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."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 integration with Git works well."
"It helped us contain critical things, like source code and several documents, which is very important to us."
"The most valuable feature is the reporting of the CPU usage on the dashboard."
"I would rate the stability of this product a nine out of ten."
"You can customize the board according to your needs."
"It is relatively easy to use and user-friendly once the setup is complete."
"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."
"The dashboards and metric reporting are valuable features."
"The feature I found most valuable in Micro Focus ALM Octane is its ability to integrate with the CI/CD stack."
"Micro Focus' technical support is good."
"I like the fact that you can use it on top of Jira."
"The interface is user-friendly."
"It's brought our entire team into a single tool. We're all looking at the same real-time data. Our project management office has been able to set up dashboards for individual teams, and do comparisons by teams, of integration, and cross-team integration, burn-up, burn-down, and cumulative flow..."
"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."
"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."
"The stability of this solution can be improved."
"The product must be more user-friendly."
"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."
"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."
"IBM Rational ALM should remove the features not used by the customers and keep this product as lightweight as possible."
"The GUI is a little bit outdated."
"There is not enough beginner support material in the form of FAQs or simple training to help you get started."
"Security and security management, meaning the integration of the security, could be enhanced. We know about Fortify, but it would be better to have security features in the original Octane platform without the need for another solution or another application."
"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."
"Currently, Micro Focus ALM Octane is considered an old-world tool in the industry and lacks the perception of being a new-age tool among its customers."
"The reporting is lacking from a requirements matrix and a traceability perspective."
"The biggest problem with ALM Octane is that it's very complex, so it's difficult to use and scale."
"It could use just some small improvements. I would like additional features, like planning features, user story mapping, or connection to collaboration tools."
"Improvements could be made by way of additional integrations across the lifecycle."
"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."
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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