Polarion ALM Reviews

When it comes to functionalities like a real-time collaboration feature and traceability capabilities, Polarion ALM has had those basic features for the past five years already, and they are pretty mature products that have all the needed requirements management features, such as traceability and reporting, and even configuration management or version controlling.

Polarion ALM can learn from Atlassian tools a lot, as the usability is not the best, and it is really narrowly focused on requirements management only. For example, if you want to do testing and test result management with it, it is very limited. Jama Connect has similar limitations, and both should really focus on developing the integrations and extendability. For example, Jama Connect does not even have an extension marketplace, whereas Polarion has a small one. However, compared to the Atlassian Marketplace where you can get whatever applications for whatever price, it is a totally different ballgame.

I would highly recommend Polarion ALM add more AI features to it. I know they have started to do something, but for example, I have been developing widgets for IBM DOORS Next, AI widgets, so that you can write and analyze requirements with the AI, and I have also done the same for Jira, creating a couple of Jira applications in the marketplace as well.

Companies that have fairly large product portfolios or large products in general, which are either software or embedded software, would benefit from Polarion ALM, but not anything super big, such as car manufacturers. They can do it, but then it starts to be not enough for them. I would say the companies that are larger than medium-sized but not anything approaching one hundred billion revenue would be the right fit.

Regarding the technical support for Polarion ALM, I have not experienced too much, but looking at them a little, I think they are quite good. Jama Connect is also quite good. They are not too big companies and have only one product, both of them, so they can really focus and help the customer. They are growing companies, so to say, and they emphasize customer support a lot.

Neutral

The pricing of Polarion ALM and IBM ELM is pretty much aligned. They are not at the same level, but I would say aligned according to the capabilities of the tools, with DOORS being more expensive but able to do more. In that sense, I think it is quite aligned, although the only thing which is annoying with them is they still are in this old model that you need to negotiate the price.

Polarion ALM and Jama Connect and especially IBM, as it is even hard to find a list price on the internet. It is an old school bazaar where this price is only for you, my friend. I understand they need to have sales people to work on and get the connection with the customer to get the maximum out of it, but I would say today you are better off if you are open with the pricing. Especially if you sell cloud products, you need to have a pay-as-you-go type of thing or monthly fees which are clearly shown to the customer.

Overall, I rate Polarion ALM a nine out of ten.

We are in our product development using Polarion ALM's functionalities. I am a power user, partly responsible for configuring the tool. We are using it for many things. The idea was to go for a requirements management tool. Before we decided for Polarion ALM, we analyzed DOORS and some other tools from the IBM platform. The decision was taken in 2009 that we would go for Polarion ALM. For us, this was the best solution considering performance and price. We rolled this out for many more things. We are using it also for project management, documentation of project pages and wikis. The major focus still is requirements management.

We are integrating Polarion ALM with other third party tools. One integration is with SAP and another one is with IBM Cognos and Power BI. We generate reportings that cannot be done directly in OnePlan, such as for resource managers to see where their people are working and on which topics.

Polarion ALM is powerful in easily creating your own workflows for completely different kinds of things. We have our own workflow for specifications such as draft, ready for review, and approved. We also have product change management reflected in the tool, risk management, and quality issues from our quality system. Results from audits can be documented and countermeasures can be tracked. It is very open and flexible. You do not need any development skills or support from Siemens itself to configure your own workflows, and this is one of the strengths of Polarion ALM.

One feature I find valuable in Polarion ALM is the easy way of configuring workflows and establishing traceability between different items. For example, requirements and specifications or planning artifacts in a project plan with change requests or risks. Traceability is really strong, and the main reason why we are using Polarion ALM is the requirements management. It is powerful with the different kinds of documents you can create, where you can generate traceability between documents very easily.

It is very easy to generate wiki pages in Polarion ALM and to link pages, so that you can adapt to information needs of the teams depending on your project subject. It is also very easy to collect high-level overviews about different projects and folders in Polarion ALM. It is easy to generate a start page where at a glance you see all your running projects or important links to other pages within Polarion ALM or outside Polarion ALM. That is definitely helping us keeping the teams informed.

Real-time collaboration allows several people to work on the same documents. We are using this technology to document decisions. Having easy access because it is web-based is also a strength. It is pretty easy to generate information and to directly distribute them to many people. That is daily business.

The backlog management for Agile in Polarion ALM could be improved or enhanced in future releases. What is missing is that if you have a hierarchy in your backlog with epics, features, and user stories, there is no simple way to generate standardized views on all this, which is available out of the box in Jira or in Azure DevOps with just one click. Here it is more complicated.

