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MindTouch

MindTouch

Overview

What is MindTouch?

MindTouch is a customer experience management platform with content management and help authoring capabilities. Formerly known as MediaWiki, it is optimized for building knowledge bases for customer self-service and agent assistance purposes.

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Recent Reviews

TrustRadius Insights

MindTouch is a versatile software that is used by various organizations for different purposes. One key use case is creating and updating …
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Our Little Corner

7 out of 10
October 18, 2017
Incentivized
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 / …
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Awards

Products that are considered exceptional by their customers based on a variety of criteria win TrustRadius awards. Learn more about the types of TrustRadius awards to make the best purchase decision. More about TrustRadius Awards

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Pricing

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What is MindTouch?

MindTouch is a customer experience management platform with content management and help authoring capabilities. Formerly known as MediaWiki, it is optimized for building knowledge bases for customer self-service and agent assistance purposes.

Entry-level set up fee?

  • No setup fee
For the latest information on pricing, visithttps://mindtouch.com/info

Offerings

  • Free Trial
  • Free/Freemium Version
  • Premium Consulting/Integration Services

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Product Details

What is MindTouch?

MindTouch is a leader in customer self-service software. According to the vendor, MindTouch brings the customer record (CRM) and customers’ self-service behavior together to better understand their experience with the brand. Additionally the vendor says companies like Accenture, ADP, McKinsey, Sprinklr, Whirlpool, and Zuora rely on MindTouch for effective self-service and because it helps them create actionable customer insights. MindTouch has been named one of 2017’s “Hot 100” best privately held software companies by JMP Securities. MindTouch aims to make an organization’s customers smarter, happier, and more successful.

MindTouch Features

  • Supported: Customer self-service
  • Supported: Agent enablement
  • Supported: Field service
  • Supported: Contextual help
  • Supported: Documentation authoring and publishing
  • Supported: CRM integration
  • Supported: Help desk integration
  • Supported: Ticket deflection
  • Supported: Analytics and reporting
  • Supported: User behavior insights
  • Supported: Versioning
  • Supported: KCS methodology
  • Supported: Structured atomic content
  • Supported: Customizable Interface
  • Supported: Mobile responsive layout
  • Supported: BI Integration
  • Supported: 20 supported languages

MindTouch Screenshots

Screenshot of Content from MindTouch site visualized with Wave Analytics.Screenshot of Example MindTouch implementation from customer Whirlpool.Screenshot of Example MindTouch implementation from customer Conga.Screenshot of Example MindTouch implementation from customer Cisco Meraki.Screenshot of Example MindTouch implementation from customer Hitachi Data Systems.Screenshot of Example MindTouch implementation from customer Zuora.

MindTouch Video

Customer Self-Service Optimizes Growth

MindTouch Integrations

  • Salesforce Service Cloud
  • Google Analytics
  • Zendesk Suite
  • SAP Commerce Cloud (formerly SAP Hybris)
  • Microsoft Dynamics 365 (formerly Microsoft Dynamics CRM)
  • Single Sign-On (SAML 2.0)
  • Salesforce Sales Cloud
  • Facebook
  • Twitter
  • LinkedIn
  • Google+
  • Contextual Help
  • SAP Cloud for Customer
  • eCommerce

MindTouch Technical Details

Deployment TypesSoftware as a Service (SaaS), Cloud, or Web-Based
Operating SystemsUnspecified
Mobile ApplicationNo
Supported CountriesAll
Supported LanguagesAll

Frequently Asked Questions

MindTouch is a customer experience management platform with content management and help authoring capabilities. Formerly known as MediaWiki, it is optimized for building knowledge bases for customer self-service and agent assistance purposes.

Reviewers rate Vendor post-sale highest, with a score of 9.3.

The most common users of MindTouch are from Mid-sized Companies (51-1,000 employees).
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Comparisons

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Reviews and Ratings

(180)

Community Insights

TrustRadius Insights are summaries of user sentiment data from TrustRadius reviews and, when necessary, 3rd-party data sources. Have feedback on this content? Let us know!

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.

Users have provided valuable recommendations for using MindTouch. These recommendations include:

  • Comparing MindTouch to other content/documentation provider software to understand its benefits.
  • Prioritizing the creation of a clear content hierarchy before implementing MindTouch.
  • Seeking help from MindTouch for migration and utilizing the available documentation.

Additionally, businesses should consider having a well-organized knowledge base, being prepared for customization requirements, and having a small team focused on regularly adding content. Flexibility in requirements and CSS/HTML knowledge can enhance the implementation process. Finally, having the Premium Support package can be helpful for the initial setup and launch of the site.

Following these recommendations can help businesses effectively reduce redundancy and optimize their use of MindTouch for content management and documentation purposes.

