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MadCap Flare

Score9 out of 10

17 Reviews and Ratings

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What is MadCap Flare?

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.

Categories & Use Cases

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Reviews

What users are saying about MadCap Flare.
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MadCap Flare and MadCap Central

Sarah NewmanView profile
Senior Technical Product Manager in Product Management at Objective Corporation (1001-5000 employees employees)

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

MadCap Flare is our primary authoring tool for online help and guides. With it we create a single-source for all content, for easy and efficient re-use. We can maintain branches of content, so can create new content without affecting the current online help. We publish and host the content in MadCap Central. We use the analytics available in MadCap Central to monitor the use of our various help systems and to identify search terms being used, to update the help for greater accuracy of terminology or to identify useful topics to add.

Pros

  • Single-sourcing
  • Branching (GIT)
  • Publishing and hosting

Cons

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

Return on Investment

  • We haven't measured this specifically

Usability

Alternatives Considered

Atlassian Confluence

Powerful tool delivers maximum features for reasonable price

⚙ Kate Montressor ⚙View profile
Sr Technical Documentation Manager in Product Management at Equinix (5001-10,000 employees employees)

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Our team writes the technical documentation for all products that our company offers. We like the flexibility and control MadCap Flare gives us. We use Flare connected to Git, so we can take advantage of seamlessly sharing files, branching and merging, and content management. We take advantage of many Flare features, especially the powerful search engine and the ability to create filtered searches. We like the ability to customize our docs with our own javascript. Single-sourcing is easy with the ability to output to multiple formats, and using Snippets and Variables.

Pros

  • single-source features
  • powerful search engine
  • easy to publish to our website

Cons

  • We always need one more thing, but are able to adapt using our own code

Most Important Features

  • Search
  • TOCs
  • Ability to import small projects into one large project

Return on Investment

  • None - it's very economical, and we don't need engineers to maintain it. We can design and update within our team.

Works, technically.

Incentivized
Cameron Michael RhoadsView profile
Technical Writer at Unqork (201-500 employees employees)

Pros

  • Snippets, variables, and conditioning are all good
  • Once you set it up, updating Help websites is easy.

Cons

  • I use it on a mac with windows parallel and it can be so buggy and laggy.
  • I would love it if the software was entirely cloud-based, like Google Docs.
  • Reviewing in Central is not a good experience, need better review functionality.

Most Important Features

  • Variables
  • Conditioning
  • The Help website

Return on Investment

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

Alternatives Considered

Google Drive

Other Software Used

Google Drive, Snagit

One of the best options on the market, but still plagued with myriad minor issues.

Incentivized
Verified User
Team Lead (201-500 employees employees)

Pros

  • Using MadCap Flare to create and publish our in-product help is much easier than using the MadCap ZenDesk Connect plug-in to publish to ZenDesk (which we used previously). It allows for more customization (with a lot of know-how) and a much easier publishing process.
  • MadCap Central works well as a source control option with MadCap Flare, aside from bugs that arise. It's fully integrated with MadCap Flare, making it easy to send files for review to other colleagues.
  • MadCap Flare has many single-sourcing tools, I'm a particular fan of snippets and conditioning. Using snippets to create article templates (then converting to text) has been a valuable tool in improving consistency and efficiency.
  • I love being able to set customizable keyboard shortcuts, including using macros to assign shortcuts to complex actions. For example, I've been able to reassign a standard Ctrl + B shortcut to apply our custom bolding style, as opposed to default local bolding. Saves lots of time and effort to use my own shortcuts.

Cons

  • I've encountered a lot of buggy behavior with MadCap Central as a reviewing platform. On return to MadCap Flare, spaces will randomly vanish, locally-formatted red text will appear where annotations were, and variables will vanish. It can be hugely frustrating for errors to be introduced as part of the reviewing process.
  • MadCap Flare can be unstable. I am using it on Parallels on a Mac (sadly it's not supported for MacOS). It tends to freeze when syncing, crash if I scroll too quickly, and cause all sorts of other "oh god I hope I saved before that crashed" moments.
  • With an 8 member team, it's not uncommon to accidentally run into merge conflicts. The conflict manager tool is nigh-impossible to understand. I think we all just pick an option to accept or reject all changes, and pray.
  • The support system is very rigid as far as enforcing price vs access tiers, which can be frustrating when you're looking for support. For example, one person has Platinum support for their license key, so only they're authorized for phone support. Tying support to individual license keys without taking into consideration how many licenses our company pays for, and just giving us all the same level of support, is a bit bizarre.
  • MadCap Flare very much feels like a software begging for a total redesign. New features get jammed into an already-crowded toolbar. There's so many buttons that it's hard to find the ones you need. It needs a modern overhaul as well as overall performance upgrades.
  • I'd love to see improvements in MadCap Central as a reviewing tool. More support for rendering custom styles, being able to hide or show conditioned text, fixing the issue of it introducing errors, and making it overall a more pleasant reviewing experience for our SMEs.

Most Important Features

  • Single-sourcing, particularly conditioning and snippets.
  • Support for building and publishing our in-product help.
  • Topic-based authoring.

Return on Investment

  • MadCap Flare makes it easy for our entire team to work on the same project.
  • MadCap Central is a mainstay of our reviewing process.

Usability

MadCap is a good option in a field that doesn't have many outstanding alternatives

Incentivized
Verified User
Employee (201-500 employees employees)

Pros

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

Cons

  • The software is often quite buggy, and certain bugs seem to date back nearly a decade and still persist.
  • Customizing shortcuts is often an ordeal.

Most Important Features

  • Conditioning
  • Variables
  • Snippets

Return on Investment

  • Saves time by offering a way to sync documents with other teammates.
  • Often requires time to troubleshoot random errors or bugs that pop up with seemingly no cause.

Alternatives Considered

Google Drive

Other Software Used

Google Drive

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