--- title: Author-It Reviews meta_title: 'Author-It Reviews 2026: Details, Pricing, & Features | G2' meta_description: Filter 37 reviews by the users' company size, role or industry to find out how Author-It works for a business like yours. aggregate_rating: rating_value: 4.0 review_count: 37 scale: '5' date_modified: '2026-06-24' parent_category: name: Content Management url: https://www.g2.com/categories/content-management --- # Author-It Reviews **Vendor:** Author-It Software Corporation **Category:** [Component Content Management Systems ](https://www.g2.com/categories/component-content-management-systems) **Average Rating:** 4.0/5.0 **Total Reviews:** 37 ## About Author-It Create. Collaborate. Manage. Reuse. Translate. Publish. All on one platform. Author-it is a true and complete Component Content Management System (CCMS) for the creation, management, localization, and publishing of a wide variety of information products. Single sourcing is the core of Author-it, and with loads of functionality like multi-channel publishing, variant management, review and approval workflows, and authoring assistance, we offer a collaborative solution capable of dealing with the needs of any organization, from SMBs to Enterprise. Unlike DITA and XML solutions, Author-it makes importing and authoring content a snap. And with no coding expertise required, collaborating in real time with SMEs and non-technical writers breaks down silos and increases productivity. Manage large content libraries easily without losing control, create modern, personalized courses, reuse and translate content without leaving the platform, and publish to multiple outputs, including HTML5, mobile, PDF, print and more. Save time and eliminate content chaos with Author-it. ## Author-It Pros & Cons **What users dislike:** - Users find the **difficult setup** of Author-It leads to a less intuitive UI and complicated exports. (1 reviews) - Users find the **UI not intuitive** , making tasks like exporting to other systems unnecessarily complicated. (1 reviews) ## Author-It Reviews ### 1. Automated workflows, ProCSS, and XML translation tool – plus first-class, fast support **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Markus L. | Technische Dokumentation, Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** June 15, 2026 **What do you like best about Author-It?** Automated workflows noticeably ease the workday. The user-specific output using ProCSS is very helpful in this regard. The translation tool based on XML also makes collaboration with external offices particularly easy. In case of questions or problems, the first-class and fast support is also convincing. **What do you dislike about Author-It?** Some work processes are cumbersome. Connection interruptions or non-functioning server features (e.g., insert images) sometimes make usage cumbersome and more time-consuming than it should be. However, what bothers me the most is that I am constantly "logged out" of the app when I have been in an external image editing program for a bit longer and then want to switch back to the program. **What problems is Author-It solving and how is that benefiting you?** Constant revisions of operational documents require continuous translation of hundreds of documents. The translation process provided by Author-it automates a large part of the work and works very well in conjunction with the tools of the translation agency. ### 2. Great support, ease of use, and a lot of finicky madness **Rating:** 3.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Oil & Energy | Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** June 17, 2026 **What do you like best about Author-It?** I'm not sure what I really like about it. I'm really just comparing my past experience with MadCap Flare and it is the support via AuthorIt when you have an issue that helps as that has been quick and helpful at times. AuthorIt is also easier to use and understand. I'm OK with the usability and organization of topics but there are a lot of buggy things that drive us nuts, so I am hoping I can share some of that here. **What do you dislike about Author-It?** -Table work is finicky. There's nothing worse than clicking on a row and the damn thing jumps to another area far away on the page when you are ready to enter something (happens every time, this is not an occasional glitch). Sometimes table rows can magically morph into some other rendition of what a row is, too and you have to then remove it and re-add and hope there's not some invisible formatting left behind forcing you to start over. -Accidently moving a topic--there needs to be a confirmation dialog for moving a topic around as it is alarmingly easy to accidently do without knowing and finding out a year later that your "Before you begin" topic is a 1/4 way into the doc. -The cursor is never where you click. We have all learned and adjusted to click slightly to the left of right of where we actually want to be. Seems like something that could be fixed easily and probably should have been fixed a long, long, time ago (but if you fix it now you'll probably throw us all off; Insert sarcasm :) ). -I don't like when Amazon times you out. Seems to happen often or too quick and when it prompts you for the landing page address for your application to re-open, it never works so you are forced to visit the A-It page again and re-login (and it is far from being a single sign on as I have to copy and paste the PW two times as well as enter my email two times. -I do like that you can switch to a simulated desktop mode in the Amazon remote server. -If you remain in the Amazon remote window and try to open two or three screens, it always selects you main desktop as display #1 and makes it so you can no longer see your tool bar to select applications like Teams and whatnot. -Lag, esp. on Friday afternoons used to be a problem as it was like we suddenly decided to turn off or update servers. I'm not sure if that will be a problem now, although I know from past experience Amazon Cloud is far from 99% availability :) . They will leave you hanging occasionally. -If I replace a display screenshot in a doc, the original may have been taken years ago, so sometimes it is hard for me to size it the same to match the others in that area. We have templates set up to resize in 5-10& increments, but I'd like the option to manually set the size in 1% increments if possible (or maybe it is there but I haven't discovered it yet). -Sometimes bullets get stuck in editorial style (red) and it is hard to add a new bullet without it going red if two style happened to touch. I'd like a way to "Clear" formatting--for real--similar to what you can do in MS Word. This will undoubtedly help in other areas, too. -Find and replace doesn't find everything. In fact, it is very unreliable and I often find things I had hoped I corrected in large docs. One cannot trust it. -I hate when you copy a couple words or a sentence on one line and try to move it up before another line and when you paste it--it all turns green in a different style, then I have to reselect the style again (PITA). It also happens a lot if I back space to join words that jumped onto a new line because of copy/paste or otherwise, and you backspace to join them and everything goes bright green (happens in tables a lot, too). -Thanks, I hope you will work on these things. It's not all bad, really but these are the main things that drive me. Like I said, I will take this over MadCap any day and I've been outspoken about that due to the quality of service / help available--so keep that up and please use real people--if I have to talk to a bot to get help I am going to snap. -Author-It aside, I really don't like how this G2 survey company tries to capture you voice data as part of two of three options to complete the survey; it is an obvious and intrusive data grab. Also prompting you to use google or LinkedIn is intrusive and I've recently seen a lot of sites and services suddenly adopt google as a way to login--more intrusive data tracking; I don't agree with it and it is alarming. 