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
Venngage
Score 8.8 out of 10
Small Businesses (1-50 employees)
Venngage is an infographics creation platform. Users can create inforgraphics for their marketing team from scratch or from a template.
$19
per month per user
Pricing
MadCap Flare
Venngage
Editions & Modules
MadCap Central
$1,500
per year
MadCap Flare
$1,999
per year
MadCap AMS
$2,999
per year
Premium
$19
per month per user
Business
$49
per month per user
Enterprise
starting at $499
per month 10+ seats (billed yearly)
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
MadCap Flare
Venngage
Free Trial
Yes
Yes
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.
50% discount for Premium and Business plans for annual pricing.
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.
I find it great for personal use especially when you are a visual person. As an assistant that needs a lot of organizing, it's wonderful. It helped me a lot and I usually don't require a lot of features. I also find it great for accessibility stuff, I respect that since I have a relative who has special needs. I didn't really need that specifically, but it's nice to know it was considered.
Extremely user-friendly: simple, easy-to-follow interface really made ramping up on the offering incredibly fast and painless.
Variety of templates: Venngage has a HUGE assortment of templates ranging from corporate reports and business decks to more visually-engaging, "fun" content such as infographics, awesome charts, and highly customizable social graphics.
Brand-alignment: we really appreciated the opportunity to tee up our brand guidelines and have those remain on the back-end and let us apply our style guide to multiple templates instantaneously.
It's hard to lock graphics into place in Venngage once you create something.
Layering is next to impossible. The feature is there but is very difficult to use and most times the user is better off copying the object over instead
Unless you have a business account (we have a professional account- middle grade) you cannot sort and organize your infographics. This is messy and cumbersome to go through and the price difference between professional and business grade accounts was quite large.
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.
I find it very user friendly, straight to the point, and the minor issues I found wasn't really impacting on my role. So I think it would depend? but personally I find it perfect for me. There were lots of templates I could use, and they were very open to feedback and customer service was very accommodating.
I think that the attention that I get as a small business owner from Venngage is excellent. They quickly respond to questions and provide information that helps to resolve the issue that I am having.
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.
We prefer Canva but feel Venngage is easier for us. In comparison to Adobe, we prefer Venngage because of the ability to have everything in one system and not have to jump around.