Attribute Ratings

Reviews

(76-100 of 110)
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Lisa Fontaine | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
MindTouch powers our online help center, which has become the most leveraged tool by internal teams and external customers for training and self-help resources. The content is created by a handful of people in our company, including our instructional designer, customer support leads, and me. MindTouch has made our online help center an invaluable addition to our company's assets. It is not only used by customers, but also internally by everyone from the executive team down.
  • Logical hierarchy for content structure makes organizing an abundance of information easy.
  • The ability to use tags and even manually set specific content to display at the top of search results makes it easy for users to find exactly what they are looking for.
  • Updating information in draft form is helpful when new software releases are pending. In addition, the revision history feature has been helpful for us when we've needed to access previous versions of an article.
  • Some other features we value are the ability to set articles to private, being able to easily move content around in the site, and the content re-use option that automatically updates information in areas where the article has been duplicated when the original has changed.
  • I think our only issue with MindTouch was that it was not explained up front that we would need a developer to add any customization to our site in the way of branding, graphics, formatting, fonts, etc.
MindTouch is the perfect solution for companies who have hardware or software and need to offer online self-help resources and training for customers. Based on my personal experience, I would say that the company should also have a UX/UI person and in-house developers, or have the resources to hire a developer and designer to customize their site.
Sue Ann Kendall | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Our organization has created a large site we call the Customer Success Center for the users of the software products we sell. There is an area for support for each product. We have the help for each of our products in MindTouch, and that is created by a team for each product. We also have our training content there. I create most of that. Our training content and a great deal of our marketing content is also on MindTouch. Customers of our products all use MindTouch to get information.
  • MindTouch allows us to organize our content hierarchically but also to find it via search. People can easily browse or go straight to what they want to see.
  • MindTouch is very easy for content creators to use. It's easy to copy and move items around, and it's especially nice that links to moved files are redirected.
  • MindTouch easily allows for collaboration. Having a version history is very useful to us.
  • The search functionality needs some help.
  • We are having a horrible time embedding the kind of video content we would like to include in our files.
  • We would like to create documentation from our files, but the PDF capability will not let us make files long enough to be the training manuals we make (more than 100 pages at least!) and we can't get a table of contents.
It's great for help content and for any other documentation about a software product. It's also very good for keeping content consistent when there is a large team working on it. It's wonderful to be able to create entire new areas of content with just a few keystrokes. The flexibility of the system is very much appreciated by our teams.
Jeff Burton | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We use MindTouch as knowledge base for our products. In our current product, it's a pretty simple integration, using a portal with special branding. In our next generation product, the integration is deeper, with mindtouch queries and results showing up inside our application, along with ticket deflection in our ticketing system.

The integration process went very smoothly and we got a lot of support from MindTouch regarding how to integrate. Part of what made the integration go so well is MindTouch was able to suggest best practices, which helped us design our knowledge base.
We are happy with MindTouch. Our biggest problem is not having enough bandwidth to update the knowledge base more regularly.
  • MindTouch creates a virtuous feedback loop by tracking how user's queries match the contents of the knowledge base, so we can develop new articles that better answer customer questions.
  • MindTouch has an API that let us embed its functionality directly into the application.
  • MindTouch is very flexible in how it lets us organize and brand our knowledge base.
  • We did an SSO (single signon) integration, and we had some problems with it. The support response turn around time was kind of slow. They eventually came through.
I think it's great for a straight up knowledge base application. If you have a team that can constantly feed it content, you will get the full power out of it, using the reporting tools provided. I also think it's great if you want to use your knowledge base content to expand your SEO footprint. This has already been working for us.
August 30, 2016

MindTouch TCS

Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
MindTouch is being used in my organization to provide an internal and external knowledge base for some of our products. We host customer-facing articles that provide customers additional help with some of the more complex features. Internally, we host training documents and guides to help our employees navigate the complex processes of our business.
My team is responsible for creating and maintaining the content. MindTouch allows us to consolidate our knowledge into one location for centralized access.

