One of the best options on the market, but still plagued with myriad minor issues.
April 09, 2021
One of the best options on the market, but still plagued with myriad minor issues.
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with MadCap Software
MadCap Flare is our primary authoring software as a technical writing team of 8. We use MadCap Central as our source control service, as well as for reviewing internally and for SME reviews. We use MadCap Flare to build and publish our in-product help, as well, which is accessible to all clients as well as the company internally.
- Using MadCap Flare to create and publish our in-product help is much easier than using the MadCap ZenDesk Connect plug-in to publish to ZenDesk (which we used previously). It allows for more customization (with a lot of know-how) and a much easier publishing process.
- MadCap Central works well as a source control option with MadCap Flare, aside from bugs that arise. It's fully integrated with MadCap Flare, making it easy to send files for review to other colleagues.
- MadCap Flare has many single-sourcing tools, I'm a particular fan of snippets and conditioning. Using snippets to create article templates (then converting to text) has been a valuable tool in improving consistency and efficiency.
- I love being able to set customizable keyboard shortcuts, including using macros to assign shortcuts to complex actions. For example, I've been able to reassign a standard Ctrl + B shortcut to apply our custom bolding style, as opposed to default local bolding. Saves lots of time and effort to use my own shortcuts.
- I've encountered a lot of buggy behavior with MadCap Central as a reviewing platform. On return to MadCap Flare, spaces will randomly vanish, locally-formatted red text will appear where annotations were, and variables will vanish. It can be hugely frustrating for errors to be introduced as part of the reviewing process.
- MadCap Flare can be unstable. I am using it on Parallels on a Mac (sadly it's not supported for MacOS). It tends to freeze when syncing, crash if I scroll too quickly, and cause all sorts of other "oh god I hope I saved before that crashed" moments.
- With an 8 member team, it's not uncommon to accidentally run into merge conflicts. The conflict manager tool is nigh-impossible to understand. I think we all just pick an option to accept or reject all changes, and pray.
- The support system is very rigid as far as enforcing price vs access tiers, which can be frustrating when you're looking for support. For example, one person has Platinum support for their license key, so only they're authorized for phone support. Tying support to individual license keys without taking into consideration how many licenses our company pays for, and just giving us all the same level of support, is a bit bizarre.
- MadCap Flare very much feels like a software begging for a total redesign. New features get jammed into an already-crowded toolbar. There's so many buttons that it's hard to find the ones you need. It needs a modern overhaul as well as overall performance upgrades.
- I'd love to see improvements in MadCap Central as a reviewing tool. More support for rendering custom styles, being able to hide or show conditioned text, fixing the issue of it introducing errors, and making it overall a more pleasant reviewing experience for our SMEs.
- Single-sourcing, particularly conditioning and snippets.
- Support for building and publishing our in-product help.
- Topic-based authoring.
- MadCap Flare makes it easy for our entire team to work on the same project.
- MadCap Central is a mainstay of our reviewing process.
Do you think MadCap Flare delivers good value for the price?
Not sure
Are you happy with MadCap Flare's feature set?
Yes
Did MadCap Flare live up to sales and marketing promises?
I wasn't involved with the selection/purchase process
Did implementation of MadCap Flare go as expected?
Yes
Would you buy MadCap Flare again?
Yes
Using MadCap Software
Pros | Cons |
---|---|
Feel confident using | Do not like to use Unnecessarily complex Difficult to use Requires technical support Not well integrated Inconsistent Slow to learn Cumbersome Lots to learn |