We performed a comparison between IBM Rational ALM and OpenText ALM Octane 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.
"The cataloging is a very valuable feature. For a lot of enterprises, they end up not knowing which applications do specific features. The cataloging helps with this. It's not that verbose, but it still gives you allowances to put in more detail."
"The most valuable feature is the reporting of the CPU usage on the dashboard."
"One of the key advantages of IBM Rational ALM is its workflow capabilities, which enable seamless collaboration between development and production teams and ensure that all stakeholders are aware of the progress and readiness of the solution. Additionally, the solution is good for integration."
"It is relatively easy to use and user-friendly once the setup is complete."
"The planning feature is rich with Scrum concepts: Sprint, Sprint retrospective, the rules in the Scrum framework."
"I would rate the stability of this product a nine out of ten."
"It's easy to use."
"The word emulation and importing is good."
"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."
"A valuable feature is the pipeline, so that we can now connect to Jenkins and then have all the results from testing, from external, in the tool, so that we can see the whole approach from there. Also, We can work with labels so we have better filtering solutions than in ALM. And it's much smarter and leaner to use than ALM."
"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."
"An improvement on previous versions because it comes as preconfigured as possible."
"The feature I found most valuable in Micro Focus ALM Octane is its ability to integrate with the CI/CD stack."
"People really how easy it is to customize. In some previous tools, that has been very limited, or you had to know how to write code to do some of the customizations, or it was very confusing. Going back to the user interface, they've made the customization of the tool, the workspace settings, very easy for people to figure out and use."
"The solution natively supports Agile-Waterfall hybrid software development at an enterprise scale. This is very important to us. Because even though the company wishes to go Agile, we still have projects which follow a Waterfall methodology. In order for us to accommodate both, we needed some sort of hybrid system. Because if we are using a fully Agile system, then the reporting might not be correctly extracted."
"The stability of IBM Rational ALM could be improved."
"The solution can improve in the development area and the customized applications."
"Of course it would be related to customer experience. The solution is not user friendly at all. It needs an expert to use it, although the reporting feature was okay."
"IBM Rational ALM should remove the features not used by the customers and keep this product as lightweight as possible."
"There is not enough beginner support material in the form of FAQs or simple training to help you get started."
"I think nowadays people are getting into Jira and other tools. What is happening is, this solution is becoming more traditional, whereas Jira and other tools are more attractive for the new users to learn and start using because of the graphical interfaces."
"The directory designer manager is uncivil. The design manager is clearly really unstable."
"The product must be more user-friendly."
"The biggest problem with ALM Octane is that it's very complex, so it's difficult to use and scale."
"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"
"It would help us if ALM Octane got FedRAMP-certified, so our government departments could use the cloud solution. That way our external consultants could access it. We've created a URL to get to it, but if it were FedRAMP-certified and service and had support in the continental United States, that would be better."
"We've only had a few stability issues. Generally, we have issues following any deployment they do, so if they do a deployment on a Sunday, then we may have a couple of issues on a Monday or Tuesday."
"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."
"Octane, from an administration perspective, is very limited. The application is improving with each release but what is missing is the ability to manage users and workspaces. I would also like "usable" reporting for more than a few workspaces. Also still missing is the ability to copy a workspace or get data in or out, except for limited REST calls."
"The limitation of Octane is that we can't do a release outside of the sprint. We can only plan the release in the sprint. With Agile and JIRA tools, we can plan the release outside the sprint and do a global release of all the projects from the sprint."
"There are some challenges when we want to integrate the tool with other products, and it takes time for a team to figure out how to do it."
IBM Rational ALM is ranked 10th in Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) Suites with 17 reviews while OpenText ALM Octane is ranked 7th in Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) Suites with 38 reviews. IBM Rational ALM is rated 7.2, while OpenText ALM Octane is rated 8.2. The top reviewer of IBM Rational ALM writes "A complex deployment that is not stable, but is cloud-based". On the other hand, 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". IBM Rational ALM is most compared with Jira, Codebeamer, Microsoft Azure DevOps, Polarion ALM and PTC Integrity, whereas OpenText ALM Octane is most compared with Jira, OpenText ALM / Quality Center, Microsoft Azure DevOps, Rally Software and GitLab. See our IBM Rational ALM vs. OpenText ALM Octane report.
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