Answerbase vs. MindTouch

MindTouch

Overview
Product	Rating	Most Used By	Product Summary	Starting Price
Answerbase	Score 8.0 out of 10	Mid-Size Companies (51-1,000 employees)	Answerbase is a knowledge management platform for customer support and e-commerce, allowing users to ask questions, receive quality answers, and browse content and articles to meet their demand for information about your products and services. Each system comes with administration and moderation tools that are designed to help companies customize, manage and grow an engaging platform. According to the vendor, advanced features like moderation, user group management, actionable content insights,…	$49 per month
MindTouch	Score 7.0 out of 10	N/A	MindTouch is a customer experience management platform with content management and help authoring capabilities. Formerly known as MediaWiki, it is optimized for building knowledge bases for customer self-service and agent assistance purposes.	N/A

Pricing

Answerbase

MindTouch

Editions & Modules

Basic: $49
per month
Professional: $149
per month
Business: $399
per month
Enterprise: Quote
per year

No answers on this topic

Offerings

Pricing Offerings
Answerbase	MindTouch
Free Trial
Yes	Yes
Free/Freemium Version
No	No
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
No	No

Entry-level Setup Fee

No setup fee

Additional Details

Answerbase Enterprise allows for 100% custom adaptations and developments to take whatever ideas, new functionalities or integration requirements you may have and make them a reality. Our knowledgeable team will manage setup, integration, and provide web-based education and training to make sure your team has all the tools and information they need to successfully manage and grow your site. Therefore, we organize a quote on a per customer basis only for customers interested in an Enterprise implementation.

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More Pricing Information

Community Pulse
	Answerbase	MindTouch
Considered Both Products	Answerbase NB Nathan Brown Sales Manager Chose Answerbase Just from a personal viewpoint, I feel that the ease of use with Answerbase is amazing and with first class customer service support team, that could not be more friendlier and helpful. The decision was easy and they designed specific requirements that met our needs. It has … Incentivized Helpful?	MindTouch Travis Sousa Director of Support, CFO Chose MindTouch I will be brief. DealerTeam is built upon Salesforce and we try to support native apps. We used Desk.com first for basic Help Ticket management. The product did not satisfy how our customers were looking for information. We upgraded to Service Cloud with Knowledge Base and … Incentivized Helpful? Harry Kaplowitz Product Manager Chose MindTouch MindTouch wasn't the cheapest option we considered, but it was the best value. It gave us the most features, controls, flexibility, and growth opportunity for the money we paid for it. We did not need a ticketing solution, and a lot of the offerings we evaluated were stronger … Incentivized Helpful? Verified User Anonymous Chose MindTouch MindTouch is user-intuitive and mobile-friendly Incentivized Helpful? Ben Mo Partner Engineer Chose MindTouch We considered: Home-built solution Self-hosted solution using out-of-the-box libraries for API documentation Incentivized Helpful? Ed Owen Director of Customer Experience Infrastructure Chose MindTouch SDL's product at the time did not elegantly handle content other than DITA. Incentivized Helpful? Ozzie Gardner Knowledge Manager Chose MindTouch In my view, MindTouch is hands down the industry leader when it comes to documentation and publishing products. None of the other products I have used provide such an intuitive interface for single-source content creation. MadCap Flare has a steep learning curve and requires … Incentivized Helpful? Matthew Teborek Director, Client Success Chose MindTouch Actually, when we evaluated MinfTouch it was evident that we didn't really need to perform due diligence against other solution providers. It was apparent from the get-go they were the perfect fit for the problems we were trying to solve. Incentivized Helpful? Verified User Anonymous Chose MindTouch We selected MindTouch after being given assurances it met all of our needs. Whilst I am sure it can do this, it was not made apparent the technical ability required to be able to achieve this and given the choice again we would not have selected MindTouch. Incentivized Helpful? Paul Schwartz VP of Information Technology Chose MindTouch Each suite offered a variety of features; however, MindTouch had powerful SAP integration and as a hosted solution the value of ownership was nearly immediate. Put on top of the API and CSS options for customization MindTouch was the top solution for our documentation … Incentivized Helpful? Seth Faber Global Services eServices Manager Chose MindTouch MindTouch offers a unique knowledge and information management tool that was different enough from traditional knowledge bases and advanced enough to not be a Wiki while allowing CRM integration and APIs for customization. MindTouch as a company is focused on making their … Incentivized Helpful? Verified User Anonymous Chose MindTouch We compared MindTouch to Salesforce Community and Salesforce Knowledge and we ultimately picked MindTouch because of the increased usability. Incentivized Helpful? Kathleen Linenberger Carrier Relations Specialist Chose MindTouch MindTouch was the first and only product we used, so I do not know what other companies provide services similar to MindTouch. Incentivized Helpful? Verified User Anonymous Chose MindTouch We have not used a competing alternative, and are still working to better implement this solution. Incentivized Helpful? Verified User Anonymous Chose MindTouch We were on Salesforce.com's KB and did not like the interface and the difficulty with article creation. The advantage of SF was that we could assign articles to individuals for review. I feel that is missing with MindTouch. It makes article creation workflows very difficult. Incentivized Helpful? Nina Wishbow Principal Technical Writer Chose MindTouch I did not select MindTouch at my current company, but I was looking into it at my previous position. It has many of the useful features of the more traditional publications tools (RoboHelp, Frame) with the ease of web deployment of other tools (HelpIQ). It has some limitations … Incentivized Helpful? Verified User Anonymous Chose MindTouch We selected MindTouch because: - it could support multiple products inside of one instance - it could support both external and internal users with conditionalized access to content Incentivized Helpful? Aaron Leonard Senior Content Manager Chose MindTouch We previously used MadCap Flare. Flare is amazing for its single sourcing capabilities, where MindTouch is lacking. But with Flare we had to do an entire build and publish each time (which took hours). Incentivized Helpful? Ryan Burke Manager, Product Education Chose MindTouch We looked at Happy Fox, Salesforce Communities, Fuze, MadCap Flare, etc. MindTouch won out because of its Salesforce integration and the fact that it was a hosted solution with everything included in one price. Incentivized Helpful? Verified User Anonymous Chose MindTouch Knova Knowledge Management and Oracle Knowledge Incentivized Helpful? Jaclyn Schoof Knowledge Program Manager Chose MindTouch We selected MindTouch because it had the most features for what we were looking for in our solution. Incentivized Helpful? Tanner Volz Technical Content Manager Chose MindTouch N/A. It has been several years since I evaluated competitors. I'm vaguely aware of ZenDesk and am in process of evaluating not - not with the intention to replace MindTouch, just to keep up with trends in the industry. I would consider a move if I ever felt that MindTouch was … Incentivized Helpful? DD Dane Dreiling Operations Specialist Chose MindTouch MindTouch has a high degree of user freedom regarding customization, offers a quick-responding support team, and keeps their site up-to-date and modern. The combination of these abilities made MindTouch a fine choice that could suit our needs. Incentivized Helpful? Alicia Tripler Billing and Operations Manager Chose MindTouch We evaluated various knowledge base options and previously used a home-grown site for documentation. Mindtouch had more options than we knew were possible and provided a more robust product. Incentivized Helpful? Himanshu Pandya Director of Technical Support Chose MindTouch We used Parature a long time ago but we left that system due to increasing costs and we moved to SFDC and WordPress. For a few years we used WordPress which was very difficult to manage especially for managing images, page redirects and overall longterm maintenance of content. Incentivized Helpful? George Eckel Principal Writer & User Experience Design Chose MindTouch MindTouch is not as sophisticated as those editors but MindTouch is the only one that generates HTML. The other editors provide additional, advanced functionality, are more bulletproof, and require the services of an experienced technical writer. MindTouch, however, is simpler … Incentivized Helpful?

