Paligo Reviews & Product Details

Content reuse is simple and easy to use. The document structure panel enables you to pull in available topics and rearrange them.

Branching enables working on different versions of the same document in parallel.

Out of the numerous other features Paligo offers, the most useful for our work are text variables, filters to include/omit segments in different document versions, and localization tools: a translation editor and localized images. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

1. A confimed translation isn't automatically unconfirmed if the source text changes. Because of this, an update to the source text can go unnoticed, and the translator does not know that he/she needs to update the translation.

2. When translating a segment in the translation editor, you can right click to show which tags/inline elements can be pulled in from the source text. If you type the translation directly into the translation dialog, and pull in an inline image in this way, the image size isn't set to be the same as that in the source text. To avoid this, you must use the copy source text tool to copy over the source text into the translation editor pane, and then translate the source text piece-wise in-between the inline elements (variable tags and inline images). If you are translating into a RTL language, this is particularly tedious.

3. From time to time, there are periods of between a few minutes and up to half an hour where Paligo is inaccessible, which is frustrating. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

The customer support is pretty responsive. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

I don't like a single part of it. From the inflexible text editor, the poorly explained features, the poorly focused on-boarding, and more. The system doesn't really incorporate the user experience as much as the feature capabilities. Where the idea that you have a managed content mass and everything becomes modular sounds great. But the management of that content is a frustrating, difficult, challenge made exhausting by the inflexibility of the system.

For example, the preview feature only lets you view topics. They can take on the profiling features that you'd like. But you don't get a complete picture of the a document until you publish it.

Another very annoying thing is how they've set up the CSS and Javascript customization. You need to waste tons of developer resources to get your styling correct. There is clearly room for non-developer types to apply smart-customization features but they don't implement this. Instead you have to hunt through tons of disorganized seeming bootstrap folders.

Translation of the documents is also a really annoying. You have to work around the system to make sure documents are in the right 'status' but you can flexibly change the status on the topic. You have to go to a folder where the topic is kept, change the status there, then go back to a translation or editor view.

Further, for being a techwriting/authoring tool, the documentation is awful. They have some task and processed based documentation but it's still really just explanatory content. Great that you can tell me what a thing is but show me how it works.

To me it feels like the design is either assuming that users will know how to use the doc-book features they've implemented or that they'll eventually 'figure it out'. I'd look elsewhere. A modern UI sitting ontop a pile of confused unfriendly code doesn't make software good. I'd take less features done really well than a billion features executed poorly. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

The first characteristic of Paligo that most users notice is that it is cloud-based, which allows all users to work from their computer (Mac or PC) and browser of choice. Authors, contributors, and reviewers don't need to install anything to use Paligo, unlike most competing products. This makes Paligo easy to implement. And unlike most cloud-based tools of a similar size, it's surprisingly fast.

As you begin using Paligo, you'll see the real power of it, which is true, complete content reuse. Paligo assigns every element a unique identifier, and you can reference that identifier anywhere. Best of all, you can use the user interface tools to reuse content, which means you don't have to enter the long unique IDs in the DocBook code.

However, if you prefer to see and manipulate the DocBook markup, you can easily do this at any time. I occasionally find that it's easier to copy and paste bits of markup than repeating steps in the UI.

Once you learn your way around Paligo, you will never duplicate efforts.

Next you'll notice that you can customize anything in Paligo. You can customize most common elements in the layout editor. You can customize less common elements through a custom CSS file. And if you want to really change the default layout, you can even create custom JavaScript files.

Versioning documentation is intuitive for anyone who has worked with any standard source control tool.

Administration of Paligo is simple. Managing users is easy and straightforward.

I have imported Word and PDF content into Paligo with good results. The topics only required minimal cleanup.

Paligo customer support is responsive, friendly, and thorough.

I found integrating Paligo with Slack, AWS, and Zendesk to be fast and easy.

I've extensively used four CCMSs over the years, and Paligo is the best at truly reusing content. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

The user interface is a bit inconsistent. For example, when editing a topic, you do not need to click "Save" to save changes (unless you select that option in the settings), but you must click "Save" to save any changes to the table of contents or layout editor.

The layout editor is quite difficult to navigate. It's a sea of drop-down menus. In the short-term, it's begging for a search feature. In the long-term, it needs to be overhauled to be much more intuitive to navigate.

One downside to being 100% cloud-based means that you can't work in Paligo when you're offline, such as when you're on an airplane.

Selecting a variable requires several clicks. Ideally, Paligo would use an auto-complete feature to anticipate which variable you'd like to use in a given situation. Competing products have similar features.

If you've never used DocBook before, there is some ramp-up time to learn its structure. If you've used DITA, but not DocBook, it's an easy transition. They are similar.

Paligo lacks an internal CSS editor. You must make any CSS edits outside of the tool and upload your CSS file through the aforementioned, hard to navigate, layout editor. This becomes an issue when you make frequent CSS edits. What's more, you need to upload a CSS file for each layout. Ideally, you'd be able to edit the CSS file right in Paligo, and rather than uploading it, you could just point to it.

