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
Paligo
Score8.7 out of 10
N/A
Paligo is a component content management system (CCMS) that helps teams manage complex technical documentation through structured authoring, content reuse, and controlled publishing.
$4,800
per year per seat
Pricing
MadCap Flare
Paligo
Editions & Modules
MadCap Central
$1,500
per year
MadCap Flare
$1,999
per year
MadCap AMS
$2,999
per year
Professional
from $4800
per year
Business
Contact Sales
per year
Enterprise
Contact Sales
per year
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
MadCap Flare
Paligo
Free Trial
Yes
No
Free/Freemium Version
No
No
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
Yes
Yes
Entry-level Setup Fee
No setup fee
Optional
Additional Details
Includes a 12-month Platinum-level Maintenance Plan.
Senior Technical Writer in Research & Development at Devyser (Biotechnology, 51-200 employees)
Chose Paligo
I was working with 10+ CMS:es (list here is not possible choose them from) “all my active work life” and Paligo GUI is unique: No or very few systems of this complexity have a rational GUI. Paligo stands out here and is very user friendly! When it comes to style sheets and …
A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. More Info
Verified User
Chose Paligo
Simpler, more aesthetic and clean, easier to use, inherent design that molds the user based on section limitations, etc.
A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. More Info
A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. More Info
A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. More Info
Lead Technical Writer in Engineering at Autonomous Solutions (Computer Software, 51-200 employees)
Chose Paligo
Paligo gives you the benefits of a fully integrated XML content database, making the whole package much easier to setup and use than a system using Oxygen. It's much easier to set up and far less expensive than Adobe's XML offerings. The cost is comparable to MadCap, but all …
A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. More Info
A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. More Info
Verified User
Chose Paligo
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 …
A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. More Info
Documentation Manager in Product Management at Carbyne (Information Technology & Services, 201-500 employees)
Chose Paligo
They are both good documentation options, but the cloud-native capabilities and intuitive UI of Paligo, plus it's ability to produce excellent output for both PDF and HTML5 were the main reasons I chose Paligo. I am very satisfied with my choice.
A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. More Info
Verified User
Chose Paligo
We selected Paligo over the alternatives for a variety of reasons: It was cloud-based (usable on a Mac) It had the features we needed: Content reuse Variables Easy restructuring and maneuverability of content
A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. More Info
A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. More Info
A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. More Info
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.
A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. More Info
One of the biggest strengths is the structured authoring, which not only gives clean content for users but is also well-suited for providing AI content. I also make good use of content reuse, which simplifies maintenance and documentation updates when features change. The taxonomy has allowed me to create versioned documentation on our site that correlates with customers' installed software versions. We're switching over to using the API for publishing to our website and that will be a nice switch from the publication structure we've used previously. The tool doesn't, at this time, allow me to connect it to a custom GPT or create one that would be based on our style guide. There also isn't an MCP server option to work better with my Claude configurations.
A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. More Info
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.
A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. More Info
A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. More Info
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
A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. More Info
A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. More Info
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.
A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. More Info
Reuse feature was the main reason for selection Paligo. It is the most powerful feature for us as now we have only one source of content that is used in all other documents through reuse. Makes it very easy when we need to update the content (in some cases at least once a quarter) and batch publishing makes it very easy to publish 100s of documents in one click
A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. More Info
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
A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. More Info
A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. More Info
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.
A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. More Info
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.
A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. More Info
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. :)
