Paligo, headquartered in Stockholm, offers their component content management system (CCMS), supporting the creation and publishing of technical documentation and help systems.
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Sanity
Score 8.4 out of 10
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Sanity from the company of the same name in San Francisco is a platform for structured content that comes with an open-source editing environment called Sanity Studio that users can customize with JavaScript and a real-time hosted data store.
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.
Customization and creation of CMS are almost limitless. Building and customizing the platform is facilitated by a wealth of documentation and video content. As opposed to graphql and traversing rest APIs, Sanity's query language is a breath of fresh air. It really helps you if you want something lightweight but at the same time you want it to be scalable then I think Sanity is your best option.
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.
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
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.
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
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.
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. :)
