Atlassian ALM vs Rally Software comparison

Atlassian and Broadcom are both solutions in the Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) Suites category. Atlassian is ranked #18, while Broadcom is ranked #10 with an average rating of 7.0. Atlassian holds a 2.2% mindshare in ALM, compared to Broadcom’s 5.8% mindshare. Additionally, 60% of Atlassian users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 91% of Broadcom users who would recommend it.

Atlassian ALM

Read 6 Atlassian ALM reviews

693 Views
679 Comparison Views

60% willing to recommend

Rally Software

Read 120 Rally Software reviews

3,558 Views
3,309 Comparison Views

91% willing to recommend

Atlassian ALM

Rally Software

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Dec 15, 2024

Rally Software and Atlassian ALM are competing products in the application lifecycle management space. Rally Software offers strong agile project management, while Atlassian ALM is known for superior integration and scalability, often preferred by larger enterprises for its extensive feature set.

Features: Rally Software offers sprint tracking, portfolio management, and team collaboration. Atlassian ALM provides project tracking, powerful customization options, and extensive integration with third-party applications, benefiting from a wide range of plugins that enhance its functionality.

Room for Improvement: Rally Software could improve its feature richness and integration capabilities with other enterprise tools. There's also a need for more customization options and flexibility in reporting. Atlassian ALM can be enhanced with a more user-friendly interface, simplified initial setup, and reduced complexity in managing integrations between its various components.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: Rally Software offers a straightforward deployment process focused on agile methodologies with dedicated support to streamline implementation. Atlassian ALM provides a smooth deployment experience with a robust knowledge base and a vibrant community, making self-service support more accessible and attractive for comprehensive support needs.

Pricing and ROI: Rally Software generally has a lower initial cost, appealing to smaller teams with budget constraints. However, Atlassian ALM offers a better long-term return on investment due to its scalability and feature set, which can result in greater productivity and cost savings, making its higher upfront cost worthwhile for businesses expecting growth or needing advanced features.

To learn more, read our detailed Atlassian ALM vs. Rally Software Report (Updated: September 2025).

Buyer's Guide

Atlassian ALM vs. Rally Software

September 2025

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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

Atlassian ALM

Ranking in Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) Suites

18th

Average Rating

7.6

Reviews Sentiment

6.6

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

Rally Software

Ranking in Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) Suites

10th

Average Rating

8.0

Reviews Sentiment

6.9

Number of Reviews

120

Ranking in other categories

Enterprise Agile Planning Tools (6th)

Mindshare comparison

As of October 2025, in the Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) Suites category, the mindshare of Atlassian ALM is 2.2%, up from 1.2% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Rally Software is 5.8%, down from 6.7% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) Suites Market Share Distribution
Product	Market Share (%)
Rally Software	5.8%
Atlassian ALM	2.2%
Other	92.0%

Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) Suites

Featured Reviews

Xie Zhifeng

R&D Director, CTO at CSDN

Scrum board feature is highly valuable and handles different user volumes

We have both small-sized and big-sized customers. The small ones generally have around 50 to 200 users. The larger ones, for example, in China, have around 15,000 platform users. So, the number of small companies is high, but the total business value comes from the big companies. Atlassian ALM can handle different user volumes. For customers with more than 500 users, we recommend deploying a high availability (HA) architecture. The solution supports both single-node and HA modes. I would rate the scalability a five out of ten. It could be better in terms of scalability with more users. It could be improved to better handle larger numbers of users. We have clients using Atlassian ALM both in China and globally. We have around 20 clients using this solution.

Read full review

Rakhee Srivastava

Sr. Information Architect and Principal Consultant UX at Tech Mahindra Limited

Real-time dashboards provide clear insights into project progress and team velocity

Rally Software is easy to use for Agile project methodology because it follows Scrum and Kanban, helping with sprint planning and backlog management. Rally Software provides real-time dashboards for different kinds of stakeholders and governance, giving clear insights into project progress, team velocity, and potential risks. Backlog management is present in the product, allowing prioritization of tasks. The dashboards provide all types of insights through analytics. Capacity planning helps optimize resource allocation, ensuring balanced workload and realistic sprint commitments for our projects. The solution integrates with GitHub, and we can also integrate with Excel and CI/CD pipelines.

