Knova Knowledge Management vs. MindTouch

Overview
ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price
Knova
Score 7.0 out of 10
N/A
Knova KM is a full-featured knowledge management software solution for large customer service and support organizations, especially those that must handle complex queries across channels in industries such as high tech, telecommunications, financial services, and the IT help desk. It is supported by Avolin headquartered in Austin, the company created from the sale of Aptean Vertical Business Applications to ESW Capital in 2018.N/A
MindTouch
Score 7.0 out of 10
N/A
MindTouch is a customer experience management platform with content management and help authoring capabilities. Formerly known as MediaWiki, it is optimized for building knowledge bases for customer self-service and agent assistance purposes.N/A
Pricing
Knova Knowledge ManagementMindTouch
Editions & Modules
No answers on this topic
No answers on this topic
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
KnovaMindTouch
Free Trial
NoYes
Free/Freemium Version
NoNo
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
NoYes
Entry-level Setup FeeNo setup feeNo setup fee
Additional Details
More Pricing Information
Community Pulse
Knova Knowledge ManagementMindTouch
Top Pros
Top Cons
Best Alternatives
Knova Knowledge ManagementMindTouch
Small Businesses
Notion
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Score 8.8 out of 10
Sogolytics
Sogolytics
Score 8.9 out of 10
Medium-sized Companies
Tridion
Tridion
Score 9.0 out of 10
CustomerSuccessBox
CustomerSuccessBox
Score 9.5 out of 10
Enterprises
Tridion
Tridion
Score 9.0 out of 10
Quadient Inspire
Quadient Inspire
Score 9.4 out of 10
All AlternativesView all alternativesView all alternatives
User Ratings
Knova Knowledge ManagementMindTouch
Likelihood to Recommend
3.0
(1 ratings)
7.6
(110 ratings)
Likelihood to Renew
10.0
(1 ratings)
8.8
(18 ratings)
Usability
-
(0 ratings)
7.5
(29 ratings)
Performance
-
(0 ratings)
8.0
(10 ratings)
Support Rating
-
(0 ratings)
7.8
(31 ratings)
Online Training
-
(0 ratings)
8.8
(5 ratings)
Implementation Rating
-
(0 ratings)
7.7
(10 ratings)
Configurability
-
(0 ratings)
5.0
(5 ratings)
Ease of integration
-
(0 ratings)
9.0
(1 ratings)
Product Scalability
-
(0 ratings)
1.4
(3 ratings)
Vendor post-sale
-
(0 ratings)
9.3
(4 ratings)
User Testimonials
Knova Knowledge ManagementMindTouch
Likelihood to Recommend
Avolin
We expereienced an upgrade by Aptean in March 2014 and it actually created issues with our interfaces to Word and well as performance issues. As of November, we have most of the performance issues resolved, however our interface with Word is still not working. It takes alot of upfront work to convert with Word and with the upgrade that was affected. Authors are still frustrated with many issues in the formatting and editing of existing data. A vital tool to update the product home pages has not been available except for sporadic late night periods since the upgrade in March. Overall, many authors are not happy with this knowledge management tool
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MindTouch
If a company doesn't want to make their knowledge base public-facing, you lose a lot of the value of using MindTouch in a closed environment. MindTouch is not ideal for extremely structured content management scenarios that are strong DITA advocates. Companies that require localization might not be good fits either.
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Pros
Avolin
  • Aptean offers simple access to Knowledge Management for our Clients, Customer Support teams as well as internal support teams. Allows our knowledge management team the ability to provide consistent and up-to-date processes and troubleshooting tips for our associates as well as ADP Clients.
  • Aptean provides an easy to use user interface with tools for authors that mimic Microsoft Word (Cut, Paste, Spell Check, Bullets, Indentation etc). It also provides an easy to user user interface for our associates in accessing the Knowledge Management solutions. The Search tool is very powerful and allows the users quick access to the information they need!
  • In the more than 3 years that we have been using Consona/Aptean, we have had very little down time. This is important to our authors as well as end users in being able to access the information. Allowing the authors the ability to update the information in near real time is another key feature of keeping our information current.
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MindTouch
  • MindTouch helps to easily organize our help articles to ensure that our end user is receiving the proper information.
  • The MindTouch platform is extremely easy to navigate which reduces the turnaround time for our team to publish new material.
  • The editor tools supplied through MindTouch make styling our documentation a breeze.
  • The contextual help tool allows our customers to consume documentation based on the page they are viewing in our platform.
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Cons
Avolin
  • We have experienced some slowness with importing pictures into our Aptean application. While they do eventually complete, it is very timeconsuming when several images are needed. Definitely tries our patience, or consider not including them at all!
  • Some of the formatting issues transfering our information from Word to Aptean are still challenging and require too much manual intervention than necessary.
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MindTouch
  • When we do have a support issue, we frequently need to go through multiple people, contacts, ways of explaining things, etc,. before someone on their end actually understands our problem. It's rare that the first person we talk to understands the big picture or appreciates our use case.
  • The draft functionality is a promising start but lacks some key features that cause us regular frustration. For example, you can only create one draft of a page at a time. This is fine if changes come to you in perfect sequential order, but it makes it impossible for us to update a live page while a draft exists. More specifically, if we're working on updating content on a page for a new feature being released next month, but then we notice a typo today, we can't fix the typo in production without first deleting the draft or doing some hacky workaround of temporarily copying/pasting the source HTML of the draft page and saving it someplace else.
  • Existence of, or integration with, true source control would be a huge win, but it's something currently lacking in the product. MindTouch's content reuse feature is helpful in the right situations, but it's not robust enough to scale well for lots of content.
