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IBM DOORS vs Jira comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Jul 27, 2025

Review summaries and opinions

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Categories and Ranking

IBM DOORS
Ranking in Application Requirements Management
2nd
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
7.0
Number of Reviews
55
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
Jira
Ranking in Application Requirements Management
1st
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
6.8
Number of Reviews
275
Ranking in other categories
Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) Suites (1st), Project Management Software (1st)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of October 2025, in the Application Requirements Management category, the mindshare of IBM DOORS is 30.6%, down from 34.7% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Jira is 13.7%, down from 15.1% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Application Requirements Management Market Share Distribution
ProductMarket Share (%)
Jira13.7%
IBM DOORS30.6%
Other55.7%
Application Requirements Management
 

Featured Reviews

UweSeufert - PeerSpot reviewer
Old but capable of storing, organizing, and exchanging requirements
I use IBM DOORS because my customer wants it for managing their requirements IBM DOORS is a tool from the 20th century. It is very old but capable of storing, organizing, and exchanging requirements. It helps to manage requirements efficiently, which significantly improves the way requirements…
AmitUbale - PeerSpot reviewer
Efficient project management that's comprehensive and and helps with time efficiency
We use Jira primarily for project management within the organization. It helps us manage tasks, bug management, and tracking tickets effectively. We assign tickets to individual team members and track them easily For project management, Jira has helped facilitate efficient task segregation and…

Quotes from Members

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Pros

"I would say that the best feature of the solution is that since everything is in one place, and if you make any changes, then they are recorded or tracked."
"Compared to other tools that I have used over the past 20 years, DOORS is the best of the best."
"It has the features of: traceability, configuration management, and user access."
"The program is very stable."
"The most valuable feature of this solution is traceability. We can track every requirement, including what the stakeholder must do and component-level requirements."
"Makes good work of prioritizing and planning product delivery."
"The most valuable feature is the management verification and login."
"The next-generation features are good."
"The links between tickets are very valuable and the boards I found to be configurable and usable. The boards allow some level of extended configuration and they can be customized according to our project needs. Additionally, it is easy to use."
"It's easy to escalate the issues to the product development team."
"The product provides high flexibility to create new workflows quickly."
"I found it super useful, as it is customizable for different teams and users."
"The roadmap feature and the ability to integrate with Power BI are probably the most valuable features in it. It is a great solution. I absolutely love it. It is a tool that was designed for project management, and it has been awesome to work with it so far. I also love Confluence."
"The layout, workflow, automation, and metrics are helpful in Jira."
"The user story map is excellent. The features can be composed into stories and they can be allocated to each of the sprints in a program increment. It allows you to see all that in the user story map, and you have various dashboards to see the stories in various views. You can see them as a backlog view, for example, or you can see as an actual sprint view."
"The solution has been very stable overall."
 

