We performed a comparison between Micro Focus ALM Octane and Micro Focus ALM Quality Center based on our users’ reviews in five categories. After reading all of the collected data, you can find our conclusion below.
Comparison Results: Micro Focus ALM Octane ultimately won out in this comparison. According to reviews, Octane appears to be a more comprehensive and high performing solution.
"The dashboards and metric reporting are valuable features."
"A valuable feature is the pipeline, so that we can now connect to Jenkins and then have all the results from testing, from external, in the tool, so that we can see the whole approach from there. Also, We can work with labels so we have better filtering solutions than in ALM. And it's much smarter and leaner to use than ALM."
"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 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."
"Backlog management is the most valuable feature. This was a capability that was missing or difficult to achieve in ALM Quality Center."
"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."
"An improvement on previous versions because it comes as preconfigured as possible."
"Octane creates a gentle approach to Agile-based projects."
"It's easy to create defects and easy to sync them up with a developer. Immediately, once created, it will trigger an email to the developer and we'll start a conversation with the developer regarding the requirements that have not been matched."
"It allows us to easily make linkage and dependencies, with plenty of integrations."
"As a system administrator, HPE ALM can be flexibly configured so that it can accommodate a variety of defined project lifecycles and test methodologies."
"From reporting to team management, everything is better now."
"Easily integrates with Oracle e-Business Suite."
"ALM is a well-known product and is one of the pioneers in providing test management facilities with a 360 degree view of requirements."
"The product can scale."
"Being able to manage tests as this is something very difficult to find in other products."
"I have yet to experience the CI/CD part of Micro Focus ALM Octane but as demonstrated by the team who is providing the services, I see that the CI/CD could improve. When we check in the code, for the code snippet that has been checked in by a particular user, you need to open a separate file. When comparing Micro Focus ALM Octane to Jira, they have a separate window in which you can click on the ID and the code is visible in the snippet. It's a two-step process in Micro Focus ALM Octane and it's a single-step process in Jira. It's essential for the developers to think about this difference."
"The biggest problem with ALM Octane is that it's very complex, so it's difficult to use and scale."
"The reporting is lacking from a requirements matrix and a traceability perspective."
"Also, while there is a Requirements Module in Octane, it is very plain. It's okay to have some requirements described there, but it's not really following the whole BDD approach. I would like to have more features for requirements in there."
"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."
"There is an opportunity for them to do a little more with the dashboarding. We still feel that HPE Quality Center/HPE ALM reporting is very powerful. We talked with R&D, and there are some things on their roadmap, but at the same time, their strategy is to connect Octane with visualization tools such as Power BI."
"There's a trend in our requests to have the ability to export data, en masse, out of Octane. There are capabilities within Octane to export data, but there are specifics around test suites and requirements and relations, as well as certain attributes, that we would like to be able to export easily out of Octane and into a database or Excel."
"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."
"Micro Focus ALM Quality Center should improve the reports. Reporting on tax execution progress against the plan. However, they might have improved over two years since I have used the solution."
"The UI is very dated. Most applications these days have a light UI that can be accessed by pretty much any browser; QC still uses a UI which has a look almost the same for the past 20 years."
"ALM Quality Center could be improved with more techniques to manage Agile processes."
"It needs Pure-FTPd WebUI and single sign-on."
"The product is good, it's great, but when compared to other products with the latest methodologies, or when rating it as a software development tool, then I'll have to rate it with a lower score because there's a lot of other great tools where you can interconnect them, use them, scale them, and leverage. It all depends on the cost."
"There is room for improvement in the scalability and stability of the solution."
"If they could improve their BPT business components that would be good"
"One drawback is that ALM only launches with the IE browser. It is not supporting the latest in Chrome... It should be launched for all of the latest browsers."
More OpenText ALM / Quality Center Pricing and Cost Advice →
OpenText ALM Octane is ranked 5th in Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) Suites with 38 reviews while OpenText ALM / Quality Center is ranked 6th in Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) Suites with 197 reviews. OpenText ALM Octane is rated 8.2, while OpenText ALM / Quality Center is rated 8.0. 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". On the other hand, the top reviewer of OpenText ALM / Quality Center writes "Offers features for higher-end traceability and integration with different tools but lacks in scalability ". OpenText ALM Octane is most compared with Jira, Microsoft Azure DevOps, Rally Software, GitLab and Codebeamer, whereas OpenText ALM / Quality Center is most compared with Microsoft Azure DevOps, Jira, Tricentis qTest, Zephyr Enterprise and OpenText UFT One. See our OpenText ALM / Quality Center vs. OpenText ALM Octane report.
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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.