Read full review

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"The main power of this tool is the integration between the different products of the Atlassian suite. We have good integration with work management with Java. This is the major strength from this provider."

"This solution fits very well into our agile product management environment."

"The most valuable feature is the Scrum board."

"I was able to create epics for our budgeting concerns and it helped me link everything together."

"The product has excellent customizable reports."

"The tool is very useful for generating metrics to improve our project management. It helps with productivity by allowing us to focus on small pieces of functionality and deliver them in short timeframes. The tool provides senior management with visibility on priorities and progress."

"It's very user-friendly."

"With this product, searching for historical information or the evolution of the requirement, detecting conflict between projects has helped a lot."

"What I like the most about Agile Central is that it is the only system I need to have full control and visibility of our entire body of work plus the activities and processes required to deliver it."

"It has allowed the quality assurance team to keep all information in sync with the application requirements and user stories for our general development."

"CA Agile Central helps the entire organization run like one powerful team."

More Rally Software pros

Cons

"The automation for scheduling software and doing software tests should be simplified because it's complex and too rigid."

"The reports are not really customizable, which is something that they should improve on."

"There is room for improvement in the high-level project management."

"More customization capabilities would be helpful. Providing a little bit more structure around how the system should be set up in terms of the hierarchy structure might be helpful as well."

"I think the interface could be a little bit more visual and less wordy. Right now, it seems like it's just a lot of text on the page. In other ticketing systems where it's more visual, you can see more of a flow. But in this one it's more just a list of tasks. I would like to see that a little bit better, especially considering it has so many great organizational features, like child tasks, different artifacts. It would be great to see it presented more appropriately."

"The solution is expensive."

"As it is right now, it does not support automation of the quality assurance process. It just supports manual testing."

"Rally Software is highly complex, and it takes some effort to get everything tied together. But once you do, it's a satisfying experience, and the result looks beautiful. Azure, ServiceNow, and Jira do not have all the features that Rally Software provides in one place, making it an exceptional tool for project management."

"I think there is a missing link with the development activity. Some developers are pushing in new versions of the code, but you cannot make the link from the user story to a specific application version."

"I would like for workspace admins to be able to hide projects in the Project Picker and not lose any historical data; make them invisible to certain users, visible to certain users, depending on permission sets. That would be lovely."

"Customization features may not be exposed or unavailable, so people may be looking for them. So, customization is an area people have told me is more desirable."

More Rally Software cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"There is a community edition available, but if the price were lower for the addons then more people would use the full version."

"The license costs are fairly high as compared to some of the other solutions out there."

"I understand it's a little more expensive. That is why many people prefer Jira."

"I don't know the exact pricing, but I think the tool is priced high. They provide quality workmanship, good software, regular upgrades, and they're always attentive and listen to users. Everything comes with a price. I think it's an expensive solution compared to Jira or other competitors, but it's a complete package."

"Rally Software costs $50 a month, and for a base account, that price is acceptable."

"It is expensive and may not be worthwhile for a small company."

"Frankly, pricing is expensive and needs to be carefully planned for when budgeting."

"From a price point, it's a cost effective solution for our needs."

"We are always looking for a discount, if the solution was less expensive it would be a benefit."

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Manufacturing Company

16%

Educational Organization

11%

Financial Services Firm

10%

Healthcare Company

Manufacturing Company

16%

Financial Services Firm

11%

Insurance Company

10%

Healthcare Company

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

No data available

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	13
Midsize Enterprise	13
Large Enterprise	110

Questions from the Community

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What do you like most about Rally Software?

Rally offers many features that help the management of activities, coordination, alignment and reports, which applies agility across the organization. If I were to highlight a particular feature, i...

