Agility vs. MadCap Flare

Agility is well suited for companies that want a balance of control and support. For major global site updates, these can be handled by Agility's support team, while minimal changes and updates can be performed autonomously by the company's own staff with ease. For companies that are interested in flexibility to reconstruct site structure or major global facelifts, Agility is less ideal because these changes must be handled and paid for through Agility support.

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

• Unlimited Content Modules which are extremely helpful for file management .
• Unlimited number of API and Asset Requests
• File management among the CMS is extraordinarily useful as a hosting tool native to our web content

Incentivized

• Snippets, variables, and conditioning are all good
• Once you set it up, updating Help websites is easy.

Incentivized

• The filing system and search function are often difficult to navigate. Finding a file that I've uploaded isn't always easy to locate in Agility CMS
• The WYSIWYG content manager isn't always intuitive. I often have to go directly into HTML editing to resolve line spacing problems

• The software is often quite buggy, and certain bugs seem to date back nearly a decade and still persist.
• Customizing shortcuts is often an ordeal.

Incentivized

I am not a part of this decision process at our organization.

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

Support is always available and responsive when we email, responding right away that they are on the case, even if they are unable to solve the issue right away. Support will usually find the issue of our problem quickly and require minimal hand-holding, direction, or re-explanation from our team. They are knowledgeable about the platform and our instance and are able to run diagnostics with minimal information from us. When issues are resolved they always request confirmation that things are working as expected before closing out our tickets.

Incentivized

A few reasons to go with Agility CMS Product Capabilities Value for money Product functionality and performance Product roadmap Better Pre-sales experience

Incentivized

I wish Google Docs would work for our purposes, but it doesn't have a lot of the technical writing features we need. Using Google Docs would make reviewing and edits much much quicker, but we need MadCap to house all our documents for our Help website.

Incentivized

• Helps get contents updated and shared very quickly
• Ability to have team work based on standard templates ensures content presentation is inline with organizational standards
• Lack of DB and templates makes it easier for interns to come onboard and develop contents - this is super cost effective

Incentivized

• Saves time by offering a way to sync documents with other teammates.
• Often requires time to troubleshoot random errors or bugs that pop up with seemingly no cause.

Incentivized