We performed a comparison between IBM Rational ALM and Rally Software 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."
"The integration with Git works well."
"The most valuable feature is the reporting of the CPU usage on the dashboard."
"It helped us contain critical things, like source code and several documents, which is very important to us."
"The solution is customizable."
"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 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."
"It is relatively easy to use and user-friendly once the setup is complete."
"CA Agile Central provides visibility into how teams are meeting business objectives."
"When we went into Scaled Agile Framework, we could not have done it without the use of Agile Central. It allows us to scale our Scrum teams, and it also enables us when we do our remote big room plannings."
"Ease of use - I don't even know when a new release is coming and I don't need to because it's so easy to use what's new."
"We can work better and at a higher quality, than we were able to before."
"The effect of these kind of tools drives the way you organize things. It helps you shape the way you flow."
"It's a good platform to keep track of all the user stories across all projects. So rather than having one off Excel spreadsheets with all of the requirements, it is a good place to have all of that."
"Rally Software provides the capability to accurately estimate the time required for building large software projects, which can be challenging to predict...Rally Software enables us to schedule tasks better, allocate resources, and meet project deadlines."
"My teams uses it for their daily agile management. They describe their user stories and track the progress of their projects."
"The interconnectivity between packages is a major support problem and can be improved."
"I would like to see better reporting features. The out-of-box reporting is - I don't want to say limited - but the focus is on the Scrum and Sprint reports. We need more reporting features regarding the history of the work, tracking it more deeply."
"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."
"IBM Rational ALM should remove the features not used by the customers and keep this product as lightweight as possible."
"The directory designer manager is uncivil. The design manager is clearly really unstable."
"The GUI is a little bit outdated."
"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 features should be more intuitive. If I'm looking for something, its location should be easy to locate."
"As it is right now, it does not support automation of the quality assurance process. It just supports manual testing."
"It could improve by being self-organizing: user stories, different hierarchies, and different perspectives. Not just as a single hierarchical structure, but something that can be multidimensional."
"There are few customisation options. For instance, the workflow for story cards cannot be changed out of the box from the standard (Defined, In-Progress, Completed and Accepted)."
"It is hard to track the changes. For example, we're in sprint 25, and then we have 26, 27, 28, and 29. Throughout that whole time, we're developing pipelines in Azure, moving to GitHub, creating pipelines, and working with teams. But sometimes, we need to revisit specific decisions made in previous sprints, like pipeline details. Maybe it's in our Azure Wiki, GitHub, or Teams, but it's not always consistent. I wish I could search for all tasks or stories related to that particular effort without needing to know everyone's individual stories or features."
"I think there is a missing link with the development activity. Some developers are pushing in new versions of the code, but you cannot make the link from the user story to a specific application version."
"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."
"We'd like better dashboards to make visibility better."
"It requires better scalability for the implementation of the whole suite. We do not use it in that fashion, and visibility is sometimes a problem."
IBM Rational ALM is ranked 10th in Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) Suites with 17 reviews while Rally Software is ranked 6th in Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) Suites with 116 reviews. IBM Rational ALM is rated 7.2, while Rally Software 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 Rally Software writes "Good discussion and note-taking capabilities but hard to track the changes". IBM Rational ALM is most compared with Jira, Codebeamer, Microsoft Azure DevOps and Polarion ALM, whereas Rally Software is most compared with Microsoft Azure DevOps, Jira, TFS, Jira Align and Asana. See our IBM Rational ALM vs. Rally Software report.
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