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What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Rally Software?

Rally Software is affordable because our customers also prefer it, and I have never heard concerns about pricing preventing us from using this tool.

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What needs improvement with Rally Software?

While I'm not heavily involved in project management tools, I am familiar with these tools. One area for improvement might be the rigidity in role and access configurations, which require many proc...

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Comparisons

Jira vs Atlassian ALM

Compared 42% of the time

Microsoft Azure DevOps vs Atlassian ALM

Compared 16% of the time

IBM Engineering Lifecycle Management (ELM) vs Atlassian ALM

Compared 15% of the time

Polarion ALM vs Atlassian ALM

Compared 10% of the time

OpenText Software Delivery Management vs Atlassian ALM

Compared 8% of the time

More Atlassian ALM Competitors

Microsoft Azure DevOps vs Rally Software

Compared 29% of the time

Jira vs Rally Software

Compared 28% of the time

OpenText Software Delivery Management vs Rally Software

Compared 5% of the time

Jira Align vs Rally Software

Compared 5% of the time

TFS vs Rally Software

Compared 5% of the time

More Rally Software Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Atlassian ALM

October 2025

Download Atlassian ALM product report

Buyer's Guide

Rally Software

September 2025

Download Rally Software product report

Also Known As

No data available

CA Agile Central, Rally Enterprise, CA Agile Training, CA Agile Coaching, CA Agile Academy, CA Agile Management , CA ALM

Overview

How to use Atlassian to manage application lifecycle: Atlassian builds software to pull together all the elements of application lifecycle management. Product management, developers, Q/A, dev ops, and business stake holders all have their own ways of interacting with application lifecycle management and Atlassian splits up the process into a few buckets.

1) Collaborate to plan and envision work

Atlassian's Confluence is a collaboration platform for building and driving consensus. Call stake holders in to give approval, comment on, and share pages and integrate with the rest of the development toolchain.

2) Build and track roadmaps

Atlassian's JIRA Software offers incredibly flexible project management with custom workflows, plugins, and high visibility rollups through JIRA Portfolio. Issues can be embedded right in confluence, or be used to kick off new branches in version control. Keep everyone on the same page with project progress.

3) Track and deploy code

Atlassian's Bitbucket is the world's most robust Git solution. The ability to deploy multiple-nodes with failover, global mirroring for super fast clones, and powerful code review control set it apart from competition. Bitbucket also has a mature plugin and hooks system that allows extensions and connection to a suite of CI software.

4) Support and Iterate

Track support requests, bugs, and route users in the right direction with JIRA Service Desk. With the same custom workflow engine as JIRA Software, a tight integration with the rest of the stack, and a knowledge base function make it a powerful addition to the ALM stack.

5) Tie it together

ChatOps helps tie every part of the ALM together. Get stake holders in the same room to manage a project, teams in the same page to manage their work, or plugin automated members to report on CI status, pull requests, page changes in Confluence, or bug reports. Like every piece of Atlassian's ALM there is a mature API for extending plugins and everything can be hosted behind your own firewall.

Atlassian

With Rally Software, you can plan, prioritize, manage, track, and continuously improve your work so that you can deliver the value that your customers need with speed, quality, and efficiency. Our enterprise-class Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) SaaS platform provides visibility into progress, roadblocks, and dependencies across multiple teams, projects, and programs. This allows you to align to your strategic goals and create better business results, and to do it all in a single system of record.

Broadcom

Sample Customers

Facebook, NASA, Cisco, eBay, Redfin, Toyota, Kaiser Permanente, Gilt, CSIRO, Autodesk, The Daily Telegraph, CODE, Illumnia

Physicians Mutual, Harvard Pilgrim HealthCare, Editora Abril, Tata Communications, Level 3 Communications, Seagate, TomTom, Philips, Hiscox, Physicians Mutual, MYOB

Buyer's Guide

Atlassian ALM vs. Rally Software

September 2025

Free Report: Atlassian ALM vs. Rally Software

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