  • User role management - user roles can be explicitly set and permissions to specific pages or sets of pages can be easily set, helping determine visibility of specific content.
  • The WYSIWYG editor is intuitive and provides preset formats for frequently used text styles
  • DekiScript extends the interface, allowing content creators to pull in other resources or provide dynamic content without having to update pages as more content is created.
  • Tagging allows dynamic content to be made visible and updating tags can help shape list results to drive customers to the content you want them to see.
  • Search can be challenging. Most customers don't use boolean search strings, so vague search terms can return lots of results, confusing customers.
  • Creating content from scratch is great, but editing can cause some text blocks to have extra formatting added, affecting the final text formatting. I've seen nested header tags in the source that should not be there along with other nested font tags that can render the text in interesting ways.
  • Formatting with CSS is not easy. In some cases, we have to submit a ticket to have our root CSS updated. The CSS should be completely user-managed.
  • Header and footer templates are not user-accessible. We have to submit a ticket to update information in our page headers.
MindTouch is well suited for authenticated users. You are able to cordon them off to a specific content area and let them explore. For anonymous users, on a site supporting many disparate products, customer can be overwhelmed with irrelevant content. For experienced content writers and managers, MindTouch allows easy creation and management of new or updated articles. New or novice writers are challenged with understanding the content hierarchy and often misplace articles.
Toby Partridge | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
MindTouch is used to create a knowledge center for our employees and for our customers (the users of our software). Content is mostly authored by technical writers in the technical publications team, but we also have SMEs in the organization who contribute. The technical publications group is responsible for reviewing content, gaining content approval, and publishing the content. The content is used by employees who sell, support, and implement our software, as well as our customers who use the software daily in their jobs. MindTouch has helped us provide more accurate and on-the-spot user assistance, which cuts down on calls to technical support. Because the content is online and provided in smaller information chunks, it is easy to keep the content current and relevant, which promotes customer satisfaction.
  • Provides the ability for anyone to create custom PDFs from topics they select. This is a strength for us because we have customers who do not allow their users to get out to the Internet, so they can designate one person who can access MindTouch, and that person can create custom PDFs for the rest of the users.
  • It provides the tools that allow us to customize the look and feel of the knowledge center. Because our knowledge center is just one part of our overall customer portal, we needed to be able to customize its look so that it would match the other components of the portal.
  • It has flexible functionality for structuring the hierarchy of the knowledge center. This was essential for us because we wanted to be able to provide information to our users in different ways and provide more than one path to finding the information they need.
  • Their technical support team is very responsive and helpful. This was important for us because this was our first time putting content online for our customers, and because we customized the look and feel ourselves, and that did require some help with HTML and CSS.
  • I'd like to see MindTouch provide the ability to create your own paragraph styles more easily. Right now it's done via CSS code on the back-end, but they need a more intuitive interface like Word and RoboHelp have.
  • When I delete text (especially text that has had particular styles applied to it), it should delete all the HTML/CSS code associated with that text as well. Instead, I have to go into the source and delete it manually, or it can have adverse effects on the text that follows in the topic.
  • Inserting images and links in the topics/pages is cumbersome. The search/browse window that comes up has too many tabs and doesn't find the images you want to insert or the topics you want to link to very easily. It doesn't seem intuitive.
MindTouch is very well-suited to creating and maintaining an online knowledge center for both employees and customers. The user, role, and group functionality ensures that each person who interacts with MindTouch has the experience that is appropriate to their role. Being able to customize the look and feel and the content flow structure makes MindTouch a great tool that allows everyone of its customers to create unique knowledge centers. No two knowledge centers are exactly alike, and you would be hard-pressed often to tell that all of the knowledge centers were powered by the same tool.
Micah Jones | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We use MindTouch to create and distribute information and support to our customers and our employees. Our training department and myself primarily create content. Our marketing department, training and support departments all help with distribution. Support and training are the business issues that MindTouch addresses.
  • Their support is very good. They are knowledgeable and helpful.
  • The layout and look of the site is nice but the power of its customization is amazing.
  • The intuitive nature of the product is also a strong point.
  • Improvements in user management. For example, default group membership for new users would be very useful. Also being able to do more to users in a grid view would be nice.
  • While customizations are possible and the sky seems to be the limit, I feel some things should be easier to customize via options rather than needing to code. For example, it would be nice if I could just turn off the menu strip in F1 windows.
  • More analytics are reporting would be good, especially on the content management side.
For an open help resource I think it can't be beat. It's a bit weaker when having to keep your resources protected.
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
MindTouch is being used as a public portal, a customer knowledge and learning accelerator, and central repository of internal knowledge. Content creation is done by a team of customer experience designers, instructional designers, and subject matter experts. It is used by over 70,000 customers worldwide in multiple languages. It has quickly become the go-to resource for customers for maximizing the ROI of our software and for accelerating their path to becoming product experts. In addition, it makes it easy for our content creators to ensure up-to-date, consistent content that's easy to find for our customers.
  • Particularly, Mindtouch excels in its search capabilities, including the ability to filter content and quickly see related content.
  • The category and guide structure enables easy implementation of disparate sources of content in an organized, easy-to-navigate way. This is vital from a user interface perspective, and makes browsing content easy.
  • Mindtouch makes it easy to load a variety of media types, tag and organize them, and cross link them, which gives our customers a robust omni-channel learning experience.
  • As the product grows, there are a few opportunities for improvement . One is to expand the ability to host streaming video content. While it can easily connect to YouTube and other hosts, the video hosting ability could be improved.
  • Another area where the product could expand is with regard to discussion forums and increasing the social aspect of learning, allowing users to interact with one another and share comments.
  • Lastly, while the Mindtouch success center is full of valuable information and their onboarding process for new customers is detailed and thorough, configuring the product is not for the faint of heart, especially if anything nonstandard is needed. Thus, despite the quick and effective customer support, the handful of 1-hour training sessions would be best augmented by more hands-on assistance. Having a list of examples of site setups with detailed instructions how it's achieved might also be beneficial. As it is, they do have excellent partner vendors that can help with customization.
Mindtouch is well suited for any organization that wants to house knowledge content for external or internal customers in an easy-to-navigate and easy-to-load central repository. But much more than a repository, it is a powerful and smart search engine, a robust help text system (including versatile style template options), and a content organization tool. It is less appropriate for organizations that want to primarily encourage social interaction, though that could be coming down the pike. The company does seem to have an aggressive roadmap and is always adding new features.
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We use MindTouch for customer-facing product documentation, as well as some documentation meant for an internal audience. I am responsible for structuring, writing, and distributing our documentation. I also manage MindTouch users and control access to various parts of the documentation site. We use MindTouch as a single-source of content for our online web-based documentation and for context-sensitive help in Cloud Cruiser, our SaaS solution for monitoring cloud billing and usage.
  • The support team at MindTouch is simply outstanding. They have provided the best support I've ever had from a software company. They respond quickly, and have provided above-and-beyond levels of support. They talk about having a vested interest in making me successful, and I've certainly felt that in my interactions with their support team. This is always the first thing I mention to colleagues when discussing my experience with MindTouch.
  • Because MindTouch is a SaaS product, I don't have to worry about managing product updates myself. I know this doesn't make MindTouch unique in the software industry, but it is a piece of how they contribute to the success of my efforts by making my life as a documentation manager simpler.
  • The integrated F1 help system was very easy to implement in our product.
  • The authoring interface feels a bit clunky at times, and I've had to make a few compromises and implement a few workarounds to accomplish what I want to accomplish. For example, while I can define variables in my doc site, those variables are not handled well in expanders. Multiple paragraphs in a table cell cause the first paragraph to add unnecessary padding above the first line of text. I've removed the paragraph tags in the source markup to remove the padding.
  • While full inaccessibility has been rare, the hosted site can be slow to respond at times. For example, pages can be slow to open for editing. Dialog boxes for images might not open with all options available.
  • MindTouch has a doc structure that is not strictly enforced, but one must work around the limitations if that structure is not wanted. For example, PDF exports cannot include pages in the first two levels of the doc structure.
MindTouch is best suited for a hierarchical documentation structure that follows a book-model organization of information. I would not recommend MindTouch for a 1-level wiki experience.
Aaron Hathaway | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
I found MindTouch (then DekiWiki) during a search for a usable wiki for internal documentation (we were one of their early customers). It served ably in that capacity for many years, and it continues to be a world-class knowledge management system, even as the product has matured and grown more specialized.

