TrustRadius Insights for MadCap Flare are summaries of user sentiment data from TrustRadius reviews and, when necessary, third party data sources.
Business Problems Solved
Flare, a documentation authoring tool, has proven to be valuable for a wide range of use cases based on user experiences. Users have found that Flare provides a modern online help appearance without the need for designing custom styles. It enables users to organize and manage their knowledge base effectively, offering robust options for customization and organization. Onboarding with Flare is relatively quick, with a small learning curve for writers to get up and running. Flare integrates well with other MadCap products, allowing for seamless workflow and reporting capabilities. It also simplifies user assistance and troubleshooting by providing different outputs from a single source. Flare's flexibility allows for adapting content to different customer needs through CSS functionality. Moreover, single sourcing with Flare reduces the chance of copy/paste errors and allows for outputting to multiple audiences, resulting in significant time-saving and efficiency in content creation. Whether it's generating online help documentation for major application products or creating product manuals and work instructions, Flare proves to be effective in streamlining documentation processes for technical writers across various industries.
MadCap Flare is our primary authoring tool for online help and guides. With it we create a single-source for all content, for easy and efficient re-use. We can maintain branches of content, so can create new content without affecting the current online help. We publish and host the content in MadCap Central. We use the analytics available in MadCap Central to monitor the use of our various help systems and to identify search terms being used, to update the help for greater accuracy of terminology or to identify useful topics to add.
Pros
Single-sourcing
Branching (GIT)
Publishing and hosting
Cons
Reviewing by internal users / Feedback from customers
CSS - easier to use an external tool
Skin styles and management
Likelihood to Recommend
Well suited for any online help, both stand-alone and in-product, context-sensitive or not. Particularly for re-use of any content across help, guides, training materials and so on. The fact that it can be based on GIT means you can integrate the system with GIT-based functions to pull content based on actual commits. Lots of flexibility.
Our team writes the technical documentation for all products that our company offers. We like the flexibility and control MadCap Flare gives us. We use Flare connected to Git, so we can take advantage of seamlessly sharing files, branching and merging, and content management. We take advantage of many Flare features, especially the powerful search engine and the ability to create filtered searches. We like the ability to customize our docs with our own javascript. Single-sourcing is easy with the ability to output to multiple formats, and using Snippets and Variables.
Pros
single-source features
powerful search engine
easy to publish to our website
Cons
We always need one more thing, but are able to adapt using our own code
Likelihood to Recommend
We currently use Flare for end-user docs but are in the process of implementing it for our API documentation. Having the content broken down into separate topics makes it easy to edit and add content. The drag-and-drop TOC makes it easy to rearrange topic order. I have also used Flare for writing non-technical books, as the built-in features help keep me organized.
MadCap Flare is our primary authoring software as a technical writing team of 8. We use MadCap Central as our source control service, as well as for reviewing internally and for SME reviews. We use MadCap Flare to build and publish our in-product help, as well, which is accessible to all clients as well as the company internally.
Pros
Using MadCap Flare to create and publish our in-product help is much easier than using the MadCap ZenDesk Connect plug-in to publish to ZenDesk (which we used previously). It allows for more customization (with a lot of know-how) and a much easier publishing process.
MadCap Central works well as a source control option with MadCap Flare, aside from bugs that arise. It's fully integrated with MadCap Flare, making it easy to send files for review to other colleagues.
MadCap Flare has many single-sourcing tools, I'm a particular fan of snippets and conditioning. Using snippets to create article templates (then converting to text) has been a valuable tool in improving consistency and efficiency.
I love being able to set customizable keyboard shortcuts, including using macros to assign shortcuts to complex actions. For example, I've been able to reassign a standard Ctrl + B shortcut to apply our custom bolding style, as opposed to default local bolding. Saves lots of time and effort to use my own shortcuts.
Cons
I've encountered a lot of buggy behavior with MadCap Central as a reviewing platform. On return to MadCap Flare, spaces will randomly vanish, locally-formatted red text will appear where annotations were, and variables will vanish. It can be hugely frustrating for errors to be introduced as part of the reviewing process.
MadCap Flare can be unstable. I am using it on Parallels on a Mac (sadly it's not supported for MacOS). It tends to freeze when syncing, crash if I scroll too quickly, and cause all sorts of other "oh god I hope I saved before that crashed" moments.
With an 8 member team, it's not uncommon to accidentally run into merge conflicts. The conflict manager tool is nigh-impossible to understand. I think we all just pick an option to accept or reject all changes, and pray.
The support system is very rigid as far as enforcing price vs access tiers, which can be frustrating when you're looking for support. For example, one person has Platinum support for their license key, so only they're authorized for phone support. Tying support to individual license keys without taking into consideration how many licenses our company pays for, and just giving us all the same level of support, is a bit bizarre.
MadCap Flare very much feels like a software begging for a total redesign. New features get jammed into an already-crowded toolbar. There's so many buttons that it's hard to find the ones you need. It needs a modern overhaul as well as overall performance upgrades.
I'd love to see improvements in MadCap Central as a reviewing tool. More support for rendering custom styles, being able to hide or show conditioned text, fixing the issue of it introducing errors, and making it overall a more pleasant reviewing experience for our SMEs.
Likelihood to Recommend
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 <i>want</i> to use Central.
MadCap Flare is used by the technical writing team at my company. We use it to write and publish all of our documentation.
Pros
Snippets, variables, and conditioning are all good
Once you set it up, updating Help websites is easy.
Cons
I use it on a mac with windows parallel and it can be so buggy and laggy.
I would love it if the software was entirely cloud-based, like Google Docs.
Reviewing in Central is not a good experience, need better review functionality.
Likelihood to Recommend
If you're just building a help website or maybe a lengthy user guide, MadCap is great.
If you're exporting your documents somewhere that doesn't support MadCap integration, there's a chance it'll be more of a headache. For example, we export a lot of our docs to an LMS, and it requires us to build each document on its own. So, even if we update a snippet, we have to re-upload all affected articles.
We use MadCap for all of our technical writing needs. This includes product guides and software user manuals. The software addresses the need of hosting our documentation as well as allowing us to share documents with peers for review before publication. The software also (attempts) to address issues of single-source documentation through features such as Snippets and Variables, though this is often a pain point.
The software does allow for "conditioning" of certain content within a single document, allowing you to publish only certain parts of a document depending on where you're publishing it. For example, an Introduction paragraph might be necessary for learning materials but not in-product help. Conditioning allows for that. This is a feature we put to work quite often within our organization.
Pros
Organizing articles via an overall project outline.
Syncing with teammates.
Cons
The software is often quite buggy, and certain bugs seem to date back nearly a decade and still persist.
Customizing shortcuts is often an ordeal.
Likelihood to Recommend
MadCap is well suited if you have a document that needs to be published in various locations, each with slightly tweaked content. It's easy enough to set certain paragraphs or sections to publish in a specific location but not others. MadCap is difficult to work with teammates. There are a lot of "rules" you have to stick to when syncing work to ensure one writer doesn't overwrite another's work.
