Which journey management platform to choose?

Jan 27 / Katrine Ly

In November 2025, Forrester released their first wave report to evaluate the 11 Journey Management (JM) Platforms that matter most and how they stack up (view report).

Among these 11 platforms, Katrine Ly selected three — Smaply, TheyDo and Cemantica — that she believe are especially worth exploring if you’re considering a JM platform, whether you’re new to the discipline or already experienced.

The review is based on her experience as a Journey Management advisor. It doesn’t cover everything, but focuses on some of the key areas that she has experienced as particularly important for organisations in their early stages of journey management. 

Before deep-diving into each of the three platforms, here is an evaluation based on two key questions organisations most often ask after they’ve secured buy-in and planned how to implement Journey Management (JM):

  1. How much are we willing to invest in a platform right now
  2. How easy is it to get started and create value?

The comparison below is therefore grounded in price range and ease of adoption, providing a quick overview of how the three different platforms plays out:

Deeper dive: A practical review of the three platforms

For each of the three platforms — Smaply, TheyDo, and Cemantica — I share a review covering the following areas:

  1. Ease of use & adoption
  2. Documentation of insights, opportunities & solutions
  3. Connectedness & traceability
  4. Shareability
  5. Collaboration
  6. Data integrations
  7. AI
  8. Measurement & effect


Many other areas matter — such as prioritisation, storytelling, reporting and scaling — but these eight are the ones that I believe differentiate more across the three platforms and from my experience tend to be particularly important for organisations in their early stages of JM.

The visualization below shows a subjective high-level rating of the three platforms across the eight areas. The scores are indicative, not absolute — each reflects multiple considerations. The nuance behind each rating is explained in the sections that follow.

Smaply

— The easy way to get started and test JM in practice
— Price: Starting at €32 per editor per month (view price at Smaply.com)

Smaply offers just enough functionality to support effective JM without unnecessary complexity. It’s very easy to use and accessible to all in terms of pricing. Starting at €32 per editor per month makes it by far the most affordable platform in this review.
For most organisations getting started with JM, one or two editors will be sufficient, which makes Smaply an ideal entry point into JM. This also aligns well with Forrester’s assessment, noting that “Smaply is best suited to companies that want to start small and scale JM at a steady pace.”

Ease of use & adoption
— Simplicity is its core strength
Smaply is extremely simple and intuitive to use — whether you’re experienced with JM or not. The simplicity of the tool is also one of its greatest strengths. You don’t get lost in complex taxonomies or heavy customisation, meaning you have a clearer focus on what really matters for organisations early in their JM maturity: Building an emerging journey-centric mindset across teams.

Documentation of insights, opportunities & solutions
— Simple format with editorial possibilities
Documentation in Smaply, TheyDo and Cemantica follows the same basic principles, but the editorial possibilities differ significantly.

When adding a new card in Smaply — such as an insight or opportunity — you have fewer formatting options than in TheyDo, but more than you have in Cemantica. For example, you can’t structure content with text hierarchy or add images directly. These limited editorial possibilities can be a strength, as it helps keep content tight and consistent. At the same time, it can feel limiting when you need to add nuance — such as visual material or clearly separated sections — here you’ll need to find workarounds.

Smaply currently only supports pain points as an insight type. However, this year, customizable insight categories will be introduced, enabling teams to define e.g. needs, behaviours and other insight types.

Connectedness & traceability
— Clear links between core building blocks
Journeys, insights, opportunities, and solutions are connected in Smaply, making basic traceability possible. This supports context and evidence-based prioritisation — an aspect Forrester highlights as critical for effective decision-making. Smaply is less advanced than TheyDo and Cemantica however, when it comes to deeper connectivity across multiple journey layers, e.g. across insights and experience impact or solutions and metrics.

Linking insights, opportunities and solutions is flexible in Smaply. Smaply allows insights to be linked directly to solutions, without first defining an opportunity; similar to Cemantica, but unlike TheyDo. This is valuable when the solution is already clear and makes it very easy to detect insights supporting the specific solution.

