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Jira vs Polarion ALM comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Apr 20, 2025

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
Ranking in Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) Suites
1st
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
6.9
Number of Reviews
274
Ranking in other categories
Application Requirements Management (1st), Project Management Software (1st)
Polarion ALM
Ranking in Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) Suites
6th
Average Rating
7.8
Reviews Sentiment
6.5
Number of Reviews
22
Ranking in other categories
Enterprise Agile Planning Tools (6th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of July 2025, in the Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) Suites category, the mindshare of Jira is 20.5%, down from 24.0% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Polarion ALM is 8.2%, up from 5.7% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) Suites
 

Featured Reviews

AmitUbale - PeerSpot reviewer
Efficient project management that's comprehensive and and helps with time efficiency
We use Jira primarily for project management within the organization. It helps us manage tasks, bug management, and tracking tickets effectively. We assign tickets to individual team members and track them easily For project management, Jira has helped facilitate efficient task segregation and…
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

"Jira has a good reporting system. It also has an API, so we can do all sorts of reporting."
"Being able to automatize the deployment of the solution has been great."
"We have around 2000 plus users, so scale wise, there are no issues. We can easily scale up with multiple users."
"It's easy to use, and it also offers excellent notifications."
"Kanban board: The board is easy to use and visually impressive to non-IT users, who found it easy to relate to."
"Jira is great for story management."
"The workflows are very easy to handle as far as scalability goes."
"I like the test cases in Jira. The orange dash items view was great, and I like the features and layout of the data. It's quite different, and people are now getting their items so quickly."
"The most valuable feature is the function of the ALM system."
"Polarion ALM helps us better structure our customer requirements, and we can also validate the specs of our products against those. If anything changes on our side, we see the impact, and we can see the effect If a customer changes requirements."
"I am impressed with the solution’s stability."
"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."
"It meets with everybody's needs without having to grab plugins."
"Scalability is good...The integration is quite good."
"The solution offers good integration."
"You can see the work ticket and you can circulate that within the teams. You can define your flows, customize according to your needs, and you can create dashboards and create the reports according to your needs."
 

Cons

"For a non-technical person to use, Jira is not intuitive."
"I would love to have more features to make nice documents, like Release Notes or a feature overview, right from JIRA."
"There could be some improvements in the project management and portfolio level features."
"I think that there is some ease of use that could be brought in to improve certain things."
"My main concern is the administration of projects, especially user groups, and this requires root access rights but there is no concept of layered admin rights."
"The tool should improve its pricing."
"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."
"From the project management perspective, I would say there are a lot of different issues that could be tweaked. There can be small improvements with traceability, for example."
"The user interface is not yet optimized."
"The user interface of Polarion ALM needs improvement as it can experience changes that disrupt workflows, especially during major updates."
"The configuration aspect of the solution is not easy. A person needs a lot of programming knowledge in order to successfully handle the job."
"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 solution can be improved by making it more user-friendly, and a server-based application rather than client based."
"The tool needs to improve its planning. It also needs to add more integrations."
"The solution needs to improve its user experience and graphics."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Almost everybody uses JIRA nowadays because it is the most cost-effective solution."
"One of my customers told me that they were receiving better pricing for a similar tool from Microsoft."
"I don't deal with licensing in my current consultant position."
"The licensing model is annoying. They nickel and dime you."
"To try this solution, use their cloud offering to get familiar. After that, it's in my view worth the money."
"We currently have ten users, and it is free for ten users."
"There is a monthly license required for this solution and it is expensive."
"The price of Jira could be lower."
"Software for medical devices is always 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 solution is expensive."
"It is an expensive product."
"The license model is okay for large companies but would be quite expensive for smaller enterprises."
"You have to pay around 50-60 euros per user."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Educational Organization
25%
Manufacturing Company
12%
Financial Services Firm
9%
Computer Software Company
8%
Manufacturing Company
27%
Computer Software Company
13%
Healthcare Company
7%
Financial Services Firm
4%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
 

Questions from the Community

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...
Which is better - Jira or Microsoft Azure DevOps?
Jira is a great centralized tool for just about everything, from local team management to keeping track of products and work logs. It is easy to implement and navigate, and it is stable and scalabl...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Jira?
We operate under a nonlimited license with Jira, allowing a number of users to access it with a single enterprise license.
What needs improvement with Polarion ALM?
The user interface of Polarion ALM needs improvement as it can experience changes that disrupt workflows, especially during major updates. Sometimes, database migrations take too long, spanning two...
What is your primary use case for Polarion ALM?
As a manual tester, I use Polarion ALM ( /products/polarion-alm-reviews ) for our weekly builds validation. These builds are crucial as they eventually lead to final release builds for customers. I...
 

Comparisons

 

Also Known As

Jira Software
No data available
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Square, Nasa, eBay, Cisco, SalesForce, Adobe, BNP Paribas, BMW and LinkedIn, Pfizer, Citi.
Engineering Ingegneria Informatica, IBS AG, Zumtobel Group
Find out what your peers are saying about Jira vs. Polarion ALM and other solutions. Updated: June 2025.
860,632 professionals have used our research since 2012.