The reporting and analytics capabilities in Polarion ALM could be improved as there are some dashboard functionalities, but they are not fulfilling our requirements.

I have been working with Polarion ALM for 16 years.

I worked with Polarion ALM extensively and a little bit with Jira, and I was interested in getting insights and comparisons of both. I had a glance at the report and checked some statements from your website on those tools. For the specific questions that I have, I did not really get the answer because it appears people are comparing apples with something else.

We are currently changing our development style to more Agile, and I think the basic design of Polarion ALM is to support Agile teams. We are struggling at the moment to set up an easy way of sprint planning. Even though there are features in Polarion ALM to generate the right views, it is not that easy. That was one of the reasons I was looking for a comparison with Jira, because Jira is very popular in the Agile environment and for backlog management might be the better choice.

My current job title is Head of Software Development. Previously, I was the Head of Project Management Office for R&D projects, having changed my position just three months ago.

I rate Polarion ALM 9 out of 10.

Neutral

Neutral

We use Polarion ALM for software development, including requirements management, testing, change requests, and task tracking. We set up the environment by configuring items and reports based on user requests. Once the environment is prepared, users work with what we have set up. We collaborate with them to define their needs and then develop the technical solutions to meet them.

We also use Polarion ALM for traceability and compliance. It is particularly strong in areas related to software functional safety and cybersecurity. One advantage is acquiring templates and then easily modifying them to fit your specific needs.

It's extremely flexible. Configuring items is straightforward and doesn't require involving the supplier each time. We find the requirement management, test management, documentation, and dashboards very effective. However, we don't use DevOps-related features, such as integration with tools like SVN or Git, because we use Azure DevOps. The aspects related to requirements, testing, changes, tasks, and agile methodology are excellent, which is why we've been using it for a long time.

I also recently suggested that CMS consider incorporating generative artificial intelligence into the system. This could greatly enhance requirement checking, improve form, content, and clarity, and assist in defining tests and developing models.

I have been using Polarion ALM for ten years. 

The product is stable. In its environment, it performs well and can effectively manage large projects, especially when configured appropriately.

I rate the solution’s stability an eight or nine out of ten.

2000 users are using this solution.

I rate the solution’s scalability an eight or nine out of ten.

We have maintenance and standard support with Siemens for any issues that arise. For routine support, we have bronze-level support included with our licenses. For more specialized needs, such as new developments or specific projects, we collaborate directly with Siemens.

Neutral

For the installation, we collaborated with Siemens and some suppliers. While the process didn’t seem overly complex from my perspective, I mainly assisted with setting up the machine environment, which was more specific to our company. 

The actual installation didn’t take much time. The major effort was defining the requirements and configuring the system with our methodology team, which took about six or seven months. The configuration process continuously evolves as the methodology team regularly makes changes, adjustments, and updates. However, once the requirements were defined, the installation was relatively quick.

The actual installation was carried out by Siemens.

The planning features focused on agile methodology, including sprint planning and micro-planning, are very effective. However, more structured planning is also possible, which could benefit users who are working with a standard waterfall methodology. 

Generative AI could provide significant benefits in the future. It would greatly help evaluate the quality of requirements, define tests, and ensure compliance with rules, such as those for system engineering.

They have two people working with the support.

Overall, I rate the solution a nine out of ten.

I work in an industry where I mainly look after the requirements, for which I use Polarion ALM.

The features of the solution are most valuable when it comes to its use in our company's development-related area.

Based on the requirements of my company, I can say that the tool helps collect information from different people with the help of a component in the tool known as epics. The tool offers our company the capabilities and features for use cases. The tool mainly helps our company in the area of planning, especially on the agile side we work on presently, which we recently integrated with DevOps. The planning phase is worked out based on the aforementioned details.

At the moment, I haven't looked in-depth into what needs improvement in the product. Based on my understanding, the tool's integration capabilities with multiple tools is an area of concern that Polarion needs to focus on more. Polarion ALM's features should be communicated easily with other tools as well. My company developed and built up some areas in Polarion ALM, because of which we are able to communicate its features with the other tools we use, but in general, everywhere, it is quite difficult to do it, mainly on the side of Azure DevOps. If you just look at Azure DevOps, it is completely on CI/CD pipeline, and the development process for certain things happens in such a tool when revolving around areas, like Sprint, Scrum, and Kanban, that fall under agile methodologies and not there in ALM, making it an area Polarion needs to build. Otherwise, Polarion ALM should be able to integrate with multiple tools and make the overall functioning feel much better.

I have been using Polarion ALM for four months.

It is a very stable solution. Stability-wise, I rate the solution a nine out of ten.