Shareability
— Easy to share public links to journeys
Shareability is especially important when you want to involve stakeholders and share your work outside the tool. With Smaply, you can share your journeys via a public link. However, viewers cannot interact with the underlying content, such as opening insights, which limits the possibility for engaging stakeholders that don’t have user access to the tool.

Collaboration
— Basic collaboration features and integration to other management tools
Collaboration in Smaply is lightweight and well suited for small teams or early-stage JM practices. Every journey, insight, opportunity, and solution has an owner, and stakeholders can be tagged to receive notifications when changes occur.
Smaply integrates with management platforms such as Jira, Azure DevOps, Asana, and Trello, making it easy to move solutions from the JM platform into delivery workflows.

However, it’s essential to define clear standards for how solutions should flow between platforms before enabling automated integrations. Without this clarity, handovers quickly become unclear and collaboration may suffer — this applies to all of the three platforms reviewed.

Data Integrations
— Strong analytics integrations
Smaply stands out by offering integrations with Google Analytics as well as PowerBI, Google Sheets and Microsoft Office. Once configured, defined data points are automatically fueled into your journeys, reducing manual effort and supporting ongoing monitoring.

AI
— A collaborative AI, giving more control over the output
Smaply’s AI support is currently mainly focused on AI-powered journey mapping, which is simple and accurate. In just three steps, you collaborate with the AI to generate a journey map that contains all phases with clear step-by-step descriptions. This works well as a starting point. Even though Smaply’s AI isn’t as expansive as in TheyDo or Cemantica, its output is — from my experience — more accurate and trustworthy.

Smaply doesn’t currently offer AI-powered synthesis of insights, creation of opportunities or solutions, though this area is expected to evolve this year.
Smaply is also launching a research repository — similar in concept to Dovetail — where teams can upload research material and conduct AI-assisted synthesis. Highlights from the synthesis are tagged and connected directly to insights, making it easier to understand how insights emerged and to maintain research traceability.

Measurement & effect
— Measuring effect is currently handled manually in Smaply
The impact of new solutions is measured manually by looking if the new solutions have affected linked insights and metrics in the context of the journey.

TheyDo

— For enterprise organisations, ready for journey-led transformation
— Price: Starting at ~€20.000 annually (basic package. More functionality = higher price)

TheyDo is the most well-known JM platform on the market and positions itself as an AI-powered enterprise solution. Organisations choosing TheyDo typically have a clear top-down mandate to work journey-led and are more likely ready to operationalise JM at scale.

Pricing reflects this positioning as TheyDo is much more expensive than the two other platforms reviewed. The price is based on the number of journeys and not users. Final costs depend on organisation size, setup etc., which requires a sales dialogue.

Ease of use & adoptability
— Simple from the outset, but can quickly become overwhelming
TheyDo is pretty straightforward from the onset, whether you're experienced in JM or new to the discipline. However, as journeys, content, and taxonomies expand, complexity will increase quickly. Long-term value depends on keeping the setup simple and establishing shared standards, structure, tagging and governance early on.

Documentation of insights, opportunities & solutions
— The richest documentation capabilities among the three platforms
Documentation is one of TheyDo’s strongest areas — and where it truly stands out. Insights, opportunities and solutions offer editorial flexibility comparable to Word or Google Docs, supporting structure, images, links, references and more.
This flexibility enables clarity and storytelling, but also increases the risk of over-documentation. Without shared formats and rules, consistency may become difficult to maintain over time.

Connectedness & traceability
— Strong connective structure across journey levels and building blocks.
All building blocks in TheyDo are interconnected: Metrics, insights, experience impact, opportunities and solutions are explicitly linked. Its strong connective structure makes context clear and traceability straightforward. Furthermore, it makes it easy to assess evidence, prioritise what matters most and understand how, e.g. a single opportunity or solution may impact multiple journeys across the organisation.

From my perspective, this holistic interconnectedness is one of TheyDo’s core strengths. It ties everything together across multiple journeys — from goals to measured outcomes — and enables both high-level storytelling and deep dives into specific journey levels.

Shareability
— Unique capabilities, enabling stakeholder engagement significantly
Shareability is another capability, whereTheyDo stands out compared to the other platforms. You can easily share public links — not only to entire journeys — but also to specific insights, opportunities and solutions.

