ClickHelp vs. MadCap Flare

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.

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

• Seamless publishing process for documentation.
• Easy to use WYSIWYG editor for creating content.
• Easy customization of HTML and CSS elements.

Incentivized

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

Incentivized

• 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.

Incentivized

• 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

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

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.

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

• 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.

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