MindTouch made the decision several years ago to focus on customer-facing support, which doesn't really apply to our internal-only use case. The downside of this change is that my users see more administrative cruft than I'd prefer. Not a huge deal, but worth considering if your use will be solely internal (MindTouch is arguably overkill for strictly internal use).
  • Clean, usable UI that the vast majority of users use without training.
  • Actively developed and very well supported.
  • More integrations than you can shake a stick at.
  • Better internal-only usage options. A user type between "community" and "pro" that can optionally contribute but which sees more of a customer's view of the content.
  • Not to single out MindTouch on this point, but portability of content is a huge issue (i.e., what if you want to move your content to a different application?). It doesn't appear that anyone has really cracked this nut yet, but I wish someone would.
  • MindTouch's official recommendation is that no sensitive/private content should be added to a MindTouch instance. While I appreciate the honesty, I do wish there were way to securely include sensitive content (page-level encryption). I recognize the complexity of the request, but it's so needed.
As stated before, MindTouch isn't an ideal platform for strictly internal knowledge management--but that's not their target market. They're interested in making customer support sites more usable, dynamic, and helpful. In that arena, I don't think MindTouch has been bested by their competitors.
Score 1 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
MindTouch is being used as a client facing knowledge base. My documentation team is 80% responsible for content creation and maintenance. We may receive content to add from the training team, but only my team uses the MindTouch product. We have a web master that is responsible for the look and feel and solving technical problems. Our new clients/potential clients/seasoned clients use MindTouch. We help solve the problem of product support.
  • I think MindTouch does a good job of versions and the ability to view and revert to a prior version.
  • It does a good job of setting permissions at the page and folder level.
  • It has a good interface for setting up MindTouch users.
  • OMG, our company could write a book here! The product's functionality is flaky and is slow to respond. Yes, it crashes. Some functionality doesn't work the way I would expect. For example, when you copy a doc say to a drafts area, it removes the number prefix so when you copy it back it does NOT overwrite the existing doc.
  • There is nothing to support the doc processes such as drafting a review, reviewing process and adding comments. In my company, when I draft something for review, I have to copy the contents out to a Google doc so people can comment.
  • What happened to MindTouch support? They use to respond within 24 hours, that is no longer the case. Seriously, it was 6 months before an account manager reached out to us. MindTouch has really gone down hill.
  • Why does someone have to have a user account to leave feedback or see the last modification date?
  • Why can't I have control over what categories generate the Related Articles? My categories are made up of entirely different products and I don't want to see a cross over of different products.
  • To me, I don't think the original designers of the product had any understanding of the online docs. It irritates me the a "User Guide" metaphor is used. Please understand the User Guides are for paper formats NOT online docs.
  • Our customers complain bitterly about searching. They want full text searching and not tag based.
  • At first, I was very excited to transition to MindTouch. However, the process was NOT easy. Training was fast and incomplete. I felt very weary after migrating 1,000 docs with many, many graphics. I am not happy with MindTouch. The company is not happy with MindTouch.
  • Last one, the URLs are way too long. Customers complain. I don't know why they don't use numbering for the articles.
March 11, 2016