As a young company, I'm sure that Paligo is aware of these drawbacks and has solutions on their roadmap. I suggest that they invest in UX designers to continue to enhance the user interface and workflows. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Paligo is an excellent instrument for technical writers who have never used single-source authoring instruments due to its intuitive interface and cloud-based access: new Paligo users learn how to use it quickly; experienced single-source authors can switch easily.

Additionally, Paligo help documentation is rather helpful, and 95% of all answers can be found there.

Last, but not least, it is the Paligo support team that makes the difference: real humans are addressing our custom/not-custom issues and trying to resolve them ASAP.

Many thanks from the EDETEK tech writing department! Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

From the experience of our department, the least helpful is the Dashboard functionality due to the following reasons:

1. The duration of the load time: it takes ages to get the dashboard loaded.

2. The data or rather how the data is organized there: for our team, in most cases, the data is useless.

The second wish-to-have thing would be the multi-select functionality for initiating/canceling review assignments. The specifics of the content we author and its number dictate the need for assignments of 30, 40, or even 50 topics at once, which is a one-hour routine. And in case we need to cancel these assignments, it is a one-more-hour routine. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

The ease and speed that you can create profesional structured authoring projects staright out the box, with version control, branching and reuse. The ability to publish into a variety of outputs works really well for us, as some of our docs are required as a PDF and some as HTML5, so the ability to quickly change between these 2 publishing versions is amazing. The cost is also very competitive when compared against other authoring tools/CMS tools on the market. Intergrated our old content quickly and effciently with the import options, with very little rework being carried out. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

The updating of the CSS to match our branding was a little more troublesome than i first imagined, as we didnt have the knowledge base to be able to complete this task to a level we were satisfied within our organisation. But from support from Paligo Help, the very useful self help docs/library this was also overcome. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

As earlier mentioned: it works! Also very good customer help and follow up if one experiences challenges. Very good communication with the key account managers if one needs upgrades or changes to the subscription. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Nothing major. There is the occational quirk, but we've used it for a year and a half now and have yet to meet anything that hinders the worklflow. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

I have used Paligo at two different companies, both which have leveraged the Zendesk integration.

It's been an exceptional CMS platform that's afforded me to be efficient and meet all content and pubilcation requirements.

Highlights:

Intuituve user interface and easy to use

Single-sourcing capabilities are exceptional

Supports multiple output formats

Seamless integration with Zendesk

Great customer support Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

There are a few features that I would like to use, but requires an upgrade to their Enterprise plan. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Paligo works out of the box, so you start creating content at once. Document restructuring is straightforward and you won't break your links when you do. Paligo is backed by exceptional customer support. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Conditional content is available at the publication level; I'd like to see it at the topic level. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

The tool is obviously powerful, and has some features that would make generating new content that's similar to existing stuff very fast (like if you're creating a v2 of an existing product). Their support staff is also usually quick as well. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Every time I log into Paligo, I leave my computer for 10 minutes since I know that's how long it'll take for Paligo to sign me in (and sometimes that's not enough time). The UI, while simple, uses font that's way too small, and notification overlays are difficult to get rid of and constantly block the next UI element you'll want to select (and there's maybe only half the keyboard shortcuts you'd find in Google Docs).

Finally, they tout having many integrations, but my experience with their Freshdesk integration has been extremely poor (I can't speak to their others). They aren't able to port content that currently exists in Freshdesk to the Paligo instance (we ended up using scripts to do this on our own). The method we were given to "tie" articles created in Paligo to the content that exists in Freshdesk is rudimentary—we had to essentially publish all articles in Paligo and send them to Freshdesk, then delete that same article that already existed in Freshdesk.

None of this was mentioned during sales calls leading up to signing the contract, and it felt like Paligo all but disappeared once pen met paper. Props to their support team for being so quick to respond to our questions and issues, but the org as a whole seemed more than happy to take our money and disappear. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

I like that Paligo offers a way to manage both topics and publications. The software is ready to go when you log in. You don't have to configure a complicated environment before you can get started. The day you sign up, you can create a publication, add topics to it, and publish everything to your web environment. You can always configure custom CSS or JavaScript to add customizations, but the output is attractive when using the default settings. I like that I can publish to multiple formats, like Word, PDF, and HTML. The documentation for the product is also excellent. If I don't understand how to do something or think the product doesn't do what I need, I can generally find the answer in the documentation. The company is responsive when I have questions, and they regularly add new features requested by users. It's also great that Paligo uses their software with few embellishments for their own documentation. I've found answers to some CSS questions by studying their docs pages. All documentation tools have issues, and I've used at least a dozen in my career. So far, Paligo has the fewest issues and is the most flexible tool I've used. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

One drawback is the lack of flexibility with API documentation. You have two default "canned" options for publishing. It's probably possible to use the basic API options as a base and expand on them, but my organization doesn't have anyone with these skills. The Paligo review tool could also be a bit better. It only allows reviewers to make comments rather than change text inline. Paligo does not host the content, which some might find a drawback. Because Paligo does not host it, there are no reporting options for how end users access the content. If your organization has a huge amount of content (like tens of thousands of pages in one publication), Paligo might not work as well for you because publishing could take a long time. For even a couple of thousand pages of topics, however, it still finishes in a reasonable amount of time. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.