# MadCap Flare Reviews **Vendor:** MadCap Software **Category:** [Help Authoring Tools (HAT)](https://www.g2.com/categories/help-authoring-tool-hat) **Average Rating:** 4.4/5.0 **Total Reviews:** 486 ## About MadCap Flare Empowering teams to create, manage, and deliver exceptional content at scale MadCap Flare is the go-to solution for technical content teams that need to streamline workflows and deliver consistent, high-quality content across every channel. Trusted by documentation, training, and knowledge management professionals worldwide, Flare combines the precision of XML-based authoring with the flexibility of multi-channel publishing—all from a single, centralized platform. Why leading teams rely on Flare: Scalable, topic-based authoring: XML-based structure ensures precision and scalability for complex documentation projects. Single-source publishing: Manage all outputs from one project to eliminate redundancy and simplify updates. Multi-channel delivery: Publish effortlessly to self-service portals, online Help, documentation hubs, and training guides. Advanced content reuse: Reuse variables, snippets, and conditions to save time and maintain accuracy. Real-time collaboration with Flare Online: Co-author, review, and manage content simultaneously in the cloud—no check-in delays or version conflicts. Integrated translation management: Accelerate localization and expand your global reach. Flexible publishing formats: Deliver content in HTML5, PDF, Word, SCORM, and more to meet diverse audience needs. Proven ROI: Cut production costs, speed release cycles, and boost customer satisfaction. What sets Flare apart: Unlike traditional content management tools, Flare is purpose-built for technical content teams—offering unmatched flexibility, control, and scalability. With Flare Online, teams gain cloud-based collaboration and instant publishing capabilities for faster, more connected workflows. Together, they form a unified platform for creating, managing, and delivering knowledge at scale—ensuring efficiency, brand consistency, and an exceptional user experience. That’s why thousands of organizations trust Flare to power their global content strategy.gy." ## MadCap Flare Pros & Cons **What users like:** - Users commend the **excellent customer support** of MadCap Flare, ensuring efficient problem-solving and user satisfaction. (4 reviews) - Users love the **user-friendly interface** of MadCap Flare, making documentation tasks efficient and straightforward. (4 reviews) - Users value the **user-friendly content management** of MadCap Flare, enabling efficient authoring and seamless workflow. (2 reviews) - Users appreciate the **extensive customization options** of MadCap Flare, allowing tailored documentation for various needs and projects. (2 reviews) - Users find MadCap Flare to be **exceptionally efficient** , significantly streamlining authoring and documentation tasks with ease. (2 reviews) - Flexibility (2 reviews) - Users value the **comprehensive tools and user-friendly design** of MadCap Flare, enhancing content development and management efficiency. (2 reviews) - Ease of Learning (1 reviews) - Easy Implementation (1 reviews) - Easy Setup (1 reviews) **What users dislike:** - Users note a **steep learning curve** with MadCap Flare, requiring regular use and commitment to master the processes. (3 reviews) - Users find the **complexity of MadCap Flare** challenging, especially when not using it regularly, but can overcome it. (1 reviews) - Users find the **cost of MadCap Flare and related events** to be prohibitively expensive and inaccessible for many. (1 reviews) - Users find **Learning Flare quite difficult** when not using it regularly, making memory of processes a challenge. (1 reviews) - Users report **performance issues** with MadCap Flare on large projects, experiencing slowdowns and lag during builds. (1 reviews) - Users report **slow performance** in MadCap Flare, particularly noticeable in large projects, affecting efficiency during builds. (1 reviews) ## MadCap Flare Reviews ### 1. Powerful Tool for Seamless Documentation Management **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Adam M. | Senior Technical Writer, Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** March 23, 2026 **What do you like best about MadCap Flare?** I really like the snippets feature in MadCap Flare. It lets me reuse small pieces of content across different parts of the application. If I'm using a line across various products or parts of the UI, I only need to update it once. This single source of truth reduces errors and misinformation. It's also great for productivity because instead of updating the same thing multiple times across the software, I just do it once, and it's updated instantly. I also appreciate the huge amount of YouTube videos and training courses available through MadCap's YouTube and their website. It makes the tool easier to manage independently and is a major strength over the competition. The logical workflow makes it accessible, even if you're new to it. **What do you dislike about MadCap Flare?** I think the MadCap Flare online interface could be improved. It's still fairly early in its adoption, and because I'm working pretty much independently, it's not that favorable for me. The idea is it's a lightweight interface you can use across different team members to work on the same topic at the same time, but it's just not really useful for me. **What problems is MadCap Flare solving and how is that benefiting you?** I use MadCap Flare to quickly update and manage documentation. It allows me to easily adjust to last-minute changes from the development team and generate multiple outputs efficiently. The tagging system helps me produce content in a smooth and controlled manner, reducing errors. ### 2. Flare Continues to Amaze After 16 Years of Versatile Use **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Transportation/Trucking/Railroad | Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** November 19, 2025 **What do you like best about MadCap Flare?