence most valuable."

"The most valuable features of Jira Align are its product roadmap and reporting."

"Align enables the capture of all capabilities."

"The technical support services are excellent."

"The reporting structure is great."

"The deployment phase of Jira Align wasn't difficult."

"The linking of PI Objectives with different features was one of the cool things. It had features, epics, and stories out of the box."

"The tool helps us with better tracking across various departments. Jira Align is highly valuable for organizations due to its flexibility. With my experience as an administrator, I can attest that it can be tailored to meet the diverse needs of any organization. It helps to eliminate the mess created by Excel spreadsheets."

More Jira Align pros

"An improvement on previous versions because it comes as preconfigured as possible."

"The solution natively supports Agile-Waterfall hybrid software development at an enterprise scale. This is very important to us. Because even though the company wishes to go Agile, we still have projects which follow a Waterfall methodology. In order for us to accommodate both, we needed some sort of hybrid system. Because if we are using a fully Agile system, then the reporting might not be correctly extracted."

"We looked at all the market-leading tools, but we did not find anything quite as comprehensive as ALM Octane. When I say comprehensive, it's not just a single tool for Agile planning, backlog management release, sprint planning, etc., but it also has a built-in, comprehensive quality management module. It also has pipelines where we can hook up with our DevOps ecosystem/toolchain."

"We are seeing some real improvements in the way we do things. We are becoming more agile in the way we do it because of that and in a way that stories are managed. Stories are given lifecycles as opposed to just being entities within a tool."

"It's more streamlined because we have it all under one umbrella. And once the business requirements and rules have been created, we can do test cases and apply them to the business rules."

"It is a very scalable solution."

"Micro Focus' technical support is good."

"The way testing is closely tied into the product Backlog has made it more intuitive, or easier to manage the relationship between building out an application and testing it. In other tools, that is more segregated. The way it's designed in Octane, people have said it makes more sense to them, and that it's easier for them to understand their data and to maintain and test their solutions."

More OpenText ALM Octane pros

Cons

"It would be helpful if they had something for capacity planning that was simpler to understand."

"Jira Align can improve the visibility of executive teams."

"The initial setup was a little bit complex."

"The product should improve its communication. My English proficiency is not high, but writing in English is another skill that you need. Maybe AI can help here. Because I can see in some other applications, they have AI helpers. So when you write something and you want to do something, it can help. For example, Google Cloud Platform has it. They have a helpdesk for it. When you want to create a cluster, it can help you."

"For future releases of Jira Align, I would suggest making workflows simpler and more user-friendly."

"Jira Align's cost needs improvement."

"Deployment was very complex."

"The platform's communication features could be more robust for better team integration."

More Jira Align cons

"Though Micro Focus ALM Octane doesn't have much of a bug, it lacks integration with some solutions. For example, my company has fairly new software, but it can't be integrated with Micro Focus ALM Octane, so integration with other software, particularly with less popular software, could be improved. Micro Focus ALM Octane also requires a lot of resources during its setup, and I find this another area for improvement. An additional feature I'd like to see in the next release of Micro Focus ALM Octane is the ability to customize the interface, especially when doing a manual test."

"The cluster architecture that we implemented was server to server communication: Octane application to Elasticsearch and Elasticsearch to another Elasticsearch service. Recently, we found this is a security gap. The Octane application is interacting with Elasticsearch server, but that was missing from the requirements and prerequisites in the setup. The Micro Focus team has not given advice on how to implement authentication-based communication between Octane to Elasticsearch, and we found it as a gap later, then our security team asked us to fix that gap. So, there was a lot of time spent on rework."

"The product's requirements management feature needs enhancement in terms of functionality."

"Globally, I don't see many major points of improvement. It's mostly plenty of little things, and it's weird to me that they are not in the product yet. They are really details, but they're annoying details... Today, in the tool, we've got plenty of assets we can handle, like requirements, user storage, defects, tasks and so on. And to all of those elements, we can add comments. We can add comments to any asset in Octane but not to tasks. It's just impossible to understand why it's not available for the tasks because it's available everywhere else. Similarly, for attachments, you can attach files absolutely everywhere except on automated runs, which is, again, awkward. I don't understand why on this element, in particular, you cannot do it. It's little touches like that."

