Jama Connect traces requirements, risks and tests. Seal runs design, build and quality on one record.

1What Jama Connect offers.

Jama Software Inc. is a Delaware corporation and lists offices in Boston and Amsterdam.¹⁴¹ In March 2024 it announced that Francisco Partners had agreed to acquire it for $1.2 billion from shareholders including Insight Partners and Madrona Ventures.¹² Its home page calls Jama Connect “The Product Context Platform” and lists requirements management, requirements traceability, spec-driven development, risk management, test management and MBSE;¹ Jama says its customers span aerospace and defence, automotive, medtech and life sciences, semiconductors, industrial manufacturing, consumer electronics, infrastructure, robotics and energy.⁵

For medical devices, Jama’s datasheet lists frameworks aligned to ISO 13485, ISO 14971, 21 CFR 820.30, IEC 62304, EU MDR and IVDR, with report and export templates for design inputs and outputs, trace reports, verification and validation, change requests, risk analysis and FMEA, and for design history file exports.¹⁵ Live Traceability tracks requirements, risks and tests and “updates linked artifacts as items change”, and its reviews support e-signatures with FDA 21 CFR Part 11 compliance.⁷ Jama says companies using it report a 28% average decrease in time for traceability and a 21% average reduction in audit preparations.⁷

Jama Connect is an annual subscription, in the cloud or self-hosted.¹⁵⁹ It is sold by licence type: Creators author, run reviews and use the API, Stakeholders view and comment, Reviewers take part in reviews and add electronic signatures, and Test Runners execute test runs and log defects.⁶ Jama charges nothing for hosting, reviewers, file storage or a hosted sandbox, gives prices on request, and offers a free 30-day trial.⁶¹¹ Medical device and life sciences companies may need to validate their use of Jama Connect, Jama says. Its Validation Kit lists the workflows, usage scenarios and test cases Jama used to obtain its TÜV SÜD Validation Certificate, and is “often purchased as part of the Jama Connect Validated Cloud Package”, which the medical datasheet lists as an option to add.¹⁰¹⁵

Other engineering tools reach Jama Connect by sync. Jama Connect Interchange, an add-on, is Jama’s integration platform for tools such as Jira and Excel, built and supported by Jama’s own teams, and Jama asks customers to contact their Customer Success Manager to find out whether it fits.⁴¹³ In its Git integration, an integration hub publishes each commit into Jama Connect, traced to the item whose ID the developer puts in the commit message.⁸ Its REST API supports reporting, data and trace synchronisation and test results import.²

Jama Connect Advisor, also an add-on, checks requirements against INCOSE guidelines and EARS notation, drafts test cases from approved requirements, suggests missing links and turns PDFs into Jama Connect items.³⁴ Jama groups its AI as Jama Intelligence and says those customers are “increasing test coverage by 5-10X, cutting testing time in half, and reducing escaped defects by 20-30%”.¹⁶ In May 2026 it launched what it calls the first MCP server in engineering management software, so engineers can work from AI tools such as Claude, Cursor and GitHub Copilot within Jama Connect’s permissions and workflows.⁵ Its AI data policy says its AI is “for suggestion purposes only” and that it does not use customer-specific data to train its general models.¹⁴

2Running Seal alongside Jama Connect.

You can keep Jama Connect for requirements, risk and tests while the first process moves to Seal. Seal’s REST API and Scripts connect other tools, and Jama’s pricing page gives API access to its Creator licence.⁶ Agree which system holds each record, the direction of transfer, the credentials and the failure handling before you connect them. Start with read access, and treat any write in either direction as a separate decision, as the regulatory guide describes.

Where software changes reach the device, Seal’s GitHub app, in beta, creates a Seal change record from a configured template when a matching pull request opens, updates it as the pull request changes, writes a commit status that links to the record, and approves or closes the pull request when the record is approved or rejected. Seal holds the approval and its Part 11 signatures; merge and deployment stay in your delivery workflow. GitHub issues with a label you choose are kept as Seal records, for example as anomalies, with their status, and Seal’s GitHub Actions attach a snapshot of the code and the release’s files to the change record.

Seal does not inspect code, run tests, merge or deploy: test evidence arrives as files from your pipeline, and Seal has no software bill of materials or vulnerability scanning. There is no two-way Jira sync; Neil can read Jira through a connection a user grants. There is no GitLab, Bitbucket or Azure DevOps app; other tools connect through Seal’s REST API and Scripts.

3Moving from Jama Connect to Seal.

Start where the design meets the build. Jama Connect can keep the records it holds for as long as you need it. Paradromics, which makes a brain-computer interface, moved from paper and legacy systems to Seal and cut operator paperwork by 80% and engineers’ traveler review time by 90%.

1. Choose one process where a design change matters beyond the design, such as the build of one device, where a change must reach verification, risk controls and the units already built.
2. Bring the procedure and the requirements, risk analysis and verification it depends on, exported with Jama Connect’s design history and trace report templates or read through its REST API.¹⁵²
3. Neil prepares changes to records, workflows and their checks for your team to verify and approve under change control, and finds requirements without verification. Seal’s 48-hour evaluation covers one process, once the scope is agreed and the inputs received. Production timing then depends on scope, interfaces, migration and your release requirements.
4. Exercise a design change before relying on it: it should flag the outputs and verification it affects before it is approved, and show the units it reaches.
5. Agree which records move and which stay retrievable in Jama Connect, and reconcile representative records before you rely on the new process.

The design control blueprint and the medical device blueprint show design inputs, outputs, verification, validation and design reviews as linked records, with the traceability matrix as a view of those links, so a requirement with no test shows as a gap while the design is developed.