Jira Align vs Rally Software comparison

Atlassian and Broadcom are both solutions in the Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) Suites category. Atlassian is ranked #9 with an average rating of 7.8, while Broadcom is ranked #7 with an average rating of 7.2. Atlassian holds a 1.4% mindshare in ALM, compared to Broadcom’s 6.8% mindshare. Additionally, 92% of Atlassian users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 91% of Broadcom users who would recommend it.

Jira Align

Read 41 Jira Align reviews

1,134 Views
704 Comparison Views

92% willing to recommend

Rally Software

Read 119 Rally Software reviews

6,892 Views
2,779 Comparison Views

91% willing to recommend

Jira Align

Rally Software

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Dec 15, 2024

Rally Software and Jira Align compete in the project management and Agile tools category, both catering to enterprise-level planning. Rally Software holds an advantage in ease of use and detailed progress tracking, while Jira Align excels in integration capabilities and portfolio management efficiency.

Features: Rally Software offers detailed progress tracking, customizable reporting, and an intuitive interface for agile methodologies. It supports release management and Kanban, although it is more focused on scrum features. Jira Align is known for strong portfolio management and integration with Jira, providing program-level reporting and a scalable structure that supports enterprise agile practices.

Room for Improvement: Rally Software can enhance its defect management cycle, Kanban functionalities, and tool integration for better analytics. Users find its interface could be more intuitive. Jira Align users face challenges with navigation, Jira integration, and customization, especially within portfolio management. The synchronization speed between Jira and Jira Align also needs improvement.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: Both platforms offer deployment in public and private clouds, with Rally also providing hybrid solutions. Rally Software's technical support is praised for responsiveness and knowledgeable service. Jira Align's support is generally reliable, although training and documentation could be enhanced to help users maximize features.

Pricing and ROI: Rally Software is priced higher, with significant ROI when agile practices are well executed, although cost might be prohibitive for small organizations. Jira Align is also costly, particularly for smaller businesses, but larger enterprises find value in its integration with Jira and comprehensive features, contributing to a positive ROI despite the upfront expense.

To learn more, read our detailed Jira Align vs. Rally Software Report (Updated: February 2025).

Buyer's Guide

Jira Align vs. Rally Software

February 2025

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Helped 845,406 peers since 2012

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

Jira Align

Ranking in Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) Suites

9th

Ranking in Enterprise Agile Planning Tools

3rd

Average Rating

8.0

Reviews Sentiment

7.0

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

Value Stream Management Software (1st)

Rally Software

Ranking in Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) Suites

7th

Ranking in Enterprise Agile Planning Tools

7th

Average Rating

8.0

Reviews Sentiment

6.9

Number of Reviews

119

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

Mindshare comparison

As of April 2025, in the Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) Suites category, the mindshare of Jira Align is 1.4%, down from 1.7% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Rally Software is 6.8%, up from 5.9% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) Suites

Featured Reviews

Tonia Spight-Sokoya

Program Support for Third Party External SPM Lead Business Execution Consultant/PMP PM at Wells Fargo

User-friendly with good documentation and the ability to integrate with other third arty vendors

I am really focused on identity access management and getting access to the vendors. Right now, I'm setting up vendor access through Azure. You can do that or with the IAM. Sometimes we have to create several different types of access because we have vaulted databases. We have the Unix databases, I have MySQL, and we have Mongo, where I get access to those user classes or to the databases in the host group. Those are all different access scenario forms that I submit after I do the configuration in the form with the security team. I need clarity on the IAM. I'm not clear on PAM eighter. Is there a form that they have to submit to get access to the internal cyber-risk teams to get their access for people to be able to use the tool on the Confluence side? Do they have to send some kind of form to the operation's security or enterprise security? To be able to get the access for privileged access, do they need to be working on projects that have vaulted databases? I still need to figure out how that works. Other companies that are competitors of Jira and Confluence, are able to create their active directories for the vendors that don't come in internally. They only do access through the cloud and through third-party, two-factor identification. That's something I was wondering if that was already implemented in the packages, the package for Confluence. It would be nice to have that right in the solution.

