Get the requirements traceability and compliance rigor of expensive proprietary ALM suites — using plain Markdown files in your own version control, native to modern AI coding assistants.
$ almirah please MyProject
parsing specifications ..... 4 ok
parsing test protocols ..... 2 ok
parsing decisions .......... 14 ok
traceability matrices ...... 4 ok
coverage matrices .......... 1 ok
implementation matrices .... 1 ok
decision links ............. 5 ok
rendering HTML ............. ./build/index.html
testing coverage ........... ⚠ 5.26%
test results ............... ✓ 14/0
implementation status ...... ⚠ 60.53%
$ █Legacy requirements and ALM platforms were built for a different era — and they make you pay for it.
Traditional requirements suites cost a fortune in licensing — before you write a single specification.
Per-seat licensing means the people who most need to read the requirements often can't even open them.
Your most critical IP — your specifications — sits trapped inside a closed database in a format you don't own.
Dedicated servers, dedicated admins, and a permanent dependency on a single vendor.
Your requirements and your issue tracker are separate silos your AI assistant can't read — and your auditors can't easily trace.
Your requirements are just text. They should live where your team already works.
Plain text in. Audit-grade, interlinked documentation out.
Author requirements, architecture, tests — and decision records — in plain Markdown.
Put your Markdown into your repository — your single source of truth.
Generate interlinked HTML with full requirement-to-test-to-source traceability.
$ almirah pleaseDevelop product variants in parallel and freeze audit baselines with tags.
Almirah keeps your entire lifecycle in plain Markdown — the native language of AI coding assistants. Your tools can finally read, write, and reason about your specifications.
Requirements, tests, and decisions are plain Markdown — exactly what modern AI coding assistants work with best. Agents draft, update, and trace your specs directly, no integration glue required.
There's no proprietary database or tracker API standing between your assistant and your project. Legacy suites lock requirements in formats an AI can't reach, and extracting status from a tracker burns tokens on every query.
Every decision and its rationale lives beside the code it changed. Your assistant works with the whole picture — better results, fewer tokens, no context lost to a separate system.
Plain text in version control: the format your team, your auditors, and your AI all speak.
Adopt only the parts you need — each capability is a plugin you can add incrementally.
Track work as Markdown decision records versioned right next to your specs — no separate issue-tracking tool, no data silo. They're decisions, not tasks: each one captures what was decided, why, and what it changed.
Capture a design choice and the reasoning behind it, so the "why" survives long after the commit.
A bug, its investigation, and the decision on whether and how to fix it — traceable like everything else.
A proposed improvement and its rationale, reviewed and recorded before any work begins.
decisions/
adr-170-introduce-decision-records.md
issues/
issue-171-dash-unordered-list.md
enhancements/
enh-173-decisions-table-view.mdAlmirah renders every record to its own linked HTML page plus an overview, and ties each decision to the documents it changed — full traceability, zero extra tooling.
Prefer a tracker? You can still integrate almost any project/issue-tracking software instead.
Parity on the rigor regulated teams can't compromise — and a win on everything else.
| Almirah | Traditional proprietary suites | |
|---|---|---|
| Cost | Free & open source | Six-figure licensing |
| Data format | Plain Markdown you own | Proprietary database / lock-in |
| Version control | Native — any Git host | Bolt-on or limited |
| Team access | Everyone on the team | Per-seat, gated |
| Infrastructure | A command-line tool | Servers + administrators |
| Flexibility | Fully customizable & scriptable | Rigid, fixed workflows |
| AI-assistant ready | Native Markdown — agents read & write | Opaque database, token-heavy for AI |
| Work tracking | Markdown decision records (or any tracker) | Separate licensed tool |
| Traceability & audit | ✓ Built-in | ✓ Built-in |
Where documented traceability isn't optional, Almirah speaks your auditors' language.
Bidirectional links from requirement → design → test → source. Coverage gaps and broken links are detected automatically when you build.
Any domain where specifications must be proven, reviewed, and traced:
Almirah is itself specified, tested, and traced using Almirah — its own framework documentation is the proof.
Adopt only as much process as your compliance level demands — scale up when you're ready, never before.
Match your efforts with the actual needs:
Zero lock-in. Built on Markdown, Git, and a single Ruby gem you already know how to use.
$ gem install Almirah
$ almirah create MyProject
$ almirah please MyProjectFrom zero to a fully traced HTML specification in minutes. And if you ever leave, you keep plain text files in your own repository.