Scalability-wise, I rate the solution an eight out of ten.

Around 12 to 13 people in my company use the solution.

Our company doesn't have any requirements, but in the future, we might increase the usage of the solution.

I rate the technical support a nine to ten out of ten.

Positive

I rate the product's initial setup phase a seven to eight on a scale of one to ten, where one is a difficult setup process, and ten is an easy setup process since the process was not too easy for me.

The solution is deployed on a private cloud.

I may not have the complete information on how much time the tool takes to be deployed because our company uses it for planning purposes, but we haven't used it yet for the deployment side.

It is an expensive product. After using other tools, Polarion ALM seems to be very expensive.

I recommend the product to those who plan to use it. My requirements from the tool are not fulfilled with Polarion ALM, so I have to use multiple tools for that. Integration and scalability are possible with the solution, but I think Polarion has to be developed in a way that supports the software development area at a very low level, in the case of which the price should not be too high so that it becomes easy for people to use it.

Compared to Azure DevOps and other development tools available in the market, Polarion ALM is a bit costlier.

I rate the overall tool an eight out of ten.

I use the solution in my company for STLC. We use the tool for testing processes, from test management to dashboard creation.

The solution's most valuable feature is that it is a strong tool. Jira is too open, and too many people can do what they want and have flexible control over it.

Some parts related to the dashboard need improvement. Nowadays, the dashboard is too complex to be created.

I have been using Polarion ALM for six months. I am an end user of the solution.

The software is stable. However, the tool's stability can be too slow at times. I don't know why dashboard creation takes so long.

It is a scalable solution. Scalability- I don't know now about the tool's scalability because I am not the admin or on any projects with the tool. I am just using the product since it is a compatible tool.

Around 100 people use the tool in my company.

I use the product every day. Mostly, I am connected to Polarion ALM because it is used for product testing and to make dashboards. With Polarion ALM, I can start off with Excel and do some of the classic management stuff. I am a test manager who is the main user of the tool.

I have experience with Jira. My company moved from Jira to Polarion ALM based on our CTO's decision.

The product's initial setup phase can be described as a medium-level process.

My company doesn't get involved in the tool's deployment process. We do functional testing.

The tool helps because our company gets more visibility in a very rigid manner, so people can just not reject a bug if we don't approve it, and we can control everything. All the tests needed to be provided can be executed. I can review all the tests. Reviewing the tests can be done before my team executes them, and then we have a strict connection with all the other staff about the product to figure out if we are able to meet the requirements and get good metrics with proper visibility.

I just use the product according to what my boss says he wants to use it for, but I don't know how much of it can be modified for our work. My company has some partnerships with the vendor, so sometimes we have a call with them.

I am just the tool's user, so I don't have to do any integrations. I just use it to identify any impact of the configurations.

I recommend the tool to others. It is a good tool for me.

I rate the tool a seven out of ten.

The solution is to create the documentation necessary, especially if it is to be given in technical documentation, to get the right to put a medical device on the market. For a medical device, you have to give the regulatory authority a lot of information, and they go down to the lines of code and to the risk management of this line of code, for this database is needed since it is no more possible to do it with hands. In this case, they outsourced the validation of the software with another company, and they made the software with another company. Polarion was used to extract from the software the information for the regulatory authority.

I worked with a customer to use Polarion. My experience is about the feedback and the output of the tool. It worked, but it wasn't the best one I have evaluated.

Speaking from my experience, I get the feedback of the user, and I get told about the document to be provided in the technical documentation. It's mostly about the report or the reporting. It's also about how to extract the quality data from a huge management report saying that all the software requirements were correctly evaluated from case management. This evaluation is correctly re-evaluated with software for the VnV process. So all of these reports and with software like Polarion, one must be able to get all of these reports with just a click, which is somehow not the case with Polarion, especially with the experience I had. There is a lot of work to be done to complete the documentation needed.

The weak point of Polarion ALM software is about reporting and time for extraction of the data included in the database to communicate with the regulatory authority. Polarion did not understand that its user just wanted the reports to be submitted in a better way.

So about the improvement needed for the entire Polarion software, I spoke several times about the difficulties of the company working with a fixed standard with a document that is 500 pages, and you get this with a PDF. Also, each line of the standard will be connected to risk analysis. So the improvement I proposed is to transfer the PDF document and pages inside the database directly to be able to use each pair with the database tools. So what I saw is that Aligned Elements proposed this but never maintained this correctly, so it was useless since data was changing very often. The database standard will be very useful for doing the safety report and everything. In fact, with what is coming for the regular database, they need to add on the database format. So this is a change that happened now. So, how to integrate these changes inside the software is new. The EDR software will be software that includes thousands of standard insights in a database and maintains them correctly.

