We performed a comparison between Jira and Micro Focus Alm Octane based on our users’ reviews in four categories. After reading all of the collected data, you can find our conclusion below.
Comparison Results: Based on the parameters we compared, Jira is a bit ahead of Micro Focus. Our reviewers found Micro Focus to be more complex to install and to have weaker security integrations. Its price point is more pleasing than Jira’s however.
"It's a Scrum tool, so it's very easy to use."
"Overall, the solution is very nice and has a variety of great features."
"It gave us control over all test artifacts in one place, along with easy traceability, mapping between stories, bugs, test cases, and test cycles."
"I like seeing which tickets are open and what our response rate is. They have a lot of good metrics in their system to see what's going on."
"The burndown charts help track projects."
"You no longer need to email people. You can mention them right in Jira and have conversations there."
"The scalability is good."
"It was very easy to learn Jira. As a scrum master, I run daily stand-ups, and they are run directly from Jira. The feature that I really love in Jira is called Issue Navigator. It allows me to customize how I want to show the user stories within Jira to my squad."
"Current version of the solution is fairly stable."
"It’s easy to set up."
"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."
"I like the fact that you can use it on top of Jira."
"The solution natively supports Agile-Waterfall hybrid software development at an enterprise scale. This is very important to us. Because even though the company wishes to go Agile, we still have projects which follow a Waterfall methodology. In order for us to accommodate both, we needed some sort of hybrid system. Because if we are using a fully Agile system, then the reporting might not be correctly extracted."
"Octane works well with the Jira portfolio to track the project with two methods: Agile and Waterfall. We can track all the testing in Waterfall or Agile and synchronize it with Agile tools."
"The dashboards and metric reporting are valuable features."
"The platform's most valuable feature is pipeline integration or continuous integration services."
"This solution would be improved with the inclusion of integration with SVN, and auto-sync with the build release number."
"The stability could be improved."
"It should be connected to ServiceNow."
"In Jira, sometimes developers are not getting alerts when Jira is moving out of the SLA to the product development team."
"Jira has recently updated their UI, but more can be done to make it even better."
"I also wish Jira had an indicator to tell you that you are approaching the limit for the story points that can be delivered during a sprint. I don't think there is an indicator like that, but such an indicator will be very helpful because then I will be easily able to see that we are approaching the limit."
"If I'm comparing it to ALM Octane, the documentation is not as robust as ALM Octane's documentation. So, they can improve on the documentation side."
"I'd like some more features around software testing. I'd like to see some more stuff done around data testing. That's what I'm most interested in."
"We have some requests to beef up the manual testing abilities and the ability to report on testing progress. All the basics are there, but there's an issue of maintainability. For example... once you plan a test and it creates a run, more particularly a suite run, you can't edit the suite run afterward... That that is not realistic with how people work. Mistakes are made and people are humans and we change our minds about things. So the tool needs to allow for a bit more flexibility in that testing area, as well as some better widgets to report on progress."
"It could use just some small improvements. I would like additional features, like planning features, user story mapping, or connection to collaboration tools."
"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."
"The product's requirements management feature needs enhancement in terms of functionality."
"We've only had a few stability issues. Generally, we have issues following any deployment they do, so if they do a deployment on a Sunday, then we may have a couple of issues on a Monday or Tuesday."
"Globally, I don't see many major points of improvement. It's mostly plenty of little things, and it's weird to me that they are not in the product yet. They are really details, but they're annoying details... Today, in the tool, we've got plenty of assets we can handle, like requirements, user storage, defects, tasks and so on. And to all of those elements, we can add comments. We can add comments to any asset in Octane but not to tasks. It's just impossible to understand why it's not available for the tasks because it's available everywhere else. Similarly, for attachments, you can attach files absolutely everywhere except on automated runs, which is, again, awkward. I don't understand why on this element, in particular, you cannot do it. It's little touches like that."
"Documentation is not clear."
"The Requirements Module could be better, to build up a better requirements process. There's a huge improvement from ALM.NET to Octane, but it's still not really facilitating all the needs of the product owners, to set up their requirements in Octane."
Jira is ranked 1st in Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) Suites with 266 reviews while OpenText ALM Octane is ranked 5th in Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) Suites with 38 reviews. Jira is rated 8.2, while OpenText ALM Octane is rated 8.2. The top reviewer of Jira writes "A great centralized tool that has a good agile framework and is useful for day-to-day planning, task management, and work log efficacy". 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". Jira is most compared with Microsoft Azure DevOps, IBM Rational DOORS, Rally Software, Polarion ALM and TFS, whereas OpenText ALM Octane is most compared with OpenText ALM / Quality Center, Microsoft Azure DevOps, Rally Software, GitLab and Codebeamer. See our Jira vs. OpenText ALM Octane report.
See our list of best Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) Suites vendors.
We monitor all Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) Suites reviews to prevent fraudulent reviews and keep review quality high. We do not post reviews by company employees or direct competitors. We validate each review for authenticity via cross-reference with LinkedIn, and personal follow-up with the reviewer when necessary.
ALM Octane integrates easily out of the box with Jira,
additionally, once you DevSecOps users are onboard to Octane,
they will realize Octane does more, so they can reduce their dependence on Jira.
Several of my customers have come to this realization.
Octane is an Enterprise solution, but Jira is not.