Mural Alternative

Key differences

Both platforms can support customer journey work. Here's a quick summary of key differences:

Journey management depth: Smaply provides a complete journey management operating model with governance, ownership, hierarchy, and metrics. Mural focuses on visual collaboration and workshop facilitation across many use cases.

Mapping structure: Smaply offers a purpose-built journey editor with structured lanes, data-rich cards, and in-map metrics. Mural uses a flexible infinite canvas with sticky notes, shapes, and connectors.

Prioritization: Smaply includes a portfolio system with scoring, a prioritization matrix, and traceability from research to delivery. Mural offers workshop-level voting for quick group decisions.

Research workflow: Smaply's Research Hub provides a dedicated synthesis space where AI helps extract and organize insights before they enter journey maps. Mural's AI features cluster and summarize content on the canvas during collaborative sessions.

Read on to learn which best suits your needs.

Quick comparison

Journey management as an operating model

Journey maps are most useful when they stay alive: maintained, connected to data, and tied to decisions. Smaply is built around this idea. Every journey map can have a Journey Coordinator (assigned owner), a Journey Performance Indicator (a key metric tracking health), and a portfolio summary showing all pain points, opportunities, and solutions with their current statuses. Linked journeys let teams build hierarchies and navigate between maps. These features turn journey maps into a managed system, not a one-time workshop output.

Mural is a visual collaboration platform where journey mapping is one of many use cases. Each mural is a standalone canvas with no concept of journey ownership, linking, hierarchy, or performance tracking. For context, Mural was not included in the Forrester Wave: Customer Journey Management Platforms, Q4 2025 evaluation, which required vendors to offer capabilities beyond a digital whiteboard. For teams that need to manage journeys over time, Smaply provides the structure to do so.

Journey mapping depth

Smaply's journey editor is purpose-built with a structured hierarchy: maps contain stages, stages contain steps, and steps contain lanes and cards. The editor offers flexible lane and card options, including emotion charts, metrics with live data, planning status from tools like Jira, and portfolio items with customer quotes attached. Maps look polished and professional without requiring design skill, and filtered views let different stakeholders see what matters to them.

Mural provides a flexible infinite canvas where teams build journey maps from generic elements: sticky notes, shapes, connectors, and icons. Several journey mapping templates are available as starting points. This flexibility is useful for early exploration and ideation, but there is no structured data model underneath. You cannot filter a Mural journey map by persona, attach metrics to specific steps, or see live delivery status in context. G2 reviewers note that larger Mural canvases can feel cluttered and slow to navigate, a challenge that grows as journey maps become more detailed.

Prioritization and portfolio management

Identifying pain points and opportunities is only valuable if you can prioritize and track them. Smaply's portfolio system captures pain points, opportunities, and solutions as structured entities with scoring dimensions (impact, reach, cost). A portfolio matrix lets teams plot and compare items visually, a dashboard provides management-level overviews, and a detailed table supports filtering and sorting. Items are reusable across journeys and linked to each other, creating traceability from customer evidence through to delivery.

Mural offers voting as a way to prioritize items during a workshop session. This works well for quick group decisions in the moment, but votes are session-based and not connected to a persistent prioritization framework. There is no scoring, no portfolio view, and no way to trace a decision back to customer evidence.

Research and AI workflow

Smaply's Research Hub gives teams a dedicated space to upload transcripts, research notes, and survey responses. AI extracts quotes, detects sentiment, and suggests insights. Teams review and refine in a synthesis space before converting insights into portfolio items or merging them with existing ones. This preserves full traceability from raw source material to journey map placement, and keeps research rigorous.

Mural's AI features are oriented toward workshop collaboration. AI Clustering groups sticky notes by theme, AI Summarize creates concise takeaways, and AI Classify tags sentiment. These are useful for processing workshop outputs in real time. However, AI only works with content already on the canvas, insights do not persist as structured data outside the session, and there is no automated connection between research findings and journey maps.

Collaboration approaches

Mural offers strong facilitation features for live workshops. The Superpowers suite includes tools like Timer, Private Mode (to reduce groupthink), Voting, and Summon (to focus attention). Combined with LUMA Institute frameworks, these make Mural well-suited for running structured collaborative sessions.

Smaply's collaboration model is designed for ongoing journey work. Teams can edit maps in real time during workshops, leave contextual comments on specific cards for async review, and use granular permissions to control who sees and edits what at the account, workspace, or individual journey level. Branded PDF exports and password-protected sharing give stakeholders polished, professional views of journey maps. Both platforms support collaboration, but Mural excels during the workshop session while Smaply excels at sustained cross-functional collaboration around living journey resources.

Pricing

Smaply offers per-editor pricing with unlimited journeys on all paid plans. Plans range from a free tier (with core mapping and portfolio features) through Repository, Framework, and Governance tiers. Self-serve signup is available on all tiers, with sales support for enterprise procurement, invoicing, and volume discounts.

Mural uses per-member pricing with tiered feature access. A free plan includes a limited number of active canvases. Paid plans (Team+, Business, Enterprise) unlock additional features like AI, advanced integrations, and SSO. Business and Enterprise tiers require annual billing or sales engagement.

Pricing subject to change. Check vendor websites for current details.

How to choose

Smaply is the better fit if:

• You need to manage customer journeys as an ongoing practice, not a one-time workshop
• You want structured journey maps with metrics, delivery status, and portfolio items in context
• Prioritizing pain points and opportunities with scoring and traceability matters to your team
• You need a research-to-action workflow where insights are persistent and linked to decisions
• You want professional, branded journey outputs for stakeholder presentations

Mural may be a better fit if:

• You primarily need a visual workspace for running workshops and brainstorming sessions
• Real-time facilitation features (Private Mode, Timer, Voting) are central to how your team works
• Journey mapping is one of many collaborative activities you need a tool for
• You need broad integration with communication tools like Microsoft Teams, Slack, and Zoom

Want to explore Smaply further?

If Smaply feels like a better fit for your approach to journey management, try it free or talk to our team about your needs.