My customers were complaining about the quality of the report. The quality of reporting needs to improve.

I have worked with Polarion ALM from Siemens. I have worked on the solution for one project. I mean, I'm hitting a thousand verticals every day, and maybe not every day, but quite a lot. I had one project where I had to do a report, and I was paid for this report. It was for a month, or maybe two months, for which I had to update my knowledge every day. I work as Polarion ALM's consultant. I never purchased the solution, but my customers purchase it and use it.

When you say a stable solution, it depends on the technology choice at starting the project. For example, what I can see now, is the protocol to exchange data between different stakeholders until now. A lot of it is web-based in XML format. Now we are talking more and more about JSON format. So there is a delay between this manufacturer and the market. But there are so many stakeholders in the medical device industry, so it is very difficult to choose the correct time to say now, we will switch from XML to JSON. In a particular case concerning Polarion ALM, that shows its sufficient repository, which is not the best. Now as I saw, every database is switching to Git and GitHub. But the market changed to Git. I would say this is what I can expect from a Polarion, which is to match the technology change that the market requires for the near future. Jira is fully integrated nowadays. So this makes it an advantage for Jira.

SVN will be obsolete someday. Polarion using SVN will become obsolete, while Jira using Git is good. Git has some problems with cybersecurity, so the company is making a safe Git. The safety of Git is a concern in my domain since, to use a device, you are using a processor, and you are using the ID for the processor, and each processor has its ID.

Scalability is good. I would say that for medical devices, we do not have so much of a problem because, as per the technical documentation, the reports must be done by the tools. We'll go from thousand pages to ten thousand pages. So ten thousand pages is not a problem for any software database today. It's more about matching the evolution of the standard that must be integrated into the database. This is a problem. For the manufacturer of the software, doing such a procedure for the customer is not required because I saw every customer doing this job and not in the right way. So doing it for Android customers is better.

I have contacted the support for my customer because of their requests to improve the reporting of the data from the database. The people I work with at Polarion complain a lot compared to Aligned Elements, which seems to have a better customer approach even though it is smaller. I worked with Cisco. Polarion had better support because of proximity criteria. There are always a lot of parameters to answer on what is the best if it is on-premises or external.

I once worked with the manager of DevioTech, and they gave me feedback from their company's engineers. Since I have never talked directly with Polarion or its engineers, it's not a good idea to speak on their tech support.

I have worked with Jama, a QMS for medical devices. Also, I have worked with Aligned Elements.

You can find on the internet a lot of comparisons between Polario and Orcanos. I have worked with Orcanos for three years, and so I can say that it is very bad and the worst.

Speaking about the time taken for implementation, I had worked on one project, and I was concerned by the technical documentation. They were done with support from Polarion. So, I don't know how many times my customers had to implement Polarion.

The solution has on-premises and the cloud version in the market, and both have advantages and inconveniences. With my experience, I am able to identify the advantages and inconveniences, but I'm not able to say if Polarion is proposed on both the models and how they proposed each of them.

Software for medical devices is always expensive. However, they are in the range in terms of price. I never bought software though I have made some comparisons for my customers. As a consultant, I have made some proposals, so I do not get myself to ask the purchase departments to request an offer. I do not remember exactly the prices, but it really depends on the parameters taken into account. In the case of another company, Polarion requested 1,00,000 for the on-premise version and 10,000 for license updates. So it isn't easy to compare things.

I know which is a better solution because I have to evaluate them and install them in certain situations. I have to teach the user how to use it, and I have to search software and databases. So I have also to explain to the database manager how I want it to be implemented.

The solution has some advantages but has some inconveniences as well. I know it's beyond the project. The integration is quite good. The weak point of doing this way is not having a full database to rely on another database. Also, the customers used it for a long time and were happy with the solution. To convince a new customer who asks me which are the best tools, and if such incidents had happened in the past, then it was my job to answer them. Hence, I wouldn't recommend Polarion. However, I can change my mind since I currently see things like Guru for a project in Geneva for implants.

I don't have enough experience to give a suggestion on this, and I'm talking about it based on the feedback from my customers who have used Polarion and Aligned Elements. If we are talking about this parameter, I have more experience with Orcanos, the medical device requirement database, from the software scanners, which an Italian company does, and my part in it was just a nightmare. So I will make a very bad note on Orcanos, but you can find on the internet a lot of capacity between Polario and Orcanos. Orcanos is one of the worst ones. I worked three years before on Orcanos, so I would not say anything bad about Polarion.

