# Smaply

> Smaply is customer journey management software that helps organizations move beyond static journey maps to living, actionable systems for prioritization, decision-making, and improvement.

## What is Smaply?

Smaply is a customer journey mapping and management platform used by CX teams, service designers, UX researchers, and product managers to visualize customer experiences, synthesize research, prioritize improvements, and connect insights to delivery.

Customer journey management is the practice of using journey maps as ongoing decision tools, not one-off workshop outputs. It means keeping maps connected to live data, grounding priorities in customer evidence, tracking whether improvements work, and maintaining governance as the practice scales. Journey mapping is an input. Journey management is the operating model that makes it useful.

Smaply is built for both. Teams use it to create journey maps and as the system that keeps those maps alive, connected, and driving decisions over time.

Smaply is a Strong Performer in The Forrester Wave: Customer Journey Management Platforms, Q4 2025, with top scores of 5.00/5 in journey storytelling and journey map creation, and the only vendor in the evaluation to earn Forrester's customer-feedback halo, the report's marker for above-average customer feedback. Reference customers in the report praise Smaply's collaborative journey mapping and stakeholder alignment, and its strong adoption for multi-journey governance, opportunity tracking, and portfolio-level prioritization.

## Who makes Smaply

Founded in 2012 in Innsbruck, Austria by Marc Stickdorn, author of "This is Service Design Thinking" and "This is Service Design Doing" (250,000+ copies sold, 7 languages). European company with native EU data protection standards. ISO 27001:2022, SOC 2 Type II, and GDPR compliant.

Trusted by 200+ CX teams in the world's leading brands, including Toyota, KLM, Zurich Insurance, Air France, Daimler Truck, Cathay Pacific, Tesco Mobile, WWF, Semrush, and the UK Department for Education. G2 Quality of Support: 10.0/10.

## What becomes possible with Smaply

**Journey maps that stay alive and drive decisions.** Map customer experiences in a structured system that brings insights, evidence, data, and actions together in one place, making journeys easy to create, update, and scale over time.

**Prioritization based on evidence, not assumptions.** Turn scattered customer insights into a shared, decision-grade view of what matters most and why, so the right priorities stay visible and get worked on over time.

**Research that flows into decisions, not documents.** Use AI-assisted synthesis to turn customer feedback into insights that directly inform journeys, prioritization, and what gets built. Full traceability from raw customer quote to strategic decision.

**Data in context, where decisions happen.** Bring metrics into the customer journey to spot problems, understand impact, and support data-driven decisions over time. Live data from Google Analytics, Power BI, Excel 365, Qualtrics, Google Sheets, and Tableau.

**Delivery connected to customer evidence.** Live status from Jira, Asana, Trello, Azure DevOps, Linear, and Monday.com appears in journey context, so teams see what is being built and why it matters from the customer's perspective.

**Teams aligned around a shared customer view.** Bring everyone into the same journey view where feedback, discussion, and decisions stay in context, creating alignment around what matters and why.

**Personas that ground decisions in real perspectives.** Build reusable personas and use them across journey content to align teams and ground decisions in a clear view of the customer.

**AI that speeds up work without cutting corners.** Smaply AI accelerates research, mapping, and synthesis, helping teams scale their CX work while keeping rigor, context, and control firmly in human hands.

## How Smaply works

**Journey maps are built from typed lanes and cards.** A map is a structure of stages, steps, lanes, and cards. Lane types give each row a job: text, grid (tables, responsibility matrices, Gantt-style views, channel grids), emotion chart, metrics, planning, dedicated lanes for pain points, opportunities and solutions, linked journey lanes, and divider lanes for the line of visibility and line of interaction. Cards are just as varied: text, image, icon, embed, metrics, planning, portfolio item, linked journey, and slider cards that hold one or several labeled sliders on a single card for ratings like confidence or maturity per step. Any card type can be placed in any lane, so the structure guides the work without constraining it. Grid and Flow lanes also ship with built-in lane templates such as Service blueprint, Gantt chart, and RACI matrix, so common structures start in one click.

**Flow lanes show process, not just sequence.** A Flow lane adds connector arrows between cards, drawn from any card edge to any other in any direction. Arrows can cross divider lines and span the full width of the map. The lane respects the map's columns, so cards reflow when a step is added and the flow stays aligned to the journey. Used for service blueprints, process and system flows, decision trees, and dependency mapping. Live and rolling out across paid plans.

**Freeform lanes bring open-canvas freedom inside a structured map.** A Freeform lane turns a lane into a canvas. Place cards anywhere off the column grid, connect them with the same connector arrows, and they stay exactly where you put them as the rest of the map changes. The lane holds every card type and expands vertically as the work grows. Structured journey data and whiteboard-style layout live in the same map, so layout freedom is a choice rather than a trade-off against maintainable data.