"The biggest problem with ALM Octane is that it's very complex, so it's difficult to use and scale."

"Currently, Micro Focus ALM Octane is considered an old-world tool in the industry and lacks the perception of being a new-age tool among its customers."

"There is an opportunity for them to do a little more with the dashboarding. We still feel that HPE Quality Center/HPE ALM reporting is very powerful. We talked with R&D, and there are some things on their roadmap, but at the same time, their strategy is to connect Octane with visualization tools such as Power BI."

"Documentation is not clear."

More OpenText ALM Octane cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Our customers buy licenses. We are not involved in its purchase."

"Jira Align is quite expensive for small-to-medium companies, but it's quite reasonable for larger ones."

"Jira Align has price packages for different purposes."

"The software is very good, but the price is expensive. Our licensing costs are on a monthly basis, but there are no additional costs to the standard license fees."

"Jira Align was reasonably priced then, especially for a bundle license that accommodated around 50 monthly users."

"Jira Align is an expensive solution."

"Jira Align's pricing is reasonable."

"At our company, we were concerned about the cost of Jira Align, which is expensive"

More Jira Align pricing and cost advice

"The comparison is always with Jira, so the pricing of Octane is a bit on the higher side. But if you look at what you have to add to Jira, on the plug-in side, to have the same abilities you have with Octane, you're more or less even, or even ahead with Octane."

"It's pretty pricey, one of the most expensive ones on the market... The value depends on if you use all the features that it has. It comes with a lot of features. The difference between the license structure of ALM and Octane versus JIRA, is that you get everything with ALM and Octane... For JIRA, you buy the pieces one piece at a time."

"The solution has reduced our testing costs."

"Going forward, I think we will want to explore adding more licenses."

"If you compare the price with the functionality, it is pretty much the same as other solutions. If you compare it to Jira, for instance, it has a lot more functionality. You don't need any plug-ins, but it's also more expensive. Once you start adding your different plug-ins to Jira, you'll probably end up with the same amount or more. There is also a yearly support cost, which is usually 25% of the initial cost of the license."

"The price of Micro Focus ALM Octane is too high compared to other solutions."

"The product is highly priced compared to other tools."

"The tool's price is extremely high."

More OpenText ALM Octane pricing and cost advice

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Financial Services Firm

23%

Computer Software Company

14%

Manufacturing Company

11%

Insurance Company

Financial Services Firm

26%

Manufacturing Company

12%

Computer Software Company

11%

Government

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about Jira Align?

I joined the company because they had a large project, and as a startup company, they needed to scale up efficiently. My task was to review the current baseline, assess the team's capabilities, and...

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What needs improvement with Jira Align?

The platform's communication features could be more robust for better team integration.

See all answers

What is your primary use case for Jira Align?

We use Jira Align for business strategies, collaboration, and reporting. The solution allows us to manage the various products and features delivered on that platform.

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Is Jira better or would you go with Micro Focus ALM Octane?

Hi Netanya, Basically , it all depends on the use cases for your environment and the business needs. Hope the below data may be relevant to you for identifying your needs and deciding on the approp...

See all answers

What do you like most about Micro Focus ALM Octane?

The platform's most valuable feature is pipeline integration or continuous integration services.

See all answers

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Micro Focus ALM Octane?

OpenText ALM Octane is an expensive product. However, it offsets costs by saving time and money, thus creating a balance between expenses and benefits. Our organization with over 1500 users sees sa...

See all answers

Comparisons

OpenText ValueEdge vs Jira Align

Compared 42% of the time

ServiceNow Strategic Portfolio Management vs Jira Align

Compared 24% of the time

Microsoft Azure DevOps vs Jira Align

Compared 5% of the time

Rally Software vs Jira Align

Compared 5% of the time

Planview AgilePlace vs Jira Align

Compared 4% of the time

More Jira Align Competitors

Jira vs OpenText ALM Octane

Compared 48% of the time

OpenText ALM / Quality Center vs OpenText ALM Octane

Compared 26% of the time

Microsoft Azure DevOps vs OpenText ALM Octane

Compared 8% of the time

Rally Software vs OpenText ALM Octane

Compared 3% of the time

TFS vs OpenText ALM Octane

Compared 3% of the time

More OpenText ALM Octane Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Jira Align