My rating of the product depends on the size of the company and how many engineers and software engineers are inside the company, along with the IT resources that they have. There are a lot of parameters for me to advise my customer. I can say that Polarion is good for you, and I will propose an open source for you.

For you, I will propose Greenlight Guru, which is more expensive. The learning curve is also longer.

We need to consider who will use it and for why, and with which competencies. But for implants, I will recommend Greenlight Guru because the quality of the reporting is better.

Suppose I can take generic requirements because, if I have to give advice to one of my customers, I will take into account much more parameters. In general, where I would say Polarion is not doing evaluations the right way, especially considering things like who is on top of the evolution. I would say evolution is the main parameter. So I really rank Polarion lower than Greenlight Guru because of such reasons. To my customer, I say also each of the solutions provides QMS, and you can have a good idea of the requirements of the company by looking at their blogs. Greenlight Guru is really looking for evolution, and because of the evolution in medical devices, it's very fast. I would take this as a top parameter, so I recommend Greenlight Guru in this case. You will also have to show the software validation to the FTA for the implant. It's an investment, in this case. They have to invest time. They have to know someone that knows things like Greenlight Guru even though their learning curve is quite slow, but having the people that know already together with the software makes sense. It's kind of a strategy as well.

I rate the overall product a five out of ten.

We use the solution for managing the requirements for a development project for a new type of transportation system. The challenge was to create a common basis for a multi-functional DevOps team working on a big program with different connected projects and to improve the development processes with a single, unified platform for requirements management, development support, testing, and release management. A major need was to more effectively plan, orchestrate, and track the requirements for our complex system across those multiple projects, and their individual yet connected lifecycles.

The tool helped us to more effectively and efficiently gather and structure the information (requirements, test plans, project management data, etc.), and share it with the involved stakeholders in a safe and change-controlled manner. It also allowed us to easily link the technical data to the PLM and 3D Design Tools and thus provide a common baseline for the whole team (which is multi-functional, spread over different locations). Compliance Management was significantly improved, and test plans were more easily created and linked to the requirements data.

It is an effective solution to improve development processes with a single, unified platform requirements, coding, testing, and release. Nevertheless, the user interface is not yet optimized. Import functions could be improved also to make the upload of structured requirement documents easier and to import those into the database. It works yet requires effort during customization. Future versions should support better workflows and task management.

We have been using the solution for three years.

I did use DOORS in the past, in another company, and I find both tools very comparable.

Multi-year subscription options usually allow for better pricing.

We evaluated and then decided against DOORS based on the cost.

I'd advise other users to be careful with deviations from any provided standard options as customization might come out costly.

I use the solution as a documentation control system. Polarion ALM is used for all facets of project management, release, testing, and validation. All the tools required are included in the solution. 

The solution's customization ability lets us tailor it to all our needs. Polarion ALM is cloud-based and therefore our teams all over the world can collaborate using the solution internationally.

The most valuable feature is the function of the ALM system.

The solution's editing capabilities need improvement.

I would like the traceability and the generation of trace matrices beefed up. Felix ALM had a very flexible and powerful trace matrix capability, that Polarion ALM doesn't have. Currently, we have a person that writes scripting to do trace matrices across requirements tests, and different versions. 

The solution has a real problem when we have two or more people working on the same document with different WIs. in Polarion ALM, we have no way of knowing if someone else is using the same document until we try to exit because a notification pops up indicating someone else is working on the document. If we exit, we potentially will override their work and will have to go into the history to reconsolidate the document." The solution only indicates that someone else is also accessing the document once we have completed our work and it does not provide any information about who it is which makes things even more complicated when trying to consolidate the document.

I have been using the solution for 11 months.

The stability is not good. We are currently having trouble with the responsiveness. Several times a day the solution is inaccessible for periods of up to ten minutes.

The solution is scalable and we currently have between 200 and 500 users.

We have plans to scale up the solution. Polarion ALM is being standardized at the corporate level. The organization has a lot of subsidiary companies and corporate IT is subsidizing Polarion ALM.

I previously used Helix ALM.

The initial setup was straightforward because we only had to access a browser.

Any ALM tool has a high return on investment.

I give the solution a seven out of ten.

The solution requires around six people to deploy and maintain.

I have been using the solution from the days when it was C Pine. Before I joined my current company, I was in an accounting company for 22 years, and we used Helix as a standard. I don't know where the pricing sits today, but at that time we could put a cloud instance of shared license for about $2,000 a seat. For what the solution included the price was very attractive.

I recommend Helix ALM over Polarion ALM for larger organizations because the price, power, and scalability are better. I've worked in Helix with hundreds of users and the solution was very good.