We performed a comparison between OpenText ALM Octane and Polarion ALM based on real PeerSpot user reviews.
Find out in this report how the two Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) Suites solutions compare in terms of features, pricing, service and support, easy of deployment, and ROI."With an Octane project, we have our automation, our requirements, our tests, our pipeline into build-and-deploy, and the ability to identify problem areas. It makes things quicker because it's more along the lines of an automated process."
"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 most useful feature of Micro Focus ALM Octane is the dashboards, they are easy to use."
"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."
"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."
"The interface is user-friendly."
"On the user side, what I like a lot is the reporting capabilities. There's no tool, to my knowledge, that gets anywhere close to Octane at the moment when it comes to the reporting capabilities. I can do everything with the reporting. There's nothing missing. I have all the options. I can create graphs, including graphs of several types and looks."
"The platform's most valuable feature is pipeline integration or continuous integration services."
"It is a very stable solution."
"We had a nice experience with technical support."
"The initial setup of this solution was straightforward, and there were not too many problems with it."
"It offers good performance."
"It meets with everybody's needs without having to grab plugins."
"The solution offers good integration."
"Scalability is good...The integration is quite good."
"The tool helped us to more effectively and efficiently gather and structure the information (requirements, test plans, project management data, etc.), and share it with the involved stakeholders in a safe and change-controlled manner."
"I would like to see the mobile testing improved so that we can simply select a mobile device, then specify what parameters we want, and the testing will be run based on that."
"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."
"When I manage projects that are being created in ALM, I have a standard template, but I don't have a template for them in Octane. I literally have to create the project from the ground up every time, which for an administrator, is a nightmare solution"
"Because JIRA is a leading tool for both development and requirements management - everybody is using JIRA - I'm pretty there will be a use case where people are trying to connect between ALM Octane and JIRA. The back-end configuration of the synchronization with JIRA could be simplified. The architecture is really complicated. We required a lot of machines to build the cluster and the configuration was not really clearly described within the documentation. This may have something to do with the fact that the software is pretty new."
"We have some requests to beef up the manual testing abilities and the ability to report on testing progress. All the basics are there, but there's an issue of maintainability. For example... once you plan a test and it creates a run, more particularly a suite run, you can't edit the suite run afterward... That that is not realistic with how people work. Mistakes are made and people are humans and we change our minds about things. So the tool needs to allow for a bit more flexibility in that testing area, as well as some better widgets to report on progress."
"It could use just some small improvements. I would like additional features, like planning features, user story mapping, or connection to collaboration tools."
"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 reporting is lacking from a requirements matrix and a traceability perspective."
"The planning and task management aspects of the solution were not that easy."
"Technical support needs some improvement."
"The interface for this solution needs to be made more user-friendly to provide a better user experience."
"The solution's editing capabilities need improvement."
"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."
"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 configuration aspect of the solution is not easy. A person needs a lot of programming knowledge in order to successfully handle the job."
"The most important thing for them to improve should be platform-independent features. They should also provide extensive pipelines and release pipelines that we can define and we can work on."
OpenText ALM Octane is ranked 5th in Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) Suites with 38 reviews while Polarion ALM is ranked 7th in Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) Suites with 17 reviews. OpenText ALM Octane is rated 8.2, while Polarion ALM is rated 7.6. 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". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Polarion ALM writes "Though needing an improvement in reporting and time for extraction of the data, its integration capabilities are good". OpenText ALM Octane is most compared with Jira, OpenText ALM / Quality Center, Microsoft Azure DevOps, Rally Software and GitLab, whereas Polarion ALM is most compared with Jira, Microsoft Azure DevOps, Codebeamer, PTC Integrity and GitLab. See our OpenText ALM Octane vs. Polarion ALM report.
See our list of best Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) Suites vendors and best Enterprise Agile Planning Tools vendors.
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