Best Alternatives
	Answerbase	MindTouch
Small Businesses	Front Score 9.2 out of 10	Sogolytics Score 8.5 out of 10
Medium-sized Companies	RWS Tridion Sites Score 9.0 out of 10	CustomerSuccessBox Score 9.5 out of 10
Enterprises	RWS Tridion Sites Score 9.0 out of 10	Verint Voice of the Customer Score 9.2 out of 10
All Alternatives	View all alternatives	View all alternatives

User Ratings
	Answerbase	MindTouch
Likelihood to Recommend	10.0 (0 ratings)	7.6 (0 ratings)
Likelihood to Renew	- (0 ratings)	8.8 (0 ratings)
Usability	- (0 ratings)	7.5 (0 ratings)
Performance	- (0 ratings)	8.0 (0 ratings)
Support Rating	- (0 ratings)	7.8 (0 ratings)
Online Training	- (0 ratings)	8.8 (0 ratings)
Implementation Rating	- (0 ratings)	7.7 (0 ratings)
Configurability	- (0 ratings)	5.0 (0 ratings)
Ease of integration	- (0 ratings)	9.0 (0 ratings)
Product Scalability	- (0 ratings)	1.4 (0 ratings)
Vendor post-sale	- (0 ratings)	9.3 (0 ratings)

