10 Best Requirements Management Tools & Software Of 2023

Jama Software provides a platform for requirements, risk, and test management. Teams building complex products, systems, and software use Jama Connect to improve cycle times, increase quality, reduce rework, and minimize effort proving compliance.

This enterprise-grade tool offers the ability to accurately capture and communicate requirements, goals, progress, and interdependencies throughout the development process. It enables you to align hardware, firmware, and software development stakeholders; improve efficiency; manage change; and prove compliance.

In Jama Connect’s features, you’ll find end-to-end live traceability of people, data, and processes, as well as real-time impact analysis, reviews, and approvals with team collaboration. For requirements gathering, you can define, organize, and execute requirements-based test plans and test cases to ensure quality and compliance.

All of these features are packed into a software that provides the flexibility to support various engineering disciplines and development methodologies. Pair that with an intuitive, browser-based interface, and you’ve got a comprehensive software that’s still easy to navigate.

You can integrate Jama Connect requirements and test plans with ALM, PLM, QA, and MBSE to ensure full traceability, visibility, and collaboration across the lifecycle.

With API integrations and third-party integration hubs, teams can work in familiar tools while contributing to projects in Jama Connect. Jama Connect licenses are available on a user and floating basis through an annual subscription model.

Pricing and trial information are available upon request.

Intland Software’s codebeamer is a full-stack, end-to-end Application Lifecycle Management platform with strong requirements management capabilities. The tool helps manage complexity from requirements to release in the delivery of safety-critical or traditional software and systems-of-systems products.

For developers of advanced products and software, this open platform extends ALM functionalities with product line configuration, and provides unique configurability for complex processes. Align people, workflows, and tools across the parallel streams of product delivery by enabling teams with a flexible, fully integrated, and highly collaborative platform.

codebeamer is a great tool to support engineers looking for traceability, transparency, and efficient collaboration in requirements management. The platform provides gapless traceability to help track interdependencies and the impact of changes throughout the lifecycle. Requirements-based testing is supported out of the box. Use codebeamer to identify, manage, and track requirements across the lifecycle in order to reduce costs, risks, and delivery times in product development.

Custom reporting options, automated change control, and simple approval management help streamline collaboration in high-velocity development environments. For developers of regulated products, Intland’s preconfigured industry templates and domain services help reduce regulatory compliance effort and costs. 

The tool integrates with Jira, Microsoft Word, Excel, IBM Rational DOORS, and plenty more. codebeamer is available as an on-premise or cloud-hosted SaaS platform with flexible licensing options to suit the needs of every team. A free 30-day trial is provided. Pricing information is available upon request.

If you’re looking for a tool that’s easy to implement, access, and learn to use, ReQtest should be at the top of your list. It’s a fully cloud-based tool that you can access from anywhere, with a friendly, transparent pricing model that intentionally accommodates small, agile, and scaling teams (as well as large organizations) with a “pay for what you use” approach.

ReQtest offers a complete suite of useful requirements management tools as well as features designed for agile requirements gathering. These include test management tools, bug tracking, and visual bug reporting tools, end-to-end requirements traceability, easy data export to Excel, collaboration features, and agile task boards.

This is a lightweight but effective solution that works well if you’re happy with a stand-alone tool (ReQtest has two-way sync with Jira, but no other pre-built integrations) and have no need for it to perform the functions of a full QMS or ALM system.

Overall, it’s one of the most affordably-priced solutions out there. It starts at $10/user/month, making it a low-risk introductory solution, especially for organizations that are using a requirements management tool for the first time.

Xebrio is a complete requirements management ecosystem that empowers teams to communicate with one another while gathering, analyzing, and finalizing requirements.

Additionally, it covers the entire project development lifecycle from requirements to releases. Xebrio’s requirement workflow allows all stakeholders to actively participate during the requirement gathering process and has an approval mechanism to ensure collective consensus.

Xebrio facilitates mapping requirements to tasks, milestones, test cases, and bugs. These requirements can then be traced to releases for end-to-end traceability. Some key features of the tool include requirements version tracking and version traceability, and real-time collaboration for requirements gathering.

Xebrio’s other significant features include task management, test coverage, milestone tracking, and bug tracking. It also supports document collaboration, time-tracking, and reporting.

In essence, Xebrio is a requirements management ecosystem with built-in project management features.

Xebrio has special pricing for startups and small teams, starting from as low as $1/user/month with a 10-user minimum. Paid plans for bigger teams start at $10/user/month and offer a 14-day free trial.

Modern Requirements offers a 4DevOps tool as a single-application solution for everything requirements management. The easy to use tools are built directly into Microsoft’s Azure DevOps, and allow you to create, automate, manage, analyze, and report requirements straight from your Azure DevOps project.

Modern Requirements4DevOps eliminates duplicate work, creates requirements reusability, and connects your requirements directly to your assets. You can build living requirements documents, diagrams, mockups, use case models, and other assets that are updated automatically as requirements change.

The tool also includes a built-in approval process (with e-signatures), easy to create baselines, and always up-to-date trace matrices. This solution allow teams to connect requirements to both development tasks and quality assurance testing for full traceability throughout the project lifecycle.

Built directly into Microsoft’s Azure DevOps, Modern Requirements provides a simple to use interface with the options to toggle off any features that might not be used by a given user. Modern Requirements also has a free guided bootcamp to help walk users through each of the offered tools, as well as professional training and support services at the implementation phase.

