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Atlassian ALM vs TFS comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Dec 15, 2024

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
16th
Average Rating
7.4
Reviews Sentiment
5.8
Number of Reviews
8
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
TFS
Ranking in Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) Suites
8th
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
7.0
Number of Reviews
99
Ranking in other categories
Test Management Tools (3rd)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of August 2026, in the Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) Suites category, the mindshare of Atlassian ALM is 2.4%, up from 1.9% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of TFS is 4.4%, up from 4.4% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) Suites Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
TFS4.4%
Atlassian ALM2.4%
Other93.2%
Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) Suites
 

Featured Reviews

BRIANJOHNSON2 - PeerSpot reviewer
Independant Consultant at B&H Designs Ltd
Long-term testing workflows have improved integration of test planning and defect tracking
The deployment depends on whether you are deploying it on your computer or across the program. Cloud-based system deployment takes some time, as it depends on your rights to your computer. I would rate the deployment as a seven on a scale of one to ten. It took a couple of hours to get it right. The IT department deploys it.
PF
Angular C Full Stack Developer at Great American Insurance
Simplified task creation enhances seamless development workflow
We use TFS for our Agile board to handle our sprints, epics, stories, and tasks, tracking how work is progressing. It is also a repository for managing code changes TFS integrates seamlessly with Visual Studio and Azure Cloud, facilitating continuous integration and continuous deployment, which…

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"The interface between the repository and test plan stands out as valuable, and I appreciate building the tests and scenarios in Test Lab and the ability to link defects throughout the system, which Atlassian ALM does better than any other testing products."
"If you can spend the little effort to configure Jira to support your more complex requirements management, then you can concentrate everything in one tool."
"This solution fits very well into our agile product management environment."
"In Bitbucket, the reviews are pretty good."
"The most valuable feature is the Scrum board."
"The Atlassian ALM suite consists at least of JIRA, Confluence, BitBucket and HipChat - just the tools you need for organizing your teams in a very efficient way."
"As a general purpose tool, JIRA and Confluence are still ahead of the competition."
"The main power of this tool is the integration between the different products of the Atlassian suite, and we have good integration with work management and software build automation (Bamboo), which is the major strength from this provider."
"It helps us respond to our customers' needs in a much faster fashion and saves our customers money in a way."
"Some of the valuable features are version control and the ability to create different collections in terms of segregating the authorization for teams who connect to small projects."
"The features such as branching and labelling are very good because they actually help you create a master branch which is a running branch."
"This tool provides a complete solution for ALM."
"The scalability of TFS is good, and we have approximately 200 users using this solution in my organization."
"The interface is good with TFS."
"The most valuable features of TFS are bug reporting and its high performance."
"TFS has allowed our development team to function better as a group, by keeping code organized, and making it easier to prevent people from stepping on each other's code."
 

Cons

"The reports are not really customizable, which is something that they should improve on."
"However, it is not really scalable, so if you want to use it for anything larger or plan to use it for product portfolios, then it starts to be problematic."
"All Atlassian products are based on JAVA which makes it a bit difficult to trace problems if you don't have much JAVA skilled staff around."
"Atlassian ALM is too expensive. The pricing is very expensive."
"Confluence is just a super-inadequate tool for editing documents."
"Frankly it's a really daunting exercise - challenging, problematic and very flaky."
"However, it is not really scalable, so if you want to use it for anything larger or plan to use it for product portfolios, then it starts to be problematic."
"The automation for scheduling software and doing software tests should be simplified because it's complex and too rigid."
"TFS is scalable with different Microsoft tools for test management but it is not scalable with other third-party tools."
"Overall, I think it would be useful to have something similar where Microsoft comes up with supporting concepts of scaling Agile in TFS so that clients don't have to look for a separate tool."
"The reporting functionality is something that they should work on."
"Test case management could be improved."
"TFS's CI/CD, project pipelines, and management development could be improved."
"They have room for improvement in merging the source code changes for multiple developers across files. It is very good at highlighting the changes that the source code automatically does not know how to handle, but it's not very good at reporting the ones that it did automatically. There are times when we have source code that gets merged, and we lose the changes that we expected to happen. It can get a little confusing at times. They can just do a little bit better on the merging of changes for multiple developers."
"We are also using Microsoft Teams. The two products function separately. There is not enough collaboration between Microsoft Teams and TFS."
"They should have design patterns in TFS for the development team, and design patterns for the QA."
 

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 price of the solution is cheaper than other competitors and it is a per-user license."
"The solution is expensive."
"The tool's licensing costs are yearly."
"Use the Microsoft recommended “seat-based” licensing model. This allows a single developer with multiple machines to consume only one client license."
"There are different prices depending on the configurations. There is a free version available. There is no extra cost for the solution. However, the hardware could be something that needs to be considered."
"TFS is more competitively priced than some other solutions."
"TFS is on the higher side, but if you intend to use the tool as a complete ALM tool, it will reduce your costs in the long run."
"We are using the open-source version."
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908,858 professionals have used our research since 2012.
 

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Manufacturing Company
21%
Financial Services Firm
9%
Outsourcing Company
9%
Comms Service Provider
7%
Manufacturing Company
12%
Financial Services Firm
11%
Construction Company
9%
Outsourcing Company
6%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business4
Midsize Enterprise2
Large Enterprise2
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business16
Midsize Enterprise26
Large Enterprise64
 

Questions from the Community

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Atlassian ALM?
Atlassian ALM is too expensive. The pricing is very expensive.
What needs improvement with Atlassian ALM?
I am still not satisfied with the requirements area of Atlassian ALM. Atlassian ALM has four parts: test plan, Test Lab, requirements, and reporting. The requirements portion continues to be an are...
What is your primary use case for Atlassian ALM?
I have been using Atlassian ALM for twenty-five years. It used to be called Quality Center, and I first used it in 2000 and 2001. The company changed, but the product remained. Atlassian ALM has no...
Which is better - TFS or Azure DevOps?
TFS and Azure DevOps are different in many ways. TFS was designed for admins, and only offers incremental improvements. In addition, TFS seems complicated to use and I don’t think it has a very fri...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for TFS?
While I do not know the exact pricing, TFS is likely more expensive than GitLab.
What needs improvement with TFS?
From a testing perspective, while the build and deploy automation capability and pipeline integration are already present to a great extent, these are areas where TFS can improve further.
 

Also Known As

No data available
Team Foundation Server
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Facebook, NASA, Cisco, eBay, Redfin, Toyota, Kaiser Permanente, Gilt, CSIRO, Autodesk, The Daily Telegraph, CODE, Illumnia
Vendex KBB IT Services, Info Support, Fujitsu Consulting, TCSC, Airways New Zealand, HP
Find out what your peers are saying about Atlassian ALM vs. TFS and other solutions. Updated: August 2026.
908,858 professionals have used our research since 2012.