1984! **What problems is Author-It solving and how is that benefiting you?** It helps us communicate our complex products to our customers in the form of user and installation guides. We output into pdf and online Help. Now video is the big push, so make sure you stay relevant there. ### 3. Reusable Topics Make Building Knowledge Bases Easy **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Emma H. | Writing Systems Manager, Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** June 17, 2026 **What do you like best about Author-It?** I like how I can reuse books, topics, and parts of topics to create online knowledge bases for different audiences. It's also incredibly helpful that hyperlinks are objects so it's easy to identify the impact of removing a target topic. **What do you dislike about Author-It?** Because it's very powerful, it does require a degree of understanding and skill that some people find a barrier. **What problems is Author-It solving and how is that benefiting you?** We benefit from using Author-it to manage complex knowledge content for several different audiences. We mostly publish content to XHTML or XML but also publish a small subset to PDF. If we had to manage that using a traditional CMS it would take considerably more time and effort. ### 4. Empowers Documentation with Reuse and Localizations **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User | Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** June 19, 2026 **What do you like best about Author-It?** I love how Author-It allows us to maintain multiple versions through variants and define metadata easily with variables. I really appreciate the content reuse feature, which means we can write or update once and it updates everywhere it's embedded automatically. The documentation localization process is also very easy to manage. I also like the ability to standardize templates and styling so those decisions are made only once, along with the ability to publish to multiple outputs. Additionally, I find it easy to publish to Fluid Topics for hosting on the web, and I value the localization manager. The initial setup of Author-It was very easy, even though the migration took some time due to many topics, but that was expected. **What do you dislike about Author-It?** Sometimes the GUI can be a little clunky. Finding topics, images, and links to embed or include can be hard because our database is huge. **What problems is Author-It solving and how is that benefiting you?** Author-It lets us maintain multiple versions with variants, define metadata easily, and reuse content for automatic updates. Plus, it manages documentation localization smoothly. ### 5. Clunky UI, complicated to use **Rating:** 0.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Adam M. | Senior Technical Writer, Information Technology and Services, Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** September 03, 2025 **What do you like best about Author-It?** Lower cost if you have a specialist user. **What do you dislike about Author-It?** UI is not intuitive compared to leading tools. Even exporting to other systems is complicated, although it may havebeen due to the way it was set up. **What problems is Author-It solving and how is that benefiting you?** I moved away from Author-It becasue it was overly complicated to use. ### 6. Evolving Authoring System **Rating:** 4.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Michael S. | Manager Training & Documentation, Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** July 20, 2022 **What do you like best about Author-It?** dataglobal has been using author-IT as an enterprise-wide editorial system at multiple locations since 2006. Currently, there are about 70,000 objects in the database. When selecting our enterprise-wide editorial system, a modular model with integrated role distribution was of crucial importance to us. The role distribution function allows us to involve a large number of authors in the creation of new content. For example, we can have our employees in development, who have very deep knowledge in their field, start the documentation process for a new function long before its market launch. The editorial revision and preparation are then carried out centrally by the documentation department. Furthermore, as a company, we have high demands on our layout design. Therefore, we use publishing templates adapted to the target audience. Another important factor for us is multi-channel publishing. This allows us to achieve great synergy effects and save valuable time by being able to publish the already existing editorial content in different target formats. author-IT has developed into a fundamental building block in our documentation process. Starting with technically detailed product documentation, through online help in HTML format, to marketing literature, author-IT can fully meet our requirements. **What do you dislike about Author-It?** Wenig Kommunikation über kommende Roadmap-Features. Dies könnte mit einem einfachen monatlichen/vierteljährlichen Newsletter verbessert werden. **What problems is Author-It solving and how is that benefiting you?** Der Hauptvorteil für meine Arbeit beim Verfassen: die Wiederverwendung bestehender Themen (auch eingebettete Themen genannt). Macht mich produktiver! ### 7. A mature CCMS wih fantatstic new ouput **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** David J. | Document and Knowledge Manager, Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** August 12, 2019 **What do you like best about Author-It?** Author-it is a mature component content management system. I've been using it now for 15 years. It is stable, and I rarely have any problems with it. It looks after all my content without me having to worry. I'm able to efficiently manage content, create content and generate it when I need it. They have recently released "Magellan" a fully responsive HTML5 output that ticks all the boxes if you want a modern-looking responsive help system. It is easy to put together, and I found t relatively easy to style to my company's brand. It does require some CSS skills but not many. I can create multiple variants and publish to different brands and versions with the same content. It takes some setup, but it is just as simple as a button press. In a team, you need one reasonably knowledgeable admin who can do the setup. In addition, I don't need to worry about format. I can publish to PDF HTML, Word or responsive HTML format. **What do you dislike about Author-It?** There is very little I dislike about it. There are like many packages niggles and bugs but lately, they have been really good at sorting some of these out, giving us the ability to change the appearance of the editor's UI colour is one such instance. They respond quickly to problems you may have and have knowledgeable staff who can help you. **Recommendations to others considering Author-It:** Don't be put off by apparent complexity. It may seem complex but it is actually quite easy to set up and to author in. When it is set up correctly the amount of time you save is worth the investment. The localisation tools it has are very good though I can't comment that much as I have never really used them heavily. **What problems is Author-It solving and how is that benefiting you?