MadCap Software, headquartered in La Jolla, offers MadCap Flare, a help authoring and technical writing tool featuring onboarding and support from MadCap, and a set of modules for designing advanced guides, aids, and web or application help aids.
$1,500
per year
Paligo
Score 9.4 out of 10
N/A
Paligo, headquartered in Stockholm, offers their component content management system (CCMS), supporting the creation and publishing of technical documentation and help systems.
$4,800
per year
Pricing
MadCap Flare
Paligo
Editions & Modules
MadCap Central
$1,500
per year
MadCap Flare
$1,999
per year
MadCap AMS
$2,999
per year
Professional
from $4800
per year
Business
Contact Sales
per year
Enterprise
Contact Sales
per year
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
MadCap Flare
Paligo
Free Trial
Yes
No
Free/Freemium Version
No
No
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
No
No
Entry-level Setup Fee
No setup fee
Optional
Additional Details
Includes a 12-month Platinum-level Maintenance Plan.
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.
Paligo is particularly well suited for developing similar document sets for multiple products or product lines. It is not a page layout application, so don't expect the same capabilities as popular applications for graphics-heavy documentation. With some up-front time developing good layouts, however, Paligo does manage to create very usable PDF output for customer-facing documents.
The review mode is super convenient. Comparing a snapshot of the previous versions with the current one clearly outlines the respective changes and reduces the necessary content to review tremendously.
The option to reuse text fragments is another handy feature. Text fragments will be updated whenever the original text fragment is altered is also extremely helpful.
Managing a content's structure was never easier. An intuitive drag & drop functionality allows you to design your document's structure however you like.
You can also fork content, in addition to reuse text fragments. This is another helpful option that no longer requires you to create repetetive chapters over and over.
The amount of CSS/JS required to customize a site's appearance can be cumbersome
Product documentation can be lacking, specifically with integrations; in some cases, support offered no real help when trying to solve a problem with an integrated service
Some features require extensive development experience to use, which can sometimes be an obstacle to less-experienced team members
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.
Generally, I'm very happy with Paligo and the productivity gains that I get from using it. There are a few arbitrary limitations on structure, and when applying conditional formatting, that I don't really understand. Unlinking / editing reused text uses this broadly inscrutible colour-coding that I just hate. It would be nice to double-click a component, make edits, then respond to a popup asking if I want to confirm the edit for all linked content, or unlink this instance. Likewise converting from an informal topic insertion to duplicates of its raw contents.
So far, support has been excellent. They reply very quickly and give in-depth replies. Solutions advisors and account managers have also been very responsive and clearly focused on creating the best experience for implementation. And that's only when the answers can't be found in excellent product documentation. The online training class and tutorials are also very good.
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.
Paligo gives you the benefits of a fully integrated XML content database, making the whole package much easier to setup and use than a system using Oxygen. It's much easier to set up and far less expensive than Adobe's XML offerings. The cost is comparable to MadCap, but all our content was already in Docbook, so the transition to Paligo was nearly seamless.
Positive - has allowed us to create templates for integration documentation. this has greatly sped up our process for creating articles for each of our integrations, which we haven't had up to this point.
Positive - has created greater alignment between the self-service content team and the marketing team.
Positive - has introduced a review and feedback workflow for our content creation that was not available in ZenDesk. The feedback directly in the app allows me to pinpoint comments about text and other elements so my writers can address them directly and become better writers in the long term.
Negative - long ramp up time due to a completely different approach to creating content. My team was training in early August and we have not yet published our new help center (though, to be fair, it is a lot of content that had to be completely rewritten)
Positive - any UI updates only require updating a single image, which has saved us dozens of hours of updating already.
