MadCap Software vs. Paligo

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

Paligo is particularly well suited for developing similar document sets for multiple products or product lines. It is not a page layout application, so don't expect the same capabilities as popular applications for graphics-heavy documentation. With some up-front time developing good layouts, however, Paligo does manage to create very usable PDF output for customer-facing documents.

Incentivized

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

Incentivized

• The review mode is super convenient. Comparing a snapshot of the previous versions with the current one clearly outlines the respective changes and reduces the necessary content to review tremendously.
• The option to reuse text fragments is another handy feature. Text fragments will be updated whenever the original text fragment is altered is also extremely helpful.
• Managing a content's structure was never easier. An intuitive drag & drop functionality allows you to design your document's structure however you like.
• You can also fork content, in addition to reuse text fragments. This is another helpful option that no longer requires you to create repetetive chapters over and over.

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

• The amount of CSS/JS required to customize a site's appearance can be cumbersome
• Product documentation can be lacking, specifically with integrations; in some cases, support offered no real help when trying to solve a problem with an integrated service
• Some features require extensive development experience to use, which can sometimes be an obstacle to less-experienced team members

Incentivized

Paligo single-sources beautifully. Allows for customization. Has the best translation features. Has the best support services.

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

Generally, I'm very happy with Paligo and the productivity gains that I get from using it. There are a few arbitrary limitations on structure, and when applying conditional formatting, that I don't really understand. Unlinking / editing reused text uses this broadly inscrutible colour-coding that I just hate. It would be nice to double-click a component, make edits, then respond to a popup asking if I want to confirm the edit for all linked content, or unlink this instance. Likewise converting from an informal topic insertion to duplicates of its raw contents.

Incentivized

All the support requests I've submitted have been resolved in one way or another. Sometimes it takes some back and forth, which is to be expected. This is where being on a different continent becomes a drawback. Since we became Enterprise users, we've also had an additional level of help and support from a dedicated account manager in the US, and the resolutions seem to come more quickly

Incentivized

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

We moved from Flare to Paligo. One of the main reasons was the fact that Paligo is a cloud product. Collaboration with anyone outside of our team was more difficult with Flare. Also, maintaining a server for Flare content was going to become an issue, and overall I felt the Flare desktop product was prone to errors and issues. The flexibility of assigning Paligo licenses was a huge factor, as was the stability of the cloud platform.

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

• I am not involved in the financial decisions for my company regarding Paligo; the decision to migrate our content to this environment predates my hiring. However, I know that the migration effort from WordPress to Paligo was an initially heavy lift, but any content migration effort would be. I believe that ultimately, getting our content out of WordPress was a positive move, and I look forward to seeing what Paligo will help us accomplish in the future. Sorry, no hard numbers from me. :)