** It allows me to manage my content very efficiently and generate output when required very quickly. ### 8. Good tool - I want more people to use it **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Machinery | Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** March 12, 2020 **What do you like best about Author-It?** Love it. I’ve loved it for years. Superb tools with forgivable compromises. We use the Cloud version for a globally distributed team. We have authors in the US, UK, Germany and India so far... I love the way you can throw yourself in as a team, be productive immediately, and tidy up using the tools as you evolve your solution. The nicest thing about implementing it this time around is how outstandingly positive my whole team have been about the tool and the experience. **What do you dislike about Author-It?** Minor things that haven't been sorted out for years but make a huge impact on their target users, like hyperlinks in Word documents or not having table numbering without customization. These days we also want tagging and taxonomy but these are not explicitly supported and need workarounds. Final snag is no internal baseline feature; you can export the whole book as XML and re-import it later though. These little things that have a big effect and prevent more widespread adoption. Overall though, these compromises do not invalidate the huge benefits of having a global, Cloud-based, relational database of content that can be reused so easily and managed so effectively. **Recommendations to others considering Author-It:** Be brave and throw yourself it. Author-it will catch you! **What problems is Author-It solving and how is that benefiting you?** - globally distributed teams can start working as soon as you switch on the Cloud solution - management of multiple brands from the same content through variants - management of multiple editions through fall-back variants - translation management - online reviews - easy CSS3-based PDF publishing through Antenna House ### 9. Great authoring software, with lots of features! **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Lisa T. | Flight Operations Coordinator, Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** August 16, 2022 **What do you like best about Author-It?** I really liked the easy use of Author-It. You did not have to worry about how everything will look later on in the published PDF. Setting styles prior to writing the sections will ensure that everything is presented nicely in the exported PDF. **What do you dislike about Author-It?** Although I liked that you did not have to worry about how the PDF will look once exported, occasionally it was hard to "fix" something afterward, as you would only know what the end product looks like once it was exported. It would sometimes take a couple of exports to get some numbering or a table right. **What problems is Author-It solving and how is that benefiting you?** With Author-It we are solving our biggest problem within document control, which would be to track all of our changes and to be able to make changes across multiple manuals at the same time. We are able to share content and track this through the Author-It software. ### 10. AuthorIT - The professional way to create your user manuals **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Civil Engineering | Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** August 06, 2019 **What do you like best about Author-It?** As implementer and trainer, one my main job is to write and create User Manuals. The important aspect of the software is it allows to create manual templates, topics, chapters, store picture and TOI in a very easy and professional way. One of important feature is the ability to link the topics, chapters and pictures to different manuals instead of creating similar data repeatedly, this feature helped me save time and create manuals very fast. I strongly recommend Author-IT software if you wish to create manuals in a simple, faster and professional way. **What do you dislike about Author-It?** Some time the response time is very slow which is very occasional. **Recommendations to others considering Author-It:** I strongly recommend Author-IT software if you wish to create manuals in a simple, faster and professional way. **What problems is Author-It solving and how is that benefiting you?** I was able to create user manuals at a faster and professional way. ### 11. Work Software **Rating:** 4.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Lisa T. | Flight Operations Coordinator, Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** July 19, 2022 **What do you like best about Author-It?** You do not have to do any formatting yourself. It is easy to start using Author-It, and once you know what you are doing, it is very intuitive and easy. **What do you dislike about Author-It?** Sometimes it is hard no knowing what the formatting will look like before publishing. It would be good to have an idea of how the PDF looks before publishing. **What problems is Author-It solving and how is that benefiting you?** To keep shared content among all of our manuals. ### 12. Overall it has been a good experience **Rating:** 4.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Computer Software | Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** July 21, 2022 **What do you like best about Author-It?** It is cloud based. Initially we had a lot of issues with stability and reliability but over the last 2 years with the planned releases things have improved. **What do you dislike about Author-It?** Most of the interactions are very mouse heavy. I would prefer more keyboard ways of doing things. **What problems is Author-It solving and how is that benefiting you?** It is the central content management system for the team and hence we can reuse a lot of content across publications. ### 13. Review of Author-it Cloud **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Computer Software | Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** October 29, 2021 **What do you like best about Author-It?** My organization has been using Author-it close for almost 8 years now, and we have had a great experience with the tool. My favourite aspect of Author-it is how light it is. We can access the product from anywhere, and we require zero IT help in maintaining it. We also maintain all of our templates ourselves. The odd time we need support to lend a hand, they respond within minutes and are incredible helpful. **What do you dislike about Author-It?** The only downside is that over the last few years, updates have slowed down. However, with Paul Trottier back in the fold, we have seen a HUGE improvement in the release cadence, inclusion of new features and overall experience. **What problems is Author-It solving and how is that benefiting you?** Author-it has allowed us to completely maintain our CMS ourselves in addition to our templates. This is a massive time and money saver. ### 14. A leading cloud based authoring tool to manage and publish learning content **Rating:** 4.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Imroz Q. | Training Lead (Sr. Associate), Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** September 06, 2021 **What do you like best about Author-It?** Author-It allows you to create, manage, review, finalize and publish learning content or any other kind of documentation at a central location. With its cloud-based technology, it is easy to access and update the content on the fly. Since Author-It is a cloud-based platform, it's easy for the team to collaborate in content creation. You don't need knowledge about the DITA and XML to create content, making the tool great. There are so many different kinds of materials you can create—for example, SOPs, eLearning, and so on. One of the best features is that Author-It can transform existing content into different learning outputs. **What do you dislike about Author-It?