blackfire.io vs. IBM Engineering Lifecycle Management

Overview
ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price
blackfire.io
Score 9.0 out of 10
N/A
Blackfire.io is designed to empower PHP developers to continuously verify and improve their app’s performance in development, testing, staging and production. It makes it possible to drill down to function/method call level to understand and fix performance bottlenecks. The vendor says its wide variety of automation options makes it a breeze to add it to a development and testing workflow. The Blackfire Player, an Open Source Web Crawling, Web Tester, and Web…N/A
IBM Engineering Lifecycle Management
Score 5.1 out of 10
N/A
IBM Engineering Lifecycle Management (ELM) is an end-to-end engineering solution used to manage system requirements to design, workflow, and test management, extending the functionality of ALM tools for better complex-systems development.N/A
Pricing
blackfire.ioIBM Engineering Lifecycle Management
Editions & Modules
No answers on this topic
No answers on this topic
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
blackfire.ioIBM Engineering Lifecycle Management
Free Trial
YesNo
Free/Freemium Version
YesNo
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
NoNo
Entry-level Setup FeeOptionalNo setup fee
Additional Details
More Pricing Information
Community Pulse
blackfire.ioIBM Engineering Lifecycle Management
Considered Both Products
blackfire.io
Chose blackfire.io
The pricing offered by blackfire.io was highly competitive and customisable as we opted for pay per use pricing model. Initial setup was very easy. The support team provided us with the detailed demo of the product and helped with the initial integration and setup. We already …
Chose blackfire.io
blackfire.io definitely provides an edge over competing products such as Datadog due to the level of monitoring and analysis it provides. Datadog is a great tool however when evaluating and catching inefficiencies in lower non production environments, blackfire.io provides a …
IBM Engineering Lifecycle Management
Chose IBM Engineering Lifecycle Management
Unfortunately, this IBM ELM installation predates my tenure, and the project and client have become entrenched in it with no viable way to move off of it. There are better products capable of doing individual workflows well. ELM's attraction is that it does a lot of things OK.
Chose IBM Engineering Lifecycle Management
The established experience contained in most IBM Rational DOORS installations is only compensated by the high flexibility of Atlassian Jira. The markets state that Jira is less expensive in the setup. There are many manufacturers that support IBM Rational DOORS to have the big …
Chose IBM Engineering Lifecycle Management
I would choose IBM Rational DOORS over any other requirements management tool out there. Polarion tries to do too many things and is great for some things but as far as requirements management IBM Rational DOORS is the best tool on the market.
Chose IBM Engineering Lifecycle Management
It was easier to do all the change management-related activities, even configurations were handled very effectively. New process definitions and initiatives made it easier for better project deliverables. Effective resource allocations and better reporting and defect …
Chose IBM Engineering Lifecycle Management
DOORS is not a suite nor an integrated tool like HP ALM or Rally. It only does one thing and cannot hold defects or accommodate sprint planning. It is older, takes longer to connect and load, and has an inconvenient timeout. It does do a basic job and can be customized to show …
Chose IBM Engineering Lifecycle Management
DOORS is the legacy and leading tool for requirements management. It is widely used by the Aerospace industry.
Chose IBM Engineering Lifecycle Management
Although Jira is getting popular in DevOps team, it does not work well with ITIL model as RTC does. RTC is still widely used for production management in our company.

CA Service Desk Manager (GSD) is integrated with TPAM which is being used for privilege account management in …
Chose IBM Engineering Lifecycle Management
To me, DOORS is like a super version of Excel and Word combined with a relational database. I have not used too many database softwares before, but DOORS does a very specific job well enough. It is so powerful that some of the tools just go unused. Some parts of the software …
Chose IBM Engineering Lifecycle Management
Requisite Pro (and Rational Requirements Composer, it's successor) is more simple and focused on requirements. Is like a part of DOORS and can be suitable to smaller projects. IT people on the other hand prefer agile tools like Jira. Of course if the project is big enough, …
Chose IBM Engineering Lifecycle Management
My organization was already using it when I joined the team.
Chose IBM Engineering Lifecycle Management
It's well integrated with IBM products so it provides better coverage across the lifecycle with first class integration. Other producst are stand alone with limited integration with ALM tools.
Chose IBM Engineering Lifecycle Management
I found [them] to be more flexible and with the possibility to create [an HTML format].
Chose IBM Engineering Lifecycle Management
An alternative which I have very briefly used is Atlassian's JIRA, which is very similar to IBM RTC, although has a modern UI, feels light-weight and is faster to respond and additionally has seamless integration with bitbucket, which is a Git platform, and other Atlassian …
Chose IBM Engineering Lifecycle Management
JIRA is simpler and much more intuitive, especially when bundled with confluence. TFS is obvious choice if working with Microsoft technologies and has superb API.
Chose IBM Engineering Lifecycle Management
I have worked on different agile project management tool like JIRA, Teamfoge and RTC. RTC is simple and has a nice UI.
Chose IBM Engineering Lifecycle Management
It is easy for the organization to identify what kind of problems there are in the project and how many change requests have been resolved and how many are pending. Thereby the employer can pro-actively arrange the meetings and address the issues to the team members.
