Curata vs. MadCap Flare

I liked Curata, but it depends on the use case of how it will be used as to how effective it is for someone. If you are trying to curate content it works great. Had I not been so put off by the issue mentioned earlier I would have given more effort to learn the CMS, so I am not sure how effective it really is.

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

• Curata is great at curating in content that is relevant to our audience. It is easy to add many different sources to the feed from all around the web and we've really seen Curata "learn" what we see as the most relevant.
• The microsite we got as part of our Curata subscription is really fantastic. It's very customizable and we've been able to really craft it to suit our needs. There are so many different options available and our Curata rep has been really great with helping us cater each piece to our vision while making helpful suggestions along the way in terms of best practices. Plus, the word processor for publishing blog posts is so easy to use and I've had no issues with it so far unlike many other CMS platforms I've worked with. The Curata microsite is actually going to be replacing our current blog very soon - we love it that much!
• I've had a great experience with customer service from Curata. Our rep is responsive and helpful and really good about not just answering our concerns but also providing feedback on our processes and giving advice for how we can improve.
• Search capabilities within the curated content feed are fabulous. This is one area where I found other solutions to be lacking when we were going through the sales process, but Curata really succeeds here. It's extremely easy to find exactly what you're looking for in your content feed.

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

Incentivized

• more subscription plans as not all people need all features.

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

For all of the features we loved when we signed on like the microsite and search capabilities and also their customer service, we will very likely renew with Curata. We also really like the evolution we have seen of the solution, just recently a new integration with Marketo (also a vendor of ours) was announced which will be very beneficial to us in optimizing our email newsletters

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

The main difference that made me choose Curata over Percolate is that it is not complex. Curata is easier to set up, to use, and to manage. It does not involve any complicated configuration to get the content and data you need. Curata technical support is amazing, to say the least. I am not an expert in the technical stuff, but I feel assured their team can help me out when I have an issue

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

• I would say neutral for us, but more so because of how we were using it and it being a stop-gap fix for us.

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