In this post, we are going to compare our tool UXPressia with Custellence to help you make the right choice and save your time.

Before searching the web for best-in-breed customer journey mapping tools, take a pause and think for a while. Do you want a tool to accomplish one thing (e.g., visualize a customer journey) or to be able to do more than that?

Custellence is more of a single-purpose tool, with its primary focus on customer journey maps. It's alright if you work with customer journey maps only. But since customer personas are an integral part of any customer journey, chances are, you will want to show them somewhere on your map. In which case, you won’t be able to do so with Custellence.

UXPressia offers both customer journey maps and personas. On top of that, there’s the impact mapping tool to help you align your business strategy with CX improvements and personas.

All the 3 tools are integrated and complement one another. At the same time, you can use them independently. So if you work with journey maps only, you don’t have to create personas and vice versa.

Let’s make a deeper dive inside each tool to see what features they have to offer.

Both tools have a similar grid structure you will find familiar if you ever worked with post-it-notes journey maps. Each map is made of rows or sections with data buckets, and columns acting as journey steps or touchpoints.

There are only two types of sections: card and curve sections. Curve sections are mainly used to visualize emotions or something alike with in-app icons, while cards can hold plain text, icons, images, links, and files.

In UXPressia, there are 20 sections available. Here are a few of the most frequently used sections:

You can also use Plutchik's wheel of emotions which will provide you with a framework for picking the right emotion for each touchpoint.

There’s also a large set of channel icons available in this section. Their descriptions are fully configurable, so you can introduce domain-specific names. Alternatively, you can upload your own set of custom icons. The channel placeholders may also refer to touchpoints or other maps and personas in the same project.

There are more sections available in the tool, and each has a description and an example to help you and your team learn the software as quickly as possible and get some fresh ideas as you’re working on your map.

When presenting customer journey maps, you will most likely want to have different map areas visible to each team. For instance, a version of the map for the executive team will differ from the one you will show to the developers. Let’s see what each tool has to offer in this department.

In Custellence, you cannot create different views to highlight certain areas within your journey map. Still, you can have hideable additional details under each section. The feature is called sub-lanes, and it allows you to have supporting information that can be hidden or shown if needed.

In UXPressia, you can focus on different areas of your journey map with the feature called Views. You can choose which stages and sections are visible under each view and then jump between views when presenting or working on your map.

When it comes to telling your customer’s story, the visual appeal of your map becomes a critical factor. Customer experience cannot always be put into words, so the more interactive and visually appealing your map is, the more likely you will deliver insights to your team.

And although both tools have relatively similar visualization capabilities, the final deliverables look very different.

Custellence offers three shapes of boxes to use in the card lane. You can also pin icons to those boxes and add images to them. As the tool doesn't have a storyboard gallery, you need to upload your own images. Here’s how you set up an individual box:

In UXPressia, you can upload your own images or use our in-built Storyboard Gallery to add storyboards to your journey map.

You can also take advantage of our rich text formatting options to style your text and set accents. You can use emojis, Font Awesome pack symbols, add hyperlinks, images, videos, and loads of interactive iframe widgets.

So what do you get as a result? Take a look at these two journey maps created in Custellence and UXPressia.

It goes without saying that the only way to create effective journey maps is to engage everyone in the process. That means collaboration and sharing are the must-have features for any customer experience software. Now, both tools have sharing capabilities. But there are subtle nuances that make a huge difference at the end of the day.

With Custellence, you can invite someone to your map via email or by sharing a direct link. The latter lets you share maps with people who don’t have a Custellence account. It is a view-only access, however.

With UXPressia, you can share maps and personas via email, through a password-protected direct link, and also with all your workspace members by enabling a single toggle.

And when it comes to direct link sharing, not only can you invite people with no UXPressia account to view and leave feedback as comments, but also to edit your maps in real time alongside you and your team. This makes it the perfect solution for digital workshops and brainstorm sessions whether with a distributed or a local team.

When you’re working on a mapping initiative as a team, it’s important to have transparency on what’s currently happening with each map and persona, and track progress to see who’s got the ball in their court at the moment.

At Custellence, your documents will have an owner, but that field is reserved for the person who create the map and cannot be edited. You can also set a status for each card on your map. However, that doesn’t tell you anything about the current status of the map itself.

By default, the maps and personas you create within UXPressia will also be assigned to you as an owner. But you can easily reassign them to a different internal owner, or even several of them, from your team.