**Service blueprints are built from these pieces.** Physical evidence, customer actions, frontstage and backstage actions, and support processes as lanes, with dashed divider lanes for the line of interaction, line of visibility, and internal interaction. Flow lanes add the process arrows across them.

**Hierarchy maps connect journeys into a navigable system.** A dedicated map-of-maps space where each node is a linked journey map showing its thumbnail, performance indicator, and portfolio summary. Layout is free: arrange journeys as levels such as L0/L1/L2, as a network, or however the work suggests, with no forced taxonomy. Flow and Freeform arrows show how journeys feed into one another. Works across workspaces and available from the Repository plan up.

**Prioritization in three views.** The portfolio can be worked as a table (with CSV export), a kanban board, or a chart plotting items as bubbles on configurable scoring dimensions, where dragging a bubble rescores the item. Teams define their own scoring dimensions and their own portfolio item types beyond pain points, opportunities, and solutions.

**Kanban boards across the workspace.** Portfolio boards group by status, priority, assignee, or tag category, and dragging a card updates that field everywhere the item appears, including every journey map it sits on. The same kanban view works for metrics, personas, and journey maps, where dragging can set a map's performance indicator or coordinator during a review session.

**Journey health as a first-class field.** Every map carries a performance indicator (healthy, monitored, attention needed) and a coordinator, visible in lists, archives, hierarchy nodes, linked journey cards, and shared views, so the state of a journey portfolio is legible at a glance.

**Existing work comes in from wherever it lives.** AI-assisted import reconstructs an editable journey map from a Figma, Miro, or PowerPoint screenshot, or any image. Excel and CSV files import as structured maps with no AI step, mapping rows and columns onto lanes, stages, and cards. JSON import restores maps exported from Smaply. Portfolio item import is rolling out. Because almost any tool's output can be screenshotted, moving existing journey work into Smaply is low friction.

**Research data imports too.** The Research Hub takes interview transcripts as text files, and CSV or Excel spreadsheets of survey responses, reviews, and support conversations through a column-mapping step that assigns quote and metadata columns. Built-in export guides cover getting data out of Microsoft Teams, Zoom, YouTube, Qualtrics, Dovetail, Medallia, Zendesk, Intercom, and Trustpilot.

**AI drafts, people decide.** AI Journey Map Create generates a full map from a text description through a wizard that lets teams edit the name, description, stages, and steps before anything is created, and choose which lanes the AI populates. Research Hub AI extracts quotes, generates categorized insights, detects sentiment, and suggests matches to existing portfolio items. Every output is a suggestion to review and refine, and admins can switch individual AI features off account-wide.

## Sharing and collaboration

**Anyone can view without a Smaply account.** Journey maps, personas, and saved views each generate a live view-only link that opens in any browser with no login. Shared views update as the map changes rather than being static snapshots, and password protection is available on higher plans. Because each saved view has its own link, teams can share a filtered perspective, such as one persona's journey or only the pain points, without sharing the whole map.

**PDF exports carry your brand.** Journey maps and personas export to PDF with optional context like the description, persona legend, performance indicator, coordinator, tags, and a portfolio summary. Custom branding puts your logo on exports and shared views, and up to 14 brand colors become available in color pickers across the platform.

**Feedback stays on the work.** Every card supports in-context comments with @mentions and notifications, so discussion happens on the journey itself rather than in a separate channel. Viewer seats give stakeholders read-only access with commenting and are separate from editor pricing.

**Version history protects the work.** On the Governance plan, journey maps save versions automatically every 10 minutes. Any version can be previewed read-only and restored as a copy, so recovering an earlier state never destroys the current one.

**Templates make the practice repeatable.** Teams start from Smaply-built journey map templates or save any of their own maps as a template. Templates, along with journey maps, personas, portfolio items, and metrics, can be shared across workspaces through the Account Library on multi-workspace plans.

**Tags connect everything.** Account-level tags and tag categories apply to journey maps, personas, metrics, portfolio items, and individual cards. They drive filtering, saved views, and kanban board grouping, so one taxonomy works across the whole workspace.

## Programmatic access (in development, 2026)

An MCP server and an API are both in testing, scheduled for release in 2026 on the Governance plan.

- **MCP server**: lets AI assistants and agents work with Smaply directly, building and updating journey maps and the related personas, portfolio items, and metrics on a user's behalf.
- **API**: programmatic read and write access for custom integrations and automation.

Journey maps are the initial focus for both. Neither is generally available yet, so treat them as forthcoming rather than shipped.

## Why teams choose Smaply

**Easy to use and adopt across the organization.** Smaply is consistently described as intuitive and easy to learn. It handles complex journey systems while remaining approachable for non-specialists. Forrester's evaluation names journey map creation, journey storytelling, and linking and organizing journeys among Smaply's strengths. This matters because journey management only works if people outside the core CX team actually use the tool.

