MindTouch

Score7 out of 10

179 Reviews and Ratings

Community insights

TrustRadius Insights for MindTouch are summaries of user sentiment data from TrustRadius reviews and, when necessary, third party data sources.

Business Problems Solved

MindTouch is a versatile software that is used by various organizations for different purposes. One key use case is creating and updating knowledgebases for customers, allowing them to access the latest documentation via the web. This feature has been particularly beneficial for Cisco Infinite Video customers, who can easily find relevant information and troubleshoot issues without needing to contact customer support.

Another major use case of MindTouch is increasing the number of contributors within an organization and ensuring governance and oversight as the number of contributors grows. By using MindTouch, companies can involve both internal teams and customers in content creation, leading to a collaborative approach that enhances the accuracy and breadth of knowledgebase articles.

MindTouch is also widely employed as a solution for dynamically changing content as products mature and to stay ahead of industry changes. Its flexibility allows companies to adapt their documentation quickly, ensuring that customers have access to up-to-date information.

Additionally, MindTouch serves as an online help center where users can find dedicated and searchable documentation for software products. It is utilized by multiple departments in an organization to publish customer-facing and internal documentation, helping to update and maintain content efficiently.

Overall, MindTouch provides solutions for creating comprehensive knowledge bases, improving collaboration among teams, facilitating content updates, and enhancing customer self-service capabilities. Its versatility makes it valuable across industries, from technology companies seeking to support their products effectively to educational institutions aiming to provide a collaborative learning environment.

Reviews

110 Reviews

SEO-friendly CMS for creating robust Support/KB websites

Rating: 8 out of 10

Incentivized

February 22, 2018

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We use MindTouch at Procore Technologies Inc. as the core CMS platform to host and manage our public support site (https://support.procore.com). I picked MindTouch over other CMS tools because of its intuitive interface and customization options. We've built a fully customized support site that matches our corporate branding style and integrates with our customer support ticketing system (Zendesk). (Prior to Zendesk, we also successfully integrated MindTouch with UserVoice.) We're able to build SEO-friendly support content that has proven to be the main driver of web traffic to our marketing site, as well as an effective lead generation tool that consistently yields product demo requests. Our internal Technical Documentation team creates and manages a majority of the content but we've also given select customers the ability to create their own customer support content in a private section of our site that can be securely accessed by their end users via our SSO integration between MindTouch and our web application. MindTouch has helped us effectively scale our SaaS company by giving users a centralized location where they can effectively support themselves in a self-service manner.

Pros

Intuitive WYSIWYG editor makes content creation quick and agile.
Created content is SEO-friendly.
Granular page, user, and group permission options make it easy to control how content is shared.

Cons

Link validation tracker. I want to be notified when a link is broken or be able to run a site-wide report on-demand.
Content Reuse tracker. I need to know where content or images are being used/re-used.
Global search and replace
Drag and drop, file/folder hierarchy
Poor quality of image resizing. Results in blurry screenshots.
Ability to change date range of popular page analytics. Right now, the oldest pages are the most popular pages.

Likelihood to Recommend

If a company doesn't want to make their knowledge base public-facing, you lose a lot of the value of using MindTouch in a closed environment. MindTouch is not ideal for extremely structured content management scenarios that are strong DITA advocates. Companies that require localization might not be good fits either.

Verified User

Strategist in Product Management (201-500 employees)

Vetted Review

8 years of experience

Easy to use, limited features.

Rating: 2 out of 10

Incentivized

October 26, 2017

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

MindTouch is used only by our department to provide documentation for customers and support staff. It is not used directly by support staff or SMEs, but this is because MT4 does not provide draft functionality as Responsive does. Given the rudimentary nature of drafts in Responsive, and no real way to control workflow, it's unclear how much our process would change with the upgrade in platform.

Pros

Ready to go out of the box, no maintenance after setup.
Easy to learn: it's a simple product, WYSIWYG.

Cons

Responsive limits how you can organize content. You can't have a guide within a guide, because according to MindTouch, you should't do that. MindTouch believes all problems are solved by the magic of their search capabilities, not in manually curating content. MT4 allows a little more flexibility, but just about everything we want to do involves an ad hoc work-around.
Single-sourcing documentation is rudimentary and untraceable, for both MT4 and Responsive. We have to leave hidden notes on the pages themselves to try to track how content is shared.
Single-sourcing images suffers from the same limitations. There's no tool for managing and tracking images, it's just another webpage on your site.
The only output is your MindTouch site. Forget about printing to PDF or anything else. We have eliminated manuals because MindTouch simply can't do them.
There's no universal replace tool. When our language changes, we have to search and then manually edit every page. MindTouch offers another work-around, for a fee.

