Paligo, headquartered in Stockholm, offers their component content management system (CCMS), supporting the creation and publishing of technical documentation and help systems.
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 …
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 …
I was not part of the selection process / did not evaluate other tools. I had previously been authoring my content in Google Suite or directly in our Learning Management System. Both of those were hells of information duplication.
We were using our own, custom management scheme - relying on tools like SharePoint to store and collaboratively edit. But we were lacking the reusability feature and content control features that Paligo provides.
Compared to Author-It, Paligo is a godsend. It's so much more performant, the output quality is much higher, and the user experience is unmatched. Before we switched to Paligo, I had to spend multiple working days just fixing the broken output that Author-It has given me, …
Verified User
Manager
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 …
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.
Affordable and easy to use. Several different tasks can be handled in the same tool - not just for editing.
Verified User
Employee
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
Better Support than any of the others; Ability to migrate at cost (unlike AIT and Flare); Teamwork and centralized variables (unlike Word, Google Docs, FM); Diff and Revert (must-have feature); L10N features (better than all others).
I trialed a version of Oxygen XML editor, but the fact that Paligo is cloud-based and integrates directly to Zendesk sold me, even though Oxygen XML is essentially the de facto standard for most structured authoring.
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.
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. :)