Adobe Audience Manager vs. MadCap Flare

If you are already using multiple other pieces of the Adobe Experience Cloud stack, adobe audience manager is an easy choice. It allows for quick and easy data activation for your first and potentially brokered 2nd party data. However this product will likely be absorbed into the adobe experience platform (AEP) soon. In the end I would wait to see where adobe is truly headed with this product before investing heavily without additional heavy adobe investments.

Incentivized

MadCap Flare has its problems, but it serves our team well as an authoring software. This would not be the case if we needed to regularly collaborate on articles, as Flare is prone to conflict issues when another person dares to breathe near an open topic. When working individually, though, it's fine. I'd love to see improvements to design, performance, and stability, but Flare remains one of the best softwares on the market for our needs as an authoring team. MadCap Central is well-suited to internal reviewing when every member is comfortable with Flare (the errors it tends to introduce set aside). SMEs, though, tend to find it hard to use. It's cluttered, some styles don't render, and it just seems like a failed attempt to reproduce Google Docs. I'd love to see improvements there, to help get our SMEs to want to use Central.

Incentivized

• We are able to generate reports that provide valuable insights into potential customer behavior, allowing us to better focus our marketing efforts.
• By allowing us to understand who are key audiences are and how they overlap with other brands and products, AAM allows us to get a fuller picture of how we should target our audience.
• Reporting in AAM is wonderful in that it is easy to understand and exportable. The use of graphics and updates make it easier to share insights with various team members--even those with minimum experience in marketing and analytics.

Incentivized

• Single-sourcing
• Branching (GIT)
• Publishing and hosting

• Biggest challenge we faced is teaching the use of it to our employees how to use it. The UI Should be easy and to understand for all fields.
• The AdWords integration is not easy to do.
• UI is sometimes slow and doesn't load Analyticals for more than 24 hours.

Incentivized

• I use it on a mac with windows parallel and it can be so buggy and laggy.
• I would love it if the software was entirely cloud-based, like Google Docs.
• Reviewing in Central is not a good experience, need better review functionality.

Incentivized

Overall usability is great, as are most of Adobe's software. Maybe a UI refresh could make it a bit easier to do advanced functions or reporting but, overall, it works very well. This is something you take for granted with Adobe solutions because when you try another vendor you realize how bad it can be.

Incentivized

MadCap Flare is in desperate need of an overall redesign. It relies heavily on dozens and dozens of tiny buttons that contain dozens of nested features. Clicking the wrong button can cause your software to freeze and crash. Building targets can be an absolute mystery, as far as all the files involved. It also has a tendency to freeze and crash. There's typically a huge learning curve for new hires who've never used it--nothing is intuitive.

Incentivized

AAM has good support, but the support is not as available, due to waiting time and queue. The instructions presented are available, but it navigation is not easy between pages. However, instructions are usually direct and straightforward, but any underlying thoughts or questions won’t be easily answered without support from their service.

Incentivized

I personally like the Adobe Audience Manager interface and it's easier to use for beginners. It also has some features that Google does not, nor do its other competitors. It is worth the money and time spent, overall. I feel like it gives a bigger and more in-depth picture to our company's audience than other programs.

Incentivized

MadCap software does offer quite a few more technical features than Google Drive, but the user experience is far inferior. Google Drive is much less buggy to work with, and it's much more accessible. MadCap only being available on Windows operating systems makes it difficult to work with teammates who may not have such a device available.

Incentivized

• Overall a Positive Return for Business who go All in on the Adobe Stack
• Solid work for brokering and anonymously sharing data between first and second parties
• The death of TRUE 3rd party data has lessened the effectiveness of all DMPs

Incentivized

• We haven't measured this specifically