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
Salesforce CMS
Score 8.2 out of 10
N/A
Salesforce Marketing Cloud Personalization (formerly Salesforce CMS) is a hybrid CMS allowing users to author content once and deliver it anywhere, in or out of Salesforce. Users create content, define content access, and define channels so they can share content and limit access to appropriate contributors. For an experience built with Salesforce, users can choose from two of the company's “what-you-see-is-what-you-get” (WYSIWYG) tools: Experience Builder and Commerce Page Designer. If the user…
N/A
Pricing
MadCap Software
Salesforce CMS
Editions & Modules
MadCap Central
$1,500
per year
MadCap Flare
$1,999
per year
MadCap AMS
$2,999
per year
No answers on this topic
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
MadCap Software
Salesforce CMS
Free Trial
Yes
No
Free/Freemium Version
No
No
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.
Salesforce CMS is well suited for anything sales. If you need information on an account, want to touch your old accounts, need to get a better idea of ownership by vertical, or want to estimate revenue from your pipeline, it is very A-OK. We use Salesforce to open, close, and study prospects to later convert them into closed deals. There is a section for notes to detail about each and every account. You can add contacts in, complete with their title, email, cell phones, and other additional info, and since our program is sync'ed up with Outreach.io you can make an immediate call from the Salesforce page. It's a must if you are growing your company and want to stay organized within multiple departments.
Easy to use, just like Salesforce's other products. Many users can sit down and figure it out in no time, and with a little training become power users.
Fast and secure - Salesforce is a leader in the cloud world so you get consistently fast results and security that is top notch in the industry.
Accessible from anywhere - if you use cloud CMS already this is a no-brainer, but for those that do in-house CMS still, this is a major difference. Mobile access from anywhere on the planet without a VPN is something you just can't do without the cloud.
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.
It's super awkward if you aren't familiar with it. I have several years' experience in both my organization's salesforce as well as others and there are still things that trip me up. I think Salesforce can get to a point where it's TOO bloated with all this information, all these integrations, what-have-you, that it can be difficult to find what you need in a timely manner or it creates a hiccup in workflows that you then have to work around. On the other hand, once these issues are identified, there is the possibility to manipulate Salesforce into creating automated workarounds. So, at least it allows for that. I think it's an issue of having so many options for bolt-ons that you start to lose perspective and functionality. You tend to lose focus on usability for users.
I'm not sure - we have hired a person/team that are Salesforce Admin so when I have a question or need support I go in-house. But, I know Salesforce has incredible L+D and trainings available for free to help users develop in their skillsets.
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.
Salesforce has a wide variety of services and its user interface was easy to understand and use. Our teams [thought] Salesforce to be better. When we were comparing the features as per our Marketing and Branding teams needs and uses, Salesforce came out on the top.