Mindtouch

Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We use MindTouch to provide a reference wiki to internal and external customers. We have access controls on the pages to control who can see what pages.
  • The templates look great.
  • Uptime has been amazing.
  • The support has been excellent.
  • Some setup of new groups and the default pages for those groups does not go smoothly.
Simple wikis work well; but more complexity brings more headaches.
March 08, 2016

MindTouch

Dave Cardillo | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We used Mindtouch to move our knowledge base from a RoboHelp version to Mindtouch. The reason was simple, we wanted a better infra for our users and an easier format to edit changes. Our knowledge base is always in a flux and MindTouch's easy to use platform provided us with a simple and effective tool to update content quickly.
  • Allows for PDF creation of pages.
  • Customization was painless.
  • Setting up pages in a format that suits our business needs.
  • Ability to store video.
  • Make the tree structure more customizable.
MindTouch was perfect for our needs at the time.
Westly Richards | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We are currently implementing MindTouch and migrating our existing content. Our education team is currently responsible for content creation, but one of the reasons we chose MindTouch was to increase the number of contributors in our organization. This included our customers and our internal teams. We were trying to increase the number of collaborators, have a system that allows us to have governance and oversight as the number of contributors increases, and have a place to put both external and internal documentation with the use of permission controlled/gated content.
  • Robust user permissioning capabilities, version control and change logs.
  • Easy to use and robust content editor.
  • Strong API for integrations.
  • Excellent support team that is knowledgable and highly responsive.
  • Lacks clear documentation for best practices on migrating from other systems.
  • Information architecture is flexible enough to offer multiple levels, but rigid in the fact that you have to put articles in guides. It is difficult to draw parallels from other platforms.
  • The use of templates is robust, but also confusing when doing customization.
  • Portfolio of customers doesn't seem that large. When asking for examples of how customers are customizing their platform, they always give the same 3 examples.
  • Platform does not allow you to put documentation in a subdirectory of your main site. (www.example.com/documentation). It requires a subdomain (help.example.com). Using a sub directory would allow us to increase SEO for our main site.
  • Lacks ability to set preferences on how URL structure is auto created when creating articles.
  • Moving content within the platform is cumbersome.
MindTouch is great at permission controlled content and easy to create articles.
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We work with a variety of customers across multiple industries who use MindTouch for different use cases. One of our clients, with offices all over the globe, uses MindTouch to help their HR department stay in compliance across all of the countries they operate in. They keep all relevant HR laws and regulations for each country - a huge amount of data. We extended MindTouch for them to provide a customized advanced search feature that allows their users (their internal HR department) to look up the data they need in seconds.

Another of our large clients is a global appliance maker (refrigerators, dishwashers, stoves, etc...). We've helped them implement a self-help/troubleshooting portal using MindTouch that allows their customers to look up relevant documentation about the appliance they've purchased. Additionally, customers who are experiencing problems with their appliance can navigate through a series of troubleshooting questions and answers in order to drill down to a solution to their problem.

And yet another one of our customers, a global maker of high-end business equipment, uses MindTouch to expose a knowledge base and product documentation to their users. Product documentation is created with a internal tool and an automated process automatically uploads the new documentation to MindTouch via the MindTouch API.
  • MindTouch is excellent for organizing large amounts of data, like articles, product information, and other types of hierarchical data. Its out of the box search and navigation capabilities allow users to find the content they need quickly. Additionally, MindTouch has the capability of doing very complex searches across content extremely quickly via its advanced search syntax.
  • MindTouch is extremely easy to use, even for people with little to no technical knowledge. It allows users to search and contribute to articles very quickly and easily. It's a great tool for collaborative publishing of information.
  • MindTouch Exposes a robust API allowing customers to integrate both internal and external systems with MindTouch. In addition, the API can be used to extend MindTouch to create a myriad of customized features.
  • Some of the more technical documentation for developers is lacking, for instance the dekiscript documentation is severely lacking.
MindTouch is excellent for collaborative publishing of content such as: product documentation, help pages, knowledge articles, etc. It's also great at supporting scenarios that involve multiple types of users or different user groups.
Matt Bishop | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We use MindTouch for both customer-facing and internal documentation. I was the team lead in implementing it as our help authoring tool (and something of an intranet as well). At the time, I was a technical writer, though I've since moved to the UX team. Our tech writer is responsible for creating and maintaining content. We maintain the help center as its own site, accessible by our users, but it is also used to populate our contextual help (which Engineering is responsible for implementing). The content is consumed by our users and our internal employees. MindTouch helps us update and maintain our documentation, and deliver it to the people who need to see it. It helps our users and team members help themselves, deflecting calls to support and helping one person with knowledge reach many people at the same time.
  • MindTouch Support is amazing. They've rarely taken more than a day to respond to my requests for help, and often will call to talk me through issues that are too complicated to solve over email.
  • MindTouch's case deflection feature is great. When someone creates a support case with us, they are first shown a list of articles in our help center that are relevant to the topic at hand.
  • MindTouch articles are easy to update. They provide a nice GUI editor; no special skills are required.
  • I recall MindTouch not looking that great out of the box. That said, we implemented it 3 years ago, so a lot may have changed since then.
  • PDF generation was a bit of a pain point, although they worked with us to get it up to meeting our needs.
  • I'm not a huge fan of the F1 contextual help offering. We ended up building our own.
I feel like MindTouch is particularly well-suited for companies who want to have online help managed by a single team. I'm not sure if the average technical writer will be interested nor have enough time to be the site administrator. Smaller companies may want to wait until they grow a bit, especially considering the expense of the product.
February 12, 2016