  • Version history of page changes is not 100% reliable. Sometimes items don't show up at all or there is a delay before the diff is visible. Also, creating a draft does not register at all in the page version history.
  • In-site search is poor, unless you know the *exact* title of what you're looking for. We tell our customers to use Google, not the MindTouch search. Google is excellent at searching our MindTouch site.
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Likelihood to Renew
Avolin
Many business units are using the Aptean product for knowledge management and a change now would be too crucial to the processes that the associates are becoming familiar with using. We have spent a lot of time promoting our Aptean Knowledge Management tool and interfaced it with our call tracking system.
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MindTouch
We've put lots and lots of content into the MindTouch system, of course, so that makes it harder to opt out, but we're also very pleased with their rate of development and weekly pushing of improvements, as well as their response and solutions to our questions and input All in all, a winning combination.
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Usability
Avolin
No answers on this topic
MindTouch
The site is responsive across multiple devices and screens. It has a clear path to contact support. The articles are searchable. Site users do have trouble navigating the site and finding what they need. That may be due to the architecture of the site, but it'd be nice if MindTouch offered more solutions are this. Our content is organized by product line. And many of those product lines have overlapping training content, so we have extensive duplicate content.
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Performance
Avolin
No answers on this topic
MindTouch
MindTouch is a hosted site, so as a heavy user there are times when I notice that pages are slow to load, or something happens like Amazon Web Services crashing the entire east coast for a few hours, that you do notice even if it isn't actually the fault of the MT tool itself. It's the risk of using a hosted tool, but the benefits are pretty amazing and outweigh these performance issues.
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Support Rating
Avolin
No answers on this topic
MindTouch
It's good. Pretty solid. We got a lot of input to get up and running, but did a lot of the setup and customization work ourselves, because of our high standards. We've gotten good response and results on specific projects related to customization and our CSM is also pretty responsive. Overall, I think that the jobs of CSMs and support folks would be easier if the product weren't wonky in some ways. They seem to have to do more "workarounds" for basic functionality that should just work out of the box
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Online Training
Avolin
No answers on this topic
MindTouch
Written documentation and videos are very good and have helped on numerous occasions when I've had to look up how to accomplish a certain task. The reason I have not given a full score is mainly because there have been some inaccuracies in the documentation because updates to the MindTouch framework have slightly changed the way things work. But this is usually the same type of challenges I face when making documentation for the software solution we develop. So all in all I'm very satisfied with both the personal webinars and the online documentation MindTouch provides for their service.
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Implementation Rating
Avolin
No answers on this topic
MindTouch
Just know that there is so much more involved than adding your content. There are so many pieces to launching your site -- especially if you are moving from another platform. If you are not a person who typically works in the "website" realm, do your homework, ask your web people, engineers, etc., because there's a lot to do that you won't know about until you are unexpectedly smacked in the face with it. Learn from my mistakes! We are very happy now, but it was a long road getting to launch day for us
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Alternatives Considered
Avolin
No answers on this topic
MindTouch
I will be brief. DealerTeam is built upon Salesforce and we try to support native apps. We used Desk.com first for basic Help Ticket management. The product did not satisfy how our customers were looking for information. We upgraded to Service Cloud with Knowledge Base and spent one year writing content and developing our support agency. Again, our customers were upset about submitting help tickets and waiting for answers. They wanted access to self-help while working with a customer. Today we continue to use Service Cloud with MindTouch integration and have found complete success. There is simply no other solution I know of that is a flexible and easy to use as MindTouch when it come to providing customer success and product support
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Scalability
Avolin
No answers on this topic
MindTouch
We tried to migrate to MindTouch for 5 months and failed, remained with Zendesk
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Return on Investment
Avolin
  • Increased Employee Effciency adding ability to look up processes and troubleshooting tips is invaluable.
  • Ability to share information with our Client Facing interface, which results in better customer service. Encouraging ADP associates and clients to become more self sufficient is what we're all about!
  • Ability to keep the information current with the effciency of the product.
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MindTouch
  • Our operational efficiently has improved significantly. Prior to Mindtouch, we managing duplicate content in two separate authoring solutions. Delivering content predictably and consistently was difficult and stressful for writers. In Mindtouch, we were able to optimize our content (remove redundancies) giving us more time to test, review, and improve content quality.
  • Traffic to our knowledge center is increasing monthly.
  • Internally, SMEs and customer-facing teams are recognizing the value Mindtouch brings through self-service knowledge. These SMEs want to contribute more to content, either as contributing writers or collaborators with tech writers.
Read full review
ScreenShots

MindTouch Screenshots

Screenshot of Content from MindTouch site visualized with Wave Analytics.Screenshot of Example MindTouch implementation from customer Whirlpool.Screenshot of Example MindTouch implementation from customer Conga.Screenshot of Example MindTouch implementation from customer Cisco Meraki.Screenshot of Example MindTouch implementation from customer Hitachi Data Systems.Screenshot of Example MindTouch implementation from customer Zuora.