** Though it's an easy-to-use tool, it takes some time to get familiar with the interface. With your broadband connection is not that great, you may face issues while updating the existing content - as it takes some time to get the updates reflected. If you compare this with other tools like XOPUS, which supports XML and DITA standards, the response time is quicker. **Recommendations to others considering Author-It:** If you are looking to create rapid content, then go for Author-It. **What problems is Author-It solving and how is that benefiting you?** I was looking for a cloud-based solution, which can help the team collaborate and create learning content quickly. We also wanted to transform existing content into different formats, which Author-It did it swiftly. It was also easy for the team to get acquainted with the features of Author-it and adapt quickly. ### 15. Followup review **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Matthew C. | Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** September 03, 2020 **What do you like best about Author-It?** I like the control that I can place in Author-IT around the structure and formatting of documents. Too many times the documents created in document editing platforms have issues with external editors changing fonts and styles to their own desires rather than a business branded style and there is a large amount of re-work on standardising formatting. **What do you dislike about Author-It?** The upgrades to Author-IT are centred around EU and US servers can client times. Typically this means I can be out of action for half a day when upgrades happen. It would be great to have an offline component or an AU cloud instance that is of less impact here. **Recommendations to others considering Author-It:** It is a great tool for managing content. There are features in it that when set up correctly significantly reduce the time and effort to build and deliver content in a consistent approach. Up from time and effort should be spent on designing the taxonomy and Information Architecture goals prior to just importing content into it an starting to write. **What problems is Author-It solving and how is that benefiting you?** I currently am using Author-IT as a training platform getting more familiar with Honeycomb and the presentation modules to provide in house and online learning. Trying to develop a method for integrating wireframe modelling as a mechanism for users to trial and error new software. ### 16. Industry-leading authoring program **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Paul H. | Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** September 02, 2020 **What do you like best about Author-It?** The ability to reuse content and customize content for different books. You can write a piece of content but use a variable that populates the verbiage with a product name. Then multiple authors can use the content without having to rewrite or tweak. **What do you dislike about Author-It?** The way the windows of the application work on the screen. The main screen opens to a book and from there you open a topic. You can't minimize the other screens. A multiple monitor implementation is essential. It is a real challenge to use remotely. **Recommendations to others considering Author-It:** Allow for the learning curve, have a clear idea of what you want it to do so you can configure with those goals in mind. **What problems is Author-It solving and how is that benefiting you?** Managing multiple authors (five) and ensuring content can be reused. The longer you use the application, the more content is available to be used going forward. You do not need to "reinvent the wheel" over and over. ### 17. Good tool **Rating:** 4.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Automotive | Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** April 07, 2021 **What do you like best about Author-It?** I really like the way it does everything automatically. The way pictures are realized and the aspect of the document. It's really intuitive and a good tool for pur company to relaize documentation. **What do you dislike about Author-It?** Not so easy to understand sometimes. Sometimes pictures are difficult to realize **Recommendations to others considering Author-It:** good tool for documentation **What problems is Author-It solving and how is that benefiting you?** Translations in all laguanges required are so easy now. ### 18. Author-it is giving me help in manuals management **Rating:** 4.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Machinery | Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** September 04, 2020 **What do you like best about Author-It?** Author gives me great help in managing documentation. It helps me in managing the translations of my manuals. With few click i have the documents ready to publish in PDF format. I use this cloud every day. **What do you dislike about Author-It?** I found some difficulties and problems at the beginning. The layout is not easier and the manuals in PDF format are too big. When i insert images is a slow process and is not possible manage the jpg or png inside the cloud. **Recommendations to others considering Author-It:** I recommend the use of Author-it to anyone who has to manage a lot of translations of their documents. **What problems is Author-It solving and how is that benefiting you?** The great benefits are the reuse of the contents and an easy a very fast process for sending documents for translation in all languages of the world ### 19. Good tool for documentation in a collaborative environment **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Bernhard S. | Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** April 29, 2020 **What do you like best about Author-It?** We are using the On Premises version. We can organize our work inside of Author-it using release sates and internal comments. Once you have setup your output formats you can fully conentrate on your content. When you have understood the concept of Author-it, then you have a very flexible and powerful tool. For writers or reviewers only, it is easy to learn and they like it. Author-it has a quick and competent support. It is very stable we had since nearly 20 years of use no problems. **What do you dislike about Author-It?** The cloud version is too expensive. The handling of tables. A table object would be very helpful. **Recommendations to others considering Author-It:** For administrators it is important to really understand the concepts. Users should forget about wysiwyg and should trust that Author-it will give them the correct output. Just concentrate on the content and use the correct styles. **What problems is Author-It solving and how is that benefiting you?** We are writing software documentations for various customers. Using Author-it we can manage all our customers in one tool. We can work together in the same projects. ### 20. Great program **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Machinery | Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** March 24, 2020 **What do you like best about Author-It?** A learning curve but their training is great. Best is the ability to reuse text. if you are writing a new document that is 80% like another product, your work is 80% done. **What do you dislike about Author-It?