ClickHelp is an online documentation tool from the company of the same name headquartered in Yerevan, Armenia, used by software companies to create user manuals, knowledge bases, FAQs, tutorials, etc., and publish them instantly in their portal.
$185
per month
Drupal
Score 7.0 out of 10
N/A
Drupal is a free, open-source content management system written in PHP that competes primarily with Joomla and Plone. The standard release of Drupal, known as Drupal core, contains basic features such as account and menu management, RSS feeds, page layout customization, and system administration.
N/A
Paligo
Score 9.1 out of 10
N/A
Paligo is a component content management system (CCMS) that helps teams manage complex technical documentation through structured authoring, content reuse, and controlled publishing.
ClickHelp is great for both big and small documentation teams. The platform is not too complex to overwhelm a small team, and neither is it too simple for a well-advanced documentation team. Scale ClickHep depending on your documentation needs, and the features are simple to understand. I also appreciate the extensive documentation that is available for new users to ClickHelp. The ClickHelp knowledgebase provides answers to every scenario, use case, feature, and functionality. The ClickHelp support team is also very responsive.
If you want to set up a basic Not For Profit (NFP) Membership system and content base, Word Press is easier than Drupal. However, if you have specific needs that require a fair bit of customisation then Drupal is the best CRM available. If the webmaster is confident with PHP and SQL, Drupal allows a lot of creativity.
Paligo is particularly well suited for developing similar document sets for multiple products or product lines. It is not a page layout application, so don't expect the same capabilities as popular applications for graphics-heavy documentation. With some up-front time developing good layouts, however, Paligo does manage to create very usable PDF output for customer-facing documents.
The review mode is super convenient. Comparing a snapshot of the previous versions with the current one clearly outlines the respective changes and reduces the necessary content to review tremendously.
The option to reuse text fragments is another handy feature. Text fragments will be updated whenever the original text fragment is altered is also extremely helpful.
Managing a content's structure was never easier. An intuitive drag & drop functionality allows you to design your document's structure however you like.
You can also fork content, in addition to reuse text fragments. This is another helpful option that no longer requires you to create repetetive chapters over and over.
The See Also element should be able to automatically update when a new topic is added. Currently, we have to manually remove and re-add the element to do that.
Ability to host image files externally (eg. S3, Dropbox), like it is done for videos. This will help save storage.
Image files from imported projects are always duplicated, perhaps a bug, but it needs to be looked into.
This is not an easy CMS to work with if you don't have a good understanding of website development. It isn't "plug-and-play" like Wordpress or Shopify.
Over time, doing major updates to the system can be taxing, especially if you aren't well-versed enough in doing system updates in line with your "child" theme and code.
The CMS can become somewhat cumbersome with server resources if not carefully optimized while you build and customize it to your liking.
The amount of CSS/JS required to customize a site's appearance can be cumbersome
Product documentation can be lacking, specifically with integrations; in some cases, support offered no real help when trying to solve a problem with an integrated service
Some features require extensive development experience to use, which can sometimes be an obstacle to less-experienced team members
The time and money invested into this platform were too great to discontinue it at this point. I'm sure it will be in use for a while. We have also spent time training many employees how to use it. All of these things add up to quite an investment in the product. Lastly, it basically fulfills what we need our intranet site to do.
As a team, we found Drupal to be highly customizable and flexible, allowing our development team to go to great lengths to develop desired functionalities. It can be used as a solution for all types of web projects. It comes with a robust admin interface that provides greater flexibility once the user gets acquainted with the system.
Generally, I'm very happy with Paligo and the productivity gains that I get from using it. There are a few arbitrary limitations on structure, and when applying conditional formatting, that I don't really understand. Unlinking / editing reused text uses this broadly inscrutible colour-coding that I just hate. It would be nice to double-click a component, make edits, then respond to a popup asking if I want to confirm the edit for all linked content, or unlink this instance. Likewise converting from an informal topic insertion to duplicates of its raw contents.
Drupal itself does not tend to have bugs that cause sporadic outages. When deployed on a well-configured LAMP stack, deployment and maintenance problems are minimal, and in general no exotic tuning or configuration is required. For highest uptime, putting a caching proxy like Varnish in front of Drupal (or a CDN that supports dynamic applications).
Drupal page loads can be slow, as a great many database calls may be required to generate a page. It is highly recommended to use caching systems, both built-in and external to lessen such database loads and improve performance. I haven't had any problems with behind-the-scenes integrations with external systems.
As noted earlier, the support of the community can be rather variable, with some modules attracting more attraction and action in their issue queues, but overall, the development community for Drupal is second to none. It probably the single greatest aspect of being involved in this open-source project.
All the support requests I've submitted have been resolved in one way or another. Sometimes it takes some back and forth, which is to be expected. This is where being on a different continent becomes a drawback. Since we became Enterprise users, we've also had an additional level of help and support from a dedicated account manager in the US, and the resolutions seem to come more quickly
I was part of the team that conducted the training. Our training was fine, but we could have been better informed on Drupal before we started providing it. If we did not have answers to tough questions, we had more technical staff we could consult with. We did provide hands-on practice time for the learners, which I would always recommend. That is where the best learning occurred.
The on-line training was not as ideal as the face-to-face training. It was done remotely and only allowed for the trainers to present information to the learners and demonstrate the platform online. There was not a good way to allow for the learners to practice, ask questions and have them answered all in the same session.
Plan ahead as much you can. You really need to know how to build what you want with the modules available to you, or that you might need to code yourself, in order to make the best use of Drupal. I recommend you analyze the most technically difficult workflows and other aspects of your implementation, and try building some test versions of those first. Get feedback from stakeholders early and often, because you can easily find yourself in a situation where your implementation does 90% of what you want, but, due to something you didn't plan for, foresee, or know about, there's no feasible way to get past the last 10%
ClickHelp provides an extensive array of features compared to what we used previously. The WYSIWYG editor is so simple, yet brings with it really cool content editing elements. Publishing content is straightforward with ClickHelp. I can publish a part of a document for partial updates, or create a new publication. I get to host multiple versions of one product documentation based on the software versions we support. The analytics provided is also very insightful.
Drupal can be more complex to learn, but it offers a much wider range of applications. Drupal’s front and backend can be customized from design to functionality to allow for a wide range of uses. If someone wants to create something more complex than a simple site or blog, Drupal can be an amazing asset to have at hand.
We moved from Flare to Paligo. One of the main reasons was the fact that Paligo is a cloud product. Collaboration with anyone outside of our team was more difficult with Flare. Also, maintaining a server for Flare content was going to become an issue, and overall I felt the Flare desktop product was prone to errors and issues. The flexibility of assigning Paligo licenses was a huge factor, as was the stability of the cloud platform.
Drupal is well known to be scalable, although it requires solid knowledge of MySQL best practices, caching mechanisms, and other server-level best practices. I have never personally dealt with an especially large site, so I can speak well to the issues associated with Drupal scaling.
We are able to cater to all our end-users regardless of the software version they are using, simply because we are able to provide multiple product documentation versions.
Our documentation publishing time was reduced significantly due to the smooth process on ClickHelp.
With one platform where all our product documentation can be housed, we are expanding technical documentation to other products.
I am not involved in the financial decisions for my company regarding Paligo; the decision to migrate our content to this environment predates my hiring. However, I know that the migration effort from WordPress to Paligo was an initially heavy lift, but any content migration effort would be. I believe that ultimately, getting our content out of WordPress was a positive move, and I look forward to seeing what Paligo will help us accomplish in the future. Sorry, no hard numbers from me. :)