User Testimonials
	Answerbase	MindTouch
Likelihood to Recommend	We implemented a Q&A board since we felt this would be the best way to create high quality content for our team when discussing the next sales strategy process. Really aids customers who have purchased a product from our company to navigate any problems they experience as they can seamlessly check the community question board Increases networking opportunities Incentivized NB Nathan Brown Sales Manager Read full review	I would recommend MindTouch to anyone who is looking to create and host their documentation for a product that has multiple types of users. Our business modal represents customers on the buy-side as well as the sell-side and we are able to easily organize documentation to service both types of users. Incentivized Verified User Anonymous Read full review
Pros	Increases your team to collaborate with each other as you are available to post questions that more people can answer to express and opinion or idea Browse existing community pages to see if your question has been answered Allows you to share relevant documents with specific staff Excellent customer service support team that are always on hand to help Incentivized NB Nathan Brown Sales Manager Read full review	Good privacy settings for each page. I can set a new article to semi-private until it's approved to go live. And I can send a link to that page out for review. Good tracking on each page history. Ability to view and restore previous page versions. I like the category search bars that only search the current category. Incentivized Kristen Kiley Instructional Designer Read full review
Cons	Onboarding checklist would be a great addition as setting up can be complicated Incentivized NB Nathan Brown Sales Manager Read full review	User experience. The product's UX is fragmented and it's hard to figure out how to do some certain very simple, important things. Many aspects of the product don't really meet industry standards for technical communication. They seem to have been cobbled together by people who don't fully understand what technical writers do. Product updates really don't address these issues. Folks in sales and support sometimes imply that the authoring platform MindTouch has created is the only way to do create documentation, which is counter to the experience of those of us who've been in the industry for any length of time. Incentivized Verified User Anonymous Read full review
Likelihood to Renew	No answers on this topic	We've put lots and lots of content into the MindTouch system, of course, so that makes it harder to opt out, but we're also very pleased with their rate of development and weekly pushing of improvements, as well as their response and solutions to our questions and input All in all, a winning combination. Incentivized Olav Andreas Frenning Technical Writer / Help Author / Copywriter / Course instructor Read full review
Usability	No answers on this topic	MindTouch has many formatting options but some procedures (like editing a template) are not easy to figure out. We needed to create several custom templates for our content and found the MindTouch user documentation on this process somewhat contradictory and incomplete. Incentivized Verified User Anonymous Read full review
Performance	No answers on this topic	MindTouch is a hosted site, so as a heavy user there are times when I notice that pages are slow to load, or something happens like Amazon Web Services crashing the entire east coast for a few hours, that you do notice even if it isn't actually the fault of the MT tool itself. It's the risk of using a hosted tool, but the benefits are pretty amazing and outweigh these performance issues. Incentivized Verified User Anonymous Read full review
Support Rating	No answers on this topic	Mindtouch support is awesome. Support agents are friendly and helpful. Some can benefit from ongoing training. Overall the support experience is very good. One area they can possibly improve is visibility into product feedback. Seeing or getting insight into requests or votes for features would be an added customer experience. Incentivized CM Carol Menzigian Manager, Technical Publications Read full review
Online Training	No answers on this topic	Written documentation and videos are very good and have helped on numerous occasions when I've had to look up how to accomplish a certain task. The reason I have not given a full score is mainly because there have been some inaccuracies in the documentation because updates to the MindTouch framework have slightly changed the way things work. But this is usually the same type of challenges I face when making documentation for the software solution we develop. So all in all I'm very satisfied with both the personal webinars and the online documentation MindTouch provides for their service. Incentivized Olav Andreas Frenning Technical Writer / Help Author / Copywriter / Course instructor Read full review
Implementation Rating	No answers on this topic	Just know that there is so much more involved than adding your content. There are so many pieces to launching your site -- especially if you are moving from another platform. If you are not a person who typically works in the "website" realm, do your homework, ask your web people, engineers, etc., because there's a lot to do that you won't know about until you are unexpectedly smacked in the face with it. Learn from my mistakes! We are very happy now, but it was a long road getting to launch day for us Incentivized Lisa Fontaine Technical Writer Read full review
Alternatives Considered	Just from a personal viewpoint, I feel that the ease of use with Answerbase is amazing and with first class customer service support team, that could not be more friendlier and helpful. The decision was easy and they designed specific requirements that met our needs. It has really complemented our workforce and saved time. Incentivized NB Nathan Brown Sales Manager Read full review	I will be brief. DealerTeam is built upon Salesforce and we try to support native apps. We used Desk.com first for basic Help Ticket management. The product did not satisfy how our customers were looking for information. We upgraded to Service Cloud with Knowledge Base and spent one year writing content and developing our support agency. Again, our customers were upset about submitting help tickets and waiting for answers. They wanted access to self-help while working with a customer. Today we continue to use Service Cloud with MindTouch integration and have found complete success. There is simply no other solution I know of that is a flexible and easy to use as MindTouch when it come to providing customer success and product support Incentivized Travis Sousa Director of Support, CFO Read full review
Scalability	No answers on this topic	We tried to migrate to MindTouch for 5 months and failed, remained with Zendesk Incentivized Ziv Peled VP Client Services Read full review
Return on Investment	Increased collaboration in the workplace Saved time on staff asking the same questions Provides customers a 'live' community to liaise with Incentivized NB Nathan Brown Sales Manager Read full review	Time to publication can be very quick, provided there are not multiple changes in flight at the same time for the same page. We have seen a tremendous increase in customer traffic and SEO. MindTouch allows us to custom-brand the look and feel of our site to match our company's marketing and branding. This instills trust in our content. The relative simplicity of the platform enabled us to hire the best people and best writers we could find, without worrying so much about specific past expertise in a complicated publishing platform. Incentivized Verified User Anonymous Read full review
ScreenShots	Answerbase Screenshots	MindTouch Screenshots