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Good for a one-person documentation/knowledge base shop
Updated October 20, 2017

Good for a one-person documentation/knowledge base shop

Nina Wishbow | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Software Version

MindTouch Responsive

Overall Satisfaction with MindTouch

We use MindTouch for our help website and context-sensitive help in our product user interface.
  • The MindTouch service has been more reliable than other, similar products I've used.
  • It also is easy to customize the appearance and layout of pages once you're familiar with how the product is structured.
  • It allows embedding of videos, which we don't do very much of at present but would like to do more of.
  • Surprisingly for a content delivery company, I found the documentation to be very sparse, so at first it was learning by trial and error.
  • The product is also not very flexible at the highest level. You have to fit your topic structure into their framework, which can be somewhat limiting.
  • MindTouch has not been particularly good as a review tool. People in my company have objected to using it, so I have to copy and paste new articles into Google Docs, which has a better review function.
  • That said, as a one-person documentation department, MindTouch has been a reasonably good platform for me. It has all of the features I need to create a help website and in-product help. Since it's a web service, it's easy for me to stay in synch with engineering without the overhead of working inside the produce code base.
  • My biggest objection to it so far is that its export to PDF feature is not as advanced as I would like. It's labor intensive to get a nice looking PDF from MindTouch.
MindTouch is particularly good if you have some HTML/CSS skill, so that you can customize their defaults. It also is well suited to a smaller documentation set and for a "mobile-first" strategy. Their display framework, which appears a set of boxes set in a grid on the page, can introduce usability issues for large or complex documentation sets because it forces the user to drill down into topics instead of being able to scan long lists of topics in a tree.

Using MindTouch

Evaluating MindTouch and Competitors

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.