Helpjuice vs. Shelf

Helpjuice is an excellent platform when you’re looking to modernize the way you create documentation. Many companies, especially larger corporations, are stuck in the past, utilizing PDFs and share drives to house and access procedures. With Helpjuice, we now have a centralized web-based platform that provides everything from analytic functions to standard templates, user-specific features, and more. My team specifically chose Helpjuice during the pandemic, when all the tech writers from my company (including myself) were moved into a single team. We needed to find a platform that would allow us to align our publishing standards while also moving us forward in the way we publish procedures. That platform was ultimately Helpjuice. Helpjuice certainly offers a variety of features, but one of the few drawbacks is that it does not incorporate or seem to integrate with any specific ticketing tool. While this isn’t an issue for me or my team, as we are required to use a specific tool internally, I can imagine that someone looking for a complete package with multi-step workflows and an intake process would not find Helpjuice adequate.

Incentivized

• We were looking for a publishing feature where there would be some required oversight.
• We have really enjoyed the AI Tool of Wizardshot as it has helped reduce the time spent writing articles.
• The analytic dashboard to see who has contributed what and which articles are the most clicked on is wonderful

Incentivized

• Article feedback disappears when resolved, would like to see a integration with Jira which we now use to track feedback changes.
• Analytics for the AI search would be appreciated. Currently we have no idea how many people are actually using this feature.
• A way to train the AI search bot. Currently there is no way to up/down vote answers or indicate how accurate or helpful an answer is.

Incentivized

HelpJuice is really amazing as a starter knowledge base vendor. They have great customer service and the ability to customize your website is endless. However, it is difficult to scale up.

Incentivized

Prior to using Helpjuice, I was using Microsoft Publisher to create all the training materials and manuals for multiple divisions within my company. It was awful. It would lag whenever I opened larger manuals, it operated like software from the late 90s, it was not intuitive, from a design perspective, and after migrating to a MacBook Pro as my work computer, I discovered that the program was NEVER created for Mac OS, requiring me to run Windows on my MacBook whenever I had to update any procedures that hadn’t yet migrated to Helpjuice. What a nightmare.

Incentivized

• As I mentioned, my productivity in terms of working around issues, asking for help, etc. is greatly reduced on a DAILY basis.
• I spend as much time finding bugs and filing tickets as I do writing content, and this was especially true at the beginning.
• The Doc Center looks nice, so you'd never know the pain behind it.