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."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."
"Everyone in a team can work on the same platform and share the same information."
"It is relatively easy to use and user-friendly once the setup is complete."
"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."
"It's easy to use."
"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 tools for requirement capture we have found very useful."
"The word emulation and importing is good."
"Octane creates a gentle approach to Agile-based projects."
"The way testing is closely tied into the product Backlog has made it more intuitive, or easier to manage the relationship between building out an application and testing it. In other tools, that is more segregated. The way it's designed in Octane, people have said it makes more sense to them, and that it's easier for them to understand their data and to maintain and test their solutions."
"The most important feature is the integration among all the different features in just one tool: Agile management system, requirements management system, test management, defects management, automatic test execution. Really, if you're looking at other tools, you will never find all that integrated into just one tool with all the traceability, with all the elements in just one place."
"The most valuable feature of Micro Focus ALM Octane is the reports. We are able to do customization."
"We are seeing some real improvements in the way we do things. We are becoming more agile in the way we do it because of that and in a way that stories are managed. Stories are given lifecycles as opposed to just being entities within a tool."
"Backlog management is the most valuable feature. This was a capability that was missing or difficult to achieve in ALM Quality Center."
"The key feature is the usability. It is fast to learn and easy to use. It's very intuitive to work with. Most of the important functions are available via a few clicks, compared to other tools where I have to open a sub-menu and then a sub-menu and another sub-menu, and then press a button."
"The integration points are very good. Octane gives us a window not only into our manual testing, but also our automation testing and our performance testing. We can see all results from all three streams of testing in one place."
"The directory designer manager is uncivil. The design manager is clearly really unstable."
"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 reporting functionality needs to be improved."
"The solution can improve in the development area and the customized applications."
"The stability of this solution can be improved."
"The stability of IBM Rational ALM could be improved."
"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."
"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."
"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"
"We’d like to see Platform One/Iron Bank compliant containers."
"Updating items, sorting, bulk updates—these things could have a bit more flexibility, but it's still possible to do them."
"They don't support all IDEs yet. We have Visual Studio code, which is not supported, and loved by our developers. This integration is missing. We also had to do our own in-house integration with the Confluence. That is also something that they could add."
"The cluster architecture that we implemented was server to server communication: Octane application to Elasticsearch and Elasticsearch to another Elasticsearch service. Recently, we found this is a security gap. The Octane application is interacting with Elasticsearch server, but that was missing from the requirements and prerequisites in the setup. The Micro Focus team has not given advice on how to implement authentication-based communication between Octane to Elasticsearch, and we found it as a gap later, then our security team asked us to fix that gap. So, there was a lot of time spent on rework."
"Development of extensions or connections to GitHub actions could be better. Better integration with Azure DevOps would also help."
"Improvements could be made by way of additional integrations across the lifecycle."
"I think the area of release management in the tool is an area of concern where improvements are required."
IBM Rational ALM is ranked 11th in Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) Suites with 17 reviews while OpenText ALM Octane is ranked 5th 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 and Polarion ALM, whereas OpenText ALM Octane is most compared with Jira, OpenText ALM / Quality Center, Microsoft Azure DevOps and Rally Software. See our IBM Rational ALM vs. OpenText ALM Octane report.
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