Read full review

Deep Maini

Agile CSM - Sr. Scrum Master at Alliant Energy Corporation

Helps you collaborate on various effects and solutions from the top to the bottom of the organization

We use Rally Software extensively in our agile development processes. We have program boards set up where we write and break down stories. We assign story points and map dependencies between different stories, showing how stories from one team may depend on stories from another team. It integrates these functions well, especially compared to Jira, which has some limitations in this area. The tool keeps improving based on how teams actually work in Scaled Agile, continually upgrading their software versions to meet our needs. I find the whole Rally Software tool integrated very nicely. In Jira, we often go to Confluence for documentation using two separate tools. But in the product, it's not like that. The documentation is tightly integrated. I don't feel like switching to another tool, like going from Jira to Confluence. The tool is designed for collaboration. It shows your organization's view, showing different teams and verticals. It helps you collaborate on various effects and solutions from the top to the bottom of the organization. It has an ecosystem that supports this. All the dependencies between different teams can be easily mapped in Rally Software. They have a program board for that purpose.

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 tool enabled everyone to see the status of each environment."

"The most valuable feature of Jira Align is the overall team vision."

"The tool helps us with better tracking across various departments. Jira Align is highly valuable for organizations due to its flexibility. With my experience as an administrator, I can attest that it can be tailored to meet the diverse needs of any organization. It helps to eliminate the mess created by Excel spreadsheets."

"The initial setup is very straightforward."

"The OKR experience is great."

"The technical support team responds quickly and resolves issues effectively."

"Jira Align's most valuable feature is the view of strategic control reports for high-level directors."

"The technical support services are excellent."

More Jira Align pros

"We use Rally Software extensively in our agile development processes. We have program boards set up where we write and break down stories. We assign story points and map dependencies between different stories, showing how stories from one team may depend on stories from another team."

"Tech support is very responsive, helpful, and available."

"Gives me a dashboard where I can see what things are not being worked on, what things are blocked."

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

"The product has excellent customizable reports."

"The visibility it brings to the plan, the ability to capture tasks, and trace them all the way through the life cycle. Providing that visibility helps both me and the team, or teams, to be able to understand where we are in the development process."

"Having that view into features and roadmap from product to delivery teams, and where they are going, then execute on."

"It's designed around Agile, so it has all of the pieces that match up with the process."

More Rally Software pros

Cons

"There are fewer customization options in Jira Align due to how it was designed."

"There is no linkage between the Jira records and the overarching schedule. We maintain the overarching schedule in Microsoft Project, and there is no linkage back and forth with the Jira tasks. They are independent of each other."

"The framework could be better."

"Jira Align's cost needs improvement."

"The synchronization between Jira and Jira Align takes too long."

"For future releases of Jira Align, I would suggest making workflows simpler and more user-friendly."

"One of the biggest issues I found in the new version was once we clicked on one of the tasks that were specifically for our group and went to look at the other portfolios in other areas we had to browse all the way back to the beginning. If you click the back button, it would not work, it stayed the same place. Additionally, if you click on page B, but then you wanted to go back to page A it would not go back to page A. You would have to browse back to the portfolio and then find your group again and open it. This was the only issue that I had with it and I am not sure if it is a Jira issue or it was because of the way the site was laid out."

"I've encountered limitations in using Jira Align for certain aspects, particularly in implementing OKRs. Jira Align's highest hierarchy is Epic, which may not always align perfectly for specific initiatives. Additionally, while Jira Align offers functionality for tracking OKRs and generating dashboards, I've found that it lacks in some areas. As a result, we've explored alternative solutions that better meet our needs in these areas. Its Kanban feature is also limited."

More Jira Align cons

"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."

"The stronger CA can get on dependency mapping the better. That's the biggest hiccup. As you're setting up your features, they should make it easier to flag the dependencies, either across features or across projects. Then you're more set up for success."

"There's a lot of support for Scrum and Agile, but it needs something for the Kanban side."

"I wish there was a view, like the Kanban view, where you could see the parent, and see all the children visually, so you could drag and drop where you want it to go. Something like that might help."

"We'd like better dashboards to make visibility better."

"We did submit an enhancement request. I think a lot of teams that do very large scale products have the same issue. They just do not realize it would help them."

"It's a bit cumbersome to manage the Project Picker. As we sunset teams or projects close out - but we still have test cases tied to those teams or projects that are being used in other spaces - we have this monstrous list in the Project Picker that becomes really difficult to manage and find, and we can't clean that up ourselves. It would be nice if it was easier to do that and not lose your history."

"The product needs to have more integration capabilities."

More Rally Software cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Jira Align is an expensive solution."

"Our customers buy licenses. We are not involved in its purchase."

"Jira Align's pricing is reasonable."

"Jira Align has price packages for different purposes."

"I would rate this solution a nine out of ten for pricing. The price of the solution depends on the number of people using it and the projects you are working on."

"At our company, we were concerned about the cost of Jira Align, which is expensive"

"On a scale of one to ten, where one is cheap, and ten is expensive, I rate Jira Align a seven out of ten."

