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GitLab vs Polarion ALM comparison

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Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Dec 18, 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

GitLab
Ranking in Enterprise Agile Planning Tools
2nd
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
7.0
Number of Reviews
92
Ranking in other categories
Application Security Tools (8th), Build Automation (3rd), Release Automation (2nd), Static Application Security Testing (SAST) (5th), Rapid Application Development Software (12th), Software Composition Analysis (SCA) (4th), Fuzz Testing Tools (2nd), DevSecOps (1st)
Polarion ALM
Ranking in Enterprise Agile Planning Tools
8th
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
6.0
Number of Reviews
24
Ranking in other categories
Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) Suites (8th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of October 2026, in the Enterprise Agile Planning Tools category, the mindshare of GitLab is 23.2%, down from 28.7% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Polarion ALM is 4.4%, up from 4.1% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Enterprise Agile Planning Tools Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
GitLab23.2%
Polarion ALM4.4%
Other72.4%
Enterprise Agile Planning Tools
 

Featured Reviews

BasilJiji - PeerSpot reviewer
System engineer at a retailer with 10,001+ employees
Role-based workflows have transformed daily deployments and improve team collaboration
GitLab has role-based access control, so when a team member needs to make a code change, they cannot directly apply it to the environment but must put in a merge request. Once a senior reviews the code and approves it, then it is implemented across the environment, making it safer and allowing everyone to experience the process. The best features GitLab offers are version control and automation, which are the major things that stand out to me. When it comes to access, the login is very smooth, with just one login integrated with our Okta, allowing everyone to log in easily. Deployments become much easier, and that is how GitLab helps. The automation features make my work easier because we use a tool called AWX, which is connected to GitLab. Whenever we run a job on AWX, it directly checks the code and uses it. Since the code is not preserved locally but kept in the cloud, it is safe and nobody can tamper with it. When it comes to safety, that is a major thing. Automation features allow the code to be accessed from any tools we use, so the jobs we run are helping tremendously and doing their work perfectly. For pipeline tasks, we have created a significant amount of pipelines, which are all hosted in GitLab. Running the pipelines has become much easier, and they are doing a perfect job, helping tremendously in our day-to-day activities. GitLab has positively impacted my organization because previously we stored code locally on servers, leading to many risks. Since GitLab came into our environment, our integration and deployments became much easier, helping our work become much smoother. Improvements from GitLab have led to better team collaboration because when several people are working, they can all edit the code and submit it as a merge request, and once approved, it reflects directly to the main branch. Many can work at the same time. When it comes to deployments, deploying has become much faster since we started using GitLab, and even if errors occur, we can spot them easily and troubleshoot, which has helped tremendously.
LasseMikkonen - PeerSpot reviewer
CEO at byte
Has provided mature traceability and configuration features while supporting complex product development for mid-to-large companies
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.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"I have found the most valuable features of GitLab are the GitClone, GitPush, GitPull, GitMatch, GitMit, GitCommit, and GitStatus."
"GitLab is used for pipeline development, automation, and deployment."
"It streamlines our DevOps processes with automated CI/CD pipelines."
"By integrating GitLab as a DevOps platform, we have enhanced agility, improved our time to market, and different teams can work collaboratively on various projects."
"It is very useful for merging our code and tracking another branch before giving release."
"GitLab has better support, and its features are superior compared to Jenkins."
"The stability is good."
"We have been using this solution for more than five years, and it is deployed on cloud."
"It offers good performance."
"Polarion ALM's integration is very good and easy to use."
"Polarion ALM delivers both document views and table views simultaneously and organizes configurations according to norms and standards."
"The best feature of Polarion ALM to me is its traceability link."
"This one tool incorporates almost all engineering tasks we need to do for one project."
"There are similar solutions out there such as Jira and Confluence, but they are not as good."
"It meets with everybody's needs without having to grab plugins."
"The solution offers good integration."
 

