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Polarion ALM vs ServiceNow Strategic Portfolio Management comparison

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Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Dec 18, 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 Enterprise Agile Planning Tools
5th
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
6.0
Number of Reviews
24
Ranking in other categories
Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) Suites (5th)
ServiceNow Strategic Portfo...
Ranking in Enterprise Agile Planning Tools
4th
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
6.8
Number of Reviews
37
Ranking in other categories
Project Portfolio Management (8th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of September 2026, in the Enterprise Agile Planning Tools category, the mindshare of Polarion ALM is 4.2%, up from 4.1% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of ServiceNow Strategic Portfolio Management is 3.7%, down from 6.5% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Enterprise Agile Planning Tools Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
ServiceNow Strategic Portfolio Management3.7%
Polarion ALM4.2%
Other92.1%
Enterprise Agile Planning Tools
 

Featured Reviews

LasseMikkonen - PeerSpot reviewer
CEO at byte
Has provided mature traceability and configuration features while supporting complex product development for mid-to-large companies
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. For example, if you want to do testing and test result management with it, it is very limited. Jama Connect has similar limitations, and both should really focus on developing the integrations and extendability. For example, Jama Connect does not even have an extension marketplace, whereas Polarion has a small one. However, compared to the Atlassian Marketplace where you can get whatever applications for whatever price, it is a totally different ballgame. I would highly recommend Polarion ALM add more AI features to it. I know they have started to do something, but for example, I have been developing widgets for IBM DOORS Next, AI widgets, so that you can write and analyze requirements with the AI, and I have also done the same for Jira, creating a couple of Jira applications in the marketplace as well.
reviewer1470327 - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Software Analyst at a tech vendor with 10,001+ employees
Workflow automation has streamlined request tracking and approval processes for my teams
ServiceNow Strategic Portfolio Management could be made better by reducing the prices. They should also provide more features with a better price compared to other tools in the market. Power Apps and Power Automate are much cheaper now compared to ServiceNow Strategic Portfolio Management. They should provide the approval license at no cost for ServiceNow Strategic Portfolio Management; otherwise, it would be difficult to continue with ServiceNow Strategic Portfolio Management. They must add integrations with other tools, and also a plug and play integration. The auto-closing of incidents with AI should be implemented; for example, if a user is facing an issue with a computer or some application, that incident needs to be taken care of by AI itself instead of a human.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"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."
"The features I find the most valuable are requirement tracking and schematics."
"The technical support is quite good."
"Scalability is good...The integration is quite good."
"It's all in one place, where every department can utilize the same tool."
"Polarion ALM is powerful in easily creating your own workflows for completely different kinds of things."
"Polarion ALM delivers both document views and table views simultaneously and organizes configurations according to norms and standards."
"Even though Polarion is quite expensive, it's quite a good solution for medical device development in general, especially for software development."
"The new feature includes different lenses, such as the organizational lens or project manager lens, allowing us to view data through various perspectives. Previously, the journey started with demand, project, and idea management."
"The integration of ServiceNow Strategic Portfolio Management with other ServiceNow modules improves workflow efficiency by calculating overall project costs associated with vendor management."
"Everything is valuable. It is tough to choose a particular feature, but project portfolio management along with agile 2.0 are two key product features that I would suggest for services companies like us."
"Feature-wise it’s very good and unique compared to Salesforce and other business management software."
"The most valuable feature of ServiceNow Strategic Portfolio Management is incident management."
"In mature companies ready for it, the return on investment would be a nine point five."
"The stability is excellent, and ServiceNow is one of the leading platforms when it comes to stability."
"We now have good visibility of our entire information system."
 

Cons

"The system’s technology is not the most current, leading to missing features that are common in web-based applications."
"The solution is not easy to use. The configuration aspect of the solution is not easy."
"One of Polarion's shortcomings would be planning. It can handle plans, but the planning feature is very basic."
"Technical support needs some improvement."
"Based on my understanding, the tool's integration capabilities with multiple tools is an area of concern that Polarion needs to focus on more."
"The interface for this solution needs to be made more user-friendly to provide a better user experience."
"The solution needs to improve its user experience and graphics."
"The backlog management for Agile in Polarion ALM could be improved or enhanced in future releases."
"The solution is very expensive and best for larger organizations, mostly due to the fact that it would be too costly to use for medium-sized companies."
"Currently, we have to customize that. It is doable. We have done it but through customization."
"When we import a really big project with a lot of tasks on it, we face some issues with dependencies. The links between tasks are not working very well. There is definitely room for improvement there. Microsoft Project, in my opinion, is the best option for such a use case."
"The solution, currently, whatever it is, it's very concrete. Customizing it is a bit of a tedious task."
"The dashboard interface is limited functionally and is not very user friendly or particularly intuitive so that, for example, if you want to combine or correlate incidents with relevant changes for a report, it's not easily done and makes reporting difficult."
"The program isn't very user-friendly, as it is rather difficult to use."
"When we originally set it up, we had some kind of success manager free of charge, and now it's an additional charge over and above what we're paying."
"ServiceNow IT Business Management could improve by adding better artificial intelligence."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"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."
"It is an expensive product."
"Software for medical devices is always expensive."
"You have to pay around 50-60 euros per user."
"The solution is 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."
"The licensing is based on metrics and is tailored to customer's needs."
"The pricing is negotiable based on the contract and licensing perspective."
"It's more suitable for larger companies as the licensing cost is relatively high. Not everyone can afford this tool."
"I rate the price of ServiceNow Strategic Portfolio Management a seven out of ten."
"The cost of the solution should not be more than $50,000 annually."
"The tool is expensive."
"The solution is expensive."
"We have a team of about 6,500 employees across the globe. So, the amount of money I'm going to save by putting the money on the table for the implementation and licenses is very high."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Manufacturing Company
30%
Comms Service Provider
6%
Healthcare Company
6%
Computer Software Company
6%
Financial Services Firm
13%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Government
7%
Healthcare Company
7%
 

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 Business10
Midsize Enterprise3
Large Enterprise27
 

Questions from the Community

What needs improvement with Polarion ALM?
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. For example, if you want to do testing and te...
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 advice do you have for others considering Polarion ALM?
The pricing of Polarion ALM and IBM ELM is pretty much aligned. They are not at the same level, but I would say aligned according to the capabilities of the tools, with DOORS being more expensive b...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for ServiceNow Strategic Portfolio Management?
I purchased the license for the product directly from ServiceNow Strategic Portfolio Management.
What needs improvement with ServiceNow Strategic Portfolio Management?
ServiceNow Strategic Portfolio Management could be made better by reducing the prices. They should also provide more features with a better price compared to other tools in the market. Power Apps a...
What is your primary use case for ServiceNow Strategic Portfolio Management?
My use cases for ServiceNow Strategic Portfolio Management include ITSM. For ITSM, I use it for the service desk, workflow creations, catalog creation, and automatic allocations. I work with Servic...
 

Also Known As

No data available
IT Business Management, ServiceNow IT Business Management Suite, ServiceNow ITBM Suite, ServiceNow ITBM
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Engineering Ingegneria Informatica, IBS AG, Zumtobel Group
Proximus, UNT SYSTEM, SAP SuccessFactors
Find out what your peers are saying about Polarion ALM vs. ServiceNow Strategic Portfolio Management and other solutions. Updated: September 2026.
914,109 professionals have used our research since 2012.