Impressions of a long-time MindToucher
Updated November 02, 2017

Impressions of a long-time MindToucher

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

Software Version

MindTouch Responsive

Overall Satisfaction with MindTouch

Most of the time it's very usable. Managing multiple versions of documentation for the same product has proved challenging at times though, as have multiple revisions to the same page.
Support is very friendly and I can tell they want to do the right thing, but I frequently communicate with support personnel that don't really understand our problem the first (or second) time I describe an issue.
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.
  • 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
  • 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.
  • Time to publication can be very quick, provided there are not multiple changes in flight at the same time for the same page.
  • We have seen a tremendous increase in customer traffic and SEO.
  • MindTouch allows us to custom-brand the look and feel of our site to match our company's marketing and branding. This instills trust in our content.
  • The relative simplicity of the platform enabled us to hire the best people and best writers we could find, without worrying so much about specific past expertise in a complicated publishing platform.
Yes - We replaced an old wiki. MindTouch is head and shoulders above our previous tool.
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.