Cons

"The solution could improve by having better integration."
"The pricing has been substantially increased, which is a major concern."
"When deploying the solution on cloud and the CI/CD pipeline, we have to define the steps and it becomes confusing."
"We have only seen a couple of issues on Gitlab, which we use for building some of the applications."
"It's more related to the supporting layer of features, such as issue management and issue tracking. We tend to always use, for example, Jira next to it. That doesn't mean that GitLab should build something similar to Jira because that will always have its place, but they could grow a bit in those kinds of supporting features. I see some, for example, covering ITSM on a DevOps team level, and that's one of the things that I and my current client would find really helpful. It's understandably not going to be their main focus and their core, and whenever you are with a company that needs a bit more advanced features on that specific topic, you're probably still going to integrate with another tool like Jira Service Management, for example. However, some basic features on things like that could be really helpful."
"It could have more security integrations and the ability to check the vulnerability of the code. I don't think it is a responsibility of Gitlab, but it would be nice to have more options to integrate with."
"The solution should be more cloud-native and have more cloud-native capabilities and features."
"As a partner, sometimes it's difficult to get support. They have a really complicated procedure for their support."
"The most important thing for them to improve should be platform-independent features. They should also provide extensive pipelines and release pipelines that we can define and we can work on."
"The ease-of-use could be improved a little."
"The user interface is not yet optimized."
"Test management lacks an automated process."
"The solution's editing capabilities need improvement."
"Nowadays, the dashboard is too complex to be created."
"The weak point of Polarion ALM software is about reporting and time for extraction of the data...The quality of reporting needs to improve."
"We use PTC Windchill, and Polarion ALM doesn't have native integration, so we had to purchase the connector to integrate it with Polarion ALM. We still haven't implemented it."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The solution's pricing is acceptable."
"I think that we pay approximately $100 USD per month."
"This is an open-source solution."
"The price is okay."
"GitLab is a free solution to use."
"There are different licensing options available, including a free limited-user license."
"GitLab's pricing is good compared to others on the market."
"The price of GitLab could be better, it is expensive."
"You have to pay around 50-60 euros per user."
"Software for medical devices is always expensive."
"The solution is expensive."
"The license model is okay for large companies but would be quite expensive for smaller enterprises."
"If the pricing would come down and it was more affordable then we wouldn't have to switch."
"It is an expensive product."
"Our license for Polarion ALM is yearly. And it's not the cheapest tool that we've looked at. So if we had made our decision purely based on the licensing cost, we wouldn't have selected Polarion."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
13%
Manufacturing Company
11%
Government
8%
Computer Software Company
8%
Manufacturing Company
32%
Comms Service Provider
6%
Healthcare Company
6%
Outsourcing Company
6%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business39
Midsize Enterprise10
Large Enterprise49
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business9
Midsize Enterprise3
Large Enterprise13
 

Questions from the Community

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for GitLab?
The setup cost for GitLab is minimal since the team has its own minimal resource balancing. The costing falls into an intermediate stage and is impactful across all results within the team. It allo...
What needs improvement with GitLab?
There are many improvements that GitLab can implement, such as addressing the issue of caching. Currently, when I have multiple tasks to merge or attempt multiple merges, the CI/CD and overall GitL...
What is your primary use case for GitLab?
My main use case for GitLab is as a version control system that we are using. Currently, I am working on an end-to-end AI pipeline, and I have deployed my whole code using GitLab so that all things...
What needs improvement with Polarion ALM?
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 te...
What is your primary use case for Polarion ALM?
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 req...
What advice do you have for others considering Polarion ALM?
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 b...
 

Comparisons

 

Also Known As

Fuzzit
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Overview

 

Sample Customers

1. NASA  2. IBM  3. Sony  4. Alibaba  5. CERN  6. Siemens  7. Volkswagen  8. ING  9. Ticketmaster  10. SpaceX  11. Adobe  12. Intuit  13. Autodesk  14. Rakuten  15. Unity Technologies  16. Pandora  17. Electronic Arts  18. Nordstrom  19. Verizon  20. Comcast  21. Philips  22. Deutsche Telekom  23. Orange  24. Fujitsu  25. Ericsson  26. Nokia  27. General Electric  28. Cisco  29. Accenture  30. Deloitte  31. PwC  32. KPMG
Engineering Ingegneria Informatica, IBS AG, Zumtobel Group
Find out what your peers are saying about GitLab vs. Polarion ALM and other solutions. Updated: September 2026.
916,197 professionals have used our research since 2012.