Pivotal Tracker vs. Rally Software

Overview
ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price
Pivotal Tracker
Score 7.2 out of 10
N/A
Pivotal Tracker is a project management program primarily for software developers. It is built from the ground up to facilitate the agile development cycle, and is optimized for structuring projects in sprints, or “stories.” The solution is now owned and supported by VMware, and is part of the Pivotal / Tanzu product line up.N/A
Rally Software
Score 6.8 out of 10
N/A
Rally Software headquartered in Boulder, Colorado developed the Rally agile software development / ALM platform which was acquired by CA Technologies and rebranded as CA Agile Central. After CA's acquisition by Broadcom the software was once again rebranded as Rally.N/A
Pricing
Pivotal TrackerRally Software
Editions & Modules
No answers on this topic
No answers on this topic
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
Pivotal TrackerRally Software
Free Trial
YesNo
Free/Freemium Version
NoNo
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
NoNo
Entry-level Setup FeeNo setup feeNo setup fee
Additional Details
More Pricing Information
Community Pulse
Pivotal TrackerRally Software
Considered Both Products
Pivotal Tracker
Chose Pivotal Tracker
JIRA is very user friendly. It's ideal for people new to the software development lifecycle and the tracking of the work. They have simply nailed the intuitiveness. Pivotal Tracker might be the better long-term tool because of the flexibility that comes with it. But as …
Chose Pivotal Tracker
I have used a number of systems like Pivotal Tracker over the last 15 years. I have had several occasions to use Wrike separate from and alongside Pivotal Tracker. Wrike was more difficult to use and seems to either be locked down by permissions, so I had to "fight" to do my …
Chose Pivotal Tracker
The only thing that PT compares to is Salesforce and we now utilize both platforms - Salesforce is a bit more organized in its automated task flow and allows us to connect our other platforms to it for efficient data transfer and data consistency.
Chose Pivotal Tracker
I haven't used dev-specific tools other than Pivotal Tracker but it's useful because it is built for a specific use case. The simplicity of an Asana or Trello is great and they have their advantages, but the additional functionality mentioned was worthwhile and a compelling …
Chose Pivotal Tracker
It's not necessarily a matter of better vs. worse when it comes to all of these different tools. They all serve a different purpose to different sized teams. I found Pivotal Tracker and monday.com to be a matter of preference while serving a similar purpose. Good for smaller …
Chose Pivotal Tracker
Pivotal Tracker keeps users 'close' to the software project(s) by allowing users to understand, in plain words, the tasks and expectations of each software release, whereas other tools are either way too close to the source code or require an extensive amount of maintenance. …
Chose Pivotal Tracker
JIRA allows teams to tailor the application workflow to meet their needs, while "opinionated" Pivotal Tracker enforces a consistent workflow approach on all team members. While I, personally, may prefer to have a system configured to my particular habits and desires as a …
Chose Pivotal Tracker
We selected Pivotal Tracker because it is highly opinionated about the process. It worked quite well for what we were expecting from it. Other software we tried were much more flexible, so we could implement our own process there.
Chose Pivotal Tracker
Pivotal Tracker, Asana and Trello all have free versions making them ideal for smaller companies to try out. All of them blast Kannan boards and issue tracking capabilities. While Trello and Asana are great products in themselves, Pivotal Tracker edges them out with its wealth …
Chose Pivotal Tracker
I've used Jira ages ago, and it was still a young product in its initial iterations. The UI was a clunky and was missing a lot of ease with drag and drop for individual stories, uploads, etc. Management of users was useable, but not as ideal as it could be.
Chose Pivotal Tracker

We selected Pivotal Tracker because of its simple, elegant workflow. This is the ideal; it's where we want to be. So we continue to improve, and as we get better, we get more out of the software.

The other software products we evaluated were too complex, and we found that …

Chose Pivotal Tracker
We have had employees in the past look at Drupal, and other open source project management tools to assist in our needs. Unfortunately each solution took too much time to implement, design and configure that we could not stop the work we were doing for clients to complete a …
Chose Pivotal Tracker
We were using JIRA and found it lacking in their UI and some of their services, especially communication. PT communicates much easier with simple links to tasks for execution and QA review.

