We performed a comparison between OpenText ALM Octane and Planview AgilePlace 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."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..."
"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 filtering options are very good once you learn them. The document reports are also valuable. You can create reports in Word and PDF formats. That's very useful."
"The platform's most valuable feature is pipeline integration or continuous integration services."
"The user experience is a lot better than any tool that I have used before. Overall, it is great. It has a smooth interface, which is very user-friendly. It makes it easier to work together and have more transparency and customization, which is very good."
"The most valuable feature of Micro Focus ALM Octane is the reports. We are able to do customization."
"The most important feature is the integration among all the different features in just one tool: Agile management system, requirements management system, test management, defects management, automatic test execution. Really, if you're looking at other tools, you will never find all that integrated into just one tool with all the traceability, with all the elements in just one place."
"Micro Focus' technical support is good."
"The transparency that it brings is valuable. I like to look at things from all angles, and sometimes, flip chart paper on a wall and sticky notes are better than something on a screen, but the way they've made it accessible from all points for anyone within an organization is great. As a project management guy, sometimes, you have to force people into new environments where they have to see what you're talking about. Any screen is a barrier, and people got to get into the screen. How do you know they do? You don't necessarily know, but you are getting around that barrier with a countermeasure of making it accessible to as many as possible. So, everyone can jump in there and see everything. It is fully transparent, and I like that. This is one thing that helps."
"LeanKit is amazing when it comes to getting answers about a given card's status. That's one of the biggest takeaways that we've had. The status is right there on the board. Everybody can see it. You just click on it and it gives you everything that you need to know, especially the comments feature because it gives us a timeline of updates. We use that a lot where we write a comment on the card and then we can see and track progress as we move it across the board."
"My team specifically uses our board for all of our Remedy tickets that come in. We had a card for every ticket that we get, and we're able to add the link to that specific ticket there.If I'm out of office, for example, and someone else needs to work a ticket or someone is being contacted to work on a ticket, I don't have to sign on it. Someone else can easily access that ticket because I put the link in there. It's nice. It has a lot of great functionality in there."
"We use the board and card hierarchies in terms of sprints so that we can see if we have cross-functional teams that are working on the same projects together, especially when projects have dependencies. The parent-child relationship within cards is really nice so that we can see what kind of dependencies there are when we're trying to get projects finished."
"I would say it's highly scalable. LeanKit can scale across the enterprise easily. Every business could probably find a use case for leveraging LeanKit."
"Adoption across stakeholders and visibility have been the biggest success for us with LeanKit."
"The "Blocking" feature has helped our scrum masters track impediments and share them at the program level to stakeholders with accountability and detail so that they understand and the action items which can be noted easily."
"Every feature is valuable. LeanKit is a Kanban-based tool where you have a visual interface that you can use to create various cards and to create boards to house those cards. You can create a board for managing project work. You can create a board to do PI planning. It is pretty close to the agile way of doing business."
"It would help us if ALM Octane got FedRAMP-certified, so our government departments could use the cloud solution. That way our external consultants could access it. We've created a URL to get to it, but if it were FedRAMP-certified and service and had support in the continental United States, that would be better."
"What could be improved in Micro Focus ALM Octane is its integration with Jira."
"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 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."
"They don't support all IDEs yet. We have Visual Studio code, which is not supported, and loved by our developers. This integration is missing. We also had to do our own in-house integration with the Confluence. That is also something that they could add."
"Development of extensions or connections to GitHub actions could be better. Better integration with Azure DevOps would also help."
"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."
"I think the area of release management in the tool is an area of concern where improvements are required."
"Within the current features, if they can give some ability to show more icons on the card, it would be helpful. It would help us in showing more data on the cards."
"Our overall impression of Leankit has been very positive, however, our experience with the JIRA integration into our Leankit boards was much harder than we anticipated and that could be improved by simplifying it somehow."
"There's room for improvement with the Instant Coffee feature. There are other businesses that have been interested in leveraging a virtual whiteboard or sticky note capability and how Instant Coffee was developed has not met the mark."
"The ability to report on customizable fields and third-party extensions needs improvement. I'd like to see more of those being able to be used. I don't know how that works for Planview, but just getting a little bit more added there would be nice."
"It is a pretty good product. It is really hard to think of things that I'd want to be improved. Sometimes, we use it for project management lessons learned. So, we have three columns, such as Could be Improved, Keep Doing, and Works Really Well. It would be helpful if there was a template set up for something like that because we code different cards based on the category. For example, if something belongs to the Could be Improved category, we may have those cards as yellow, but then I have to change the color of them and put a header. It is not as smooth, but it still works fine. To be honest, I don't have a lot of complaints about it."
"They have a feature called Instant Coffee. It was in the beta phase. They released it from beta, and now, it is a legit thing. We were in the pilot here. I liked the idea of Instant Coffee, and I like how it is integrated, to some degree, with LeanKit, but I have two big rocks to throw at them on this. The first one is that Instant Coffee does not save your work very well in terms of saving it in formats that you can then go back and edit as Visio would. It leads to the next point, which is, we're not really clear on what they're trying to do with Instant Coffee. I feel that they're trying not to reinvent Visio, Miro, and other software programs out there that do mapping, visual diagrams, etc. Miro is fantastic in that regard. I gather they're not trying to reinvent Miro, but it sure would be nice if it had more aspects of Miro in it, such as being able to draw arrows and write on them on the top."
"The integration with the Enterprise One product is probably an area for improvement. It's not really broken. It's just that it is such a handy tool and a great way to visually manage things. There is a very limited hookup/integration between Enterprise One, which is the master Planview tool, and LeanKit. While they are looking at this on their roadmap, it definitely needs to happen. There is a lot of opportunity there."
"I do not know what it can do in the area of scrum. Maybe it has that functionality. I have never tried to set it up. You think of LeanKit from the perspective of Kanban. I don't know if there is a template for scrum, a scaled agile framework, or any of those scaling frameworks."
Earn 20 points
OpenText ALM Octane is ranked 7th in Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) Suites with 38 reviews while Planview AgilePlace is ranked 18th in Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) Suites. OpenText ALM Octane is rated 8.2, while Planview AgilePlace is rated 9.0. 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 Planview AgilePlace writes "Gives us visibility into projects and enables users to leave comments on different projects". OpenText ALM Octane is most compared with Jira, OpenText ALM / Quality Center, Microsoft Azure DevOps, Rally Software and GitLab, whereas Planview AgilePlace is most compared with Jira, Microsoft Azure DevOps, Jira Align and Rally Software. See our OpenText ALM Octane vs. Planview AgilePlace report.
See our list of best Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) Suites vendors and best Enterprise Agile Planning Tools vendors.
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