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Helix ALM vs Polarion ALM 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

Helix ALM
Ranking in Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) Suites
19th
Average Rating
6.4
Reviews Sentiment
6.8
Number of Reviews
7
Ranking in other categories
Application Requirements Management (8th), Test Management Tools (16th)
Polarion ALM
Ranking in Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) Suites
5th
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
6.0
Number of Reviews
24
Ranking in other categories
Enterprise Agile Planning Tools (6th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of February 2026, in the Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) Suites category, the mindshare of Helix ALM is 1.6%, up from 0.5% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Polarion ALM is 6.1%, down from 7.4% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) Suites Market Share Distribution
ProductMarket Share (%)
Polarion ALM6.1%
Helix ALM1.6%
Other92.3%
Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) Suites
 

Featured Reviews

Harold Pogue - PeerSpot reviewer
Global IT Director of Digital Platforms. Digital and Connected Commerce at a healthcare company with 10,001+ employees
Helix ALM is insanely configurable, with great traceability, and flexibility
The most valuable features of Helix ALM are traceability and flexibility. One thing that distinguishes Helix ALM from other solutions is that it is a hybrid cloud model. Helix ALM is not a full cloud implementation like Valerian, Jira Jama, or Atlassian, where we just go through a browser onto the cloud. In the case of Helix, we have code that goes on our computer and then that communicates to the cloud. We have the backup and distribution capability of the cloud, but we have code executing on our machine, and we don't need to worry much about speed and internet lag problems.
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

"The tool offers high stability."
"The most valuable features of Helix ALM are traceability and flexibility."
"Helix ALM enables users to build, make efficient and effective decisions, and use least-cost methods for maximum benefit, as fast as possible. They allow you to see and visualize your configuration."
"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."
"The features I find the most valuable are requirement tracking and schematics."
"Polarion ALM helps us better structure our customer requirements, and we can also validate the specs of our products against those. If anything changes on our side, we see the impact, and we can see the effect If a customer changes requirements."
"It is a very stable solution."
"We had a nice experience with technical support."
"You can see the work ticket and you can circulate that within the teams. You can define your flows, customize according to your needs, and you can create dashboards and create the reports according to your needs."
"The solution offers good integration."
"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."
 

Cons

"Helix ALM should be able to integrate with other systems better. Helix ALM should also have an easier user interface, and the solution needs to have drag-and-drop tools included in it."
"It would be great to see Perforce's strategy is for implementing intelligence into the process via AI or ML. It's not clearly defined, at least not to my knowledge."
"The accountability and the equivalent to using, acting, editing, working with Word, and also importing and exporting from Word needs improvement."
"The planning and task management aspects of the solution were not that easy."
"The user interface of Polarion ALM needs improvement as it can experience changes that disrupt workflows, especially during major updates."
"The system’s technology is not the most current, leading to missing features that are common in web-based applications."
"As Polarion ALM is a development-oriented tool, easy support or easy access is provided by default, but if I want to use detailed features, I need to write the script, particularly the VM script, and this is its area for improvement. I want Polarion ALM to have a graphical user interface that doesn't need scripting. In the next release of the tool, I'd like for it to not require scripting and programming because needing to run script language is time-consuming."
"Nowadays, the dashboard is too complex to be created."
"Technical support needs some improvement."
"The solution's editing capabilities need improvement."
"The user interface is not yet optimized."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"I rate the product price a nine on a one to ten scale, where one is low price and ten is high price."
"I give the solution a nine out of ten for pricing."
"The license model is okay for large companies but would be quite expensive for smaller enterprises."
"You have to pay around 50-60 euros per user."
"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."
"It is an expensive product."
"If the pricing would come down and it was more affordable then we wouldn't have to switch."
"The solution is expensive."
"Software for medical devices is always expensive."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Manufacturing Company
13%
Healthcare Company
12%
Comms Service Provider
10%
Educational Organization
7%
Manufacturing Company
29%
Computer Software Company
11%
Healthcare Company
6%
Financial Services Firm
4%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business3
Midsize Enterprise2
Large Enterprise2
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business10
Midsize Enterprise3
Large Enterprise12
 

Questions from the Community

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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

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Overview

 

Sample Customers

Invision, Softing, CACI, Hunter Industries, ITSO, Itron, EEC, Database Consultants Australia, VirtualScopics, March Networks, WorkForce
Engineering Ingegneria Informatica, IBS AG, Zumtobel Group
Find out what your peers are saying about Helix ALM vs. Polarion ALM and other solutions. Updated: February 2026.
881,757 professionals have used our research since 2012.