** We output to MSWord and then make a PDF. We have to do the page breaks manually. The parts component is added in Word before making the PDF. **Recommendations to others considering Author-It:** Great program **What problems is Author-It solving and how is that benefiting you?** if you are writing a new document that is 80% like another product, your work is 80% done. ### 21. User Friendly Component Content Management System (Author-it) **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Machinery | Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** March 03, 2020 **What do you like best about Author-It?** The easy of use of Author-it for people that have little understanding of writing and publication. For example we have a mechanic from our assembly line writing assembly instructions. I take him only four sessions of approximately 2 hours and he was up and running. It took me as an experience Author-it user approximately one week to setup the work environment, templates and publication process so that it was easy to use for non-experienced-writers. It is easy to create user-groups and limit what every user sees when working with Author-it. We have roles for Operator Manuals, Marketing Information and Factory Instructions. **What do you dislike about Author-It?** As an administrator I see everything in the system and that is sometimes a bit annoying, for example when I need to write content for operator manuals. If I only want to see operator information I have to switch of views manually. That is however only my problem, all other users have been specified and see only the information that is relevant for their tasks. **What problems is Author-It solving and how is that benefiting you?** Change of out machine documentation was uncontrolled, basically a previous manual was copied and modified for a newer machine by the Engineering department. There was no revision and complete manuals where re-translated each time a language was required. The main benefits for us at this time are: - Content exists once and translated once (reduction of translation costs). - New developments are documented when developed, no information is copied. - Because of the modular approach in Author-it, we are able to publish customer specific manuals. (Instead of manuals that contain all possibilities the customer gets manuals with the possibilities he purchased.) ### 22. Great content management, could be better on the publishing side **Rating:** 4.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Jody W. | Documentation Specialist, Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** August 08, 2019 **What do you like best about Author-It?** Author-It is superior when it comes to managing large amounts of complex, single-sourced content. It easily handles variations to content, and the UI is intuitive. I know that whatever content-management challenges that come up, Author-It will handle them. The support I receive from the Service Desk is second-to-none. They get back to you quickly, and genuinely care about your question or issue. **What do you dislike about Author-It?** First, Author-It needs to offer more online formats to publish out to. At the time of writing (August 2019) they offer mostly legacy formats like WebHelp and HTML Help. I have had to heavily customise my CSS to improve the look and feel and behaviour of my WebHelp output. But I would like to see HTML5 formats on offer soon. I want to easily be able to publish modern, responsive HTML5 content. I want my help to have decent search, and I want to be able to embed metadata inside each content object. I want it to look less like the early 2000s. I know that the company is working hard to make this possible, so I look forward to seeing what they offer in the next 12 months. Second, there is a huge learning curve for new users. Honestly, I almost had a breakdown learning it. The configuration and relationship between the foundation objects that make the whole thing wor is complex. I fully document all of my config wherever I implement the system so I can remember what the hell it all means. Third, the output to MS Word is OK but requires quite a bit of mop-up to make your printed output look good. I like my documents to look perfect so if you can live with a little weirdness, then you might not think this is a big deal. **Recommendations to others considering Author-It:** The complex setup is worth it. The content management aspect of Author-It is fantastic. **What problems is Author-It solving and how is that benefiting you?** Effective content re-use, efficient and secure management of knowledge assets, ability to publish to online and print formats. ### 23. A great CMS to make managing all my content much easier **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Arnold S. | Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** May 12, 2020 **What do you like best about Author-It?** no more searching for files or images, quick finds trough locate option **What do you dislike about Author-It?** No more endless debates about why old recently updated content came back in other manuals dye to copy/paste. **What problems is Author-It solving and how is that benefiting you?** Building and managing technical manuals. Nice ability to single source chapters, topics and images. ### 24. Software documantation and Localising with Author-IT **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Marie R. | Owner, Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** September 13, 2019 **What do you like best about Author-It?** Heather :-) and the whole team also in Europe. Always helpful and friendly. Author-it with Localise is a powerful Single-Source-Publishing software for all our belongings: Creating Help systems and pdf documentation, importing Release Notes from word and creating an extra help system for Release Notes, Preparing translations into several languages with localise and exporting them to/importing them from out Translation Memory System and monitoring the statuses by using release states. Because we are specialised ware documentation we especially like the object-oriented workflow as it is also in development tools. Also that the data is hold in SQL makes the work effective and helps to quickly find existing content and last but not least makes data backup easy. Teamwork is also great because of the object-oriented workflow. It is great that Paul Trotter is back! **What do you dislike about Author-It?** The handling of tables is tricky and could be smoother. And: too many mouse clicks are needed. We would appreciate a better keyboard using. What we sometimes miss is the possibility to check out projects and edit them offline and check them in again. **What problems is Author-It solving and how is that benefiting you?** No problems but a great all-in-one workflow for all our needs as described beforehand. ### 25. Author-it is giving me a great help in document management **Rating:** 4.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Automotive | Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** August 02, 2019 **What do you like best about Author-It?** Author gives me great help in managing and speeding up the management of translations of my documents. In a few steps I have the complete documents ready to send. I found the advice that i read in the author community that I read often very useful. I would like to have a lighter author manual for entry level users. **What do you dislike about Author-It?