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IBM DOORS Next vs Jira comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Apr 6, 2025

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

IBM DOORS Next
Ranking in Application Requirements Management
5th
Average Rating
7.6
Reviews Sentiment
6.3
Number of Reviews
13
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
Jira
Ranking in Application Requirements Management
2nd
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
6.9
Number of Reviews
274
Ranking in other categories
Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) Suites (1st), Project Management Software (2nd)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of May 2025, in the Application Requirements Management category, the mindshare of IBM DOORS Next is 8.9%, up from 7.9% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Jira is 15.4%, down from 16.2% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Application Requirements Management
 

Featured Reviews

Roger Trackwell - PeerSpot reviewer
An industry-leading tool to demonstrate traceability between requirements, with valuable features for tailoring modules and managing several thousand requirements
The biggest thing is that it shows cradle to grave traceability between the initial parent requirement and the lowest level, or what we call a CID, a critical item development spec. You can establish your verification plans in DOORS, and then as you get test results, you can put them in DOORS as a link or as a pointer to where that specific test resides on a company database. Then you can also write compliance rationale and add a column for coding, like pass, fail, green, yellow, red, meets, does not meet, partially meets, or whatever scoring criteria you want to use. Like I said, the best thing about it is that it provides you that visibility of your verification, allowing you to know how close you are to your pre-production activities, prototyping, go ahead, or whatever it is.
Saroj Ekka - PeerSpot reviewer
Offers good repository integration, sprint board and easy to set up
There are some features and reports we need that are not there. For example, if I have to find out the capacity of the current sprint by user and compare it with the previous sprint, that visibility isn't there. We can know the capacity and what happened with the whole sprint, but not for an individual person to see where it's falling and how it's tracking. Report and analytics capabilities are important for a product manager. That visibility is important, so we use Jira. Some of the features are there, and I use my own Excels or other data things to compensate for that.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"My company contacts the solution's technical support, and they are good and responsive."
"There are many good features with DOORS. The solution has a concept of streams and baselines, as well as a concept of components. A component is a subproject inside a project."
"As far as maintaining our requirements so that we can have copies of them, it's good. I can print it out if necessary."
"It's web-based, so you don't have anything to install."
"The most valuable features are the baselines and links."
"The "Link by Attribute" feature is useful for making links without needing to use the web interface manually."
"The most valuable features are the versioning of requirements and the possibility to reuse them."
"One of the most valuable features is how you can tailor the modules."
"I like seeing which tickets are open and what our response rate is. They have a lot of good metrics in their system to see what's going on."
"Scaling the product wouldn't be difficult."
"The timeline management is great."
"The JIRA user interface looks great. It's an overall good experience. It's very intuitive in the sense that you understand how it's going to work. It's very self-explanatory, and it's beneficial overall."
"We have the best community to support any problems that we have."
"The burndown chart is also helpful when it comes to reporting and allows us to know where we are going, especially during development."
"In our organization, we use Jira for project management and usually use the Scrum project type. We might adjust the workflows and stages to better suit our needs, but we mostly use the default functionalities it offers to manage our projects."
"It's a Scrum tool, so it's very easy to use."
 