Modern Requirements is fully embedded with Microsoft’s Azure DevOps and provides your team with the opportunity to turn your new and existing projects into a single source of truth. They also offer full integrations through their Sync Bridge with all of the common tools.

Licenses are available on a User and Floating basis, and can be purchased as a perpetual license or through a subscription model.

Pricing information available upon request. Free 30-day trial available.

IBM Engineering Requirements Management DOORS Next is a big hitter in the requirements management software game, with a comprehensive group of resource management software and companion products.

The main differential feature of IBM Engineering Requirements Management DOORS Next is its interoperability with other tools, including lifecycle management, team collaboration, and systems/software engineering (including MagicDraw, which makes it easy to convert spreadsheets into models that human brains can understand).

As part of the IBM ecosystem, it integrates with Jazz-based products and hosted Jazz solutions as well.

All in all, IBM Engineering Requirements Management DOORS Next offers a flexible solution that works well for large-scale enterprises, offering a high degree of granularity and configurability.

That said, IBM Engineering Requirements Management DOORS’ greatest strength is also its biggest drawback—it’s highly customizable, but at the same time, its large database and general complexity can make configuration management a bit cumbersome.

It’s not the easiest tool for everyone in your organization to use, although they do help you solve this potential issue by offering plenty of support: on-demand webinars, responsive support, how to’s, etc.

DOORS Next costs from $164/month as a SaaS.

Accompa stands out among the crowd, not necessarily for its features but for its overall ease of use, ease of implementation, friendly pricing/payment model, and great customer service.

That said, Accompa doesn’t have the most robust feature set out there. They add new features on a continuous basis, but if you need something comprehensive in the here and now, I’d look to big players like Jama or Rational DOORS. In most cases, however, I wouldn’t be scared off by Accompa’s lack of features.

This solution does offer a truly useful collection of essential features (or else they wouldn’t be on this list!), and these include requirements traceability, automatic change and dependency tracking for impact analysis, discussion boards and alerts for collaboration, and requirements prioritization rules. It also offers some customization, such as custom fields, views, and user roles.

Another advantage of this tool: an above-average set of pre-built integrations, including Jira, FogBugz, HP Quality Center, IBM Rational, IBM Rational ClearQuest, Bugzilla, trac, VersionOne, Rally, Agilefant, Seapine Software, SmartBear, and VisualStudio Team Foundation Server.

Accompa costs from $199/month.

The Orcanos requirements management tool offers some better visualization and reporting features than others. This includes real-time dashboards that are intuitive to navigate, as well as their DocGen feature for importing/exporting Word files to easily create a software requirements doc, aided by custom templates and embedded reports.

Orcanos delivers all of your essential requirements tools—end-to-end traceability, some basic collaboration features (messaging, alerts), and test management features. Additionally, users have praised Orcanos for their responsive customer support.

Overall, this is an especially good tool if you’re eventually going to require a full QMS (Quality Management System) or ALM (Application Lifecycle Management)—with this tool, it’s simply a matter of upgrading your plan to gain access to ALM or QMS features for risk assessment, quality control, customer complaint management, etc.

The only downside of this tool is its lack of pre-built integrations (it does integrate with Zapier, however). The pricing plan could also be friendlier—they do offer free 30-day trials, but their basic plan requires a minimum of 5 users (at $69/month each), so it’s not the best fit for smaller organizations.

Orcanos costs from $69/user/month.

Perforce’s Helix RM software is offered as a stand-alone module in their ALM (Application Lifecycle Management) suite, a product widely used among top-tier organizations.

This requirements management tool is scalable and can handle large files—it’s a great fit for large, distributed teams. Perforce has also gained a great reputation for responsive and effective customer support.

Helix RM offers a full suite of useful features, including a better offering of graphical tools than your average requirements management tool.

These include real-time collaboration features (comments, approval management, and easy file exports), impact analysis tools, requirements traceability, and test case management, file history graphs and even a time-lapse tool to visualize an item’s progress over time.

Helix resource management also stands out for its integrations—a two-way sync with Jira, as well as integrations with various Microsoft products, Slack, Eclipse, GitHub, Go2Group, Rational DOORS, and OpsHub.

Overall, Helix RM is a powerful tool, but it does take time to set up, implement, and learn to use it effectively. The good news is that they offer a wide variety of resources like video tutorials, training, and a comprehensive knowledge base to simplify the learning curve.

Perforce Helix RM costs from $179/month.

ClickUp is a project management software that can help you with every aspect of your project, requirements included. You can handle requirements by using the documents feature or a list view with customized fields.

If you decide to use documents, then you should add a document called ‘project requirements.’ Then, use extra pages to record your change requests and add dates to the title to know which one is the latest version.

If you decide to use a list view, you can create each requirement as a task and record changes to any particular request in the activity log. Then, make sure you have a dropdown field with statuses like ‘original’ and ‘updated’ to keep track of which requirements have changed.

ClickUp can help you connect to your requirements documents in other apps, thanks to its integrations. It offers native integrations with Slack, G Suite, Dropbox, and many more tools, as well as over 1,000+ integrations through Zapier.

ClickUp is free with limited storage for an unlimited number of users. Paid plans start at $5/user/month and offer a free trial.