MindTouch vs. Web Manuals

Overview
ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price
MindTouch
Score 7.0 out of 10
N/A
MindTouch is a customer experience management platform with content management and help authoring capabilities. Formerly known as MediaWiki, it is optimized for building knowledge bases for customer self-service and agent assistance purposes.N/A
Web Manuals
Score 5.1 out of 10
N/A
Web Manuals headquartered in Malmo offers their suite of technical documentation authoring tools, specifically to the aviation industry.N/A
Pricing
MindTouchWeb Manuals
Editions & Modules
No answers on this topic
No answers on this topic
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
MindTouchWeb Manuals
Free Trial
YesNo
Free/Freemium Version
NoNo
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
YesNo
Entry-level Setup FeeNo setup feeNo setup fee
Additional Details
More Pricing Information
Community Pulse
MindTouchWeb Manuals
Top Pros
Top Cons
Best Alternatives
MindTouchWeb Manuals
Small Businesses
Sogolytics
Sogolytics
Score 8.9 out of 10
MindTouch
MindTouch
Score 7.0 out of 10
Medium-sized Companies
CustomerSuccessBox
CustomerSuccessBox
Score 9.5 out of 10
Tridion
Tridion
Score 9.0 out of 10
Enterprises
Quadient Inspire
Quadient Inspire
Score 9.4 out of 10
Tridion
Tridion
Score 9.0 out of 10
All AlternativesView all alternativesView all alternatives
User Ratings
MindTouchWeb Manuals
Likelihood to Recommend
7.6
(110 ratings)
8.0
(1 ratings)
Likelihood to Renew
8.8
(18 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Usability
7.5
(29 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Performance
8.0
(10 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Support Rating
7.8
(31 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Online Training
8.8
(5 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Implementation Rating
7.7
(10 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Configurability
5.0
(5 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Ease of integration
9.0
(1 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Product Scalability
1.4
(3 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Vendor post-sale
9.3
(4 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
User Testimonials
MindTouchWeb Manuals
Likelihood to Recommend
MindTouch
If a company doesn't want to make their knowledge base public-facing, you lose a lot of the value of using MindTouch in a closed environment. MindTouch is not ideal for extremely structured content management scenarios that are strong DITA advocates. Companies that require localization might not be good fits either.
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Web Manuals
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.
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Pros
MindTouch
  • MindTouch helps to easily organize our help articles to ensure that our end user is receiving the proper information.
  • The MindTouch platform is extremely easy to navigate which reduces the turnaround time for our team to publish new material.
  • The editor tools supplied through MindTouch make styling our documentation a breeze.
  • The contextual help tool allows our customers to consume documentation based on the page they are viewing in our platform.
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Web Manuals
  • Employee attendance tracking for small unit departments
  • Work place instruction
  • Having controlled documents with links between other such docs
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Cons
MindTouch
  • When we do have a support issue, we frequently need to go through multiple people, contacts, ways of explaining things, etc,. before someone on their end actually understands our problem. It's rare that the first person we talk to understands the big picture or appreciates our use case.
  • The draft functionality is a promising start but lacks some key features that cause us regular frustration. For example, you can only create one draft of a page at a time. This is fine if changes come to you in perfect sequential order, but it makes it impossible for us to update a live page while a draft exists. More specifically, if we're working on updating content on a page for a new feature being released next month, but then we notice a typo today, we can't fix the typo in production without first deleting the draft or doing some hacky workaround of temporarily copying/pasting the source HTML of the draft page and saving it someplace else.
  • Existence of, or integration with, true source control would be a huge win, but it's something currently lacking in the product. MindTouch's content reuse feature is helpful in the right situations, but it's not robust enough to scale well for lots of content.
  • Version history of page changes is not 100% reliable. Sometimes items don't show up at all or there is a delay before the diff is visible. Also, creating a draft does not register at all in the page version history.
  • In-site search is poor, unless you know the *exact* title of what you're looking for. We tell our customers to use Google, not the MindTouch search. Google is excellent at searching our MindTouch site.
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Web Manuals
  • 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
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Likelihood to Renew
MindTouch
We've put lots and lots of content into the MindTouch system, of course, so that makes it harder to opt out, but we're also very pleased with their rate of development and weekly pushing of improvements, as well as their response and solutions to our questions and input All in all, a winning combination.
