MadCap Central Reviews & Product Details

The variety of outputs, content re-use, variables, and general flexibility in theming.

The ability to build many sites from a single project on MadCap Central using vanity URLs and document IDs provides powerful integration tools.

The built-in reporting tools are pretty good too.

MadCap support is awesome, the response times are great, plus everyone I was in touch with was knowledgeable and friendly. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Central itself is very limited in scope, this leads to convoluted workflows.

The disjointed nature of Central projects (flare + lingo + central) means that you need to switch from one application to the other quite often, re-compile to verify, etc. especially when you work on a multi-lingual project. It becomes a problem when someone reports a very minor error, like a typo, you have to go into Flare, correct the error, go into Lingo re-translate the line where the error was in the language(s), then go back to Flare to re-upload then rebuild and republish.

Assigning IDs to documents for permanent links is error-prone and time-consuming (this is done in flare).

The desktop applications I use tend to crash, so you need to save often (the person who trained me on it internally made a point to mention this repeatedly).

The review process cannot be managed entirely online, you will need to go to Flare to close and accept changes no matter what.

Overall it feels like I am working in a different time period, stuck between 1996 and 2005, working on disjointed desktop applications that will rarely provide the complete information set you need to quickly identify a problem, where the workflow is hindered by modal dialog boxes and going HTML/online is an afterthought. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Its online, which makes working with other writers easier, however, this only replaces what Flare never did very well with Git Integration Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Its missing a lot of functionality that was in Flare

Its buggy, my license stopped working 2 months after it was issued

The price is too high for a half baked product Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

The best thing about MadCap Central is being able to send topics for review and have the contributors make their changes without having to use Flare. It is also great to have the ability to upload our projects to Central and control who has access. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

The downside of Central is not being able to send a complete project for review. At the moment, we only publish PDF output and the SMEs are the reviewers, so for them to view the content by topic can be inconvenient for them. The would rather see the whole rather than the parts. Also, I wanted to make use of the taskboard, but it has become more admin, as I am the only writer and our team uses Azure DevOps. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Things I like about Flare:

* Powerful single sourcing: In general, Flare breaks documentation down to essential components (such as topics, TOCs, layouts) which you can manage separately and then assemble as you wish. Using multiple TOCs, I can easily create several different doc targets using different output formats and adjust my content to match target-specific requirements (from scope to specific wording or variable values).

* Variables are handy for things like company and product names. You can even use variables inside references.

* Text snippets allow for flexible content reuse.

* Conditional tags are great for "conditionalizing" anything from entire topics to specific paragraphs or even words. You can then control which conditions are included into your output (or even what's shown at a topic level).

* Flare has a great editor, which neatly visualizes the underlying HTML structure of a document and enables me to work with tags (move them around, apply classes, and so on). Once you get used to it, it's really hard to go back to things like Robohelp.

* Flare + Central (online hub) provide a collaboration infrastructure that we use both amongst our doc team (git environment for source control) and for reviews (our product owners have a separate account which they use to review updated topics online).

* Flare provides several out-of-the-box HTML5 layouts that serve as a good starting point for new projects: https://www.madcapsoftware.com/downloads/madcap-flare-project-templates/

* Flare has powerful PDF layout tools - I set it up once to match our branding, and then it's push one button - get a ready-made PDF.

* Madcap's support is reasonably quick and never failed to help me out so far. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Things I don't like about Flare:

* This is not so much a critique of Flare, but rather our current CSS template setup. While Flare provides an internal CSS editor, it requires Flare-specific expertise to set it up properly. If your CSS comes from a design team not familiar with Flare, you might run into issues.

* Sort of related to the previous item - Flare doesn't provide flexible enough tools that would enable me to modify the HTML5 layout. It's not impossible - but it requires under-the-hood tinkering and expertise that's not covered by out-of-the-box tools.

* When sending topics for review in Central, I cannot apply any conditional tags - content goes out full, as is, which is not always helpful. Plus, it doesn't allow reviewers to edit text snippets inside topics (only separately). Sometimes I prefer to put my edits into a Word file and send it out to reviewers instead of Central.