** Admittedly, long ago... in the very beginning, I had to move from RoboHelp to Flare... it was a steep learning curve for me... but once I got it, I never looked back... After 16 years, I still learn something new and magical about Flare with every project. Flare is often fun to work with because there are so many ways to use it. I have used it for online help, knowledge bases, and it's currently what I use for our company glossary. There are periods of time when I am asked to or want to incorporate a new element or functionality into a project. Tech Support - especially Keaton L. - has helped me through those challenges, as needed. Those folks in TS are amazing. **What do you dislike about MadCap Flare?** Because Flare is rather complex in its ways, it is definitely a challenge if I don't keep working in it... between jobs or because certain jobs haven't allowed me to use it on a regular basis, it can sometimes be a challenge to remember the processes. But those are quickly overcome. **What problems is MadCap Flare solving and how is that benefiting you?** I think the biggest change in the documentation due to Flare is our official company glossary. It used to be maintained in Confluence... that tool is like the Wild West... everyone is doing their own thing... and the search feature was not the greatest. It also didn't look great and it was hard to get to. Once we decided we were changing it over to Flare, the interface for the glossary is so much cleaner and easier to navigate. The use of snippets and micro content makes the search feature more efficient, and so much easier to navigate. We also impressed our Legal department by using it for a couple of their knowledge bases - they were happy to see what we were able to create for them. ### 3. Peerless Authoring Software **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Adam M. | Senior Technical Writer, Information Technology and Services, Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** April 16, 2024 **What do you like best about MadCap Flare?** The features are industry leading. Topic-based authoring, snippets, conditional settings make for a fully customiseable output. Lovely UI to use. The team are really helpful and friendly. **What do you dislike about MadCap Flare?** Steep learining curve. But if you put in the effort and watch the training videos and read the great documentation, you will get to where you need to be. MadCap Software do MadWorld conferences for documentation professionals. The cost of entry and travel required is prohibitively expensive for me. If only an online stream attendance was available so thoese of us who cannot attend in person don't miss out. **What problems is MadCap Flare solving and how is that benefiting you?** Documenting multiple versions of software in the same shared source content. I can design lovely outputs and hosted sites using Central. ### 4. A collaborative tool made specially for Technical Writers or writers. **Rating:** 4.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** GEM CLAIRE A. | Technical writer, Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** July 16, 2025 **What do you like best about MadCap Flare?** collaborative and intuitive. It helps me collaborate with my team proactively. Easy to integrate with other file formats. Easy to connect and really help our team especially in assisting customers. **What do you dislike about MadCap Flare?** sometimes its really technical, and has a lot of updates but its understandable but very laggy **What problems is MadCap Flare solving and how is that benefiting you?** Helps collaboration easier within teams in a certain project ### 5. Comprehensive and User-Friendly Documentation Tool **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** TEJAS S. | Technical Writer, Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** November 16, 2024 **What do you like best about MadCap Flare?** The platform is exceptionally user-friendly, making it efficient and straightforward to handle both authoring and technical documentation tasks, as well as carrying out thorough reviews. The support team and documentation provided by MadCap have also been extremely helpful and accurate, ensuring we can quickly find solutions to any issues that arise. Additionally, if you’re looking to customize standards or layouts, MadCap Flare is an ideal tool, offering extensive flexibility and options to tailor documentation to specific requirements. **What do you dislike about MadCap Flare?** On large projects with many topics and assets, Flare may occasionally experience slow performance or lag, especially during builds. **What problems is MadCap Flare solving and how is that benefiting you?** Flare allows for easy reuse of content across multiple projects through its topic-based authoring and single-source publishing capabilities, saving time and ensuring consistency. It simplifies the generation of various outputs (PDFs, HTML5, eBooks, etc.) from a single source, eliminating the need for duplicate work across formats. Features like responsive HTML5 output, searchable help, and intuitive navigation improve user experience in our documentation. ### 6. Organization Simplified **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Aly O. | Senior Account Executive (US Summits), Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** April 25, 2025 **What do you like best about MadCap Flare?** MapCad really helps organize documents and offers brilliant solutions to improve software. **What do you dislike about MadCap Flare?** Price is somewhat high, but if you use it regularly the ROI will eventually be high. **What problems is MadCap Flare solving and how is that benefiting you?** Helps bring all my developments in one place, offers solutions that expedite processes. ### 7. MadCap Miracle ! **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Lori K. | Product Manager, Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** November 05, 2024 **What do you like best about MadCap Flare?** Branching is making our lives so much easier. Also the support from Keaton is amazing! **What do you dislike about MadCap Flare?** There is a definite learning curve, but that time is well spent. **What problems is MadCap Flare solving and how is that benefiting you?