You can't win them all

Amanda Cross | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized

My client used MindTouch to publish information for and by its community of network administrator users.

Many people within the company created the content, as well as some trusted partners. As the community manager, I reviewed the contributions, worked with the authors, and organized the content.

The content was used by users of the client's technologies, mostly network administrators.

The client used the information in MindTouch to speed up the publishing process and increase product understanding in their most technical users so they could engage more deeply with the product.

  • MindTouch develops its functionality through its API first and then builds its UI on its own API. It's an approach that makes automation and integration much smoother, plus it's just an admirable development practice.
  • MindTouch has very good availability. In fact, I can't even remember the last time I saw an outage.
  • MindTouch supports UNICODE in its editor, so you can include content in just about any language.
  • The support organization is sometimes slow to acknowledge bugs, or even admit that the product behavior you're experiencing is a problem at all.
  • The documentation site is out of date and incomplete. It does not use MindTouch's own search, despite the fact that MindTouch touts its search feature.
  • The sales team can be too aggressive. You feel like you have to be on your guard to make sure they're not selling you things you don't need.

MindTouch is very well suited to information that you want openly available. It is great for distributed authoring of keyword-rich content, which is an easy and authentic way to improve SEO for a company.

MindTouch is not as well suited to information that you want to restrict access to. Permissions do exist on a per-page basis, but there are undocumented ways around them.