All documents have a status field, where you can select from default or custom statuses to track progress.

Receiving timely and constructive feedback from teammates is crucial when working on a customer journey map. And the easiest way to do that is to leave comments directly on the map.

You can leave text comments on your map. To do that, you need to switch to the Comments mode and hover over a card.

UXPressia has a real-time commenting mode available to both viewers and editors, including users who come to your map through the direct link. We have two types of comments: text and audio. You can also post reactions and leverage dot voting.

You can edit, delete, resolve comments, and reply to them in real time. You can also mention your teammates and set up email and in-app notifications to keep track of comments and activities within the map.

UXPressia also lets you receive Slack notifications about new comments and other activities happening within your maps and projects such as when a new map is created or shared, etc.

Having all the files you need at hand speeds up your work and lets you keep a consistent look for the documents created within your organization.

Currently, there are no options to store or reuse files in the tool.

In UXPressia, your team can enjoy a shared repository of components and files called a Team Library. It supports stages, touchpoints, images, channels, and documents. Once you upload your files, you can reuse them across maps and personas within the workspace.

This is the next logical step you take after creating your journey map.

A presenting feature disables adding new elements to both lane types. It doesn't deliver a presentation-like experience.

With UXPressia, you have a dedicated presentation mode that delivers a PowerPoint-like experience. You can present your journeys and personas in the screen sharing mode, zoom in and out on specific areas, and even change the background color for the slide.

If you’ve been using some other tool for journey mapping, you’d naturally want to keep your progress and take the maps with you when making the switch.

As of now, you can’t import your data to Custellence. The only option is to recreate the work you’ve done by building the same structure from scratch and copying and pasting the text of your journey map cells.

At UXPressia, you can import Excel or CSV files, import data from Google Sheets, simply paste it, or import your maps and personas manually.

Downloading maps to your computer to send someone via email, print, or just keep as a hard copy is also a good option with cloud-based software. Here’s what these tools have to offer.

With Custellence, you have 3 options: PNG, PDF, and CSV.

With UXPressia, you have scalable vector-based PDFs in both dark and white printer-friendly versions. Exported PDF maps can be branded with your company’s logo and the brand color. You can also export Personas (including the multi-persona mode with all personas on the same page) and Impact Maps.

On top of PDF, there is also a PNG, PowerPoint, and CSV export option.

They say learning is growing. So whether you are an experienced mapper, or if you’re just cutting your teeth on customer journey mapping, having some learning materials and support at hand when you need them is crucial.

Both tools provide live chat and email support options, but they differ a lot when it comes to learning base.

If you want to learn the fundamentals of customer journey mapping, you can purchase a $220 online video course at Custellence.

Inside the tool, you’ll find a few journey mapping templates available. Plus, there’s a help center where you can learn the basics of the software.

At UXPressia, we offer interactive and practice-based education in CX with our UXPressia Academy product.

Inside the tool, there are 120+ filled templates for a variety of industries with examples. We also have a blog where you will find many guides, insights, best practices, and downloadable freebies.

Finally, you will find over 100 articles covering every product feature in detail on our help center.

At Custellence, you have 3 plans: one free and two paid ones. Free plan users can create an unlimited number of maps with two default lane types: card and curve.

Their paid plan goes at around $30 per month + VAT, while to find out other pricing options you have to contact Custellence directly.

We have three plans: forever free, Starter, and Pro. Custom enterprise plans are also available upon request. Plus, we have special pricing for education and nonprofits.

With the forever-free plan, you can create one journey map, one persona, one impact map. You’ll be able to add comments and assign statuses for documents, export your work to PNG, and share it via email with 1 other user.

The Starter plan costs $16/month per user ($160 per year) and lets you have 3 documents of each type: journey maps, impact maps, and personas. On this plan, you can leverage unlimited email sharing and password-protected direct link sharing, export your documents to PDF and CSV, use embed code and charts, introduce user roles, and unlock the Multiple personas view.

The Pro plan costs $36/month per user ($360 per year) and includes all the Starter plan features, plus unlimited journey maps, impact maps, and personas, branding, export to PowerPoint, Google Analytics, Mixpanel, Jira, and Slack integrations, and unlimited access to templates. Among other available features will be Version history, the Team Library, and custom document statuses.

But at the end of the day, seeing is believing, so why don’t you sign up for a forever-free account at UXPressia and see if the tool fits your needs.

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