This is extremely valuable because many stakeholders are not interested in navigating a full journey map — they’re interested in a specific set of insights, opportunities or solutions. In one of my previous projects, the journey manager replaced her long explanatory emails with a more simple email with direct links to specific insights and opportunities.

Stakeholders could immediately see descriptions, status, and ownership in a live view — without needing to understand how to read a journey map.

Collaboration
— Designed for collaboration at scale
Every journey and pieces of journey content has an owner, and you can add groups or tag stakeholders to receive notifications. Updates and changes are logged in a central activity feed, making it easy to track progress and decisions over time.

Integrations with other management systems — such as Jira, Azure DevOps, Trello and Asana — support cross-team collaboration. However, avoid simply integrating and letting everything run automatically from day one. It’s important to first define how solutions should move between the JM platform and other management systems, and how ownership and decision-making are handled.

If this isn’t clear before integrations are activated, you’ll quickly create a gap between platforms and the processes around them — and collaboration is more likely to fail; this also applies to the other two platforms.

Data integrations
— Rich integrations and more to come
TheyDo currently integrates with five analytics platforms — Tableau, BigQuery, Snowflake, Qualtrics, and Expoints — as well as nine customer feedback tools, including SurveyMonkey and Typeform. The range of data and customer feedback integrations has expanded significantly over the past year and continues to evolve. TheyDo’s integrations are, according to Forrester, also praised through customer references.

AI
— AI-generated journey maps and content, where human judgement is critical
TheyDo’s AI can create and enrich journey maps either from scratch or based on uploaded data such as interview transcripts or survey responses. It can also generate insights, images/story boards and opportunities from existing content or new data.

You don’t collaborate with the AI during analysis, which means less control over the output. However, you can review, edit, and adjust results once the analysis is complete.

Currently unique to TheyDo, each AI-generated insight includes an evidence score that shows how many data points support the insight. The quality is generally solid, but reliable output requires sufficient data volume, and human judgement remains essential to ensure accuracy and relevance.

One particularly strong feature in TheyDo’s AI, is its ability to summarise insights across journey levels, for example rolling up detailed touchpoint-level insights into strategic-level journey insights.

Evaluation & effect
— Visual highlighting of new solutions makes impact easier to assess
When a solution is launched, its launch date appears directly on relevant metric graphs within the journey context. This makes cause-and-effect visible in a way that resonates with executives and senior leadership. Because everything is connected, documenting improvements and demonstrating value becomes much more concrete. This is one of the areas where TheyDo consistently delivers executive-level credibility.

Cemantica

— Advanced capabilities at a relatively affordable price.
— Price: Starting at ~€3000 annually for three users (view pricing at cemantica.com)

Cemantica is the most advanced platform of the three reviewed. It covers the full journey management lifecycle — from programme definition and journey mapping to implementation and measurement.

It offers a wide range of functionality across three phases: Define, design, and measure. This can be a real strength, but can also feel overwhelming at first, especially for organisations without prior JM experience.

Pricing is reasonable, making Cemantica a somewhat affordable option that allows organisations to start small (minimum three users) and scale their JM practice over time.

Ease of use & adoptability
— Requires structure, experience and a clear plan
At first glance, Cemantica appears simple and easy to use. Once you get started working in the platform, it quickly becomes clear that it offers more functionality and more possibilities than the two other platforms reviewed. This includes more advanced journey mapping building blocks, journey programmes, projects, action plans and more.

Because of its breadth, most organisations will benefit from having a clear implementation and rollout plan — typically starting with a limited part of the platform and expanding usage gradually over time. According to the Forrester wave report, the flexibility of the platform is praised by reference customers.

Documentation of insights, opportunities & solutions
— Simple and structured without editorial flexibility
Documentation in Cemantica is very simple. Unlike Smaply and especially TheyDo, there are no editorial possibilities when documenting insights, opportunities or solutions.This strict structure can be a strength when consistency is critical, but can feel limiting when richer storytelling, visual material or nuanced explanation is needed.

Connectedness & traceability
— Strong structural connectedness across all stages
Cemantica has a strong structural approach to connectedness, linking programmes, journeys, solutions and projects in a coherent way. This supports a holistic overview of the journey landscape and enables traceability across different stages of your JM projects.

