What's the difference between a "pipeline" and the "customer journey"?

These two words get confused constantly, and they're genuinely different things: a pipeline is the container, and the customer journey is one specific thing you can put in it.

A pipeline is the general idea

A pipeline is a named set of stages a contact moves through, like "New contact", "Proposal sent", "Payment request", each with its own default priority, how long it should take, a colour and an icon, and its own task templates for what a staff member should actually do at that stage. You can build as many pipelines as you need: each one is simply its own separate stage list, and only the one you mark as the default is where a new contact starts automatically. That default pipeline is your customer journey.

The customer journey is your main pipeline

The customer journey is your main pipeline: the one marked as the default, where every new contact starts. A whole extra layer of automation is wired to it, whether you set it up with AI or built the stages yourself:

• AI drafts a full set of stages for you, starting from a proven set covering everything from first contact through to asking for a review and tailored to your business, and you review and edit every stage before anything is installed. Or build your main pipeline's stages yourself with Edit journey.
• Once it's set up, every new contact with a phone number or email automatically gets the whole journey's tasks created for them, not just customers you add by hand: someone who texts you gets pulled in too. A web chat visitor who hasn't shared either gets no tasks yet, and joins the journey the moment they add a phone number or email.
• It marks the exact point where a lead becomes a customer. Everything before that point is still "selling"; everything after it treats the person as an existing customer.
• Only a contact's current stage ever has open jobs. The next stage's jobs are created the moment the current one's are all done or skipped, not before, and an automation set to fire when a contact enters a stage runs at that same moment.

You only ever have one customer journey, because you only have one main pipeline. It's still a pipeline underneath, shown as the default in your pipeline list. While customers are on it you can't make a different pipeline your main one: finish or move them first. Every other pipeline you build works the same way underneath it: the tasks you attach to a stage are still created the moment a contact reaches that stage, and a stage on the customer side of the line still marks a lead as a customer there too. The one exception is where a contact starts: someone with no phone number or email who lands on the first stage of your main pipeline gets no task there, because nobody can reach them yet. What the customer journey adds on top is the one-off setup that creates a contact's whole set of journey tasks at once, right when it's installed, rather than you having to build that yourself.

Which one to use

If you only need to track where a contact is and hand out the right task at each stage, build a plain pipeline. If you want every new contact walked through the same set of steps automatically from first contact to getting paid, install or draft the customer journey. See How do I set up a pipeline for how my customers move through my business? and How do I set up my customer journey?.