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Jira vs Polarion ALM comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Jul 27, 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
6.8
Number of Reviews
275
Ranking in other categories
Application Requirements Management (1st), Project Management Software (1st)
Polarion ALM
Ranking in Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) Suites
3rd
Average Rating
7.8
Reviews Sentiment
6.2
Number of Reviews
23
Ranking in other categories
Enterprise Agile Planning Tools (6th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of September 2025, in the Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) Suites category, the mindshare of Jira is 17.7%, down from 23.8% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Polarion ALM is 7.5%, up from 6.1% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) Suites Market Share Distribution
ProductMarket Share (%)
Jira17.7%
Polarion ALM7.5%
Other74.8%
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 as a structure has Confluence for documentation, and for what it is offering it is a strong suit with Atlassian."
"The solution has been very stable overall."
"The roadmap feature and the ability to integrate with Power BI are probably the most valuable features in it. It is a great solution. I absolutely love it. It is a tool that was designed for project management, and it has been awesome to work with it so far. I also love Confluence."
"I found it super useful, as it is customizable for different teams and users."
"Jira is a comprehensive tool for managing projects. It helps in task segregation and assignment, making it time-efficient for employees."
"It's a very complete product overall."
"One of the most valuable features is querying because the jQuery function is very good. Additionally, we can create good designs very easily."
"It's very flexible. I can define workflows and custom fields and dependencies between issues and projects. And every project can have a custom configuration with my fields, my names for fields, my validations, and my workflows. It's very customizable."
"I am impressed with the solution’s stability."
"We had a nice experience with technical support."
"It meets with everybody's needs without having to grab plugins."
"It offers good performance."
"The features I find the most valuable are requirement tracking and schematics."
"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."
"Polarion ALM has some valuable tools for managing our targets and requirements. I think that's its best feature."
"The most valuable feature is the function of the ALM system."
 

Cons

"The reporting capabilities, specifically customized reports, should be improved. The out-of-box reports don't meet our needs. We are big into customizing our reports, and being able to do ad hoc reporting would be good."
"We'd like to use it with non-Agile projects in the future, however, right now, it is a very Agile-focused product."
"Tracking is important but the built-in features don't meet our needs."
"Ease of administration and customization. It is really clunky in this area."
"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."
"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."
"The documentation on how to create dashboards and take advantage of other features in the tool are areas where the tool has certain shortcomings."
"The initial setup was a bit problematic in terms of getting access to Jira. That goes for a few users, including me."
"The solution can be improved by making it more user-friendly, and a server-based application rather than client based."
"The configuration aspect of the solution is not easy. A person needs a lot of programming knowledge in order to successfully handle the job."
"The interface for this solution needs to be made more user-friendly to provide a better user experience."
"The ease-of-use could be improved a little."
"The system’s technology is not the most current, leading to missing features that are common in web-based applications."
"We use PTC Windchill, and Polarion ALM doesn't have native integration, so we had to purchase the connector to integrate it with Polarion ALM. We still haven't implemented it."
"The weak point of Polarion ALM software is about reporting and time for extraction of the data...The quality of reporting needs to improve."
"One of Polarion's shortcomings would be planning. It can handle plans, but the planning feature is very basic."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"We are a regional research and education institute. We're using the free license provided for educational institutes."
"There is an annual subscription to use Jira."
"The price of Jira could be lower."
"As a company, we get a subsidized price, and it's lower than what's quoted on their website."
"We are using the enterprise license which is nice because it ensures that we always have the latest versions of Jira software."
"The price of Jira is reasonable."
"I don't deal with licensing in my current consultant position."
"I rate the tool's pricing a five out of ten. It's paid yearly."
"It is an expensive product."
"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."
"You have to pay around 50-60 euros per user."
"The license model is okay for large companies but would be quite expensive for smaller enterprises."
"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."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Manufacturing Company
16%
Financial Services Firm
11%
Computer Software Company
10%
Government
8%
Manufacturing Company
28%
Computer Software Company
11%
Healthcare Company
7%
Educational Organization
4%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business102
Midsize Enterprise57
Large Enterprise149
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business9
Midsize Enterprise3
Large Enterprise12
 

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 backlog management for Agile in Polarion ALM could be improved or enhanced in future releases. What is missing is that if you have a hierarchy in your backlog with epics, features, and user sto...
What is your primary use case for Polarion ALM?
We are in our product development using Polarion ALM's functionalities. I am a power user, partly responsible for configuring the tool. We are using it for many things. The idea was to go for a req...
 

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: September 2025.
867,445 professionals have used our research since 2012.