** I noticed some difficulties especially at the beginning. I would like some features to be added to get better and easier layout. I hope that a new version with some new features will be released soon. The author-it manual is too big, sometimes I find it difficult to find the sections that can help me. Inserting images is a somewhat slow procedure and it is necessary to have another software to manage them. During the layout of my documents I sometimes have to change or move some parts of the documents to get a good final layout. **Recommendations to others considering Author-It:** Author-IT is a great way to create documentation. Initially I found some difficulties because it is different from the systems used in the past by me, but later I started working faster. **What problems is Author-It solving and how is that benefiting you?** Using Author-it I have all my documents in one place and easily accessible. In a single interface I have all the tools for drafting documents and sending them to translation. I believe this is a great advantage over other systems. Moreover in case of problems the Author-it community is always very prepared to available and has quickly solved my problems. ### 26. Complex, but incredibly powerful **Rating:** 4.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Computer Software | Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** August 07, 2019 **What do you like best about Author-It?** AIT allowed us to grow from 1 help system and 20 paper manuals to multiple help systems (in a variety of flavors) and well over 100 paper manuals. Single-sourcing, reuse, variants, and release states allow us to work smarter, not harder, as we keep up with release updates. **What do you dislike about Author-It?** AIT has a steep learning curve. As I've trained others on using it, I realize that much of my ability to navigate it, migrate our former Robohelp content, and get templates and such working smoothly is because of my background in computer science. Intuitively understanding copies versus instances of objects, templates, versioning, and object-oriented concepts was critical in setting things up in an effective way. I would love for AIT to provide more training and more help providing and/or setting up templates initially. I would also love for AIT to better support single-sourcing. I'd love for it to automatically flag duplicate content and offer to merge it. I would love the ability to merge identical topics or graphics. Xtend does the exact opposite--it encourages more duplication, not less. I want the inverse of Xtend--"Hey, you're typing a definition of this field that's exactly the same as this other field. Would you like to make this an embedded topic and use it both places?" YES! This increases the ability to maintain documentation effectively, keeps our database smaller, makes our publish time smaller, and makes the output files smaller. Wins all around. I would also love for Honeycomb to be embedded/enabled at no extra cost. This ties in to the single-sourcing. Our company will not pay for such a price hike, but man, could we use it. **Recommendations to others considering Author-It:** If you are a small department needing to crank out and maintain an extensive library of documentation, AIT is a great solution. You will need someone with an understanding of single-sourcing concepts, data management, information architecture, and the specific needs of your department to get things set up properly and running well. However, the initial sharp learning curve is worth it. **What problems is Author-It solving and how is that benefiting you?** In Robohelp, as a lone technical writer, if a change was made to one of our main screens, I had to change it in our help system and separately in about 20 paper manuals. There was no reuse of content. There was no ability to make the change in ONE place and have it automatically update in all of the relevant areas. With AIT, and with our efficient setup and intentional reuse of topics and graphics, updating our documentation is far easier, which means that we can maintain more documents and provide far more for our customers. ### 27. Cloud version is expensive and not possible to tailor for customer needs. **Rating:** 2.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Antti K. | Documentation Manager, Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** August 07, 2019 **What do you like best about Author-It?** Easy to write and re-use topics. Possibilities to maintain user rights. **What do you dislike about Author-It?** Not possible to use effectively in multilingual company. We don't get benefits of re-using topics between different branch offices because we have multiple source languages. System doesn't recognize for example Chinese as same language if it has been translated from different source languages (translation paths). There are at least 4 different platforms (files, localize, ...) in the one program. And those are not made with the same logic. ProCSS publishing was excepted to solve many publishing problems but it is quite complex to configure and some functions are impossible to implement. Proper manual for ProCSS commands is missing. There is no user right limits in Files. That is a massive risk to loose everything. There seems to be mystic publishing problems that AIT support doesn't admit. Document sharing is missing from cloud version. **Recommendations to others considering Author-It:** Think twice. :) **What problems is Author-It solving and how is that benefiting you?** It has given more headache to administrator than our old system. Old systems looks now better than in the past. Those were not so bad as we thought. ### 28. Compact, powerful tool for device documentation **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Markus L. | Dipl.-Ing., Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** August 05, 2019 **What do you like best about Author-It?** Using content for multiplied device documents. Easy compositing after finishing the content A wide workspace for customization the document by using own format and layout **What do you dislike about Author-It?** Some steps (like deleting objects) are not restorable Some times the database stuck with changes and you have to restart the author-it client. **Recommendations to others considering Author-It:** With the right support and installation and a basic learning, Author-it is a powerful tool for documentation. **What problems is Author-It solving and how is that benefiting you?** Difference between "one document content" and "multiply document content" solves a big amount of time. Content management instead of document management is a great opportunity for multiplied documents. ### 29. Its an okay tool but gets really slow with bigger files **Rating:** 2.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Logistics and Supply Chain | Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** April 05, 2020 **What do you like best about Author-It?** Creating topic alias and cross referencing **What do you dislike about Author-It?** The way images are handled and super slow behaviour with large files **Recommendations to others considering Author-It:** I recommend it to people with smaller files **What problems is Author-It solving and how is that benefiting you?** Solving updating a common topic across multiple guides ### 30. Great for Large & Complex Documentation Projects **Rating:** 4.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Computer Software | Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** August 08, 2019 **What do you like best about Author-It?** The ability to reuse content is extremely helpful. Combined with the ability to use variants for specific situations, Author-It really helps us deal with the complexity that our projects throw at us. **What do you dislike about Author-It?