Chose IBM Engineering Lifecycle Management
This product had many of the same features, was easier to use, which would result in less training, and had a lower price tag. Logic and reason do not always figure prominently in a decision. Sometimes there are intangible characteristics that alter the flow. In my observation, …
Best Alternatives
blackfire.ioIBM Engineering Lifecycle Management
Small Businesses
GitLab
GitLab
Score 8.8 out of 10
Polarion ALM
Polarion ALM
Score 9.9 out of 10
Medium-sized Companies
GitLab
GitLab
Score 8.8 out of 10
Polarion ALM
Polarion ALM
Score 9.9 out of 10
Enterprises
GitLab
GitLab
Score 8.8 out of 10
Polarion ALM
Polarion ALM
Score 9.9 out of 10
All AlternativesView all alternativesView all alternatives
User Ratings
blackfire.ioIBM Engineering Lifecycle Management
Likelihood to Recommend
9.0
(0 ratings)
3.0
(0 ratings)
Likelihood to Renew
-
(0 ratings)
8.0
(0 ratings)
Usability
-
(0 ratings)
4.0
(0 ratings)
Support Rating
-
(0 ratings)
5.0
(0 ratings)
Implementation Rating
-
(0 ratings)
10.0
(0 ratings)
User Testimonials
blackfire.ioIBM Engineering Lifecycle Management
Likelihood to Recommend
blackfire.io is best suited for any company that has a development team managing code releases into different environments. This tool is crucial in cases where there are codebase changes or upgrades and it really helps in load testing and code validity. With every new codebase release there could be a risk of how it affects the infrastructure supporting it so blackfire.io helps report on those metrics.
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IBM Engineering Requirements Management DOORS former IBM Rational DOORS profits very much from the mighty market position it had till today. It had been the most favored requirement engineering tools suite with the highest investments in the infrastructure concerning hardware, software, and knowledge sources. It was embedded in knowledge sources of test stands, hardware labs, and knowledge database servers. It allowed for some of the highest profit changes and made the fame with it. But the paradigms of requirements engineering change. If not were superseded by completely different approaches for the target solution worlds. The foremost position in the selling tables is unstable if changes are not solved or coped with by the strategist at IBM and their customers. Since the highly successful alternative suits are already at the market, and some are from IBM already the lifecycle for IBM Engineering Requirements Management DOORS is at the later highs. But the suite is still at the very top and very popular. There are still many problems unsolved and many wishes at the customers to make the use more comfortable and efficient at the overall level. If the time of setting up the software package is passed the adoption get more extended and complicated. There is a lot of work at the stage around and the expertise will be required for a long time from now.
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Pros
  • Provide details on processes eating up valuable server resources
  • Alert against bottlenecks and find bottlenecks
  • Performs load tests in code before moving to production environments
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  • There are a couple of areas where IBM Rational DOORS is quite strong. First, it is part of the IBM CLM solution so the artifacts developed in this module can be easily available for other functions like development and QA. They can link with their stories and test cases and team leads and managers can use traceability matrix to find out where there are gaps in coverage.
  • Comprehensive configuration management functionality (concept of multiple streams and global configuration) is available, which can be helpful if you need to implement configuration management scenarios for your product or project. For example, a certain version of a requirement can be linked with one story and another version of same requirement can be linked with another story. This is the unique feature which other current tools in the market don't provide.
  • It's highly customizable so you can configure the project areas based on your need. You can have your own requirement types, and you can define templates to speed up the process. Comprehensive review functionality is there as well.
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Cons
  • They count same API endpoint AND same method (e.g. POST, OPTIONS, GET etc) as different profiles
  • Customer service needs a lot of improvement
  • The documentation can be a bit more detailed to remove any scope of doubts
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  • Too complex for projects or businesses that don't really need the detail. It is basically overkill.
  • If you are new to IBM Rational tools, it may be a medium learning curve. You'd also need lots of training from your people, since, as usual, this tool shouldn't be managed alone.
  • It may seem old fashion compared to Jira and the current control tools used in IT industry.
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Likelihood to Renew
No answers on this topic
One of the downsides for us was the capabilities of the native build tools were lacking. The project management and work item tracking capabilities are great and I would recommend the tool to anyone. There is a definite learning curve with RTC as a source control system, and the streams are a concept unique to the product
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Usability
No answers on this topic
The UI is terrible and not intuitive. Users need training in order to complete tasks. Much like SAP, it's not the clearest tool. The tracing feature is especially complicated because you must write the scripts yourself. There is a learning curve. Also, even the setup, installation, and logging in each time takes a considerable amount of time.
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Support Rating
No answers on this topic
It does a basic job and has the potential to complete some robust reporting tasks, however, it really is a clunky piece of software with a terrible user interface that makes using it routinely quite unpleasant. Many of our legacy and maintenance projects still use DOORS but our department and company use many alternatives and are looking for better tools.
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Implementation Rating
No answers on this topic
No problems
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Alternatives Considered
The pricing offered by blackfire.io was highly competitive and customisable as we opted for pay per use pricing model. Initial setup was very easy. The support team provided us with the detailed demo of the product and helped with the initial integration and setup. We already had tried our free version as well and the results looked good. So opted for blackfire.io
Read full review
Unfortunately, this IBM ELM installation predates my tenure, and the project and client have become entrenched in it with no viable way to move off of it. There are better products capable of doing individual workflows well. ELM's attraction is that it does a lot of things OK.
Read full review
Return on Investment
  • Reduce in bugs by 50%, more happy customers
  • 2x decrease in load time for the website
  • 100% performance validation before production release
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  • RTC helps automate incident management workflow which improves our work efficiency. With the integration with Geneos and GSD, we can one click create RTC incident tickets from Geneos with most of the information copied from Geneos automatically and then link the details to GSD for privilege account management if needed.
  • RTC provides a holistic view on ad hoc production activities. We use RTC for production management. Whoever needs to get access to production due to non-planned activities (planned change is managed in GSD) has to raise an incident ticket or service request ticket in RTC so as to get production privilege accounts.
  • RTC is also being used to review and approve the usage of privilege account which help us to meet audit requirements. For example, if a user made some database change using privilege account under incident number xxx, an entry will be added in RTC and sent to account owner or production support manager to review and approve.
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