Communication with two XBee's and Arduinos over serial
Did you set one of your modules into coordinator mode?
Every xBee network needs a coordinator. Therefore, you need to put one of your Xbee modules into coordinator mode using the "Function Set" dropdown box in X-CTU. The coordinator has the fixed address 0, so you need to set DL and HL address parts of the other module to 0. On your coordinator, you can set DL to FFFF and HL to 0, which is the broadcast address.

Softserial won't help you. It's just a way to use some of the pins as an additional serial port. Don't use that if you can use a hardware serial port.