We performed a comparison between GitLab and OpenText ALM Octane based on real PeerSpot user reviews.
Find out in this report how the two Enterprise Agile Planning Tools solutions compare in terms of features, pricing, service and support, easy of deployment, and ROI."The code merging capability is something that we use very frequently."
"The merging feature makes it easy later on for the deployment."
"The solution's service delivery model is fantastic."
"GitLab integrates well with other platforms."
"It speeds up our development, it's faster, safer, and more convenient."
"The most valuable feature of GitLab is its security."
"I find the features and version control history to be most valuable for our development workflow. These aspects provide us with a clear view of changes and help us manage requests efficiently."
"The stability is good."
"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."
"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."
"We like Micro Focus ALM Octane because its performance is okay, and its stability is okay, so we use it a lot. The platform is easy to use."
"With an Octane project, we have our automation, our requirements, our tests, our pipeline into build-and-deploy, and the ability to identify problem areas. It makes things quicker because it's more along the lines of an automated process."
"It is a very stable tool. The tool has been in the industry for so many years. Stability-wise, I rate the solution a nine out of ten."
"It is a very stable solution. Stability-wise, I rate the solution a ten out of ten."
"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."
"The feature I found most valuable in Micro Focus ALM Octane is its ability to integrate with the CI/CD stack."
"Even if I say I want some improvement, they will say it is already planned in the first quarter, second quarter, or third quarter. That said, most everything is quite improved already, and they're improving even further still."
"I don't really like the new Kubernetes integration because it is pretty focused on the on-premise environment, but we're in a hybrid environment."
"The documentation could be improved to help newcomers better understand things like creating new branches."
"We would like to generate document pages from the sources."
"GitLab would be improved with the addition of templates for deployment on local PCs."
"I would like to see security increased in the future. A secure environment is very important."
"Merge conflicts and repository maintenance could improve. If there is someone new to the system they would not know if there is a conflict."
"I've noticed an area for improvement in GitLab, particularly needing to go through many steps to push the code to the repository. Resolving that issue would make the product better. My team quickly fixed it by writing a small script, then double-clicking or enabling the script to take care of the issue. However, that quick fix was from my team and not the GitLab team, so in the next release, if an automatic deployment feature would be available in GitLab, then that would be good because, in Visual Studio, you can do that with just one click of a button."
"Because JIRA is a leading tool for both development and requirements management - everybody is using JIRA - I'm pretty there will be a use case where people are trying to connect between ALM Octane and JIRA. The back-end configuration of the synchronization with JIRA could be simplified. The architecture is really complicated. We required a lot of machines to build the cluster and the configuration was not really clearly described within the documentation. This may have something to do with the fact that the software is pretty new."
"We’d like to see Platform One/Iron Bank compliant containers."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"Updating items, sorting, bulk updates—these things could have a bit more flexibility, but it's still possible to do them."
"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."
"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."
GitLab is ranked 2nd in Enterprise Agile Planning Tools with 70 reviews while OpenText ALM Octane is ranked 7th in Enterprise Agile Planning Tools with 38 reviews. GitLab is rated 8.6, while OpenText ALM Octane is rated 8.2. The top reviewer of GitLab writes "Powerful, mature, and easy to set up and manage". 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". GitLab is most compared with Microsoft Azure DevOps, SonarQube, Bamboo, AWS CodePipeline and Tekton, whereas OpenText ALM Octane is most compared with Jira, OpenText ALM / Quality Center, Microsoft Azure DevOps, Rally Software and Codebeamer. See our GitLab vs. OpenText ALM Octane report.
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