We performed a comparison between Jira and Micro Focus Alm Octane based on our users’ reviews in four categories. After reading all of the collected data, you can find our conclusion below.
Comparison Results: Based on the parameters we compared, Jira is a bit ahead of Micro Focus. Our reviewers found Micro Focus to be more complex to install and to have weaker security integrations. Its price point is more pleasing than Jira’s however.
"The workflows are very easy to handle as far as scalability goes."
"Being able to automatize the deployment of the solution has been great."
"It allows you to do a lot of stuff, and the functionality is pretty rich. It integrates well with other products, like GitLab, that we are currently intensely using at the company."
"Overall, the solution is very nice and has a variety of great features."
"The adaptability of the Scrum and Kanban boards for other uses, with careful use of the customization features."
"It is a stable solution, and we have had no issues with stability."
"The dynamic communication and the ability to customize it the way we want are the most valuable features."
"The user story map is excellent. The features can be composed into stories and they can be allocated to each of the sprints in a program increment. It allows you to see all that in the user story map, and you have various dashboards to see the stories in various views. You can see them as a backlog view, for example, or you can see as an actual sprint view."
"It’s easy to set up."
"We like Micro Focus ALM Octane because its performance is okay, and its stability is okay, so we use it a lot. The platform is easy to use."
"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."
"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."
"The interface is user-friendly."
"The filtering options are very good once you learn them. The document reports are also valuable. You can create reports in Word and PDF formats. That's very useful."
"The key feature is the usability. It is fast to learn and easy to use. It's very intuitive to work with. Most of the important functions are available via a few clicks, compared to other tools where I have to open a sub-menu and then a sub-menu and another sub-menu, and then press a button."
"There are a lot of predefined reports. We can attach additional reports for users, like who worked on what defect and when, as well as what is the status of the release compared to the previous release. It is really endless. All the data is really linked together. Then, if all the data is linked together, there is an option to prepare reports out of it. We are very impressed with its reporting capabilities."
"Jira could be easier to use, especially for administrative tasks. It's quite complex, so it's important to understand it well. While the reporting and dashboards are good, there's room for improvement in some areas where extra features would be helpful."
"From a very software-centric or a lead developer standpoint, there should be the ability to work at multiple levels. You have epic stories and use cases or epic stories and tasks. It would be nice to be able to have multiple levels of stories and multiple levels of epics work with it. It's lacking a little bit there, and this is the big thing for me because it makes it difficult to do a real sprint when you're limited to one story per epic. It's really hard to isolate tasks at multiple levels to match the type of use cases you normally do. That's the biggest difficulty. Other than that, they've been improving year to year, and every version seems to have a level of improvement."
"Based on the feedback from my admin, it is sometimes difficult to find some of the features. It is not a big deal, but its configuration interface can be improved to make it easy to find things."
"They can maybe dumb down the directions for building the automation a little bit because to be able to build out the automation, I had to play around with it and learn what all the fields meant and what they were referencing. I don't have an IT background originally. My background is in biology, and I got into project management by chance. I am good at it, but I haven't really worked with coding languages. In terms of writing automation, it is easier for devs because they intuitively know what they're being asked, but as a PM who originally didn't have IT experience, it was a little bit daunting at first. It could also have an extra hierarchy to be able to allow tasks under stories. It could be the way it is set up at our organization, but currently, under stories, you can have sub-tasks, but you can't create a task. Being able to customize your hierarchy a little bit more would be beneficial because sometimes, the devs would say, "Well, here's a story, and now we need sub-tasks," but as we were building out the sub-tasks, sometimes we had to go a step lower to dig in a little bit more, and we couldn't do that."
"Having more seamless integration with Confluence would really help us track our product management activity and other product details in one place."
"I would like to see more robust release management within the tool."
"I would like our clients' IT group to be able to have oversight without setting up agents. We're managing tickets, and I'd like their IT group to see everything we're doing without having to set them up as agents. There should be a better way of managing their users. I've got such requests, but Jira is expensive, and it is difficult to pay an agent fee for somebody else to view these tickets. Currently, the only way in which I can do that is by setting a user up as an agent, and it becomes cost-prohibitive. They need to do a better job on ticket viewers."
"It can have a more high-level view of portfolios. It has quite detailed views, but I would like a high-level view of portfolios. We want to integrate Jira with Microsoft Active Directory, and I don't know how easy or hard it is going to be. I don't know if Jira supports this. We are starting that integration in the last quarter of this year. I hope to find all the required tools for this integration."
"Also, while there is a Requirements Module in Octane, it is very plain. It's okay to have some requirements described there, but it's not really following the whole BDD approach. I would like to have more features for requirements in there."
"The limitation of Octane is that we can't do a release outside of the sprint. We can only plan the release in the sprint. With Agile and JIRA tools, we can plan the release outside the sprint and do a global release of all the projects from the sprint."
"The biggest problem with ALM Octane is that it's very complex, so it's difficult to use and scale."
"Octane, from an administration perspective, is very limited. The application is improving with each release but what is missing is the ability to manage users and workspaces. I would also like "usable" reporting for more than a few workspaces. Also still missing is the ability to copy a workspace or get data in or out, except for limited REST calls."
"Development of extensions or connections to GitHub actions could be better. Better integration with Azure DevOps would also help."
"Security and security management, meaning the integration of the security, could be enhanced. We know about Fortify, but it would be better to have security features in the original Octane platform without the need for another solution or another application."
"The elements in filtering need to be improved, meaning the number of filters I can use in widgets or in the grid views in parallel. There's a limitation which bothers a lot of our users. Filtering in text, or having a complex filter is limited. In a given field, for example, I can use a filter only once. I cannot say, 'Include the values 1, 2, and 3, and exclude value 17.' This is not possible but we have requested it often."
"What could be improved in Micro Focus ALM Octane is its integration with Jira."
Jira is ranked 2nd in Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) Suites with 259 reviews while OpenText ALM Octane is ranked 5th in Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) Suites with 38 reviews. Jira is rated 8.2, while OpenText ALM Octane is rated 8.2. The top reviewer of Jira writes "A great centralized tool that has a good agile framework and is useful for day-to-day planning, task management, and work log efficacy". On the other hand, the top reviewer of OpenText ALM Octane writes "Reporting engine, widgets, and dashboards are a huge plus, and powerful REST interface means we can interact with other tools". Jira is most compared with Microsoft Azure DevOps, IBM Rational DOORS, Rally Software, Polarion ALM and TFS, whereas OpenText ALM Octane is most compared with OpenText ALM / Quality Center, Microsoft Azure DevOps, Rally Software, GitLab and Codebeamer. See our Jira vs. OpenText ALM Octane report.
See our list of best Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) Suites vendors.
We monitor all Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) Suites reviews to prevent fraudulent reviews and keep review quality high. We do not post reviews by company employees or direct competitors. We validate each review for authenticity via cross-reference with LinkedIn, and personal follow-up with the reviewer when necessary.
ALM Octane integrates easily out of the box with Jira,
additionally, once you DevSecOps users are onboard to Octane,
they will realize Octane does more, so they can reduce their dependence on Jira.
Several of my customers have come to this realization.
Octane is an Enterprise solution, but Jira is not.