MadCap Software

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.

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.

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.

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.