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Polarion ALM vs ServiceNow Strategic Portfolio Management 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

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)
ServiceNow Strategic Portfo...
Ranking in Enterprise Agile Planning Tools
4th
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
6.8
Number of Reviews
37
Ranking in other categories
Project Portfolio Management (8th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of October 2026, in the Enterprise Agile Planning Tools category, the mindshare of Polarion ALM is 4.4%, up from 4.1% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of ServiceNow Strategic Portfolio Management is 3.8%, down from 6.0% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Enterprise Agile Planning Tools Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
ServiceNow Strategic Portfolio Management3.8%
Polarion ALM4.4%
Other91.8%
Enterprise Agile Planning Tools
 

Featured Reviews

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.
reviewer1470327 - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Software Analyst at a tech vendor with 10,001+ employees
Workflow automation has streamlined request tracking and approval processes for my teams
ServiceNow Strategic Portfolio Management could be made better by reducing the prices. They should also provide more features with a better price compared to other tools in the market. Power Apps and Power Automate are much cheaper now compared to ServiceNow Strategic Portfolio Management. They should provide the approval license at no cost for ServiceNow Strategic Portfolio Management; otherwise, it would be difficult to continue with ServiceNow Strategic Portfolio Management. They must add integrations with other tools, and also a plug and play integration. The auto-closing of incidents with AI should be implemented; for example, if a user is facing an issue with a computer or some application, that incident needs to be taken care of by AI itself instead of a human.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"The software is stable."
"The most valuable feature is the function of the ALM system."
"It is a very stable solution."
"It offers good performance."
"The tool helped us to more effectively and efficiently gather and structure the information (requirements, test plans, project management data, etc.), and share it with the involved stakeholders in a safe and change-controlled manner."
"Polarion ALM has some valuable tools for managing our targets and requirements. I think that's its best feature."
"I am impressed with the solution’s stability."
"Polarion ALM's integration is very good and easy to use."
"We like the ease of making the dashboards, gathering information of a set of projects, programs and portfolios."
"Everything is valuable. It is tough to choose a particular feature, but project portfolio management along with agile 2.0 are two key product features that I would suggest for services companies like us."
"The ease of use is the most valuable feature. It's very intuitive to set up."
"The demand management tool is very strategic because it helps assess risk, gives you a visual of different demands, and rates those values."
"It manages portfolios and aligns our current portfolio with internal changes."
"The solution is scalable."
"The product is quite convenient and user-friendly."
"The best feature is the effective reporting system for project portfolio and program management."
 

Cons

"I also recently suggested that CMS consider incorporating generative artificial intelligence into the system."
"The backlog management for Agile in Polarion ALM could be improved or enhanced in future releases."
"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."
"One of Polarion's shortcomings would be planning. It can handle plans, but the planning feature is very basic."
"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."
"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."
"If you were to say that everything is integrated and it's a complete solution, I would say it's not."
"The planning and task management aspects of the solution were not that easy."
"The user interface could be more modern."
"The timing reporting module, and how it's used is a bit difficult to understand. Everything related to project management is quite extensive. It needs to be simplified. At first, our users didn't want to use it, because it seems a bit complex."
"The timing reporting module, and how it's used is a bit difficult to understand."
"When we originally set it up, we had some kind of success manager free of charge, and now it's an additional charge over and above what we're paying."
"The solution is very expensive and best for larger organizations, mostly due to the fact that it would be too costly to use for medium-sized companies."
"When we import a really big project with a lot of tasks on it, we face some issues with dependencies. The links between tasks are not working very well. There is definitely room for improvement there. Microsoft Project, in my opinion, is the best option for such a use case."
"The price keeps going up, and to remain competitive, it needs to have a competitive edge."
"We track salaries or paychecks of the resources. They change from time to time, such as every six months or every year. If they can come up with a default or out-of-the-box feature to manage those multiple payable costs so that we can automatically calculate the project costs rolled up. That would be the coolest feature that we can expect from ServiceNow. We would like to have an automatic feature to manage the payable costs. We should be able to manage or maintain multiple pay costs so that while calculating the project roll-up costs for individual projects, the respective pay costs in a particular period are picked up automatically from the backend. Currently, we have to customize that. It is doable. We have done it but through customization."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"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."
"The solution is expensive."
"You have to pay around 50-60 euros per user."
"Software for medical devices is always 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."
"The cost of the solution should not be more than $50,000 annually."
"They sell some things in bundles, and it could be handier that some of those things could be sold in another way, like purity models and other packages. Another thing that I'm struggling with is the pricing of ServiceNow's FYE experience, which includes the tools that are positioned for supporting HR."
"The solution could improve by being less expensive and the pricing model is confusing. Many people are getting charged different amounts. There are additional fees that they are adding on."
"We have a team of about 6,500 employees across the globe. So, the amount of money I'm going to save by putting the money on the table for the implementation and licenses is very high."
"I would rate the cost as five out of ten."
"The solution was quite expensive."
"The tool is expensive."
"I rate the price of ServiceNow Strategic Portfolio Management a seven out of ten."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Manufacturing Company
32%
Comms Service Provider
6%
Healthcare Company
6%
Outsourcing Company
6%
Financial Services Firm
13%
Manufacturing Company
10%
Healthcare Company
7%
Outsourcing Company
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business9
Midsize Enterprise3
Large Enterprise13
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business10
Midsize Enterprise3
Large Enterprise27
 

Questions from the Community

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...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for ServiceNow Strategic Portfolio Management?
I purchased the license for the product directly from ServiceNow Strategic Portfolio Management.
What needs improvement with ServiceNow Strategic Portfolio Management?
ServiceNow Strategic Portfolio Management could be made better by reducing the prices. They should also provide more features with a better price compared to other tools in the market. Power Apps a...
What is your primary use case for ServiceNow Strategic Portfolio Management?
My use cases for ServiceNow Strategic Portfolio Management include ITSM. For ITSM, I use it for the service desk, workflow creations, catalog creation, and automatic allocations. I work with Servic...
 

Also Known As

No data available
IT Business Management, ServiceNow IT Business Management Suite, ServiceNow ITBM Suite, ServiceNow ITBM
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Engineering Ingegneria Informatica, IBS AG, Zumtobel Group
Proximus, UNT SYSTEM, SAP SuccessFactors
Find out what your peers are saying about Polarion ALM vs. ServiceNow Strategic Portfolio Management and other solutions. Updated: September 2026.
917,433 professionals have used our research since 2012.