MadCap Flare vs. RWS Tridion Sites

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

SDL Tridion works well for organizations with a large website with a lot of content to continuously create and manage. The use of page templates and component presentations makes creating new pages fairly straightforward. It can be a little cumbersome when it comes to trying to "break from the norm" and build web pages that are outside of the template-driven format; however, there are ways around this to create pages that break away from the normal page-template format of the website. In this regard, SDL Tridion can be pretty flexible, allowing us to create a lot of custom functionality to keep up with constantly changing web trends.

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

Incentivized

• Makes it easy to spin up a new site quickly
• Allows for numerous users to work on the same site without conflicting with each other's changes
• Allows you to unpublish changes or revert to old versions if you make a mistake
• Allows you to time publishing actions (for example, you can set it to happen overnight)

Incentivized

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

• If you are hoping to orbit the planet with a CMS, Tridion is built to leave the solar system. It is a very very powerful solution built for very serious enterprise businesses in hope of robust capabilities, which could be good or bad.
• Supporting business users is a hefty lift and requires significant training and regular retraining, and support.
• It's a niche solution that originally came out of Europe and was largely unknown in America. But today it's growing in popularity across the United States.
• Finding capable support, and developers specializing in Tridion capabilities isn't always easy. And 8 years ago it was nearly impossible, involving finding European developer support shops in order to get the assistance needed. This is changing though and American developer firms are becoming more widely available.

Incentivized

I am giving this a semi-high rating because we have already got Tridion up and running and we are still in the process of moving the sites over to Tridion. It is unlikely we will be moving things to a new CMS AGAIN in the near future as the cost to get Tridion was high.

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

The editor user interface is very user friendly and in-site editing makes simple updates fast and easy. The extensibility of Tridion is a big plus and the ability to add our own options into the default Tridion interface helps us integrate with external systems. Finally, the user permissions and security system helps us deploy it within our large organization.

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.

Interwoven teamsites, Documentum, Adobe - teamsites and documentum are old and limited. Adobe rocks but I like where I am and Tridion does a lot of the same things. No need to reinvent the wheel or move to a lateral product.

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

Incentivized

• SDL is a very complex system. Creating custom components by external vendors turned out to be expensive.
• The learning curve is very slow, so training takes a lot of time and cost.
• The revamped corporate site looks clean, modern, and is mobile-friendly.

Incentivized