Basecamp is just really a super note taking and asset depot. I would not consider true …
Chose Pivotal Tracker
Compared to other task management tools, Pivotal Tracker has the best blend of functionality and cost. When you need something simpler than Jira, and not solely focused on code or UI related tasks like BugHerd, and have a more direct approach to completing tasks than Trello - I …
Chose Pivotal Tracker
Pivotal Tracker, for better or worse, provides a more structured and rigid workflow than most. That makes it easy to get started, but if you have your own workflow you want to integrate into it, it could mean it'll take longer to get used to or customize. It's still more …
Chose Pivotal Tracker
Our team has evaluated Basecamp, Trello, and others but overall preferred the simple and flexible layout of Pivotal Tracker.
Chose Pivotal Tracker
Our organization actually does not exclusively use Pivotal. We also have teams on solutions like Trello and LeanKit. It's all preference, those who buy into all the agile features that pivotal provides, love it. Those who do not need all the overhead, simply use a different …
Chose Pivotal Tracker
Rally is too complicated - there are far too many fields that all have the same meaning. It's a better agile tool in my opinion since it it was designed purely as an agile tool, but since the CA technologies acquisition, the tool has become more complicated and there are far …
Chose Pivotal Tracker
Compared to Rally the tool seems more accessible because or the suite of apps available. It also feels more polished and stable than Rally. It definitely has more tools and features but again it can be overkill for a smaller team or project.
Chose Pivotal Tracker
Overall I have found that I prefer using Pivotal over all the competitors I've tried. There are certain aspects of the other products which I do like but as a whole Pivotal does a better job. My one request is that I feel it is very much a web app and the other products have …
Chose Pivotal Tracker
I have also used Trello and Jira. A small company with only a couple of projects may be best suited with Trello due to its cost and simplicity, whereas Jira may be better suited for a large company that can afford a dedicated Jira manager, due to its complex configurations and …
Chose Pivotal Tracker
Jira is very complex, while tracker is more straightforward to use. Tracker requires less micromanagement and upkeep.
Asana is pretty but not useful for product and engineering build. It is more geared towards design projects.
Chose Pivotal Tracker
For teams less than a dozen or so, Jira is total overkill. PT is just the right amount of complexity for our company.
Rally Software
Chose Rally Software
Rally and Asana have comparable features and are both valuable project management tools, but Asana's user interface is well-organized and highly intuitive. It's easy to add tasks and collaborators, edit due dates, indicate progress on tasks, close out projects, etc. However, …
Chose Rally Software
Overall, Rally Software is a better and more powerful tool than Jira for the same exact purposes. Jira cannot function as a requirements repository so it needs plugins or separate tools to do the same thing. There is no space or option to see all defects or user stories or …
Chose Rally Software
We have used Jira in the past. Jira is easy to use and seems to be an industry standard. Rally is clunky and expensive. The dev side did not pick it, the business did due to its reporting capabilities.
Chose Rally Software
I did not select Rally; it was chosen by the organization. If I were choosing what to use within my own team, I would use Trello. It's free, very simple to use, and has a much nicer user interface. My company previously used VersionOne however, and I prefer Rally over that …
Chose Rally Software
Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe) & through Test Management were two critical factors that lead to selection of CA Agile Central (formerly Rally).

