MindTouch

MindTouch offers a unique knowledge and information management tool that was different enough from traditional knowledge bases and advanced enough to not be a Wiki while allowing CRM integration and APIs for customization. MindTouch as a company is focused on making their product great where as other vendors treat this space as a bundle or checkbox feature without being robust enough to replace a knowledge base and PDF manuals.

I did not select MindTouch at my current company, but I was looking into it at my previous position. It has many of the useful features of the more traditional publications tools (RoboHelp, Frame) with the ease of web deployment of other tools (HelpIQ). It has some limitations (rigid structure, lack of PDF support come to mind), but all of these tools have their strengths and weaknesses.

We selected MindTouch because:
- it could support multiple products inside of one instance
- it could support both external and internal users with conditionalized access to content
- it was cloud-based, which enabled users from different offices to work on the same project
- it was reasonable robust in tagging, content categorization, conditionalization, etc.

I will be brief. DealerTeam is built upon Salesforce and we try to support native apps. We used Desk.com first for basic Help Ticket management. The product did not satisfy how our customers were looking for information. We upgraded to Service Cloud with Knowledge Base and spent one year writing content and developing our support agency. Again, our customers were upset about submitting help tickets and waiting for answers. They wanted access to self-help while working with a customer. Today we continue to use Service Cloud with MindTouch integration and have found complete success. There is simply no other solution I know of that is a flexible and easy to use as MindTouch when it come to providing customer success and product support.

Each suite offered a variety of features; however, MindTouch had powerful SAP integration and as a hosted solution the value of ownership was nearly immediate. Put on top of the API and CSS options for customization MindTouch was the top solution for our documentation visibility initiative. Another value point for MindTouch was the implementation services that were purchased. The service provided best practice and ensured our timely and cost sensitive go live.

MindTouch has a high degree of user freedom regarding customization, offers a quick-responding support team, and keeps their site up-to-date and modern. The combination of these abilities made MindTouch a fine choice that could suit our needs.

In my view, MindTouch is hands down the industry leader when it comes to documentation and publishing products. None of the other products I have used provide such an intuitive interface for single-source content creation. MadCap Flare has a steep learning curve and requires builds to generate content in the format you need prior to publishing. RoboHelp also requires builds to create content, which again leaves you with the task of publishing the generated content. MindTouch is the only product that allows me to instantly publish content and maintain that content in real time. MindTouch also provides the most intuitive method for controlling access to sensitive data by allowing me to limit content access by user group. As an evergreen SaaS company, we need a product that evolves as quickly as we do. MindTouch is that product.

MindTouch is by far better than Zendesk. Article management and editing are much better and richer (more than a basic font. MindTouch has a better interface and better design options out of the box. MindTouch has a dedicated customer success management [team] and support from the basic package that really wants to help you around the clock.

We wanted a SaaS solution that was always online. In the past we used RoboHelp, but the whole idea of having to compile the help project before publishing seemed rather backwards at a point. Mind, we have not reviewed later installments of RoboHelp.

With MindTouch we can edit stuff live - we use this a lot to fix smaller inaccuracies in our docs based on support feedback, and it's all fast and accurate.

Zendesk has a nice documentation feature for smaller projects, but we found that with the sheer volume of documentation that we produce, nothing could measure up to MindTouch.

N/A. It has been several years since I evaluated competitors. I'm vaguely aware of Zendesk and am in process of evaluating not - not with the intention to replace MindTouch, just to keep up with trends in the industry. I would consider a move if I ever felt that MindTouch was not keeping up.

MindTouch wasn't the cheapest option we considered, but it was the best value. It gave us the most features, controls, flexibility, and growth opportunity for the money we paid for it. We did not need a ticketing solution, and a lot of the offerings we evaluated were stronger in content areas but were tied directly to ticking solutions we didn't need.

MindTouch is user-intuitive and mobile-friendly

We considered:

• Home-built solution
• Self-hosted solution using out-of-the-box libraries for API documentation
• Wordpress, Joomla, and other light-weight CMS/blog solutions for API and other documentation
• Knowledge bases built into existing/prospective customer service / ticketing systems: HelpScout, Desk.com, Freshdesk, etc.

We chose MindTouch because our management was already familiar with the solution, having implemented it before. Also, it's feature set was more robust than any of the other solutions we looked at, and has the customer service/support staff to help us get up and running quickly. We also appreciated the enterprise-level features made available, like custom SSL certs and domain names, branding, and customizability.

MindTouch is not as sophisticated as those editors but MindTouch is the only one that generates HTML. The other editors provide additional, advanced functionality, are more bulletproof, and require the services of an experienced technical writer. MindTouch, however, is simpler and covers most if not all of the bases that writers use every day.

SDL's product at the time did not elegantly handle content other than DITA.

Actually, when we evaluated MinfTouch it was evident that we didn't really need to perform due diligence against other solution providers. It was apparent from the get-go they were the perfect fit for the problems we were trying to solve.

We selected MindTouch after being given assurances it met all of our needs. Whilst I am sure it can do this, it was not made apparent the technical ability required to be able to achieve this and given the choice again we would not have selected MindTouch.

We compared MindTouch to Salesforce Community and Salesforce Knowledge and we ultimately picked MindTouch because of the increased usability.

MindTouch was the first and only product we used, so I do not know what other companies provide services similar to MindTouch.

We have not used a competing alternative, and are still working to better implement this solution.

We were on Salesforce.com's KB and did not like the interface and the difficulty with article creation. The advantage of SF was that we could assign articles to individuals for review. I feel that is missing with MindTouch. It makes article creation workflows very difficult.

MindTouch makes finding specific content easy and efficient.

We previously used MadCap Flare. Flare is amazing for its single sourcing capabilities, where MindTouch is lacking. But with Flare we had to do an entire build and publish each time (which took hours).

We looked at Happy Fox, Salesforce Communities, Fuze, MadCap Flare, etc. MindTouch won out because of its Salesforce integration and the fact that it was a hosted solution with everything included in one price.