* This may be a minor gripe, but Flare doesn't automatically unbind links to topics that are out of scope in your current output (and even Adobe Robohelp could do that, I miss this simple feature).

* Flare doesn't handle large image maps well (it resizes them without resizing the link areas).

* Finally, a strategic consideration: authoring content in Flare requires a desktop application, as opposed to having a web-based option for contributors who are not trained technical writers. This applies to all help authoring tools, but I think it's something to keep in mind, especially if you wish your documentation to be a collaboration between multiple people. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

I love the ability to store our Help projects in the cloud where they are easily accessible to our whole team as needed. The source control functionality and the ability to host our content outside the boundaries of our product development lifecycle are invaluable. The hosting capability will become even more valuable when federated single sign-on becomes a reality (soon, I hear!). I particularly enjoy showing off the analytics we have begun gathering on how users are interacting with our content. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

The reviews function is good overall from a writer's perspective. Being able to pull review comments directly into Flare without having to rewrite saves time and reduces mistakes. But, it's a bit clunky from a reviewer's perspective, especially when it comes to understanding the interface regarding snippets and how to edit or offer comments on those. Some reviewers refuse to use it for that reason. But once everyone gets the hang of using it and how to incorporate changes into Flare, they all seem to like it. Bottom line: It's a great function, but requires a bit ramp-up and change management.

I really like the hosting functionality. However, I feel like the process for setting up sites and making the association between them, Help builds, and users could be streamlined. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

I like having a secure location to store my data and be able to access it from anywhere. One of my favorite features is the Task list. I create lists of items I'm working on, need to work on, and have all this information at a glance to show management. It's also great to build PDFs or HTML sites & host them directly from Central, where our associates and clients can access them.

I also appreciate the checklists to keep track of all the topics in a manual that need to be added or updated for each new manual.

So many great tools all in one place! It's a dream, not needing to worry about configuring databases and storage - MadCap handles that part for us. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

I wish the checklists could be automatically created based on TOCs rather than folders. My manuals re-use content from multiple folders. It's just the table of contents that I want to work with, and I don't care from which folder the topics come. I'd also like to implement single sign-on from our company's website for the client to log directly into Central. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

MadCap Central does an outstanding job of keeping track of my and my colleague's work. It consistently connects to my projects and allows me to easily sync my work to a place that is accessible to my teammates. At the same time, I'm able to easily get their changes. I like that I can see our changes in a side-by-side view, and easily revert changes if necessary. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

I would prefer a better filing and search system. We have many projects, and there isn't an easy way to organize them, the way you can in a file explorer. This is not mitigated by the search function (perhaps it would be if we were rigorous with our project naming but it's not always possible). I recognize the organization methods match the typical GIT structure, but this issue causes us to lean on other tools that allow us to implement a more traditional folder structure. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

With a push of a button, I can set up a remote repository for my flare projects. I can easily host and manage my content without dependencies on my DevOps or IT teams. I can create customer-facing for public content and staging sites to preview updates and new content in a matter of minutes. Central is an invaluable tool we use daily to manage our documentation and strategic planning. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Sometimes building the site from Central seems to take much longer than when I build on my local machine. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Analytics and reporting give me the tools I need to prioritise the documentation requirements. You can use Google analytics to provide some of this information but it does not give you the same in-depth analysis that Central does. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

I don't use all the features. I am a team of one and I don't use the reviewer features, there are a lot of features in the product and not all are obvious to me as a user as to what they do. When you open the product it's a blank canvas to add widgets and dahsboards but it should give you a starting point and maybe requires some UX improvements. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

The ability to have the whole team pull projects from the latest version. This is our preferred venue for a large, thorny project that regularly has six contributors. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

I'd like a per-company option to set up something like folders-- all the projects affiliated with Project A in one area, Project B in the next folder, etc. That would make it easier to assign permissions and even to locate projects rather than searching by product. The flat view of everything in one pool isn't great. We also checked out the associated review tool and found it lacking in features. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.