Craft vs. StoriesOnBoard

Craft is really well suited for any size design team - I have used it within a team of 3, and within a team of 30. It helps with collaboration within the team, and between external teams through 'sync' with Invision. It increases efficiency of using Sketch with things like 'data', 'duplicate', and 'stock'. These tools not only make designing faster, but also more realistic, allowing us to 'test' our designs sooner.

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.

• Craft is built to digital products developers, so its workflow is great.
• It has a very nice interface and is a beautiful tool.

Incentivized

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

• tools hard to understand
• user interface is a bit tricky for some who is not familiar with these apps
• detailed control page with more formatting options

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).

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.

Responsive chat with founders to answer any questions you have.

Incentivized

Craft was originally developed in response to ExpressionEngine's shortcomings. While ExpressionEngine has caught up in some regards, it still looks and feels a bit unpolished by comparison. Additionally, ExpressionEngine's vendor has never gotten UI right - not on their website, nor in their CMS. Craft remains easier to use, more polished and provides a wider feature set in its base install (without needing plugins). As for WordPress - while I recognize its massive popularity, I find its reliance on themes, third-party plugins, along with security shortcomings, make it a poor fit for the larger custom projects we build. On the other hand, if you want to throw up a passable website in a day, you can't beat WordPress.

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.

• Easy to keep track of notes in a more structured way than a long single document that gets added to over time.
• Great for sharing with collaborators.
• Allows for quick draft creation which produces better final documents.

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.