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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

"The software is stable."
"Scalability is good...The integration is quite good."
"Polarion ALM delivers both document views and table views simultaneously and organizes configurations according to norms and standards."
"The solution offers good integration."
"I am impressed with the solution’s stability."
"Polarion ALM has some valuable tools for managing our targets and requirements. I think that's its best feature."
"Polarion ALM's integration is very good and easy to use."
"It offers good performance."
"It helps me evaluate teams' historical performance using velocity charts."
"Agile Central allows us to log one hundred percent of the work we do and it allows for no hidden work, so teams can't go under the radar with what they're working on."
"Reporting is much easier and faster than Micro Focus ALM, with CA AC built on web services... Also, the data is more granular when it comes to tasks, iterations, sprints, and releases."
"What I like most about Rally Software, in terms of using it for the agile process, is that it's clear, useful, and user-friendly. I also like that it has every field you can use for the Scrum process."
"The metrics - collecting metrics. It's because we've used several other tools in the past, and they don't give you a full indication of how well your teams are performing, at a portfolio level, at a product level, and at the team level."
"The effect of these kind of tools drives the way you organize things. It helps you shape the way you flow."
"The Defect feature. In one view you can see all your defects and you can push them into the different releases."
"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."
 

Cons

"The weak point of Polarion ALM software is about reporting and time for extraction of the data...The quality of reporting needs to improve."
"The ease-of-use could be improved a little."
"Polarion ALM can learn from Atlassian tools a lot, as the usability is not the best, and it is really narrowly focused on requirements management only."
"The user interface is not yet optimized."
"The tool needs to improve its planning. It also needs to add more integrations."
"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 planning and task management aspects of the solution were not that easy."
"The system’s technology is not the most current, leading to missing features that are common in web-based applications."
"It's a bit cumbersome to manage the Project Picker. As we sunset teams or projects close out - but we still have test cases tied to those teams or projects that are being used in other spaces - we have this monstrous list in the Project Picker that becomes really difficult to manage and find, and we can't clean that up ourselves. It would be nice if it was easier to do that and not lose your history."
"The Reporting feature can improve, especially around executive summaries and dependency mapping."
"We would like more meaningful, customizable dashboards."
"It could improve by being self-organizing: user stories, different hierarchies, and different perspectives. Not just as a single hierarchical structure, but something that can be multidimensional."
"I would like for workspace admins to be able to hide projects in the Project Picker and not lose any historical data; make them invisible to certain users, visible to certain users, depending on permission sets. That would be lovely."
"A lot of the features that we would be looking to add, I am learning may not be within Agile Central, but part of another CA tool set."
"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."
"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."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The solution is expensive."
"The license model is okay for large companies but would be quite expensive for smaller enterprises."
"If the pricing would come down and it was more affordable then we wouldn't have to switch."
"It is an expensive product."
"You have to pay around 50-60 euros per user."
"Software for medical devices is always expensive."
"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."
"We are always looking for a discount, if the solution was less expensive it would be a benefit."
"Frankly, pricing is expensive and needs to be carefully planned for when budgeting."
"From a price point, it's a cost effective solution for our needs."
"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."
"I understand it's a little more expensive. That is why many people prefer Jira."
"It is expensive and may not be worthwhile for a small company."
"The license costs are fairly high as compared to some of the other solutions out there."
"Rally Software costs $50 a month, and for a base account, that price is acceptable."
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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.