Cons

"IBM DOORS should cover all engineering functions seamlessly, not just requirement engineering."
"The user interface for the Change Proposal System could be improved."
"Rational DOORS' most valuable feature is that you can write any kind of requirement you want."
"Complexity, performance, openness are the three areas that can be improved. The IBM architecture and specifically Jazz looks more complex. There are a lot of servers. It's quite complicated. The search capabilities lack in IBM Rational DOORS Classic for customers who have a database with a requirement of more than 25,000 records. For example, you can search easily for a module, but it's really difficult to look for keywords through the whole database because all the modules are separated into small components, which makes the search quite complex. This is something that's really annoying because when we want to make an impact analysis, we would like to analyze the product globally. It's quite difficult to manage. The fact that you can interact externally with data makes it complex. The approach is complex and doesn't work as expected. For example, when I tried to experiment with exporting some records, the tool crashed, but I couldn't find out the root cause, that is, whether it happened because of Rational Windows or lack of memory. It was just crashing. Logs weren't very clear. IBM can try to use more recent technology for different aspects and make it easy. They can also provide free integration from DOORS Classic to DOORS. Currently, all the customization in Excel is lost, which makes it very complex. It would be a feature to make new versions compatible with features in the past versions."
"It would be nice if it could be scaled-down so that it could be installed and implemented without much learning or training."
"The low performance of the solution is probably because it is quite an old tool."
"IBM should integrate some solutions they already own toenhance the utility of the product further. Specifically import and export to Office products is more difficult than it needs to be."
"Both the performance and the price could be improved."
"Test case management could be more user-friendly. When we add or update test cases, there should be a better way to organize them within the dashboard."
"In the way it is deployed, I think Jira is too dependent on the third-party applications that are available in its marketplace. If we could get some of the basic functionalities which are offered by these third-party applications, that would be ideal because each time we need a new functionality, we have to purchase a new plugin as an add-on."
"The only thing that JIRA doesn't for us is release management in a way that I can create a list of versions easily."
"The performance and stability are visibly degrading since the database has been growing every year."
"There is a difficulty viewing all the attachments because they are shown in one place. I would like attachments to be shown at the comment level."
"It would be ideal if the solution could be available as a mobile application."
"If they want Jira to be the one-stop shop of the view of all of your deliverables, not just from a defect tracking perspective, but also from a requirement perspective, a code perspective, and a testing perspective, it needs to pull out more data and work better as an integration tool."
"Something I would like to see improved is the traceability feature. When you have a user story, if you can see all the test cases, it would be an improvement if you could see any design documents or any change management."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The licensing costs for the product are quite high."
"IBM Rational DOORS is highly expensive."
"I would rate the pricing a seven out of ten, with one being very affordable and ten being quite expensive."
"It's expensive."
"I am not sure why it is so expensive, but one license will cost approximately $15,000 in US dollars."
"I think it's expensive because you have to pay for the licenses to IBM and all that and maintain them."
"It is expensive to onboard additional users."
"I don't personally know what the numbers are. I just know that one of the reasons we've limited it to three seats is a function of cost."
"Jira is expensive and a lot of people are choosing DevOps because they are cheaper, open-source, easy to use, and have basic licenses. Jira should decrease its price to be more competitive."
"The standard package of Jira is for 100 users. They should offer more packages for other increments, such as 500 or 2,000. In my previous company, there was a free package that provided a minimal number of users."
"We are on an annual license and could be less expensive."
"There are no additional costs to the standard licensing."
"Its price is fine, but we would like it to be less expensive. We are paying on a yearly basis."
"Its price is good and similar to other products. It is about five or six dollars per user."
"For very small companies, if you have less than 10 individuals, it is $10 a year for each of the products. When we were a part of the enterprise and had more than 10 people using it, or before they came up with this solution for small companies, it was $2,500 a year for the license for Jira and Confluence, and I believe something like $600 a year to perpetuate the license. I can't remember if it was $600 or $2,500 annually. It was for up to 25 people at the time, and this was in the early 2000s and mid 2000s."
"We make use of the solution free of charge."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Manufacturing Company
26%
Aerospace/Defense Firm
8%
Computer Software Company
7%
Government
6%
Manufacturing Company
16%
Financial Services Firm
11%
Computer Software Company
10%
Government
8%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business12
Midsize Enterprise10
Large Enterprise36
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business103
Midsize Enterprise56
Large Enterprise149
 

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about IBM Rational DOORS?
The traceability matrix in DOORS improved our project outcomes. It helps ensure coverage of requirements at different levels, from user requirements to software requirements to test requirements.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for IBM Rational DOORS?
Over the years, the first version cost something around 5800 euros.
What needs improvement with IBM Rational DOORS?
Compared to today, DOORS' competitors also excel in this discipline. Yet the price is too high. It's often not as generic as it used to be. IBM promised to find a way for a generic format that allo...
Is Jira better or would you go with Micro Focus ALM Octane?
Hi Netanya, Basically , it all depends on the use cases for your environment and the business needs. Hope the below data may be relevant to you for identifying your needs and deciding on the approp...
Which is better - Jira or Microsoft Azure DevOps?
Jira is a great centralized tool for just about everything, from local team management to keeping track of products and work logs. It is easy to implement and navigate, and it is stable and scalabl...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Jira?
We operate under a nonlimited license with Jira, allowing a number of users to access it with a single enterprise license.
 

Comparisons

 

Also Known As

Rational DOORS
Jira Software
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Infosys, Chevrolet Volt
Square, Nasa, eBay, Cisco, SalesForce, Adobe, BNP Paribas, BMW and LinkedIn, Pfizer, Citi.
Find out what your peers are saying about IBM DOORS vs. Jira and other solutions. Updated: September 2025.
868,787 professionals have used our research since 2012.