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 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."
"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."
"An improvement on previous versions because it comes as preconfigured as possible."
"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 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."
"I like the fact that you can use it on top of Jira."
"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."
"Defect management is very good."
"The execution module and the test planning module are definitely the most valuable features. The rest we use for traceability, but those are the two modules that I cannot live without."
"Being able to manage tests as this is something very difficult to find in other products."
"It allows us to easily make linkage and dependencies, with plenty of integrations."
"Produces good reports and has a great traceability feature."
"The most valuable feature of Micro Focus ALM Quality Center is the alignment of the test to the execution and the linking of the defects to the two. It automatically links any issues you have to the test."
"I found the ease of use most valuable in Micro Focus ALM Quality Center. Creating test cases is easier because the solution allows writing in Excel."
"Within Quality Center, you have the dashboard where you can monitor your progress over different entities. You can build your own SQL query segments, and all that data is there in the system, then you can make a dashboard report."
"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."
"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."
"Improvements could be made by way of additional integrations across the lifecycle."
"The limitation of Octane is that we can't do a release outside of the sprint. We can only plan the release in the sprint. With Agile and JIRA tools, we can plan the release outside the sprint and do a global release of all the projects from the sprint."
"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 reporting is lacking from a requirements matrix and a traceability perspective."
"Octane, from an administration perspective, is very limited. The application is improving with each release but what is missing is the ability to manage users and workspaces. I would also like "usable" reporting for more than a few workspaces. Also still missing is the ability to copy a workspace or get data in or out, except for limited REST calls."
"The QA needs improvement."
"If they could improve their BPT business components that would be good"
"An area for improvement in Micro Focus ALM Quality Center is not being able to update the Excel sheet where I wrote the test cases. Whenever I update some test cases, I'm unsuccessful because there is overlapping data or missing cases from the sheet."
"There were multiple modules and stuff to the solution so maybe the requirements can map to test scripts. It can't map to test steps. If you've got a process that's set up and you've got multiple test scripts that are in it, each script has to be linked to the requirement and the whole set can't be. If we're doing process-driven testing, it's more difficult to do it at the script level, which is what we're finding from a traceability perspective."
"Sometimes I do run my queries from the admin login. However, if I want to reassess all my test cases, then I am still doing this in a manual manner. I write SQL queries, then fire them off. Therefore, a library of those SQL queries would help. If we could have a typical SQL query to change the parameters within test cases, then this is one aspect I can still think that could be included in ALM. Though they would need to be analyzed and used in a very knowledgeable way."
"The Agile methodology is now being used across all the organizations, but in this solution, we don't have a dashboard like Jira. In Jira, you can move your product backlogs from one space to another and see the progress, that is, whether a backlog is in the development stage or testing stage. Micro Focus ALM Quality Center does not have this feature. It is typically very straightforward. You just execute the test cases from it, and you just make them pass, fail, or whatever. They can also improve its integration with Jira. The browser support needs to be improved in this because it supports only Internet Explorer as of now. It does not have support for Firefox, Chrome, Safari, or any other browser. There are also some performance issues in it. Let's say that you are doing the testing, and you found something and are logging the defect. When you try to attach several or multiple screenshots with the defect, it slows down, which is a very common problem people face. I would like them to include a functionality where I am able to see the reports across all the projects. When you have multiple projects, being a manager, I would like to see the reports across all the projects. Currently, there is no single sign-on through which we can get all the information at one place. You need to log into it project-wise. If you have ten projects, you can't view the information in one dashboard."
"ALM only works on Internet Explorer. It doesn't work on any other browser. In my opinion, Internet Explorer is generally a bit slower. I would like to see it work on Chrome or on other browsers."
"The integration could be improved because with Agile technology you are working more quickly than with a top-down methodology."
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.
