Trainual is a modern training manual for growing businesses. It provides one simple tool that aims to help users centralize processes and policies, automate onboarding and training, and build a foundation to scale faster. The vendor says Trainual is designed for small to medium sized businesses that are growing quickly and eager to document systems and processes, define step-by-step workflows, eliminate grey area between roles, and ensure that training happens consistently, every…
BookStack is fantastic for having business users and not-so-technically-savvy IT users. It enables them to create a documentation they like in a visual way while still forcing them to adhere to logical structure of a document. It works fine even for more technical matters such as integration guidelines, especially when these concern some of the more obscure technologies. The exported docs are presentable but lack any interactivity. Where it lacks is generating heavily technical documentations. Heavier REST or GraphQL integrations should for example be documented through other means. As for developer documentations, there are definitely more suitable alternatives, also.
We have offices set around the world, and hiring new team members in certain countries makes it a bit difficult, especially now to fly out or fly in to help get them situated and fully trained. This really helps close the gaps in between the distance and training. Makes onboarding a heck of a lot easier.
The subject organization could use work! It's just jumbled and needs folders.
It's very cumbersome to have to click back and forth to subjects when you are within a task. I wish there was a larger side bar that could show ALL subjects, topics, and tasks in one glance with drop-down menus.
During the entire sales process, the Trainual team was great to work with. After the sale, their onboard process was top notch as well and was very quick to answer any questions and actually were open to customizing the platform to meet our specific needs. They have been great this entire time.
Confluence, having only a slight advantage in terms of features compared to BookStack, really only makes sense to procure as a part of the Jira bundle. It requires much more maintenance from my experience and does not really deliver any extra value aside from the very strict certifications like HIPAA. DokuWiki and MediaWiki both provided way too much in terms of customizability, not really focusing on the business need. Of course, MediaWiki was conceived for a whole different purpose but is very often seen being used for both internal and public documentation delivery. DokuWiki did not provide the authors with the user-friendly environment that BookStack has and integrated most poorly with LDAP. As for OneNote, which was used for support docs prior to BookStack, it provided the authors with too much of a user-friendly environment, rendering the product of their work very inconsistent. Also, the sharing model was either peer-to-peer or within Teams, neither of which made it easy to audit and supervise.
Previously we just wrote task items in shared Google documents. It was the best of what we could do at the time, but this is a whole different world, and we love it! Being able to integrate quizzes and photos and interactive video is excellent!
Spillover within Business IT staff up, nearly double substitutability. This is through the ability of a support technician servicing a different product to find a guide describing how to solve the more frequent issues the way a product lead would do it.
Time to draft and publish a documentation down some 20% compared to previous solution.
OpenSource that integrates fine with enterprise-grade software and somehow even passes security audit. 20 times cheaper to implement compared to Confluence, almost free to maintain.
