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Polarion ALM vs Rally Software comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Dec 15, 2024

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

Polarion ALM
Ranking in Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) Suites
6th
Ranking in Enterprise Agile Planning Tools
7th
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
6.2
Number of Reviews
24
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
Rally Software
Ranking in Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) Suites
10th
Ranking in Enterprise Agile Planning Tools
6th
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
6.9
Number of Reviews
120
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of October 2025, in the Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) Suites category, the mindshare of Polarion ALM is 7.5%, up from 6.4% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Rally Software is 5.8%, down from 6.7% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) Suites Market Share Distribution
ProductMarket Share (%)
Polarion ALM7.5%
Rally Software5.8%
Other86.7%
Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) Suites
 

Featured Reviews

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.
Rakhee Srivastava - PeerSpot reviewer
Real-time dashboards provide clear insights into project progress and team velocity
Rally Software is easy to use for Agile project methodology because it follows Scrum and Kanban, helping with sprint planning and backlog management. Rally Software provides real-time dashboards for different kinds of stakeholders and governance, giving clear insights into project progress, team velocity, and potential risks. Backlog management is present in the product, allowing prioritization of tasks. The dashboards provide all types of insights through analytics. Capacity planning helps optimize resource allocation, ensuring balanced workload and realistic sprint commitments for our projects. The solution integrates with GitHub, and we can also integrate with Excel and CI/CD pipelines.

Quotes from Members

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Pros

"We had a nice experience with technical support."
"Polarion ALM delivers both document views and table views simultaneously and organizes configurations according to norms and standards."
"When it comes to functionalities like a real-time collaboration feature and traceability capabilities, Polarion ALM has had those basic features for the past five years already, and they are pretty mature products that have all the needed requirements management features, such as traceability and reporting, and even configuration management or version controlling."
"The solution offers good integration."
"The software is stable."
"Polarion ALM's integration is very good and easy to use."
"The best feature of Polarion ALM to me is its traceability link."
"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."
"With this product, searching for historical information or the evolution of the requirement, detecting conflict between projects has helped a lot."
"The product has excellent customizable reports."
"The effect of these kind of tools drives the way you organize things. It helps you shape the way you flow."
"Having that view into features and roadmap from product to delivery teams, and where they are going, then execute on."
"When it comes to the valuable features of Rally Software, it excels at burn-down charts, burn-up charts, and road mapping once it's set up. I particularly appreciated the new feature for releases and road mapping, which worked exceptionally well."
"The most valuable feature is actually creating a field within there for architectural review. So when teams are struggling or have questions on the architecture or strategy that they take, they can actually flag that particular story, release, or project. Those can then be reviewed by the architecture team and the teams actually get additional information on how to course-correct, build on the architecture that we're trying to build throughout the organization, and get over road blocks much quicker."
"It's very user-friendly."
"We use the roadmap features, and we're getting better at using dates to use the roadmap so that we can see if we're on target for work."
 

