MadCap Software, headquartered in La Jolla, offers MadCap Flare, a help authoring and technical writing tool featuring onboarding and support from MadCap, and a set of modules for designing advanced guides, aids, and web or application help aids.
$167
per month
Sanity
Score 8.1 out of 10
N/A
Sanity from the company of the same name in San Francisco is a platform for structured content that comes with an open-source editing environment called Sanity Studio that users can customize with JavaScript and a real-time hosted data store.
$15
per month per seat
Pricing
MadCap Flare
Sanity
Editions & Modules
MadCap Central
$1,500
per year
MadCap Flare
$1,999
per year
MadCap AMS
$2,999
per year
Free
$0
Growth
$15
per month per seat
Enterprise
Custom Pricing
per month per seat
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
MadCap Flare
Sanity
Free Trial
Yes
No
Free/Freemium Version
No
Yes
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
Yes
No
Entry-level Setup Fee
No setup fee
No setup fee
Additional Details
Includes a 12-month Platinum-level Maintenance Plan.
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.
Customization and creation of CMS are almost limitless. Building and customizing the platform is facilitated by a wealth of documentation and video content. As opposed to graphql and traversing rest APIs, Sanity's query language is a breath of fresh air. It really helps you if you want something lightweight but at the same time you want it to be scalable then I think Sanity is your best option.
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.
MadCap software does offer quite a few more technical features than Google Drive, but the user experience is far inferior. Google Drive is much less buggy to work with, and it's much more accessible. MadCap only being available on Windows operating systems makes it difficult to work with teammates who may not have such a device available.