It's tempting to treat a RACI chart and a stakeholder map as two versions of the same exercise, since both involve listing people and assigning them a category. They're not interchangeable — they answer different questions, and using the wrong one leaves a gap the other was built to fill.
RACI answers "who does what on this deliverable"
RACI stands for Responsible, Accountable, Consulted, Informed. It's a task-execution tool: for a specific deliverable — a report, a decision, a milestone — it names exactly one person as Accountable, the people actually doing the work as Responsible, the people whose input is required before it's finalized as Consulted, and everyone else who just needs to know as Informed. It's scoped tightly to the work item in front of you, and a single stakeholder can have a different RACI role on every deliverable in the engagement.
A stakeholder map answers "who matters in this relationship overall"
A stakeholder map isn't scoped to a deliverable — it's scoped to the account. It plots people by power and interest to answer a standing question: who can affect whether this engagement succeeds, gets renewed, or gets killed, regardless of which specific task is on the table this week. A stakeholder's position on the map doesn't change from deliverable to deliverable the way their RACI role does — the CFO is high-power/low-interest whether you're shipping a slide deck or a full strategy revision.
Why most engagements need both
The two tools operate at different altitudes and answer questions the other one can't. A stakeholder map won't tell you who's actually responsible for drafting Tuesday's deliverable. A RACI chart won't tell you that the person you've marked "Informed" on every deliverable is actually the one person whose support determines whether the contract renews. Run the stakeholder map first — it tells you who to build the relationship with. Run RACI per deliverable — it tells you how to actually get the work done without missing a required sign-off.
A worked example
Engagement: a six-month operations overhaul for a mid-size client.
Stakeholder map (built once, revisited quarterly): VP Operations is high power/high interest — manage closely. Finance director is high power/low interest — keep satisfied. Three team leads are low power/high interest — keep informed. This tells you where to spend relationship-building time over the life of the engagement.
RACI (built per deliverable, e.g. the new process documentation):a team lead is Responsible for drafting it, the VP Operations is Accountable for sign-off, the finance director is Consulted on cost impact, and the other two team leads are Informed once it's final. Note that the finance director — "keep satisfied" on the map — is Consulted here, not Informed, because this particular deliverable touches budget. The map didn't predict that; the RACI had to be built fresh for this deliverable.
If you're only building one of these right now, start with the map — it's the one that keeps you from losing the account, and the free Stakeholder Mapping Tool gets you a first version in minutes.