Cons

"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."
"The user interface is not yet optimized."
"Based on my understanding, the tool's integration capabilities with multiple tools is an area of concern that Polarion needs to focus on more."
"Technical support needs some improvement."
"The ease-of-use could be improved a little."
"Test management lacks an automated process."
"Nowadays, the dashboard is too complex to be created."
"The solution can be improved by making it more user-friendly, and a server-based application rather than client based."
"The solution is expensive."
"I think the interface could be a little bit more visual and less wordy. Right now, it seems like it's just a lot of text on the page. In other ticketing systems where it's more visual, you can see more of a flow. But in this one it's more just a list of tasks. I would like to see that a little bit better, especially considering it has so many great organizational features, like child tasks, different artifacts. It would be great to see it presented more appropriately."
"From a test management perspective, it should have the capability to give you both automation and manual integration in one place."
"What I don't like about it is that it is really hard to find old work to reference information and use the reporting section of the application in terms of trying to analyze trends. If I am trying to find out which interfaces took this long and I want to compare and measure improvement from one quarter to another quarter, the reporting mechanism within Rally is very troublesome. They have an Excel plugin that you're supposed to use, but you literally have to pull the raw data out before you can do the analysis. You can't do it within Rally, and if you can, it is a secret, and I don't know how to do it. It should have better, easier, and user-friendly reporting without having to use the Excel add-in. It is very clunky. There is a lot of data in there, but it is not organized in such a way that makes it intuitive. You really have to kind of look for where do you put your documentation or dates. Some customization is available, but it is not plug-and-play like Jira. When I switched from TFS to Jira, I just went and started using Jira, whereas with Rally, you kind of have to really get in and figure out what you need to do before you set stuff up, or you're going to get yourself stuck. You can just start using Jira and be successful."
"The product itself seems to have a lot of bugs. One issue is that it sometimes allows people to modify data inappropriately. For example, team members can change numbers at will. While we have a mechanism to track changes, people can still alter numbers, create or delete tasks, and create or delete high-level activities without proper controls."
"Rally Software is highly complex, and it takes some effort to get everything tied together. But once you do, it's a satisfying experience, and the result looks beautiful. Azure, ServiceNow, and Jira do not have all the features that Rally Software provides in one place, making it an exceptional tool for project management."
"The navigation within the tool sometimes is a little tricky for me. I'm sure with more use, more practice, I'll become accustomed to it, but some of the things just aren't intuitive."
"There's a lot of support for Scrum and Agile, but it needs something for the Kanban side."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The solution is expensive."
"If the pricing would come down and it was more affordable then we wouldn't have to switch."
"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."
"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."
"Software for medical devices is always expensive."
"It is an expensive product."
"The license costs are fairly high as compared to some of the other solutions out there."
"We are always looking for a discount, if the solution was less expensive it would be a benefit."
"I understand it's a little more expensive. That is why many people prefer Jira."
"Rally Software costs $50 a month, and for a base account, that price is acceptable."
"From a price point, it's a cost effective solution for our needs."
"It is expensive and may not be worthwhile for a small company."
"I don't know the exact pricing, but I think the tool is priced high. They provide quality workmanship, good software, regular upgrades, and they're always attentive and listen to users. Everything comes with a price. I think it's an expensive solution compared to Jira or other competitors, but it's a complete package."
"Frankly, pricing is expensive and needs to be carefully planned for when budgeting."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Manufacturing Company
28%
Computer Software Company
11%
Healthcare Company
6%
Educational Organization
4%
Manufacturing Company
16%
Financial Services Firm
11%
Insurance Company
9%
Computer Software Company
8%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business10
Midsize Enterprise3
Large Enterprise12
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business13
Midsize Enterprise13
Large Enterprise110
 

Questions from the Community

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...
What do you like most about Rally Software?
Rally offers many features that help the management of activities, coordination, alignment and reports, which applies agility across the organization. If I were to highlight a particular feature, i...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Rally Software?
Rally Software is affordable because our customers also prefer it, and I have never heard concerns about pricing preventing us from using this tool.
What needs improvement with Rally Software?
While I'm not heavily involved in project management tools, I am familiar with these tools. One area for improvement might be the rigidity in role and access configurations, which require many proc...
 

Also Known As

No data available
CA Agile Central, Rally Enterprise, CA Agile Training, CA Agile Coaching, CA Agile Academy, CA Agile Management , CA ALM
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Engineering Ingegneria Informatica, IBS AG, Zumtobel Group
Physicians Mutual, Harvard Pilgrim HealthCare, Editora Abril, Tata Communications, Level 3 Communications, Seagate, TomTom, Philips, Hiscox, Physicians Mutual, MYOB
Find out what your peers are saying about Polarion ALM vs. Rally Software and other solutions. Updated: September 2025.
872,778 professionals have used our research since 2012.