Executives want to maintain trace-ability & detailed test management options like we get in ALM along with SAFe implementation support. …
Chose Rally Software
It was a close race between JAMA, JIRA and Rally. We decided to go for JAMA as a requirements management tool and use Rally for Agile projects. The cost was another factor that made us select Rally.
Chose Rally Software
Our evaluation was done many years ago, but at the time Rally provided the best mix of SCRUM-driven features, visibility and economy for our product engineering teams.
Chose Rally Software
Selected because the others seemed worse two years ago when the decision was made. VersionOne seemed ugly and too restricted. Might look better now. Microsoft TFS, now VSO, looked limited but also might look better now. Microsoft is improving it at a remarkably rapid pace. Jira …
Chose Rally Software
The process we used to select a tool was to create a scorecard of IT and Business stakeholder needs. We then reviewed seven tools and graded them against the scorecard requirements. We took the top two products and had a one day hands on demonstration with selected IT and …
Chose Rally Software
We used CA Agile Central (formerly Rally) before but recently switched to Jira. I used jira before Rally too, and I think it was easier to manage defects in Jira. Also, I think Jira is better for teams and companies that want to implement agile/scrum life cycles. It's easier to …
Chose Rally Software
We started exploring new tools, and found better adaptation of our team toward Jira. Jira provided engineers with simpler interfaces and more reliable service, even though less unnecessary features. Also the managers found in Jira better ability to eliminate noise and focus on …
Chose Rally Software
I've also evaluated the following agile solutions: ActiveCollab, Agile Bench, Agilo for Scrum, Atlassian JIRA, Pivotal Tracker, SpringGround, Targetprocess. Telerik Teamprocess, VersionOne, ZebraPlan etc.
If it’s time to transition to software that’s specific to your Agile …
Chose Rally Software
Rally has much more features with regards to the the traditional Agile methodology and has more extensive tracking features for the project managers. Pivotal tracker was used for a smaller company and smaller teams but since my current company is larger in scale and has more to …
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User Ratings
Pivotal TrackerRally Software
Likelihood to Recommend
8.0
(0 ratings)
7.0
(0 ratings)
Likelihood to Renew
10.0
(0 ratings)
9.0
(0 ratings)
Usability
6.0
(0 ratings)
7.6
(0 ratings)
Availability
-
(0 ratings)
10.0
(0 ratings)
Performance
-
(0 ratings)
7.0
(0 ratings)
Support Rating
8.0
(0 ratings)
5.7
(0 ratings)
Online Training
-
(0 ratings)
7.0
(0 ratings)
Implementation Rating
-
(0 ratings)
8.0
(0 ratings)
Configurability
-
(0 ratings)
7.0
(0 ratings)
Ease of integration
-
(0 ratings)
7.0
(0 ratings)
User Testimonials
Pivotal TrackerRally Software
Likelihood to Recommend
The UI of the Pivotal tracker is really beautiful and amazing, which looks trivial, but we have it open all the time, so it's nice for us. In Pivotal tracker for me its very Easy to create tasks or stories anytime without facing any problems. Pivotal tracker provides us a ton of features to track the tasks and manage a team and the projects. Pivotal tracker allows for a entire team to be on the same page of the tool in regards to where is the project right now, right status of every task, what is being worked on and by whom.
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If your organisation is planning to adopt Scaled Agile Framework Methodology (SAFe) without being worried about cost, CA Agile Central is one of the best tools. Here, you can look at various release trains and how that then flows up to the overall program budget. You can look holistically across all the release trains with minimal effort and have it flow up to the program office’s budget. It also helps by easily maintaining backlogs and integrating more seamlessly into software developers releases, iterations, and features. It has no conformance issue as it supports almost all the browsers like IE from version 8.0, Firefox from 3.6 and the newest versions of Chrome (from 6.0) and Safari (from 4.0).
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Pros
  • Pivotal Tracker helps our team visualize our projects in the form of stories (virtual cards) moving through our workflow. This encourages us to break down projects into manageable chunks and have important conversations about deliverables and scope.
  • The forced-prioritization allows our team to have a shared understanding about what is most important and make collective decisions about what our team will work on next.
  • By dividing future iterations by our team's velocity, Pivotal Tracker accurately predicts when we will complete future work.
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  • structuring teams separately in a clean way. You can add as much teams as you want, and guarantee each team's work would stay separate in browsing, graphs and analytics.
  • detailed menus and drop-downs listing of features - technically it covers all there is of agile aspects and some more
  • ability to set your email notifications on/off
  • ability to split user stories into the next iteration if work isn't done in the previous one - no need to duplicate your user story manually
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Cons
  • Used to have a newsfeed-type feature with all the updates from the previous day. They removed it. I liked getting a snapchat of what changed from before.
  • When signing up for email alerts, can be inundated with emails for every change to the status of a story.
  • Communication on stories through the comment section can be a little difficult, and not very organized.
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  • It is overly complicated in some views.
  • Project Filtering seems buggy. Pinning a project does not always seem to help. Seems to default back to previous projects.
  • Whereas it is great for project reporting, it is not nearly as easy as Jira for devs to use.
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Likelihood to Renew
I love the simplicity, non-configurability, and price/performance of this tool. Hands down my favorite project management tool for agile.
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Assuming we were paying - right now my group gets it for free as the broader engineering organization pays for it. There would be switching costs. There would be pretty minimal data migration, but the biggest cost is getting people to learn a new tool and starting off on the right footing. Evaluation and identification of the right product is a big part of switching too
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Usability
It works good enough. I didn't have many problems with that. The user interface is a bit confusing though. The team took some time to understand where some configurations were.
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Great UI, recent refresh was terrific. Great graphs and metrics, inline editing for updates, and a multitude of views on sprint progress make for a great team collaboration experience. There is also an active community and forums so that if you do need help, it is readily available
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Reliability and Availability
No answers on this topic
Don’t recall ever being unavailable.
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Performance
No answers on this topic
The screens render relatively quickly but many actions that you would expect to require a single click require multiple clicks and pop-up windows. The extra windows and clicks make the product feel ponderous.
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Support Rating
We've never had to request support in the 5 years I have been using it. A solid solution! Everything I have had questions about is on the website. New features are in their newsletter with more details on their website. Often I am using the new features within a few minutes of reading the article.
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I've had to use support only one time and my issue was eventually resolved but not because of my ticket--because others complained about the functionality taken away so they brought it back. My ticket was never answered or addressed. So I can't really say much for the support factor for Rally.
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Online Training
No answers on this topic
It more or less confirmed that we are using it the way they had in mind. We were hoping for a epiphany in terms of how we could use it better.

