ClickHelp vs. MadCap Flare

ClickHelp is great for both big and small documentation teams. The platform is not too complex to overwhelm a small team, and neither is it too simple for a well-advanced documentation team. Scale ClickHep depending on your documentation needs, and the features are simple to understand. I also appreciate the extensive documentation that is available for new users to ClickHelp. The ClickHelp knowledgebase provides answers to every scenario, use case, feature, and functionality. The ClickHelp support team is also very responsive.

Incentivized

MadCap Flare has its problems, but it serves our team well as an authoring software. This would not be the case if we needed to regularly collaborate on articles, as Flare is prone to conflict issues when another person dares to breathe near an open topic. When working individually, though, it's fine. I'd love to see improvements to design, performance, and stability, but Flare remains one of the best softwares on the market for our needs as an authoring team. MadCap Central is well-suited to internal reviewing when every member is comfortable with Flare (the errors it tends to introduce set aside). SMEs, though, tend to find it hard to use. It's cluttered, some styles don't render, and it just seems like a failed attempt to reproduce Google Docs. I'd love to see improvements there, to help get our SMEs to want to use Central.

Incentivized

• Seamless publishing process for documentation.
• Easy to use WYSIWYG editor for creating content.
• Easy customization of HTML and CSS elements.

Incentivized

• Organizing articles via an overall project outline.
• Syncing with teammates.

Incentivized

• The See Also element should be able to automatically update when a new topic is added. Currently, we have to manually remove and re-add the element to do that.
• Ability to host image files externally (eg. S3, Dropbox), like it is done for videos. This will help save storage.
• Image files from imported projects are always duplicated, perhaps a bug, but it needs to be looked into.

Incentivized

• Reviewing by internal users / Feedback from customers
• CSS - easier to use an external tool
• Skin styles and management

MadCap Flare is in desperate need of an overall redesign. It relies heavily on dozens and dozens of tiny buttons that contain dozens of nested features. Clicking the wrong button can cause your software to freeze and crash. Building targets can be an absolute mystery, as far as all the files involved. It also has a tendency to freeze and crash. There's typically a huge learning curve for new hires who've never used it--nothing is intuitive.

Incentivized

ClickHelp provides an extensive array of features compared to what we used previously. The WYSIWYG editor is so simple, yet brings with it really cool content editing elements. Publishing content is straightforward with ClickHelp. I can publish a part of a document for partial updates, or create a new publication. I get to host multiple versions of one product documentation based on the software versions we support. The analytics provided is also very insightful.

Incentivized

MadCap Flare provides for proper single-sourcing of content for an array of needs. Wikis are incredibly limited, static and hard to manage, and content quickly becomes obsolete.

• We are able to cater to all our end-users regardless of the software version they are using, simply because we are able to provide multiple product documentation versions.
• Our documentation publishing time was reduced significantly due to the smooth process on ClickHelp.
• With one platform where all our product documentation can be housed, we are expanding technical documentation to other products.

Incentivized

• Negative: Wasted hundreds of hours troubleshooting madcap bugs or quirks.
• Positive: We have a robust Help website we can update with ease.

Incentivized