MadCap Flare vs. Scribe

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

If you need to make any kind of instruction and your programmes are on Chrome you can document any procedure in a matter of minutes, you can then edit it and make extra notes and explain things in more detail. I can't think of any business that could not use this, unless IT block it

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

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

The layout is easy to follow, when you are looking at their instructions they are very clear and easy to follow, the help section is easy. Once you have learned the control buttons it's very simple. Editing is very easy as you just click on the section, edit what you want. You can delete and copy easily

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

• 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