Likelihood to Recommend

MindTouch (MT) is well-suited for companies that have simple documentation. It works out-of-the-box, with little training. No technical knowledge is needed after initial setup and CSS customization. The hosted site is fast, and requires no maintenance.

It is not well-suited for professional technical writers. I don't think MT even has technical writers on their staff, given their own documentation and their lack of features a writer would need. Judging by the changes from MT4 to Responsive, there is little interest in producing a more robust authoring tool.

Vlad Todor

Technical Writer in Customer Service at RenWeb School Management Software (51-200 employees)

Vetted Review

3 years of experience

View profile

MindTouch - An exiting new addition to our team!

Rating: 10 out of 10

Incentivized

October 23, 2017

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We just launched MindTouch and we are very excited to have this new resource! MindTouch will allow us to eventually move all of our product documentation online, allowing us to keep content fresh and improve the customer experience. We started with a new product initially and will soon be moving all of our product documentation to MindTouch. We are also looking into ways to further utilize this resource across all departments company wide.

Pros

Ease of Use, both from a user perspective as well as an editor
Ability re-skin the UI to reflect your own branding
Very responsive support team

Cons

We've only been using MindTouch for a month and haven't noted any major issues yet

Likelihood to Recommend

I honestly have only had interaction with MindTouch from a product documentation perspective. As Creative Director, I was responsible for rebranding the UI to match our company branding. We are in the antivirus and endpoint security sector, and so far this resource has proven to be an excellent resource. Currently we are using MindTouch for product documentation, but we intend to take full advantage and see where else it might prove useful.

Verified User

Director in Marketing (51-200 employees)

Vetted Review

A great tool for organized documentation and contextual help tools!

Rating: 8 out of 10

Incentivized

October 23, 2017

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We are currently utilizing MindTouch as a documentation center to teach our new and existing customers how to utilize our software. Documents currently include FAQ's as well as step by step walk-throughs of our platform. These walk-throughs include screenshots of our software to give our customers a better idea of how our software works. We have found that MindTouch is easily customizable and allows us to separate out documentation for our multiple user types. We have also enjoyed the contextual help tool which allows our customers to consume documentation based on the page they are viewing in our platform.

Pros

MindTouch helps to easily organize our help articles to ensure that our end user is receiving the proper information.
The MindTouch platform is extremely easy to navigate which reduces the turnaround time for our team to publish new material.
The editor tools supplied through MindTouch make styling our documentation a breeze.
The contextual help tool allows our customers to consume documentation based on the page they are viewing in our platform.

Cons

The Media Repository has proven to be difficult to use as the images typically become distorted.

Likelihood to Recommend

I would recommend MindTouch to anyone who is looking to create and host their documentation for a product that has multiple types of users. Our business modal represents customers on the buy-side as well as the sell-side and we are able to easily organize documentation to service both types of users.

Verified User

Representative in Customer Service (51-200 employees)

Vetted Review

2 years of experience

MindTouch- easy to learn, easy to use

Rating: 7 out of 10

Incentivized

October 20, 2017

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Used to answer common customer questions globally. It reduces the amount of resources we need for support. We are moving from a high-touch customer support model to a low-touch model.

Pros

Easy to create articles
Easy to search for them from google
Easy to organize content in a way customers can find the topics they are interested in

Cons

Once in an information area it can be difficult to zero in on the article of interest. Additional filter options could be useful.
More templates
Better batch operations to simplify reorganization and restructuring of content

Likelihood to Recommend

Well suited if customers already know about it. Can be difficult to 'train' customers to use it as a first resource (instead of calling or chatting). Can be difficult to manage if there are thousands of articles. Easy to manage if there are hundreds. If content creation can be automated (even partially) this can be a good scenario.

Verified User

Consultant in Engineering (5001-10,000 employees)

Vetted Review

3 years of experience

Impressions of a long-time MindToucher

Rating: 7 out of 10

Incentivized

October 20, 2017

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

MindTouch is the primary authoring and publishing tool for our Tech Writing department. It powers our customer-facing support site. The business problem it solves is allowing us to easily reach our customers via the web. We have 1000s of articles and a team of people writing, editing, and updating content every day.

