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 an open-sourced product that is easy to customize."
"The burndown charts help track projects."
"The most valuable feature of Jira is the reporting feature, which allows us to track our team's tasks."
"Jira can track projects, time management of assignments, and keep everything on schedule. The performance of the solution is good."
"It's really smart how they connected third-party vendors into their own marketplace. You can create and add apps. Anybody can do it."
"One of the valuable features is traceability from requirements to test cases."
"We use Jira for project management and tracking."
"Kanban board: The board is easy to use and visually impressive to non-IT users, who found it easy to relate to."
"The defect management gives us full-fledged capabilities for handling defects, including capturing the details of the defects and even screenshotting the defect cases. The defect management is comprehensive."
"It’s easy to set up."
"It is a very stable solution. Stability-wise, I rate the solution a ten out of ten."
"The most useful feature of Micro Focus ALM Octane is the dashboards, they are easy to use."
"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 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 way testing is closely tied into the product Backlog has made it more intuitive, or easier to manage the relationship between building out an application and testing it. In other tools, that is more segregated. The way it's designed in Octane, people have said it makes more sense to them, and that it's easier for them to understand their data and to maintain and test their solutions."
"The most valuable features of the solution are its ability to manage test scenarios, test results, and test automation, which are its primary functionalities."
"Backlog pruning and visualization are poor."
"A lot of features, such as time tracking, are only available through the marketplace. If multiple users are working on a user story, we aren't able to pull out the reports. So, there are many things that they aren't offering. They are available only through the marketplace. That's not good for a product."
"The challenge which I frequently see from Jira is the label. When you search for a label sometimes, it suddenly disappears. If there's a mismatch due to all-caps or lower case, you won't be able to find it. It won't even come up as a recommendation or suggestion. That's something that can be really frustrating, as people create labels in their own specific ways and then no one else can find anything."
"It's also difficult to migrate through, things don't always tie-up. It's not easy to use."
"The GUI should have much better features like more graphical illustrations. There are some cases or benchmarks that we are trying to capture into a dashboard GUI's graphical summary, but unfortunately JIRA is not able to do that."
"The dashboard reports can be improved. Its dashboard reports are good, but you cannot have complex reports. They are currently very basic. For instance, we can only choose two columns for a dashboard, so it is not friendly enough."
"I would like to see visualization of release planning. I can list the releases and I can give dates to releases, but to show how they are happening on a timeline, I would need to order the Portfolio part. But just for this, it may be too much to use the Portfolio for that."
"The work items structure is not hierarchical and that needs to be changed. It's too flat."
"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."
"Updating items, sorting, bulk updates—these things could have a bit more flexibility, but it's still possible to do them."
"Development of extensions or connections to GitHub actions could be better. Better integration with Azure DevOps would also help."
"Currently, Micro Focus ALM Octane is considered an old-world tool in the industry and lacks the perception of being a new-age tool among its customers."
"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."
"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."
"There are some challenges when we want to integrate the tool with other products, and it takes time for a team to figure out how to do it."
"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."
Jira is ranked 2nd in Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) Suites with 257 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.