We performed a comparison between Rally Software 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."Helps me determine how fast I can launch, go to production."
"The reporting, and being able to roll that up across the verticals, was an important selling point for us."
"Gives me a dashboard where I can see what things are not being worked on, what things are blocked."
"Tech support is very responsive, helpful, and available."
"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."
"It's designed around Agile, so it has all of the pieces that match up with the process."
"The main ways that I used it when I was in it day to day was keeping up with the burn rate within the teams. Also, to track at the feature level too, as far as how we were doing with actually being able to deliver that feature."
"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."
"The most valuable feature of TFS is that it keeps the code secure while working collaboratively in a team of four or five individuals."
"The most valuable feature is the backlog."
"The most valuable features are the dashboard and task-selection capability."
"We use TFS for forecast management."
"The API for managing TFS programmatically is very powerful, you can listen on work items changes by TFS events."
"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."
"It is a stable solution."
"Some of the valuable features are version control and the ability to create different collections in terms of segregating the authorization for teams who connect to small projects."
"I think there needs to be some simplification. The team-level side can be challenging and complicated."
"More customization capabilities would be helpful. Providing a little bit more structure around how the system should be set up in terms of the hierarchy structure might be helpful as well."
"We would like more meaningful, customizable dashboards."
"One problem I see is that if there is a dependent user story - for example, if my team is working on one thing and there is a dependent user story from another team - we can have a dependency created but we don't know if there is a change of status from the other team. That is something which is very important for Agile Central to look into so that if the other team makes any changes we will be notified as well."
"The stronger CA can get on dependency mapping the better. That's the biggest hiccup. As you're setting up your features, they should make it easier to flag the dependencies, either across features or across projects. Then you're more set up for success."
"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."
"More importantly, we are seeing internal challenges from Atlassian because of their highly integrated suite that enables further automation and centralization of activities that are also highly necessary – messaging notifications cued off builds, collaboration on Solution Architecture Documentation, etc."
"I wish there was a view, like the Kanban view, where you could see the parent, and see all the children visually, so you could drag and drop where you want it to go. Something like that might help."
"TFS needs to be stable."
"Since the TFS was an on-prem solution, the private network accessibility was restricted."
"The interface can be improved and made more user-friendly."
"TFS isn't a great tool if you're on the cloud."
"Merging branches is definitely one of the more challenging aspects for people new to TFS."
"I'd like to see some kind of visualization tool for TFS that would make life much easier."
"TFS and MTM have their own style of working and they are different from other tools like Jira or TestRail, which are simpler and easy to use."
"The solution is stable but could improve."
Rally Software is ranked 8th in Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) Suites with 116 reviews while TFS is ranked 3rd in Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) Suites with 93 reviews. Rally Software is rated 8.2, while TFS is rated 8.0. The top reviewer of Rally Software writes "A solution that enables users to accurately estimate the time required for building large software projects". 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". Rally Software is most compared with Microsoft Azure DevOps, Jira, Jira Align, OpenText ALM / Quality Center and Digital.ai Agility, whereas TFS is most compared with Microsoft Azure DevOps, Jira, Visual Studio Test Professional, OpenText ALM / Quality Center and TestRail. See our Rally Software vs. TFS report.
See our list of best Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) Suites vendors.
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