"My company pays approximately 399 USD per month for the solution."

More Jira Align pricing and cost advice

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

"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."

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

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

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

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

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

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Financial Services Firm

25%

Computer Software Company

14%

Manufacturing Company

11%

Insurance Company

Educational Organization

78%

Manufacturing Company

Financial Services Firm

Insurance Company

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about Jira Align?

I joined the company because they had a large project, and as a startup company, they needed to scale up efficiently. My task was to review the current baseline, assess the team's capabilities, and...

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What needs improvement with Jira Align?

The platform's communication features could be more robust for better team integration.

See all answers

What is your primary use case for Jira Align?

We use Jira Align for business strategies, collaboration, and reporting. The solution allows us to manage the various products and features delivered on that platform.

See all answers

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...

See all answers

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

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 ...

See all answers

What needs improvement with Rally Software?

The product itself seems to have a lot of bugs. One issue is that it sometimes allows people to modify data inappropriately. For example, team members can change numbers at will. While we have a me...

See all answers

Comparisons

OpenText ValueEdge vs Jira Align

Compared 44% of the time

ServiceNow Strategic Portfolio Management vs Jira Align

Compared 22% of the time

Microsoft Azure DevOps vs Jira Align

Compared 5% of the time

Planview AgilePlace vs Jira Align

Compared 4% of the time

Targetprocess vs Jira Align

Compared 4% of the time

More Jira Align Competitors

Microsoft Azure DevOps vs Rally Software

Compared 37% of the time

Jira vs Rally Software

Compared 33% of the time

TFS vs Rally Software

Compared 7% of the time

OpenText ALM / Quality Center vs Rally Software

Compared 5% of the time

OpenText ALM Octane vs Rally Software

Compared 3% of the time

More Rally Software Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Jira Align

March 2025

Download Jira Align product report

Buyer's Guide

Rally Software

March 2025

Download Rally Software product report

Also Known As

AgileCraft

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

Overview

Jira Align is a cloud-based agile planning tool designed to help enterprises visualize, manage, and carry out large-scale software and IT projects. Jira Align’s features are designed to align the activities of your company’s development team with the overall goals of the organization by helping you achieve the following results:

Connect and coordinate enterprise-level business teams.
Make your entire enterprise’s work visible to drive and improve business outcomes.
Improve product quality with a fully aligned organization.
Shorten delivery cycles by increasing operational efficiency.

With Jira Align’s integration with Jira Software, businesses can simplify governing large-scale software development efforts by translating their strategy and goals into the technical execution and delivery of work.

Jira Align uses the aggregated data from Jira Software to produce reports on every aspect of the development process. Product stakeholders are granted immediate visibility into the progress that has been made and can easily identify delays and their causes.

The solution also assists in budget planning by assigning expenses to various work items and giving management real-time insights into ongoing expenditures and performance against set budgets.

Jira Align Features

Some of the top features and benefits of using Jira Align include:

Strategy management: Jira Align provides a clear visualization of where your enterprise is holding via strategic snapshots. The snapshot helps guide teams throughout the product. With the snapshot in view, it becomes easier to see and track the goals your company wants to carry out.

Progress monitoring: View a progress bar that provides indication of the level of completeness of your projects. The interface is populated with live data, which assists with planning and execution reporting.

Reporting and metrics: Jira Align creates valuable insights using the aggregated data it collects, ensuring that changes are tracked across teams and results are made visible early on in the process. These metrics allow managers to quickly determine what actions need to be taken.

Scalability: Jira Align is designed to work within organizations with hundreds of technical staff members and it can scale to support tens of thousands of users.

Backlogs and workflows: Effectively manage your work utilizing backlogs and workflow boards.

Customizable dashboard: Lay out key data points to help management keep tabs on important items. Easily make decisions based on active live consolidated data along with forecasting, risk tracking reports, and more. To help lower risks, Jira Align provides you with a visualization of program cross dependencies. It also displays a comprehensive view of resource utilization across projects, and highlights inefficiencies so that they can be resolved quickly.

Reviews from Real Users

Jira Align stands out among its competitors for a number of reasons. Two major ones are its program-level planning options and its reporting capabilities.

A project manager at a consultancy notes, “I like how things can be sorted out, and it shows the different objectives one can do. You could also create a team view that would allow your team to see work outcomes. Jira Align also helps with the reporting, because we can export data to Excel or another format.”

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

Anthem, nielsen, Homeland Security, NCR, dimension data

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

Buyer's Guide

Jira Align vs. Rally Software

February 2025

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