Likelihood to Recommend Well suited for our needs of multiple images for auto auctions from a variety of sellers. Pointing them to one platform is easier than attempting to use a variety of platforms as we were doing before (email, slack,
Dropbox and
Google Drive would randomly be used by a variety of employees )
Read full review 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.
Read full review Pros Flexible. This CMS can be easily extended and provide access to dynamic content Simple. The WYSWG is very easy to work with and identifying pages and content in the system is fairly easy Clean Interface. The interface is clean and uncluttered keeping focus on the content and not other factors. Read full review Snippets, variables, and conditioning are all good Once you set it up, updating Help websites is easy. Read full review Cons Contentful uses "references" to allow you to build very modular content. If I have a "slider" content type, I can create a "slide" content type which references a "button" content type, and so forth. This works well, but I occasionally wish there was a better solution for one-off content, like a settings page. Currently, this is done for creating an entire content type called "settings" with a single entry. Not a big deal, but not ideal, either. There are a few quirks with GatsbyJS integration, etc, but these issues are being fixed and improved upon very quickly. A minor gripe, but Contentful does not have a way to organize fields within an entry. Entries with many fields are somewhat tiresome to scroll through. Read full review 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. Read full review Usability 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.
Read full review Alternatives Considered In the past we've used
WordPress to manage documentation content.
WordPress was more flexible than Contentful but also prone to inconsistencies and we ended having a lot of hacks to accomplish various
WordPress tricks. With Contentful there's less ambiguity so content producers are less likely to go astray. We also have our own in-house programmatic template solution for managing content, but this was a previous pain point when we needed to get the dev team to do a deploy for every content change.
Read full review 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.
Read full review Return on Investment Positive - new hires are able to get onboarded quicker with us using Contentful Positive - we can customize the journey of what modules/material the user sees after a course/video/article Positive - it's been an overall game changer when hiring external candidates who need extensive training Read full review 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. Read full review ScreenShots