MadCap Flare vs. Web Manuals

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

Formating, linking, compliance, and customized distribution. It is easy to navigate and review changes. Hospitality Management, Airlines crews, individual management systems, etc. Standardization of documents; compliance checklists easily available. If you are limited on office/ management staff and/or do not have a single base for your flight crews, Web Manuals would be the tool for you.

Incentivized

• Single-sourcing
• Branching (GIT)
• Publishing and hosting

• Employee attendance tracking for small unit departments
• Work place instruction
• Having controlled documents with links between other such docs

Incentivized

• I use it on a mac with windows parallel and it can be so buggy and laggy.
• I would love it if the software was entirely cloud-based, like Google Docs.
• Reviewing in Central is not a good experience, need better review functionality.

Incentivized

• Certain automated modules require validation by the user when they update themselves, it would be better if this is automated.
• Publishing a manual as PDF can take several minutes to process, this processing time could be improved.
• Possible compatibility issues with new IOS versions

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

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.

Incentivized

• We haven't measured this specifically

• Saved Time and save cost of using different software to manage individual tasks
• Documents links are easy to access, no KT sessions every time and productivity increased
• No particular hiring is required, easy to use and implement

Incentivized