Cons

"There is room for improvement in the APIs that they have exposed for integration."
"When you are in Jira or Confluence, you have some freedom in how you type in text. That's also a weakness of Confluence, however, as it opens the doors to sloppy work. In DOS Next Generation, the text is very rigorous, but it might be difficult for people who don't have the discipline. Having a way to quickly enter requirements could help. It might already be in there, but I don't know. I don't have enough experience with the tool yet."
"Both the data storage and reporting for this solution need improvement."
"I have come to the conclusion that if you are considering migrating from DOORS to DNG, don't! Instead of spending 100's to 1000's of hours doing migrations, invest those hours in a DXL programmer to make DOORS do what it isn't doing for you now."
"It offers a bad user experience and the usability is poor."
"IBM Rational DOORS Next Generation is not a very user-friendly product."
"As a web tool, DNG can be difficult to use if the server is loaded or your network connection to it is saturated."
"Be very careful how you load your DNG server. There are limits to the number of artifacts a server can handle."
"There is always a bit of a performance problem. It's a bit slow to load the whole data."
"Workflows can be improved. We don't use workflows because we can't handle that much complexity. Its interface could be more intuitive for workflows."
"It would be ideal if Jira had future functionalities to integrate more easily with various aspects of code reviews."
"There should be a way to look for specific comments. When we have thousands of comments on a Jira ticket, there is no way to look at the comments of a specific type. In the comments, if there is a way to put a tag, it would be helpful. For example, when there are a lot of lengthy discussions happening on a particular ticket, there could be a conclusion tag or something like that to indicate a conclusion. It would help in sorting the comments based on a certain category, such as conclusion."
"I don't know if it's the way it's deployed in the organization, but the interface we are provided is not as customizable as other tools. The multi-language report is not enabled in our installation. I don't really know if it's something related to the tool or our installation."
"Scripts should be more readily available for implementing projects."
"I have noticed a problem with Jira in the Philippines. In the Philippines, there are only a few companies that offer local support, which is alarming."
"It is not user-friendly."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"If the product price were not reasonable enough, our company would not use IBM Rational DOORS Next Generation."
"The cost of maintenance is €20,000 to €30,000 ($22,000 to $33,000 USD) and there are no additional fees."
"You are going to need a beefy server and a fat network pipe to it in order to make DNG and its companion tools work well for users."
"The price of this solution is very high, and it increases year after year."
"Users can buy a three-year license for about 12,000 Euros."
"The tool's pricing is reasonable."
"It is certainly a long-term solution for our company and for previous companies that I have worked for. They have these long-term term licenses, but I'm not sure if they really pay on a yearly basis. They are certainly using it for a really long period and for a lot of users."
"The price seems reasonable to me. It's very similar to Splunk."
"I don't deal with licensing in my current consultant position."
"We are using the enterprise license which is nice because it ensures that we always have the latest versions of Jira software."
"There is a monthly license required for this solution and it is expensive."
"We feel that the product is a good value for the cost."
"If you are using just Jira, it is cheap, but if you start to use it and you feel you need some more services or more functions, then you have to buy add-ons, which can make it expensive."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Manufacturing Company
23%
Aerospace/Defense Firm
8%
Government
8%
Computer Software Company
7%
Educational Organization
48%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Financial Services Firm
7%
Computer Software Company
6%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
 

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about IBM Rational DOORS Next Generation?
The tool's most valuable feature is displaying requirements in a tabular format. This means you can see everything laid out in columns and rows. It is more aesthetic compared to other tools. The tr...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for IBM Rational DOORS Next Generation?
The pricing is considered unreasonable, and there is speculation that IBM may not be putting much effort into further development, possibly treating it as a cash cow.
What needs improvement with IBM Rational DOORS Next Generation?
There is a need for improvement in user experience, as the UI is too complex and outdated. Updates should be more frequent to ensure security and functionality, especially in addressing vulnerabili...
Is Jira better or would you go with Micro Focus ALM Octane?
Hi Netanya, Basically , it all depends on the use cases for your environment and the business needs. Hope the below data may be relevant to you for identifying your needs and deciding on the approp...
Which is better - Jira or Microsoft Azure DevOps?
Jira is a great centralized tool for just about everything, from local team management to keeping track of products and work logs. It is easy to implement and navigate, and it is stable and scalabl...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Jira?
We operate under a nonlimited license with Jira, allowing a number of users to access it with a single enterprise license.
 

Comparisons

 

Also Known As

Rational DOORS Next Generation, RDNG, Rational Requirements Composer and IBM RRC
Jira Software
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Major health insurer
Square, Nasa, eBay, Cisco, SalesForce, Adobe, BNP Paribas, BMW and LinkedIn, Pfizer, Citi.
Find out what your peers are saying about IBM DOORS Next vs. Jira and other solutions. Updated: April 2025.
851,604 professionals have used our research since 2012.