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.

Neutral

Neutral

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.

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.

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.

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.

I’ve worked on a few exercises, mainly on importing requirements, customization, and integrating with other third-party software. 

The tool's most valuable feature is its browser experience. I rate its traceability feature a ten out of ten. From the initial stage to the release, you can manage everything through a single point. 

Integration requires a lot of effort. You typically need to work with an implementation partner to get it done. Most connectors available for Polarion ALM are paid. Unlike other vendors offering several standard connectors for free, integrating third-party software with Polarion ALM involves discussing and coordinating with the third-party software providers, which requires effort. 

Most of our customers use multiple third-party software, and integrating them with Polarion ALM can be difficult. Even if we configure it for project use, integrating all this software plays a major role. It’s challenging to convince clients to use Polarion ALM because it requires a lot of effort and manual work to sync data from other third-party software.

I have been working with the product for six months. 

I rate the solution's stability a seven out of ten. During a power outage, you must reindex everything, which can be time-consuming. 

I rate the tool's scalability a ten out of ten. The software has no practical limitations regarding managing projects or the load; it depends on your chosen deployment model. You're good to go if you have a good server with sufficient RAM. The software itself has no limitations. We have around 15-16 customers. 90 percent of our customers are medium businesses. 

Raising a ticket and getting a reference number can take a lot of time, especially for small queries.

Positive

I rate the solution's deployment ease an eight out of ten. It involves adding a user and assigning roles. The deployment time depends on the customer's requirements, but it can be completed within one to two days. However, the integration part requires a longer time and more resources. Our deployment team handles it. They contact the customer to gather information on the kind of software they are using, the number of users, how many developers, and QA teams. Based on that information, it is structured, calculated, and managed accordingly.

You can deploy the product yourself. 

Most of my customers use the solution on-prem and in the cloud, and I rate it an eight out of ten. I would recommend Polarion ALM. However, users should consider the kind of environment they are working in and which services they plan to integrate. This will play a major role in their overall experience with the software.