Pendo
Pendo is a comprehensive product experience platform that helps you track user behavior, deliver in-app guidance, and gather feedback to build software that your customers actually love using.
Smaply
Smaply is a visual journey mapping software that helps you centralize customer insights, create detailed personas, and map complex ecosystem maps to improve your overall customer experience strategy.
Quick Comparison
| Feature | Pendo | Smaply |
|---|---|---|
| Website | pendo.io | smaply.com |
| Pricing Model | Freemium | Freemium |
| Starting Price | Free | Free |
| FREE Trial | ✘ No free trial | ✓ 14 days free trial |
| Free Plan | ✓ Has free plan | ✓ Has free plan |
| Product Demo | ✓ Request demo here | ✓ Request demo here |
| Deployment | ||
| Integrations | ||
| Target Users | ||
| Target Industries | ||
| Customer Count | 0 | 0 |
| Founded Year | 2013 | 2012 |
| Headquarters | Raleigh, USA | Innsbruck, Austria |
Overview
Pendo
Pendo helps you understand exactly how customers interact with your software so you can make data-driven decisions. You can track every click and navigation path without requiring manual coding or engineering resources. This deep visibility allows you to identify where users get stuck, which features they ignore, and what drives long-term retention across your web and mobile applications.
Beyond just analytics, you can take immediate action by deploying in-app walkthroughs and targeted announcements to guide users through complex workflows. By combining usage data with direct user feedback and sentiment polling, you create a complete picture of the product experience. This enables your product, success, and marketing teams to increase feature adoption and reduce churn through personalized, automated communication.
Smaply
Smaply is a dedicated journey mapping tool designed to help you visualize and manage your customer experience in one central place. Instead of scattered spreadsheets or static slide decks, you get a dynamic environment where you can build detailed journey maps, develop rich user personas, and visualize stakeholder relationships through ecosystem maps.
You can use the platform to identify pain points in your current service delivery and collaborate with your team to design better future-state experiences. It is particularly effective for UX researchers, service designers, and CX managers in mid-market to enterprise organizations who need to transform raw qualitative data into actionable visual insights that stakeholders can actually understand.
Overview
Pendo Features
- Retroactive Analytics Track every user action automatically from day one without needing to write custom code or tag individual elements.
- In-App Guides Create walkthroughs, tooltips, and banners to onboard new users and highlight new features without waiting for development cycles.
- Sentiment Tracking Launch NPS surveys and polls directly inside your application to capture user feedback while the experience is top-of-mind.
- Product Roadmapping Connect user feedback and usage data to your product strategy to prioritize the features that drive the most value.
- Session Replay Watch visual reconstructions of user journeys to see exactly where people struggle or encounter friction within your interface.
- Cross-App Analytics Monitor how users move across your entire portfolio of web and mobile applications to understand the total customer journey.
Smaply Features
- Journey Map Editor. Create multi-layered journey maps with text, images, and storyboard icons to visualize every step of your customer's experience.
- Persona Editor. Build detailed profiles of your target users to ensure your team stays focused on real human needs and behaviors.
- Ecosystem Maps. Visualize the complex relationships between stakeholders, processes, and technologies that happen behind the scenes of your service.
- Live Collaboration. Invite your teammates to edit maps in real-time and leave comments to speed up your design and approval process.
- Dynamic Data Linking. Link personas directly to your journey maps so you can see how different segments experience the same service differently.
- Export Options. Generate high-resolution PDF, PNG, or Excel files of your maps to share professional reports with your stakeholders.
Pricing Comparison
Pendo Pricing
- Up to 500 monthly active users
- Basic product analytics
- In-app guides and walkthroughs
- NPS surveys and polling
- Roadmap visualization tools
- Everything in Free, plus:
- Unlimited monthly active users
- Advanced segmentation and targeting
- Resource center for user help
- Detailed sentiment analysis
- Standard integrations
Smaply Pricing
- 1 active project
- 3 journey maps
- 3 personas
- 1 ecosystem map
- Basic export options
- Everything in Free, plus:
- 3 active projects
- Unlimited journey maps
- Unlimited personas
- Unlimited ecosystem maps
- Premium export formats
Pros & Cons
Pendo
Pros
- Codeless tracking makes setup fast for non-technical teams
- Powerful in-app messaging improves user onboarding significantly
- Retroactive data allows you to see past user behavior
- Combines quantitative and qualitative data in one place
Cons
- Initial setup requires technical help for data mapping
- Pricing scales quickly and can become very expensive
- Steep learning curve for advanced reporting features
- In-app guides can occasionally conflict with site CSS
Smaply
Pros
- Intuitive drag-and-drop interface for quick mapping
- Professional export quality for stakeholder presentations
- Specialized tools for personas and ecosystem maps
- Generous free tier for individual practitioners
Cons
- Learning curve for complex multi-lane maps
- Limited integrations with external data sources
- Performance can slow down with very large maps