Within the software experience landscape, many solutions promise to answer your UX hopes and dreams.
Digital Adoption Platforms (DAPs) provide the tools to onboard and walk users through software. Product Experience solutions offer behavioral analytics, A/B testing, and in-app communications. Experience Management (XM) platforms collect and analyze user feedback.
Each solution tackles one piece of the puzzle, but none solves all of your needs.
Because of this, most organizations end up with a patchwork of tools that excel in narrow areas but fail to provide insight into the entire user journey and the tools to make improvements instantly.
But there’s another category of software you’ve been quietly using that solves all of these needs: Software Experience Management (SXM). This category is like an umbrella: it brings together the capabilities spread across DAP, Product Experience, and XM platforms.
And while this category may sound new, it’s actually a continuation of what winning software companies have been doing for a decade. Here’s how it’s similar and different from the existing software categories you’ve been working within.
Digital Adoption Platforms (DAPs): Great at showing, bad at fixing
DAPs are a band-aid for broken software: they guide users through friction, but don’t tell you why the friction exists in the first place (or how to resolve it). Did that tour actually work? Are users more engaged afterwards? You’ll never know with a DAP because they measure clicks, not downstream behavior changes or outcomes.
With a DAP, enterprises repeatedly attempt to solve the same workflow and UI problems without visibility into what’s actually broken or whether their “solutions” work.
SXM turns this around: instead of guiding users through bad software experiences, it shows you why your experiences are bad. Where users struggle, what they do before and after, and how they feel about it. You can connect in-app guidance and user behavior to business metrics to determine which guides are moving the needle on adoption, engagement, and retention.
What DAPs do well
- Guided in-app tours
- Contextual tooltips
- 新規ユーザーをオンボーディングする
- Step-by-step walkthroughs
What's missing
- Deep analytics
- User feedback and sentiment
- Performance data from in-app guidance
- Out-of-app communications
Why SXM is different
- Encompasses the entire user lifecycle
- Combines cross-application analytics, qualitative feedback, replays, and outcome measurement
Product Experience: Powerful for analytics, blind to sentiment
Product Experience tools excel at the “what,” not the “why.” They tell you what customers are doing in your software, but are often blind to the employee experience.
These tools shine when you need granular analytics into customer behavior: tracking feature adoption, mapping user journeys, running A/B tests. Product teams love them for optimizing conversion funnels and deploying contextual guidance. But they’re only built for one side of your tech stack—missing tools to help you understand sentiment, improve employee experiences, and measure your work’s impact on business outcomes.
Most importantly, they also treat symptoms, not causes. Sure, funnels and session replays show where users get stuck before they can make a purchase. But do you have the tools to act on these insights immediately in-app? Most teams still depend on development resources to improve their UI and make fixes.
SXM gives teams the tools to understand what’s happening across customer and employee software experiences, and make fixes instantly. Analytics and replays show you what users are doing in-app, sentiment tells you what users wished for instead, and embedded guidance tools let you skip weeks of development time and jump right to improvements.
What they do well
- プロダクトアナリティクス
- A/B testing and experimentation
- User journey mapping
- Feature usage tracking
- Typically offer in-app guidance
What's missing
- Don’t address internal employee software experiences
- Lack of unified insights across employee and customer touchpoints
- Requires significant resources to implement and maintain
Why SXM is different
- Provides a unified approach for both customer AND employee software experiences
- Combines cross-application analytics, qualitative feedback, replays, and outcome measurement
Experience Management (XM): Listening without seeing
XM platforms are like having an anonymous complaint box: You’re getting loads of feedback, but you don’t know who’s struggling (or happy) and what got them to that point. Without behavioral context, acting on feedback is an expensive guessing game.
When someone gives you a Detractor NPS score, XM platforms flag that your user is frustrated. But to act on this, you need answers to more questions:
- What did they do before submitting that feedback?
- Are they a power user or a first-time user?
- What were they trying to achieve with your software?
- Are they a free user or a top enterprise customer?
SXM helps you connect these dots. When an employee or customer gives negative feedback, you see their actual journey: where they clicked, how long they waited, what they were trying to do. Positive feedback gets the same treatment, helping you identify and replicate what's working.
Using user feedback to enrich and support your behavioral analytics and replays, you can get specific, actionable insights (and the tools to act on them) in one place.
What they do well
- Collecting feedback via surveys
- Analyzing reviews and ratings
- Measuring post-interaction sentiment
What's missing
- Reactive indicator of sentiment
- Limited behavioral context
- No actionable insights
- No direct intervention capabilities
Why SXM is different
- Gives you a clear understanding of what's happening, and the tools to act immediately
- One platform for feedback, user journeys, session replays, and guidance
SXM platforms: The full picture, finally
SXM platforms give you what others miss: software experience isn't just about the “what,” “how,” or “why.” It's about connecting all of these data points together into a cohesive story so you can see how your work is driving real business outcomes.
SXM is a new way to think about what you’ve been practicing for years. Instead of Band-Aid solutions, disconnected data, and siloed teams, you can bring everything your entire enterprise needs into one place.
They’re also enabling much-needed speed and agility that companies need to keep up with AI-native startups. Product, IT, Revenue, and Marketing teams love SXM solutions for this reason.
This is part of our 2025 Software Experience Buyer’s Guide. Explore the resource to get your software experience maturity score, templates to guide your buying journey, and more.