They also want to be a go to source for agile processes and have an online resource center. It’s not that great but had a couple of nuggets. It hasn’t really helped us too much and we are not too far off from the classical interpretation of agile.

I would recommend training, in particular for organizations that multiple on-going projects. The product seems optimized for larger, more complex teams and getting proper training on how to configure, administer and use the system would be beneficial
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Implementation Rating
No answers on this topic
Implementation of RALLY services and program satisfaction among various group,... 1) Dev Outcomes: How were our resiliencies, development, learning & practitioners “make them do the work,” but that they ask you to do it “in a way like before. 2) The Ops group: Just wish to make sure any change won't break current production envirements All the stake holders has to be on the same page
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Alternatives Considered
Pivotal Tracker, Asana and Trello all have free versions making them ideal for smaller companies to try out. All of them blast Kannan boards and issue tracking capabilities. While Trello and Asana are great products in themselves, Pivotal Tracker edges them out with its wealth of features including trackability of epics, burndowns, better reporting, and analytics. JIRA, on the other hand, is way more customizable, has more reporting capabilities and more features than Pivotal Tracker but is more expensive too. At the end of the day, it comes down to what you're looking for in an agile project management tool as well as how much you're willing to pay for it.
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Rally and Asana have comparable features and are both valuable project management tools, but Asana's user interface is well-organized and highly intuitive. It's easy to add tasks and collaborators, edit due dates, indicate progress on tasks, close out projects, etc. However, Rally's interface is somewhat cluttered and difficult to navigate. My team ended up choosing Asana over Rally due to these concerns.
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Return on Investment
  • Pivotal Tracker has been a cost-effective solution for what we need. It has allowed our ROI to be greater than if we went with another system.
  • Learning curve; with this easy to use tool, it has been a shorter learning curve for new hires to find what they need to accomplish their task.
  • Flexibility; we are right now stuck at 4 levels of classification; project; Story, Task, Comments. If we were able to expand on this, we would be able to role this out faster to other departments within our business.
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  • Moving from Waterfall to Scrum or Kanban has been a big win for us. The adaptability and customization of CA Agile Central has aided in our success.
  • Agile methodologies and CA Agile Central has made it easier to integrate business product owners into an agile team.
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