We performed a comparison between IBM Rational ALM and TFS 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."
"You can customize the board according to your needs."
"At the same time, if you're working from the architect or the designing team you, it's quite easy to manage the resources online."
"The most valuable feature is the reporting of the CPU usage on the dashboard."
"The integration with Git works well."
"The planning feature is rich with Scrum concepts: Sprint, Sprint retrospective, the rules in the Scrum framework."
"We have something called the GC (global configuration), which is a unique feature compared to any other competitor we have in the ALM space."
"The solution is customizable."
"Work item management integration with source control."
"The solution is very much stable."
"The work item feature is most valuable. It allows us to store all product requirements. We can also link the test cases to those requirements so that we know which feature has already been tested, and which one is waiting for testing. We can also couple the code reviews, unit tests, and automated tests into these requirements. It is reliable. It has all the features and good performance. It also has reporting tools or analysis tools."
"For what I need TFS for, I have never run into any limitation."
"The most valuable features are the dashboard and task-selection capability."
"What I like the most is that you can set permissions on just one folder."
"The most valuable feature is simplicity."
"TFS is very user-friendly."
"One of the complaints from users is that they have to click buttons too many times for just a simple task. Changing this would lead to a better user experience."
"Some improvements to the user interface (UI) would be helpful, such as exposing more services to make it easier to customize to the needs of each customer."
"There is not enough beginner support material in the form of FAQs or simple training to help you get started."
"The directory designer manager is uncivil. The design manager is clearly really unstable."
"The stability of IBM Rational ALM could be improved."
"IBM Rational ALM should remove the features not used by the customers and keep this product as lightweight as possible."
"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."
"The GUI is a little bit outdated."
"TFS needs to be stable."
"TFS isn't a great tool if you're on the cloud."
"Integration from Visual Studio could be improved."
"There are many things that I cannot do, and I have a lot of bugs."
"More options could be provided from the perspective of requirements management, which would help product owners to use the tool effectively."
"Merging branches is definitely one of the more challenging aspects for people new to TFS."
"Overall, I think it would be useful to have something similar where Microsoft comes up with supporting concepts of scaling Agile in TFS so that clients don't have to look for a separate tool."
"They have room for improvement in merging the source code changes for multiple developers across files. It is very good at highlighting the changes that the source code automatically does not know how to handle, but it's not very good at reporting the ones that it did automatically. There are times when we have source code that gets merged, and we lose the changes that we expected to happen. It can get a little confusing at times. They can just do a little bit better on the merging of changes for multiple developers."
IBM Rational ALM is ranked 10th in Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) Suites with 17 reviews while TFS is ranked 3rd in Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) Suites with 93 reviews. IBM Rational ALM is rated 7.2, while TFS is rated 8.0. 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 TFS writes "It is helpful for scheduled releases and enforcing rules, but it should be better at merging changes for multiple developers and retaining the historical information". IBM Rational ALM is most compared with Jira, Codebeamer, Microsoft Azure DevOps, Polarion ALM and PTC Integrity, whereas TFS is most compared with Microsoft Azure DevOps, Jira, Rally Software, TestRail and OpenText ALM / Quality Center. See our IBM Rational ALM vs. TFS report.
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