Accelo vs. StoriesOnBoard

Accelo is a system that can do it all. It's extremely sophisticated. Depending on the sophistication of your organization, or specifically the abilities of the people you put in charge of the implementation, it can almost be too sophisticated. It all just depends on your situation. The more you use it, the more data you give it, the more you'll be able to see and do. It's incredibly powerful. But it's definitely not a tool that would be appropriate for smaller boutique type organizations that have only basic needs.

Incentivized

As mentioned earlier, we also use StoriesOnBoard to create other processes (customer and employee journey). We use the swim lanes to differentiate between measures, tools and processes and working with them is very easy and understandable for this purpose.

Less easy is the use of context, i.e. when one part of a story map depends on another story map. This cannot be avoided (at least for us) to avoid creating redundancy (and the risk of creating different stages). At appropriate places, we refer to the other map in the title.

• Timing Client Work: You are able to better manage your time on your clients.
• Housing Client Info in one Area: You can view all you need for any given client in one area.

Incentivized

• User role management
• Jira integration
• Keyboard shortcuts
• Filtering by personas

• Accelo is excellent on the adaptation to its deep functionalities.
• Managing multiple project is very challenging.
• Not easy to collect multiple reports across platforms.

Incentivized

• Switching the view to a vertical mode (easier to scroll).
• Better availability of information on user story mapping.
• Possibility to link to activities and steps from other maps (Context).

Looking forward to seeing more refinement of features provided and upcoming features promised :)

StoriesOnBoard works really well; all features are well thought through. It could look a bit fresher, although the new updated dashboard is already much better than it was.

From the beginning the Accelo team has been very invested in ensuring our success and overall happiness with the platform. The initial implementation specialists and trainers did a fairly good job of learning our company and needs, and tried to tailor the trainings accordingly. However, once we made the formal switch to the platform, meaning we no longer were using our legacy systems, we found that we had a lot of questions....and a lot of ideas and recommendations. The support team is extremely responsive and seemingly happy to receive our continual feedback. And if we encounter an issue that seems to be a system issue, they work diligently to fix it (we've actually had an engineer join a call with us to learn of the issue - and subsequently fix it)

Incentivized

Accelo doesn't really exceed any competitors in any one area of their product, but in 2015 when we made the move this was the best option that included all the tools we wanted. However, user adoption was low in some areas due to the UI, so we scaled back Accelo and added other tools.

Incentivized

The only other competitor we looked at was cardboardit.com. Both had solid functionality, but StoriesOnBoard was more user-friendly and quick to learn and use in our opinion.

• It substantially reduced the number of systems we use to run our business.
• It reduced the need to train our staff on a variety of platforms.
• It gave us the ability to have a client-facing portal that directly integrates with our backend systems.

Incentivized

• StoriesOnBoard (and story mapping in general) creates a low-cost visual method of aligning on high-level business and technical requirements early in a project and provides an ongoing reference as the project progresses. Having this alignment is critical for the later stages of the project.