I was not part of the cost negotiations. But the purchasing guys confirmed that OpenText offered the best pricing to us.

As a partner, we offer perpetual licensing as well as annual or monthly subscription licensing.

I’m not sure how it compares to other products.

There aren’t any additional costs that I am aware of. It may be different with different deployments. However, customers in the security community have their own secure cloud, and so they just install it there.

ALM is a little pricier than Zephyr Enterprise. Because of our familiarity with ALM and the fact that we had all the integrations, it was easier to resume using it. 

I would say that it is an affordable product. There is an annual service fee, which is one of the additional payments to be made apart from the standard licensing costs attached to the solution.

If you compare the price with the functionality, it is pretty much the same as other solutions. If you compare it to Jira, for instance, it has a lot more functionality. You don't need any plug-ins, but it's also more expensive. Once you start adding your different plug-ins to Jira, you'll probably end up with the same amount or more.

There is also a yearly support cost, which is usually 25% of the initial cost of the license.

The price of Micro Focus ALM Octane is too high compared to other solutions.

I'm unable to share the licensing cost of Micro Focus ALM Octane because that's confidential information.

The product is highly priced compared to other tools. However, it offers substantial value. There is a distinction between OEM pricing and the final pricing for customers. They could understand the delta between the two and work towards a favorable outcome.

I rate the product price an eight on a scale of one to ten, where one is cheap, and ten is expensive. The product is neither cheap nor expensive.

For what it does, it's very reasonably priced. I like the licensing model as well, because it's very flexible. You can scale licenses up and down for short periods of time. 

In terms of pricing, it's comparable to what we had previously. It's not priced at the higher end of the scale by any means. It's priced nicely, in the middle of the market. For what you're getting, it's a very good tool.

The pricing of the tool falls in the mid-range zone. When you compare it to other similar tools, I would say it's on the expensive side. The licensing costs for the tool are not straightforward and vary based on several factors, such as the volume of licenses, duration, geography, and customer. The price may become lesser if there is a higher volume or longer duration. Therefore, giving a straightforward one-line answer regarding the price is impossible.

I rate the tool's pricing an eight on a scale from one to ten, where ten is very expensive.

It's pretty pricey, one of the most expensive ones on the market.

The value depends on if you use all the features that it has. It comes with a lot of features. The difference between the license structure of ALM and Octane versus JIRA, is that you get everything with ALM and Octane. All the plug-ins that come with them pretty much come with the product. You may have some one-offs that you have to buy outside the product but it pretty much all comes with the product.

For JIRA, you buy the pieces one piece at a time. If you only use three of the pieces, you only have to pay for three of the pieces.

If I used all the features of the tool then the price of the tool would probably be fair. I've been doing this for 45 years and I don't think there's a tool on the market that anybody uses fully.

The good thing with ALM and Octane is you get all the features and you don't have to add anything else. If you want to see what the others are, you have them to use.

With JIRA, you need those three things and you buy those three things and, most of the time you don't go looking to see if you can use something else. Maybe two of those things could help you immensely with something else, but typically you don't go looking for them because they may cost more money and you may not have it.

Everything in the tool is good, but then it's expensive. The mindset, now, is go Agile. And go Agile means go cheap, at least in the executives' minds. But, in reality it's not.

You're fighting the "JIRA monster" because all the new developers in schools today use JIRA. When they come out on the marketplace they know JIRA and they like to use it. They don't know Octane because it's a new tool and it's still in its beginning, growing pains. You really have to have a perfect scenario that convinces them to leave what they know to go to what they don't know. I fought tooth and nail to get people to start using Octane here because we had a license, meaning it didn't cost anything more than we were already paying. I couldn't get anybody to come see it. I couldn't get anybody to use it. What I started doing was selling it to new people, people who hadn't been involved with JIRA before. They took it and they like it, except for the one team that left because they didn't like it.

The senior management of my company handles the purchases of the solution. However, the price per developer was a major reason we switched from Jira. Apart from the complexity and the support, the price was a major reason that a team of 20 people unanimously decided that we would prefer to go with Micro Focus ALM Octane rather than Jira. The senior management had seen some benefit in it and they preferred it over Jira because the per developer cost was less and the support was superior.

I think the cost of ALM Octane is comparable to other solutions. It's actually a little less than DOORS Next Generation, but I don't have the numbers in front of me.

It will be as expensive as ALM.NET, if not more expensive. But here's a good tip: If you have ALM.NET, you are able to share your licenses from ALM.NET to Octane. You just have to define a dedicated number of licenses on ALM.NET and then you can share them with ALM Octane, with some configuration effort. This is something that you have to take into account, that there is a possibility of such license sharing that could decrease your costs.

Compared to open-source tools, the price the ALM Octane is definitely higher, in terms of the licensing cost.

ALM Octane is very expensive.

I highly recommend the flex licensing model. With flex, we can ramp up or down to accommodate demand changes for roll-outs or PoCs, etc., as needed. It is especially useful for our performance and load testing areas.

In my opinion, it's good value for the price that you pay.

Going forward, I think we will want to explore adding more licenses.

I don't deal with licensing and pricing, but it's worth the money, from my point of view, because it's very good. But that's all I can say about that.

The comparison is always with Jira, so the pricing of Octane is a bit on the higher side. But if you look at what you have to add to Jira, on the plug-in side, to have the same abilities you have with Octane, you're more or less even, or even ahead with Octane.

There is a conversion fee for changing licenses to Octane, even if the current license is from the same company.

Pricing is the weakest point. It is expensive, but the tool has plenty of features. The main problem we have is that the pricing is very high compared to some other solutions.

It's expensive. HPE products, and now Micro Focus, have always been expensive. The license is not cheap, and it will always be a challenge, particularly for small organizations like ours.

The investment in this product may not be cheap, but you can get high value out of it. Please consider consultancy to have a complete and detailed configuration tailored to your needs for best ROI

Microsoft is a big challenge for OpenText when it comes to pricing because they are much cheaper. But it definitely depends on the complexity of the environment. If it has multiple technologies, at that point, looking at other options and Microsoft would be a feasible approach.