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Web Manuals
No answers on this topic
Usability
MindTouch
The site is responsive across multiple devices and screens. It has a clear path to contact support. The articles are searchable. Site users do have trouble navigating the site and finding what they need. That may be due to the architecture of the site, but it'd be nice if MindTouch offered more solutions are this. Our content is organized by product line. And many of those product lines have overlapping training content, so we have extensive duplicate content.
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Web Manuals
No answers on this topic
Performance
MindTouch
MindTouch is a hosted site, so as a heavy user there are times when I notice that pages are slow to load, or something happens like Amazon Web Services crashing the entire east coast for a few hours, that you do notice even if it isn't actually the fault of the MT tool itself. It's the risk of using a hosted tool, but the benefits are pretty amazing and outweigh these performance issues.
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Web Manuals
No answers on this topic
Support Rating
MindTouch
It's good. Pretty solid. We got a lot of input to get up and running, but did a lot of the setup and customization work ourselves, because of our high standards. We've gotten good response and results on specific projects related to customization and our CSM is also pretty responsive. Overall, I think that the jobs of CSMs and support folks would be easier if the product weren't wonky in some ways. They seem to have to do more "workarounds" for basic functionality that should just work out of the box
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Web Manuals
No answers on this topic
Online Training
MindTouch
Written documentation and videos are very good and have helped on numerous occasions when I've had to look up how to accomplish a certain task. The reason I have not given a full score is mainly because there have been some inaccuracies in the documentation because updates to the MindTouch framework have slightly changed the way things work. But this is usually the same type of challenges I face when making documentation for the software solution we develop. So all in all I'm very satisfied with both the personal webinars and the online documentation MindTouch provides for their service.
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Web Manuals
No answers on this topic
Implementation Rating
MindTouch
Just know that there is so much more involved than adding your content. There are so many pieces to launching your site -- especially if you are moving from another platform. If you are not a person who typically works in the "website" realm, do your homework, ask your web people, engineers, etc., because there's a lot to do that you won't know about until you are unexpectedly smacked in the face with it. Learn from my mistakes! We are very happy now, but it was a long road getting to launch day for us
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Web Manuals
No answers on this topic
Alternatives Considered
MindTouch
I will be brief. DealerTeam is built upon Salesforce and we try to support native apps. We used Desk.com first for basic Help Ticket management. The product did not satisfy how our customers were looking for information. We upgraded to Service Cloud with Knowledge Base and spent one year writing content and developing our support agency. Again, our customers were upset about submitting help tickets and waiting for answers. They wanted access to self-help while working with a customer. Today we continue to use Service Cloud with MindTouch integration and have found complete success. There is simply no other solution I know of that is a flexible and easy to use as MindTouch when it come to providing customer success and product support
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Web Manuals
No answers on this topic
Scalability
MindTouch
We tried to migrate to MindTouch for 5 months and failed, remained with Zendesk
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Web Manuals
No answers on this topic
Return on Investment
MindTouch
  • Our operational efficiently has improved significantly. Prior to Mindtouch, we managing duplicate content in two separate authoring solutions. Delivering content predictably and consistently was difficult and stressful for writers. In Mindtouch, we were able to optimize our content (remove redundancies) giving us more time to test, review, and improve content quality.
  • Traffic to our knowledge center is increasing monthly.
  • Internally, SMEs and customer-facing teams are recognizing the value Mindtouch brings through self-service knowledge. These SMEs want to contribute more to content, either as contributing writers or collaborators with tech writers.
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Web Manuals
  • 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
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ScreenShots

MindTouch Screenshots

Screenshot of Content from MindTouch site visualized with Wave Analytics.Screenshot of Example MindTouch implementation from customer Whirlpool.Screenshot of Example MindTouch implementation from customer Conga.Screenshot of Example MindTouch implementation from customer Cisco Meraki.Screenshot of Example MindTouch implementation from customer Hitachi Data Systems.Screenshot of Example MindTouch implementation from customer Zuora.