Pros

Automatic redirects when we change a page title/URL
Good WYSISWYG editor
SEO is awesome
Allows customized branding/look-and-feel
Full SaaS solution -- we have no hardware or files or anything stored locally

Cons

When we do have a support issue, we frequently need to go through multiple people, contacts, ways of explaining things, etc,. before someone on their end actually understands our problem. It's rare that the first person we talk to understands the big picture or appreciates our use case.
The draft functionality is a promising start but lacks some key features that cause us regular frustration. For example, you can only create one draft of a page at a time. This is fine if changes come to you in perfect sequential order, but it makes it impossible for us to update a live page while a draft exists. More specifically, if we're working on updating content on a page for a new feature being released next month, but then we notice a typo today, we can't fix the typo in production without first deleting the draft or doing some hacky workaround of temporarily copying/pasting the source HTML of the draft page and saving it someplace else.
Existence of, or integration with, true source control would be a huge win, but it's something currently lacking in the product. MindTouch's content reuse feature is helpful in the right situations, but it's not robust enough to scale well for lots of content.
Version history of page changes is not 100% reliable. Sometimes items don't show up at all or there is a delay before the diff is visible. Also, creating a draft does not register at all in the page version history.
In-site search is poor, unless you know the *exact* title of what you're looking for. We tell our customers to use Google, not the MindTouch search. Google is excellent at searching our MindTouch site.

Likelihood to Recommend

MindTouch makes it really easy for writers to write. The learning curve for the tool is low. The SEO is excellent -- we always trust our content will be in the top 3 Google search results (we're usually #1). We've found some aspects of it to be challenging though when trying to manage support documentation for multiple versions of a product.

Verified User

Employee (501-1000 employees)

Vetted Review

4 years of experience

Our Little Corner

Rating: 7 out of 10

Incentivized

October 18, 2017

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

It's being used as the backbone of our Intranet across the company. This allows us to have general as well as technical information from / for all departments in a quickly accessible (and secure) site. As our use of other software tools grow and our company expands, we are looking to leverage additional information and useful resource links for all employees.

Pros

Notifications of updates / changes that may impact service or performance
Easy to access support and receive assistance or answers
Knowledgeable staff

Cons

We find the whitelisting process to be unnecessarily slow.

Likelihood to Recommend

We haven't used it outside of an informational intranet. In a review of modifying the site to be more of a social intranet, we found that the product seemed to be lacking. We believe a 7/10 represents a solid and reliable score and as the product continues to expand, we look forward to enjoying it even more.

Verified User

Manager in Information Technology (501-1000 employees)

Vetted Review

2 years of experience

Success with MindTouch?

Rating: 8 out of 10

Incentivized

October 17, 2017

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Our training team set up MindTouch to house all our training videos and articles. The site is used by our customers as well as our internal departments such as support and sales. The articles contain detailed documentation on our product's features. We also use it for release notes and to link to Gotomeeting registration pages for our live training classes.

We recently starting using a separate LMS system so we can assign and track our customers' training during onboarding scenarios. We use an LMS for this because MindTouch can't do this.

Pros

Good privacy settings for each page. I can set a new article to semi-private until it's approved to go live. And I can send a link to that page out for review.
Good tracking on each page history.
Ability to view and restore previous page versions.
I like the category search bars that only search the current category.

Cons

When they release product updates each Thursday, sometimes those break areas of our site. Either it interacts with and breaks our custom branding or it breaks the layout and responsiveness of existing pages. So far MindTouch has not been able to find a solution to any of my tickets on these issues. So that puts the problem back on us to go through all of our 3,000+ pages and apply a fix, or to rebrand certain areas like our customized search page which broke and was reverted back to default.
The reports could be more helpful. I'd like to filter these reports further before I export.
the search feature isn't strong enough. Doesn't always pull up the best results, and it's difficult to sort through the results and know what is what. Is it a video? An article?

Likelihood to Recommend

It's good at easily creating and housing all our documentation/articles.

It has a simple and effective way for customers to contact support. With the 3 contact methods appearing on certain pages of the site. And a good support contact form that integrates with our Salesforce.

The user community features look to be a good fit for us, but we've not implemented it yet because our engineering department still needs to prepare the single-sign-on for us.

It's not as appropriate for housing all our video tutorials. Right now we can put each video on its own page and list them similar to articles. It would be better if we could easily move and navigate between videos without having to click into individual pages. It'd also be nice to have more linking/association between videos and articles of the same subject matter.

It's not as appropriate for offering our live class schedule or registration. I'd like to see a GoToMeeting integration. Or even a good way to display classes on a calendar, with the ability to filter which classes display on the calendar.

Kristen Kiley

Instructional Designer at Kareo (501-1000 employees)

Vetted Review

1 year of experience

View profile

Solid Product, Some Room for Improvement. Take Guidance from Industry Veterans.