** Caveat: I use the desktop version, not the cloud version. The UI is very cumbersome. Particularly windows management. In particular, following relationships is almost impossible when you have the level of sharing and embedding complexity that we do. Some sort of graphical, clickable relationship diagram (like in RoboHelp) would be extremely helpful. **Recommendations to others considering Author-It:** Have a look. While RoboHelp/FrameMaker have component management, its clunky by comparison. **What problems is Author-It solving and how is that benefiting you?** A way to keep up in a fast-paced, multi-team, software product development in an agile/scrum/dev-ops environment. ### 31. professional content management **Rating:** 4.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Machinery | Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** October 08, 2019 **What do you like best about Author-It?** professional tool for content management. very skilled support and easy to use **What do you dislike about Author-It?** user interface is a bit old style. there are few partners on local markerts and the cost of licences and consultant is quite expensive **What problems is Author-It solving and how is that benefiting you?** centralize and standardization of contents that used to publish tecnhical documentation ### 32. Need more improvements **Rating:** 2.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Antonio T. | Documentation Manager, Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** August 02, 2019 **What do you like best about Author-It?** The easy way for translation all the documents **What do you dislike about Author-It?** non-flexibility in the daily working, we cannot see page break before publication **What problems is Author-It solving and how is that benefiting you?** manual creating work time ruduced ### 33. Using Author-it for User Guides, APIs and Release Notes **Rating:** 3.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Jacqueline L. | Lead Technical Writer, Computer Software, Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** October 08, 2015 **What do you like best about Author-It?** Author-it allows you to create standardized title pages, copyright notices and other formatting. Once everything is set up (which can be a painful process), you're in great shape for creating your docs. Once your Word and FrameMaker docs are entered into Author-it you can re-use sections easily. Changing it in one place changes every version of the same piece of text everywhere. This can save a great deal of editing, cutting and pasting. **What do you dislike about Author-It?** Reading Word docs into Author-it can be a very painful process. Graphics must be entered individually with a number of steps required to make them the right size and format. I had to use both Visio and Paint to convert a graphic and make it AI-ready to import. Forget about trying to import Excel spreadsheets into AI. **Recommendations to others considering Author-It:** It's good for vanilla type docs with fairly simple graphics and tables. Excellent for large pieces of docs that are repeated, like copyright pages and patent information. Not so good for complicated graphics and tables. **What problems is Author-It solving and how is that benefiting you?** We're trying to use AI to create docs that can be converted to PDF's or used for HTML help. So far we haven't used the full capabilities of AI to create object-oriented docs. ### 34. Author-it: For the Organized Mind. Or the Mind that Would Be Organized. **Rating:** 4.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Sandra F. | Senior Technical Writer, Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** October 08, 2015 **What do you like best about Author-It?** Author-it forces you to organize your content and to plan how smaller pieces of text and graphics will fit into the big picture. It's a database, and it relies heavily on templates. These things make it easy to apply global changes to style and formatting, and to maintain consistency among different authors. I like the flexibility. Author-it gives you many options for reusing content: embedded text, variables, and variants, as well as the basic technique of using the same topic in multiple "books." The Support staff is wonderful - friendly, prompt, and thorough. Support is usually done via email; many of the staff are in Author-it's home country of New Zealand (18-hour time difference from the East Coast of US), although they do have US support staff if you really need to talk to someone on the phone, which in my experience has been rare. They also offer online chat, which I haven't really used. I have rarely had technical problems; I have been using it for nearly six years and can't recall the database ever being down, unless one of our servers was having trouble. My experience has been with HTML Pages, .chm, Word, and .pdf (by way of Word) outputs. I just find it to be a fun tool, and I'm very fond of it. **What do you dislike about Author-It?** Author-it is great for enforcing consistent standards. This means that it is not as flexible when it comes to playing with the appearance of a Help system. If you are someone who likes to experiment with formatting on the fly you might find Author-it's template system for styles confining. There is basically no such thing as manual formatting in Author-it. Every change to formatting has to be defined in a Style object. It's easy enough to change things like font size or color as long as you do so through a Style object, but to get certain effects in Web-based or .chm Help - the most important in our case was image maps - you can't use Author-it. Author-it allows you to incorporate .js or .htm files, but the files themselves, unless you stick to the ones that are provided with your Author-it installation, would have to be produced separately in another tool. So if you are not content to stick with the templates Author-it provides, it helps to have some understanding of HTML, .css, and JavaScript. That being said, the Support staff have helped me with things like customizing an .hhp file (outside of Author-it) to modify .chm Help, even though these things may not specifically be Author-it questions. It is good that the Support staff is wonderful; documentation leaves some things to be desired. When they moved from the 4.x release to 5.0 line, they actually removed a lot of very helpful information from the Knowledge Center (their web-based Help. You can still get to the 4.0 KC but I don't know how much longer this will continue. The training manual we were given when we started is poorly organized and difficult to search. And error messages, though I know how to interpret most common ones now through experience, and they are usually attributable to something I did and can easily fix, are neither user-friendly nor well documented. For the past several years Author-it has been pushing their Cloud version. We have been using Author-it since 2009 and have the On Premises version. Because of the marketing push for Cloud I have fears that they will take On Premises away. When we got Author-it, we were told it supported WinHelp, which was of value to us because we are stuck producing WinHelp for certain products, for technical reasons. The WinHelp Author-it supports is formatted in a way I haven't seen since the 90s - single pane - so we had to stick with RoboHelp for Word for our WinHelp. I know WinHelp is old but if they were going to say they supported it they should at least have supported the latest version of old. This issue probably concerns almost no one in the world except my department. :-) **Recommendations to others considering Author-It:** The great thing about Author-it is that because it's a database, it enforces consistency and enables reuse of content. Author-it gives you many options for reusing content: embedded text, variables, and variants, as well as the basic technique of using the same topic in multiple "books." It can publish to Word, which makes it a good tool to have if you are working with reviewers outside the Docs team, since most of them will want to work in Word. It supports many other outputs, including TouchHelp. I think it helps to have a fascination with the more technical side of Help authoring when you use Author-it. I like being able to make it do different things by incorporating Java scripts and .bat files. I have been using it long enough that I know how to interpret most error messages, but when I was first learning the product I would sometimes get errors when I tried to generate output that ended up meaning something simple, but were worded cryptically. **What problems is Author-It solving and how is that benefiting you?