Deployment models
aqua and Polarion both come with Cloud and On-Premise offerings. The latter is mandatory for heavily regulated industries that deal with sensitive data as well as government organisations. On-Premise offerings can generally be negotiated into the level of vendor maintenance & support that works best for your company.
aqua deployment models
Vendor Cloud
Private Cloud
On-Premise
User Management
ALM usually pay much more attention to user management than the average test management solution. After all, you have many more people using the software and they come from several teams and even departments. Some people are working on the project part-time, so you may want to limit their input. Itās even more important when you have crowd testers.
Polarion and aqua deliver to help you tackle all these scenarios. They come with default roles, but you can create new roles and even assign individual permissions.
Polarion permissions
aqua’s permission editor
Default user roles
Custom roles
Individual permissions
QA-specific permissions
SSO
Test Management
Polarion is a pretty close match for aquaās test management functionality. It has proper test management functionality with test cases that can be parametrised, grouped into test scenarios, executed, and edited in bulk when needed. The only notable omissions relative to aqua are nested test cases (or a similar time-efficient way to reuse test cases) and shared views of the workspace.
Defining test steps in Polarion
Polarion test report
Test scenarios in aqua
Nested test cases in aqua
Test cases
Test scenarios
Test reports
Execution history
Nested test cases
Bulk edits
Scripts
Labelling
Custom fields
Parametrisation
Filters
Folders
Views
Shared views
Workflows
Logging
Item change history
Change reversal
Comments
Attachments
Mentions
Email nudging
Integrations & Automated Testing
Polarion goes wide but not necessarily deep with how they handle integrations. It has very few native integrations, driving customers to establish connections themselves via APIs. There is also an extensions marketplace, but the extensions there are neither maintained nor endorsed by Polarion.
aqua has a much bigger suite of native integrations. Unlike Polarionās, it focuses on test automation rather than exchanging data with other management tools. You too can use REST API to connect any other solution.
I know there is some bias at play, but aquaās offering is more compelling. The native integrations cover virtually all major test automation tools, while Polarion requires custom integration(s) or adopting xUnit framework for automated QA.
Management Integrations
Automation integrations
First-party automation
API for custom connections
Auto-translation in workspace
Misc. integrations
Full list of aqua integrations
Best QA integrations suite in the market
Dashboards
QA dashboards are insightful for both testers and their colleagues. The main requirements here are utilising any data in the workspace and supporting custom data. Both aqua and Polarion do that.
aqua, however, also offers KPI Alerts. You can set up values that certain metrics should not go above or under (e.g. over 2 Critical bugs in Safari). If that happens, the dashboard widget changes the pattern so you see the anomaly at a glance. Conservative KPI Alerts is how you prevent issues from piling up.
Test run statistics in Polarion
aqua dashboard with KPI Alert at work
Dashboards
Data
Custom fields values
Graph types
KPI Alerts
Reporting
Polarion and aqua both have some of the most advanced reports in the field. They support external text and imagery, transform and enhance workspace data for any need, and can easily be exported or shared elsewhere.
aqua report example
Custom reports
Pulling any data
Custom layout
External text & imagery
Drag-and-drop
Custom bands
Text formatting
Image formatting
Diagrams
Pivot tables
Scripts
Parametrisation
ALM
aqua and Polarion both handle the entire applicationās lifecycle, from gathering requirements and fulfilling them to testing and defect management.
Native ALM
Test case management
Requirements management
Defect management
Software dev. methodology
Workflows
Project management
Code overview in Polarion
Polarion project plan
aqua workflows
Pricing and Scaling
Polarion ALM does not disclose their pricing. The general market rate for an Enterprise-focused tool like that would be several thousand euros per 12-month license per user. A permanent license could very well be pushing ā¬10,000, especially when you factor in maintenance and support costs.
What we can compare here is pricing of aqua and Polarion X, which seems to be a modernised reskin of Polarion ALM. The Base plan starts at $36/month (before VAT), but this tier is largely here to lower the perceived entry cost. Going over 20 users mandates switch to Pro at $98/month, and 100+ users is $135/month (before VAT).
Even teams with under 20 users may ultimately have to splurge cash for Polarion X Pro. The Base plan is limited to 500 documents and 25,000 work items, and reaching that is just a matter of time for any ongoing project. All plans are also billed annually, which is a bit counterintuitive for a truly small-scale endeavour.
By contrast, aqua costs ā¬89/month per user no matter the size of your team. There is also room to add high-volume, Enterprise-grade features at a reasonable extra fee. One paid aqua license also gives you unlimited free Basic licenses, which can be used not just for browsing but for test runs as well.
Monthly license, 1-19 users
Monthly license, 20-99 users
Monthly license, 100+ users
Free basic licenses
Billing
Human customer support
*Polarion pricing doesnāt include VAT
Conclusion
Polarion and aqua are evenly matched when it comes to their feature suite. The only major distinction is aquaās approach to automation with much more native integrations. You will likely not need to build any integrations yourself via API, and thatās just not the case for Polarion. Thereās generally more complexity and at times redundancy when it comes to setting up Polarion, onboarding employees, and maintaining the workspace.
What makes a huge difference is cost, where Polarion quickly ramps up to at least triple the aqua price. Make no mistake: any company with 20+ people will be paying extra, and smaller established teams will eventually bump against other limits as well. This becomes poor value real quick.
On the other hand, aqua has the same price of ā¬89/month. You can scale up and down when needed without artificial limits with monthly billing. The free Basic licenses also spare you the expense of paying for seldom users that do not create new test cases or requirements (they can still report bugs). aqua may already be a better deal for companies below 20 users, and it certainly is above that.
Enterprise-grade ALM at a sensible price