One particularly strong capability is that touchpoints can be connected directly to both data and insights. This makes it possible to see how touchpoints perform quantitatively (data) and how customers experience them qualitatively (insights) in the context of the journey.

As in Smaply, insights in Cemantica can also be linked directly to solutions without going through an explicit “opportunity” phase, giving teams flexibility to adapt the model to how they actually work.

Shareability
— Only user-based access
Journeys and content in Cemantica can only be explored by users with access to the platform. Views can be customized per user role, which creates a focused experience for internal users. However, this also limits broader stakeholder sharing and engagement outside the core team.

Collaboration
— Strong for internal teams, more limited for external stakeholders
Cemantica supports collaboration well within teams that actively use the platform. Ownership, roles, and responsibilities are clearly defined, and the platform works well for cross-functional teams working closely together.
Because access is user-based and public links are not available, collaboration with stakeholders outside the core team requires onboarding them as users, which can become a barrier in larger organisations.

As with the other two platforms, Cemantica integrates with management systems such as Asana, Jira, and Azure DevOps, among many others. To ensure smooth collaboration and consistent processes across platforms, it’s important to be deliberate about how solutions should flow between the journey management platform and other management tools before enabling fully automated integrations.

Data integrations
— Cemantica is strongest in this area
Cemantica stands out as the platform with the most extensive data integrations across customer feedback, analytics, and operational data systems. A full overview is available in their Connectors Brochure, which can be downloaded from their website. This breadth of data integration makes Cemantica strong for organisations that want to work in a highly data-driven way and connect journeys directly to customer– and operational data at scale.

Download Cemantica’s Connectors Brochure (cemantica.com)

AI
— An omnipresent AI companion drawing from internal and external data.
Cemantica includes an AI companion (Alex) embedded across the platform. It can generate personas, journeys, insights, opportunities and solutions. It can help you prioritize and validate opportunities and solutions, and it can provide a financial impact analysis, which — according to the Forrester report — many customers plan to use.

Cemantica allows you to choose whether AI outputs — such as personas, journeys, insights etc. — are generated from a prompt combined with publicly available data, or based solely on your own data. I’ve only tried the prompt-based option using public data. This works well for creating generic personas. However, when generating journey maps — including content such as insights and opportunities — I see it more as a source of inspiration than a reliable source of truth.

You can’t see the sources of underlying data, and the outputs don’t necessarily reflect your specific business or customer experience. Human judgement and adjustments is therefore quite critical.

Measurement & effect
— Built for structured, data-driven measurement
I haven’t experienced measuring effects first-hand in Cemantica. However, the platform is clearly designed to support ongoing measurement and evaluation.

Journeys are closely tied to programmes, projects and data, which makes it possible to track impact over time and across journeys. Measuring effect here is less about visual storytelling (as in TheyDo) and more about structured, data-driven follow-up — making Cemantica particularly relevant for organisations that want to operationalise JM deeply into governance and performance management.

What to do now?

Focus on the practice before diving into tooling: Remember that the JM practice comes before buying- and setting up a platform. Among lots of things, you need to clarify goals, a plan, governance and ways of working. If you define the practice inside the platform, the platform will end up defining your practice — often in unintended ways. It should work the other way around.

Define your unique path for getting started with JM: There’s no one-size-fits-all approach for getting started with JM. A top-down mandate requires a very different setup than a bottom-up, one-person initiative trying to build momentum. Regardless of how you start, JM is a new practice in the organisation. It won’t take hold unless it’s planned, implemented, tested, valued — and perhaps most importantly: meaningful to both colleagues and leaders, customers and business.

Try out the platforms with a clear purpose: All three platforms offer a one-month free trial. Use this time to understand how the platform works — not to prove the business case for JM. One month is rarely enough for that. Trials are most valuable when your goals are already clear and you’re testing the fit, not value.

Stay updated on JM platforms: JM is a rapidly growing practice, and the platform landscape is evolving just as fast. New platforms are already emerging, and existing ones continue to expand their capabilities. We’ll keep exploring and sharing insights as the market develops.
Adapted from an article originally published on Day21.dk, written by Katrine Ly.

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