April 2025

Download Jira Align product report

Buyer's Guide

OpenText ALM Octane

April 2025

Download OpenText ALM Octane product report

Also Known As

AgileCraft

Micro Focus ALM Octane, Micro Focus Octane

Overview

Jira Align is a cloud-based agile planning tool designed to help enterprises visualize, manage, and carry out large-scale software and IT projects. Jira Align’s features are designed to align the activities of your company’s development team with the overall goals of the organization by helping you achieve the following results:

Connect and coordinate enterprise-level business teams.
Make your entire enterprise’s work visible to drive and improve business outcomes.
Improve product quality with a fully aligned organization.
Shorten delivery cycles by increasing operational efficiency.

With Jira Align’s integration with Jira Software, businesses can simplify governing large-scale software development efforts by translating their strategy and goals into the technical execution and delivery of work.

Jira Align uses the aggregated data from Jira Software to produce reports on every aspect of the development process. Product stakeholders are granted immediate visibility into the progress that has been made and can easily identify delays and their causes.

The solution also assists in budget planning by assigning expenses to various work items and giving management real-time insights into ongoing expenditures and performance against set budgets.

Jira Align Features

Some of the top features and benefits of using Jira Align include:

Strategy management: Jira Align provides a clear visualization of where your enterprise is holding via strategic snapshots. The snapshot helps guide teams throughout the product. With the snapshot in view, it becomes easier to see and track the goals your company wants to carry out.

Progress monitoring: View a progress bar that provides indication of the level of completeness of your projects. The interface is populated with live data, which assists with planning and execution reporting.

Reporting and metrics: Jira Align creates valuable insights using the aggregated data it collects, ensuring that changes are tracked across teams and results are made visible early on in the process. These metrics allow managers to quickly determine what actions need to be taken.

Scalability: Jira Align is designed to work within organizations with hundreds of technical staff members and it can scale to support tens of thousands of users.

Backlogs and workflows: Effectively manage your work utilizing backlogs and workflow boards.

Customizable dashboard: Lay out key data points to help management keep tabs on important items. Easily make decisions based on active live consolidated data along with forecasting, risk tracking reports, and more. To help lower risks, Jira Align provides you with a visualization of program cross dependencies. It also displays a comprehensive view of resource utilization across projects, and highlights inefficiencies so that they can be resolved quickly.

Reviews from Real Users

Jira Align stands out among its competitors for a number of reasons. Two major ones are its program-level planning options and its reporting capabilities.

A project manager at a consultancy notes, “I like how things can be sorted out, and it shows the different objectives one can do. You could also create a team view that would allow your team to see work outcomes. Jira Align also helps with the reporting, because we can export data to Excel or another format.”

Atlassian

OpenText ALM Octane helps organizations implement a “quality everywhere” approach and improve Agile and DevOps development and testing processes to improve the flow of work across the software delivery value stream. You can tightly align quality efforts from development to release, employ a broad range of tests anchored by automation, and continuously monitor and improve for increased throughput. OpenText fosters an open approach so that quality is visible, traceable, and continuously improved. By synchronizing quality and testing with Agile and DevOps processes, risks are mitigated early in the software delivery value stream – speeding the way for faster delivery and improved customer satisfaction.

ALM Octane facilitates a tailored and scalable approach for large enterprises. You can deploy your way and minimize infrastructure needs with deployment options spanning on-premises, SaaS, and public cloud (Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure Marketplaces). Similarly, various licensing options can tailor the features to meet specific needs with support for thousands of concurrent users in geographically disperse locations.

OpenText

Sample Customers

Anthem, nielsen, Homeland Security, NCR, dimension data

Orange, Airbus, Haufe Group, Kellogg's, Claro, Bon Secours, World Wide Technology

Buyer's Guide

Jira Align vs. OpenText ALM Octane

April 2025

Free Report: Jira Align vs. OpenText ALM Octane

Find out what your peers are saying about Jira Align vs. OpenText ALM Octane and other solutions. Updated: April 2025.

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