February 12, 2016

MindTouch - 1 Year Later

Score 6 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We use MindTouch as our online help center, supporting the use of our software product. We keep all articles and information public so our users do not need to log in to access information. Within our organization we have a team of 3 people primarily responsible for content creation on the Help Center, with 1 acting as the primary editor/publisher. A larger team makes content suggestins and drafts but does not actively use the platform to create or publish.
MindTouch has provided us our first dedicated, searchable help library, and therefore has helped us better support our users.
  • Reusable content: I do love their tool that allows us to create a piece of content, bank it, and then add it to different areas of the site as needed. When it is necessary to update that infromation, for example after we release a product update for our software, we just go to one place and update it there, and the changes are carried through whereever we have used that piece of content.
  • Search: The search tool seems to work quite well. This is the main way our users find information nd we have so far found it to be reliable.
  • Product Issues: We have frequently run into issues where we are trying to do something that seems basic, but there is an issue that we either have to work around, or wait and hope for a fix. For example, we're trying to embed Vimeo videos, but MindTouch continues to strip the full screen option from the Vimeo player. This is a critical feature for our users.
  • Limitations of Support: We have also experienced several instances where we have a problem, but the support team either can't tell us or won't tell us the solution because they consider it an add-on service. In the end we have been able to figure out most of these issues on our own, but it has increased the overhead to support this product. There have also been cases where the solution was not what the engineer implied it would be, which has left us to wonder in some cases how knowledgeable or equipped the support staff is to assist.
  • Design and Customizations: When we analyzed the product, it was described as extremely customizable. For the most part we have found it to be so. However, in critical ways it is not customizable, certain features are tied together, so my recommendation to any buyer is to decide on the final design and functionality for the system, and ensure those customizations are possible. It should be noted we did not use a MindTouch recommended programmer to make our customizations, as we wanted to keep this development in-house. I am not confident that using one of their recommended programmers would have made this process easier, and it most certainly would have increased our cost significantly.
  • Publishing and Privacy: The process MindTouch recommends to set up draft pages for editing and approval is cumbersome. This seems to be a workaround practice rather than something the tool was designed to accommodate.
I think MindTouch is a fine tool for many instances. The text editor is sufficient and the embed options help with publishing media. However, if you are looking to do something with the tool that is not part of their default configuration, I would be wary. I have found their support to be dependent on additional expenditures, so this would also be something to sufficiently budget for based on need.
Score 6 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We are using MindTouch as a platform for both customer facing and departmental documentation. Content creation is primarily sourced by support agents and project leads, then edited and managed by our documentation team. This allows us to ensure that customers get the information they need to effectively work with our products, and give our support team the information they need to troubleshoot issues effectively.
  • The MindTouch platform has one of the most robust WYSIWYG editors I've used, so it's an easy to get new content creators up and running.
  • MindTouch's hierarchical approach forced us to restructure the documentation we already had, which ultimately resulted in a much easier-to-navigate, better-organized solution.
  • MindTouch's support team is readily available to answer questions I've got. Furthermore, they won't hesitate to connect me to the best person for my question, so I'm sure to get a quick answer or resolution.
  • Though MindTouch's search algorithm is leagues ahead of our original home grown solution, the relative lack of customizability has been frustrating for an otherwise open-ended solution.
  • MindTouch's own documentation has a lot of room to improve; there's significant overlap between articles, and it's not always clear what content applies to my use case.
  • The lack of visibility into the feature request process and updates makes it difficult to show traction or next steps for a given issue.
  • Considering the limited support for custom code, MindTouch's API documentation could use some massive improvements. In recent memory we've discovered an error in their API documentation and run into a bug, for something as simple as updating an article. In using the MindTouch API, we've repeatedly been unsure whether an issue was due to our own approach or a bug in their system, and their documentation didn't give us any of the info we needed to solve it ourselves.
MindTouch is an ideal platform for enabling authorship of new content, especially from agents with little time to learn a new platform. Thanks to the open-ended hierarchical structure, MindTouch encourages new companies to think about what information they can present, and how to present that information in digestible chunks. MindTouch's bigger weaknesses show up when there are existing requirements for a documentation solution, or when you want to track user analytics outside of the limited build-in use cases.
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We use MindTouch as our technical documentation website platform. Content is largely created by information developers, but also by customer care (integrators and customer support specialists). Information developers review and publish content to the public-facing areas of our MindTouch site, while customer care members write and publish internal-only articles. MindTouch helps us make our latest technical content available to employees, partners and clients around the globe 24/7 and only requires a web browser. We can easily edit and publish updated information without a lengthy publication cycle. Users can easily search or navigate to the content they need.
  • MindTouch has excellent customer support! Representatives are very responsive and professional. I like having the option to either email support or to call a real person on the phone. Reps will often initiate a screen share to see exactly what the problem is and to help troubleshoot it. Even when the answer is not what I want to hear, support staff will always offer alternative ideas and try to be as helpful as they can.
  • MindTouch has an editing interface that is easy for authors to write and edit their content. It works similarly to Microsoft Word and other document editors, which encourages even casual authors to capture important content without being intimidated by an unfamiliar interface or strange markup language. It also allows advanced authors to see the HTML code when needed. The editor can also be customized if you'd like to add your own custom styles and other functionality.
  • MindTouch allows a great deal of customization in its home page, site headers and footers, CSS, and other site elements. Anyone can do their own basic custom site branding without needing to be a web design expert. But if you have access to a designer (or if you contract with one of MindTouch's partners for site design), you can really personalize the look and feel of your site.
  • MindTouch may not be robust enough to support large or complex documentation sets with lots of versioning and linking. There is no built-in functionality for version management or distinguishing different versions of a guide. Links sometimes are broken when pages are moved, copied, or deleted. There is no reporting available for broken links or identifying all the links that reference a certain page.
  • MindTouch may not fit well in a company with formal content reviews by multiple reviewers. Older versions of MindTouch have no built-in review workflow or features. The newest version does include useful review features, but may fall short if you need to track and respond to comments from reviewers.
  • I find the MindTouch documentation inconsistent in places and have noticed typos and grammatical errors. Perhaps this is because I am a particularly detail-oriented tech writer. :-) I would also like to see more documentation on customizing and writing scripts to add advanced functionality to sites.
I think MindTouch is an excellent tool for a knowledge base type collection of "flat" topics or for technical documentation with simple requirements. If you have a large body of content with complex versioning, linking, or reuse, or if you need a robust review and publishing process, you may need to make some compromises or look at other tools.
Paul Herzog | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We are currently use MindTouch to house internal process documentation, external facing content for third party affiliates, and customer facing content as well. We have draft contributors set up on each internal team responsible for content creation. MindTouch is a great place to store all of our internal processes to ensure they aren't spread across emails and multiple cloud drives.
  • User friendly
  • Custom branding to match our corporate site
  • Search functionality is excellent
  • Content feedback and content analytics helpful for ensuring quality content
  • Tables are static and can be tricky
MindTouch is well suited to replace emails for sharing process documentation, job aides, etc., as you are able to version track and ensure that employees are getting the most up to date information.
February 09, 2016

A Mindtouch review

Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized

Currently, Mindtouch is being used to consolidate multiple knowledge repositories into a single point of access. It is our goal to promote the sharing of knowledge, research, technical documentation and standards by allowing all SOM employees the ability to contribute content without restriction. Ideally, this mentality promotes greater engagement and better knowledge sharing.

Presently, we have team leaders who will be responsible for content creation, but in the future, we should have content being contributed from any level employee who is knowledgeable in the subject matter.

The Knowledge Management Group will be responsible for distribution. As they strive to find better ways to present the data and knowledge collected throughout the firm, Mindtouch has the potential to be the fundamental platform used. We envision that all SOM employees will benefit from the consumption of the content within Mindtouch.