Rating: 7 out of 10

Incentivized

October 17, 2017

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We're using MindTouch on our team only. Other groups publish content on our corporate website. It meets the documentation needs of our customers and our content is also available to the public, so it can help with marketing and SEO.

Pros

The authoring environment is easy enough to use.
Customer Service reps are responsive and resourceful.

Cons

User experience. The product's UX is fragmented and it's hard to figure out how to do some certain very simple, important things.
Many aspects of the product don't really meet industry standards for technical communication. They seem to have been cobbled together by people who don't fully understand what technical writers do. Product updates really don't address these issues. Folks in sales and support sometimes imply that the authoring platform MindTouch has created is the only way to do create documentation, which is counter to the experience of those of us who've been in the industry for any length of time.

Likelihood to Recommend

MindTouch can get a help site up and running quickly, and it's honestly better than a lot of other products out there.

It's more appropriately used by dedicated tech writers than those in other roles, because there's a bit of a learning curve due to some of the oddities with the product. Those include strange, proprietary templates and complicated customizations.

Verified User

Manager in Product Management (51-200 employees)

Vetted Review

1 year of experience

Easy & fast content authoring platform

Rating: 8 out of 10

Incentivized

October 10, 2017

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

At Gainsight, our documentation team members are the primary authors in MindTouch, but the published docs are utilized by other internal teams as well as our customers. We use MindTouch to share product release notes, user guides and admin configuration guides, tutorials, troubleshooting tips, FAQs, as well as some short feature overview videos. Our internal teams can submit feedback on individual articles directly in MT, and the docs team receives email notifications. Our Biz Ops team is working on documentation to support new customer on-boarding, and we're planning to host that in its own category on MT. Additionally, our support team is starting to use a private category on MT to host their internal technical documentation.

Pros

Authoring and editing articles is quick and easy.
Mindtouch has a really responsive and helpful support team.
You can customize the structure of your documentation on MT.
You can easily re-use content from one article in another, as well as pull in multiple articles to a path or sequence of documentation.

Cons

You can't easily manage the sequence of articles in a sub-category or guide.
If you are migrating documentation from another platform to MT, you may encounter a rocky road and lots of manual QA.
There's no real draft management functionality available. If you want to offer article feedback to someone, all you can do is enter text in a single comment box at the end of the article. As a result, we still use Google Docs for drafting and sharing articles for review, and then when they're finalized, we publish them on MT.
Some of their backend tools for reviewing broken hyperlinks, or locating unpublished articles, as well as their OOTB reporting options need improvement. They feel somewhat buried in the backend and inflexible; for example, you can't export a long list of records for easier review.

Likelihood to Recommend

If you don't already have a documentation portal in place, MT is a great option. If you need to have private and public categories, and different people need to be able to edit/view articles in different categories, MT has the permissions structure in place to handle that. If you want to re-use content, including media, MT can support those use cases. If you want to present some articles in a path, to help users tackle a larger task or process, MT can do it with their paths feature.

If you're migrating docs from another platform, be sure to figure out how your existing article URLs will be handled. All of our old article URLs were broken in the migration, which created a bad end user experience that we were dealing with for several months.

If you need to have detailed reporting capabilities on user activity, you'll probably have to connect MT to Google Analytics or another tool.

Lila Krutel Meyer

Sr. Education Manager in Product Management at Gainsight (201-500 employees)

Vetted Review

View profile

Loading Reviews List....

Success with MindTouch?

Rating: 8 out of 10

Incentivized

October 17, 2017

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Pros

Good privacy settings for each page. I can set a new article to semi-private until it's approved to go live. And I can send a link to that page out for review.
Good tracking on each page history.
Ability to view and restore previous page versions.
I like the category search bars that only search the current category.

Cons

When they release product updates each Thursday, sometimes those break areas of our site. Either it interacts with and breaks our custom branding or it breaks the layout and responsiveness of existing pages. So far MindTouch has not been able to find a solution to any of my tickets on these issues. So that puts the problem back on us to go through all of our 3,000+ pages and apply a fix, or to rebrand certain areas like our customized search page which broke and was reverted back to default.
The reports could be more helpful. I'd like to filter these reports further before I export.
the search feature isn't strong enough. Doesn't always pull up the best results, and it's difficult to sort through the results and know what is what. Is it a video? An article?

Likelihood to Recommend

It's good at easily creating and housing all our documentation/articles.

The user community features look to be a good fit for us, but we've not implemented it yet because our engineering department still needs to prepare the single-sign-on for us.

Kristen Kiley

Instructional Designer at Kareo (501-1000 employees)

Vetted Review

1 year of experience

View profile