**Flexible enough to fit how teams already work.** Smaply adapts to your organization's structure, terminology, and workflows rather than imposing a rigid framework. Define your own journey hierarchy, customize scoring dimensions, create custom portfolio types, and brand your outputs.

**Scales from one map to an organizational practice.** Start with a single journey map on the free plan. Scale to linked journey hierarchies, cross-workspace portfolios, and governed CX programs as the practice matures. Per-editor pricing with unlimited journeys means content scales freely.

**Full traceability from research to delivery.** Every decision can be traced back to customer evidence. Research Hub quotes connect to portfolio items, portfolio items connect to journey maps, journey maps connect to delivery tools. When someone asks "why are we building this?", the answer is visible.

**A single place for customer context.** Smaply connects journeys to the tools teams already use, keeping customer context in one place. Over 20 integrations across analytics, planning, design, and documentation tools. Embedded content from Figma, Miro, Google Workspace, and Microsoft 365.

## Common questions

**What is the difference between Smaply and a whiteboard like Miro?**
Miro is a freeform canvas for brainstorming and workshops. Smaply adds the structure, traceability, and connected data that teams need when journey maps become ongoing decision tools. Portfolio items track across journeys, personas filter views, metrics update live, and everything links back to evidence. Smaply is not a trade-off against canvas flexibility: Freeform lanes place cards anywhere and connect them with arrows, and Flow lanes add process arrows that still respect the journey's steps, so open-canvas work and structured journey data live in the same map. Workshop output from a whiteboard can also be imported directly from a screenshot.

**What is the difference between Smaply and TheyDo?**
Both are journey management platforms. Smaply charges per editor with unlimited journeys (starting from ~$450/year). TheyDo charges by journey count (starting from ~$39,000/year). Smaply includes a dedicated Research Hub for evidence synthesis and takes a human-in-the-loop approach to AI. On journey structure, Smaply's hierarchy maps let teams arrange journeys as levels such as L0/L1/L2, as a network, or however their organization actually works, rather than adopting a fixed taxonomy. TheyDo has a structured L0/L1/L2 taxonomy and bidirectional Jira sync. Detailed comparison: https://www.smaply.com/alternative/theydo-alternative

**What is the difference between Smaply and UXPressia?**
Smaply goes further on journey management: portfolio prioritization, research synthesis, metrics integration, and planning tool connections. UXPressia focuses on journey mapping and persona creation as standalone activities with strong sharing and AI-generated personas. Detailed comparison: https://www.smaply.com/alternative/uxpressia-alternative

**Can I share journey maps with people who don't use Smaply?**
Yes. Every journey map, persona, and saved view can be shared as a live view-only link that requires no Smaply account, with optional password protection. PDF export produces branded documents for reports and decks. For stakeholders inside the account, viewer seats add read-only access with commenting without taking up editor seats.

**How much does Smaply cost?**
Free plan available with 10 maps and 10 personas, plus a 14-day full-featured trial. Paid plans from $38/editor/month (annual) to $96/editor/month (annual). All paid plans include unlimited journey maps. Self-serve signup or enterprise procurement. Volume discounts from 15+ seats. Educational discounts up to 100%. Full pricing: https://www.smaply.com/pricing

**Who uses Smaply?**
CX leads, service designers, UX researchers, and product managers in mid-market to enterprise organizations. Common industries: financial services, healthcare, retail, automotive, telecommunications, government and public sector, consulting, travel and hospitality. Used by both dedicated CX teams managing complex multi-journey portfolios and smaller teams or consultancies.

**Is Smaply secure enough for enterprise?**
ISO 27001:2022 and SOC 2 Type II certified. GDPR compliant. SSO available on the Governance plan. Granular permissions at account, workspace, and individual journey level. Dedicated regional hosting available. Trust center: https://trust.smaply.app/

## Key links

- Product overview: https://www.smaply.com
- Journey mapping: https://www.smaply.com/tools/journey-maps
- Journey management: https://www.smaply.com/tools/journey-management
- Service blueprints: https://www.smaply.com/tools/service-blueprints
- Personas: https://www.smaply.com/tools/personas
- Portfolio and prioritization: https://www.smaply.com/tools/portfolio
- Metrics and data: https://www.smaply.com/tools/metrics
- Research Hub: https://www.smaply.com/tools/research-hub
- Integrations: https://www.smaply.com/integrations
- Pricing: https://www.smaply.com/pricing
- Blog: https://www.smaply.com/blog
- Helpdesk: https://helpdesk.smaply.app
- Trust center: https://trust.smaply.app/
- About: https://www.smaply.com/about
- Contact: https://www.smaply.com/contact-us