The main business problem that Mindtouch should address is the number of disconnected knowledge repositories that currently exist. We envision Mindtouch to be a single platform, accessible anywhere, that SOM users can get access to the information they need.

  • Promote and rank the quality of content. This enables authors to create better, more applicable content.
  • Search. The search mechanism within Mindtouch is strong and allows users to locate information more quickly.
  • Content classification and content metrics. Content can easily be classified to guide the user into a more detailed focus. The backend metrics are also useful to understand the usefulness of the existing content.
  • Provide content classification examples of other industries. Beyond products and sales approach.
  • Provide more Dekiscript examples and promote these examples. For the non-developer grasping Dekiscript can be a challenge. Having a solid repository of examples helps promote understanding.
  • Add more system metrics. The more analysis is available to admins and authors the better.
  • Provide more docs around site customization and CSS. Be upfront with what is possible and what is not.
This totally depends on the type of content that an organization wants to organize and classify. It also depends on the audience. Mindtouch is flexible enough to be used in almost any scenario, but it requires a significant amount of planning and thought regarding content structure. I would say that Mindtouch is only successful when a proper data classification and architecture is applied.
February 09, 2016

Grow your membership

Jeff Sherr | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We use it as a wikipedia for legal resources and links to training videos for our state public defender system as well as the National Association for Public Defense.

I oversee the content creation for Kentucky and work with a team on the national content.

MindTouch allows us to share resources, manuals, pleadings and training links with over 11,000 public defenders and staff.
  • Easy to add content
  • User privileges
  • Tracking changes
  • Email notifications
  • Please continue to improve search
  • Improve forum functions
MindTouch is best for sharing content. We haven't had much luck in using the features to engage users. That may be particular to our audience.
February 08, 2016

MindTouch Review

Lisa Vernon | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 5 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
My company utilizes Mindtouch as a repository of help files for our customers. We refer customers to our "Help Center" which is powered by Mindtouch.
  • The way knowledge articles can be organized is ok.
  • How search results are populated is too complicated to understand and not really useful. Would love to be able to understand how to "promote" an article to first place, second place, etc., in the search results at will. This process should be more straight forward. Every time we've tried to inquire about how search results are populated we get answers like "well...partially by key words, sometimes in the title, sometimes in the tagging, etc....". Never just a simple answer and certainly not explained in a way that is useful.
  • Support follow-up is not sufficient. We have experienced "search" problems no less than 5 times since Aug of 2015. Each time it is the same issue and we contact MindToch to let them know the issue and that it is preventing our customers from getting information. Each time, they say they will look into it and then what seems like days/weeks later we get answers like "it's fixed now." Each time they want the same screen shot. Each time we're told they are experiencing difficulties on their end - and then there is no real follow-up regarding what the specific issue is/was. This is frustrating as we want some guarantee that the issue will not continue in the future.
I think in instances where you want specific search results to appear - MindTouch is not the answer. If your expectation is that your customers will "rate/rank" articles and that is how they should appear in order of ranking in your search results - maybe MindTouch is for you.
Graham Mackie | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Mindtouch is being used to provide self service support to our global customer base. The content is created and maintained in-house by my support team and allows our customers to access a wealth of technical material about our products 24/7.
  • Provides an easy to use repository for complex technical information.
  • Supports complex and consistent formatting and document layouts across a variety of browsers and platforms.
  • Allows users to download PDF versions of the content to take away when there is no internet at the location they are planning to use it e.g. race track or proving ground.
  • The search engine still needs improvement as not all searches seem to get the right article first or even second time.
  • Managing multilingual versions is challenging and needs some work.
It works well in our environment where our customers are mainly male and aged 25-45 so they like a self service approach rather than calling or sending e-mails
The content can be seen at www.racelogic.support

February 04, 2016

MindTouch

Corey McDonald | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 6 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
MindTouch is used in our organization to manage our internal knowledge base about our processes and product. We use this in training as well as a reference tool for configuration of our product and managing of our customers. We have a point of contact on our team that manages the content and any changes necessary. Our customer support engineers use the information to reference how to configure our product.
  • MindTouch is quite easy to navigate both as a user and as a content creator.
  • Generation of content in MindTouch is relatively easy to do.
  • The process of giving feedback on content to content creators is very easy.
  • I would have liked to get more knowledge of best practices of customers using MindTouch. I was a little lost at the beginning trying to figure out the best way to organize things and how to use the system.
  • The support I have received seems a bit distant. It would be nice to have a dedicated support person to help me out that knows how I use the product and can help me throughout the process. It would be nice if they gave me feedback on how I set things up and gave me ideas on things I could improve.
  • Managing user profiles is not very straight forward in MindTouch. It is hard to get it right the first time to ensure everyone has the right access and the access of the whole group is correct. I basically had to keep trying things until it seemed to work.
MindTouch seems well suited for tech savvy users that do not need help from support. It requires a dedicated resource to manage the system. It is fairly easy for end users to learn to use.
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