** When writing user manuals in software development, functionality in scope changes frequently. By utilizing MadCap's branching capabilities, we can separate each feature and then decide which branch(es) should be used for a release. Branching is automated, and only requires intervention if a potential conflict arises between branches. This functionality is a game changer. ### 8. Fantastic Software for Tech Writers **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Vidya Raman S. | Technical Writing Specialist, Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** January 29, 2018 **What do you like best about MadCap Flare?** Single sourcing Flexibility in managing templates and styles HTML5 templates Top Nav functionality **What do you dislike about MadCap Flare?** Integration with TFS Issues with formatting tables **Recommendations to others considering MadCap Flare:** I definitely recommend Flare for anyone with the following requirements: - HTML5 output and responsive design - Single sourcing - Managing multiple projects - Large number of projects - Large projects (typically with thousands of topics) The learning curve may be high initially, but the help and resources available on MadCap's web site are excellent. The website provides many examples for HTML5 projects. The only areas where Flare seems to be lacking are: - Integration with TFS: We have had recurring issues with check ins particularly losing our changes after a successful check in . - Table formatting: We have had issues with tables re-sizing automatically. Flare tends to add a lot of additional code to the basic HTML for table. - Table Styles: The table stylesheet editor should be extended similar to the Stylesheet Editor. It should provide for additional formatting options. **What problems is MadCap Flare solving and how is that benefiting you?** Easy to manage large projects in Flare Ability to set up a Master Project and use it across multiple projects ### 9. Flare remains the best content authoring tool on the market and for now remains value for money **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Gerard W. | Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** April 16, 2024 **What do you like best about MadCap Flare?** I’ve used various commercial content authoring tools for the past twenty years to build Help and training systems for global software developers and tertiary institutions. About a decade ago, spurred on by the increasing licence costs for the tool we were using at the time, I assessed the content authoring offerings then available. Flare stood out for its features (especially the HTML5 output), usability, UI, ease of implementation and value for money, and despite the significant effort in migrating from one system to another we decided to move to Flare. I use Flare on a daily basis and it is not a decision I’ve regretted. Flare is a powerful authoring tool and it keeps pace with technological innovations. MadCap’s Support is generally very good, and the online documentation and training videos are excellent. I continue to assess the content authoring offerings every few years and am content that we are using the best content authoring tool on the market. **What do you dislike about MadCap Flare?** My only concern these days is with licencing. MadCap’s decision a few years ago to eliminate tiered Support / Licencing (it now only offers the more expensive premium licence) was disappointing. In recent years MadCap has focussed development on its new cloud offering, MadCap Central – I’ve assessed this and am not yet convinced that the features available, and the higher cost, are better value than the desktop offering, at least for our number of users and setup. My concern is that MadCap’s licensing model might encourage a move to the Cloud offering (desktop licencing costs have increased in recent years). Time will tell. In conclusion, I believe that Flare remains the best content authoring tool on the market and for now at least remains value for money. **What problems is MadCap Flare solving and how is that benefiting you?** We build large and complex software offerings and our documentation is comprehensive. A big issue with any large Help system is discoverability - users need to be able to find answers to their questions. Flare has an impressive range of features (from indexing to microcontent) to facilitate discoverability. ### 10. Great tool!!!! **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Information Technology and Services | Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** November 05, 2024 **What do you like best about MadCap Flare?** MadCap provides a comprehensive set of solutions, making it a unique and easy-to-understand platform. It includes all the essential tools needed for efficient content development and management, which streamlines the workflow for users. It is easy to use, easy to implement, and has great customer support available. **What do you dislike about MadCap Flare?** Nothing as such, Flare is a great tool and easy. **What problems is MadCap Flare solving and how is that benefiting you?** It has given us a great platform to develop user-friendly and attractive outputs that grab users' attention, and its support team helps us a lot at each and every point. My Special thanks to my SME "Keaton Lullo" who has been a great support to us and been there to solve each and every problem we face. ### 11. A complete help authoring solution to meet all your documentation needs! **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Financial Services | Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** August 02, 2022 **What do you like best about MadCap Flare?** Very powerful single-sourcing tool and offers a great deal of flexibility with design. The interface is really good - it is easy to find and add a lot of online interactive features - such as drop-downs and responsive layout tiles. If you are good with HTML, CSS and JS, there's a lot that you can customize. Scripts are easy to add. **What do you dislike about MadCap Flare?** No option to set conditions for showing two different outputs from the same document in different pages of the same online help. I need to do a lot of manual readjustment to fix tabbed spaces such that the text sample I create looks the same in both online and print. Coming from FrameMaker, these are the options I miss a lot: 1) No drag-and-drop options to add graphic objects like text boxes, arrows, circles, etc. (and hyperlinked text within it!) . 2) No easy way to see how your final PDF output would look like. The preview window just allows me to see a bit of the current topic. 