** We produce Tech Manuals and Install Guides that share a significant amount of content but differ slightly across products. The products are often released together as a suite, so we are often generating multiple Tech Manuals and Install Guides within the space of a few weeks. Before we got Author-it we maintained the Install Guides in Word and the manuals in FrameMaker, and did a lot of copying and pasting, with multiple writers performing the same edit in multiple documents. It took a lot of planning, but I was able to break down the Install Guide and Tech Manual for each product into basic topics, using Author-it's embedded text, variable, and variant features to customize the topics for different products. Now, if we get a tech doc update that affects multiple products, we often only need to edit one topic. It takes a lot less time than before to apply feedback and re-generate these documents during a review cycle. We do a similar thing with Help and User Manuals. That was less complex to implement because there we did not have the problem of topics varying slightly across a number of products. Since our User Manuals duplicate content from the Help, once the Help content has been updated, a User Manual can be generated in a few minutes. Much better than copying and pasting. ### 35. Great staff who are always helpful, but with some points of frustration with stability. **Rating:** 3.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Computer Software | Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** October 08, 2015 **What do you like best about Author-It?** The workflow for writers is excellent. Having a CMS output to Word is, surprisingly, an advantage because most writers can adjust or create a Word Template. Working in Ant or other language to update document appearance can be far more challenging. **What do you dislike about Author-It?** Their SLA offers 99.9% availability. That still high for a SaaS platform. They should be striving for 99.99, which is standard. They don't do much of anything to announce updates or improvements. The process for setting up and configuring the application's many objects to interact correctly is extremely complex. Setting up security is cumbersome. I don't like that Word Macros don't work on the SaaS platform. The publishing engine can be buggy. I don't know how much effort they are putting into fixing these types of issues. I've submitted tickets but years go by without change. **What problems is Author-It solving and how is that benefiting you?** We are able to manage a very large document set with both HTML Help and PDF components with a very small staff using AI. It now works with Mobile as well. Also we have started to use it for RFP processing. ### 36. Very good solution when it works **Rating:** 3.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Consumer Electronics | Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** September 29, 2015 **What do you like best about Author-It?** Ability to easily re-use topics and see in which books those topics have been used, localize into over 30 locales, publish directly into different formats. Company is responsive and does its best to solve our issues. **What do you dislike about Author-It?** Lack of direct interface with any decent layout tool for printing books on paper. Poor quality Localize module which is now being redeveloped by Author-it to make it fit for purpose. Total lack of user doc format for mobile devices being supplied despite a promise that it would be... **Recommendations to others considering Author-It:** Good product if you need a CMS as well as an authoring tool. Test Localize FIRST before you buy it to make sure it fulfills your needs. NB. We do not use the reviewing module just now. **What problems is Author-It solving and how is that benefiting you?** Production of several books with overlapping content, we needed a CMS as well as an authoring tool. Ability to localize from one set of en-gb source into multiple languages using our preferred vendor. ### 37. It is very hard to learn but I enjoy the versatility of the output. **Rating:** 2.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Information Technology and Services | Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** October 01, 2015 **What do you like best about Author-It?** Using common elements of text that can be stored centrally and reused. **What do you dislike about Author-It?** Having multiple files and objects for every single graphic is cumbersome. Also, changing the look and feel of text elements has been difficult because they don't look the same in our dual outputs (.chm and .html). I don't feel much control over the look of the output, or maybe we just don't know how to change it, so it looks very bland. **Recommendations to others considering Author-It:** Take a training class. **What problems is Author-It solving and how is that benefiting you?** We are writing customer-facing online help and converting that to a user guide in PDF form. We can do both outputs with little or no intervention. ## Author-It Discussions - [Can I and if yes how create training tutorials?](https://www.g2.com/discussions/16122-can-i-and-if-yes-how-create-training-tutorials) - 1 comment, 1 upvote - [Where is the manual Author it ProCSS configuration and commands?](https://www.g2.com/discussions/13938-where-is-the-manual-author-it-procss-configuration-and-commands) - 2 comments, 1 upvote - [View Author-It pricing details and edition comparison](https://www.g2.com/products/author-it/reviews?section=pricing&secure%5Bexpires_at%5D=2026-06-25+03%3A06%3A36+-0500&secure%5Bsession_id%5D=2b61193d-d9f2-46a3-acab-2fd834609cba&secure%5Btoken%5D=89a31ec62036e17f596fae25a52371701d59484a1cd2dff1e18ef87fedd98d7e&format=llm_user) ## Author-It Features **XML Data Model Type** - DITA (Darwin Information Typing Architecture) - DocBook - S1000D - SCORM **Training & eLearning** - Content Creation - Content Libraries **Generative AI** - AI Text Generation - AI Text Summarization **Agentic AI - Course Authoring** - Adaptive Learning - Natural Language Interaction **Software Model** - SaaS (Software as a Service) - Hosted - On-Premise - Cloud-based **Platform** - Customization - Integration APIs - Internationalization - User, Role, and Access Management - Performance - Mobility - Reporting - Dashboards **Creation Features** - XML Authoring - Workflow Management - Collaborative Review ## Top Author-It Alternatives - [MadCap Flare](https://www.g2.com/products/madcap-flare/reviews) - 4.4/5.0 (483 reviews) - [Heretto](https://www.g2.com/products/heretto/reviews) - 4.1/5.0 (39 reviews) - [Paligo](https://www.g2.com/products/paligo/reviews) - 4.6/5.0 (57 reviews)