3) PDF image maps for any shape other than rectangles don't work too well unless I change the dpi. 4) No option for adding only change bars without displaying changes while preserving tracked changes in the output. **What problems is MadCap Flare solving and how is that benefiting you?** Moving our PDF documentation into HTML. Standardizing our look and feel of documents. ### 12. Intuitive and versatile tool **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Computer Software | Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** April 19, 2024 **What do you like best about MadCap Flare?** After using FrameMaker and AuthorIt for several years, I find Flare most intuitive and easy to handle. I find the user interface appealing and most of the many features are easy to find and understand. I work with Flare every day. I enjoy working in the WISIWIG environment while being able to quickly swith to the xml code when things get tricky. Online documentation and customer support have proven to be very helpful on many occasions. **What do you dislike about MadCap Flare?** None of the bugs we reported has been solved. I was given advice to store projects direcly on C because slightly longer file paths lead to errors during publication of projects. Compatibility with RWS Trados not good. **What problems is MadCap Flare solving and how is that benefiting you?** Our customers demand customer specific documentation. Large numbers of files and conditions in combination with several TOCs allow us to meet that demand. This also helps us to save translation costs. ### 13. Brilliant support for a complex powerful tool **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Benjamin M. | Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** April 17, 2024 **What do you like best about MadCap Flare?** Flare enables us to produce documentation variants that match every customer's unique system configuration with ease and precision. The range of functions like synchronisation with spreadsheets and simultaneous web and print publishing make it streets ahead of competitor offerings. The technical support team are patient, knowledgable and thorough. **What do you dislike about MadCap Flare?** It's not simple to learn and can frustrate the beginner but the support guys make it all work **What problems is MadCap Flare solving and how is that benefiting you?** Turning an inefficient way of working wasting many people's effort into a slick production line with vastly superior outputs in a fraction of the time ### 14. It's complex, but there's no better tool for producing multiple outputs from a single source **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Steve D. | Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** April 16, 2024 **What do you like best about MadCap Flare?** Three things: 1. Single sourcing, enabling reuse of content, especially nested snippets (i.e. snippets within snippets) 2. Side-by-side XML and text editors, enabling direct editing of tags 3. Microcontent - this is really great **What do you dislike about MadCap Flare?** It crashes on rare occasions for no apparent reason The find/replace functionality is not very useful **What problems is MadCap Flare solving and how is that benefiting you?** Rather than rasing support tickets, users are referring more and more to the documents and websites produced by Flare. This reduces the load on our support team. It's also organizing and documenting our products' knowledge bases for in-house use. ### 15. Friendly Tool **Rating:** 4.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Computer Software | Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** April 18, 2024 **What do you like best about MadCap Flare?** MadCap is very friendly and we can perform a lot of changes to our content very easily. It also helps to add other related files to the content. **What do you dislike about MadCap Flare?** The interface can be little more user friendly. **What problems is MadCap Flare solving and how is that benefiting you?** It solves problems related to considering a look and feel of the help portal by providing Templates which can be adjusted with our content. ### 16. Good product, but has some issues with updates. **Rating:** 4.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Anjanie R. | Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** April 16, 2024 **What do you like best about MadCap Flare?** I like that it is user friendly and it is generally pretty simple to navigate; you just follow the given instructions/rules and write. **What do you dislike about MadCap Flare?** I dislike that there are frequent IT issues. **What problems is MadCap Flare solving and how is that benefiting you?** It is solving time with regards to publishing procedures. When SOPs (standard operating procedures) are individually launched, it makes the process harder. With Flare, users have the ability to build multiple procedures all at once, saving a lot of time and fulfilling the needs of the business. ### 17. A good single sourcing tool **Rating:** 4.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Chris M. | Computer Engineer, Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** April 17, 2024 **What do you like best about MadCap Flare?** Usability, the many features, prompt customer support and robustness **What do you dislike about MadCap Flare?** Some long-existing known bugs that have not been resolved in years **What problems is MadCap Flare solving and how is that benefiting you?** Single-sourcing our customer documentation. I can integrate many sources of information and convert to HTML with few and easy steps. ### 18. Great app for tech writers like me! **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Ian Limwell A. | Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** February 14, 2023 **What do you like best about MadCap Flare?** MadCap Flare is a popular authoring and publishing tool for technical writers that offers a wide range of features such as content management, multi-channel publishing, and localization support. Its ability to generate output in multiple formats, including HTML5, PDF, and mobile apps, is highly appreciated by users. **What do you dislike about MadCap Flare?** Madcap Flare's learning curve and high cost. It has been known to have a relatively steep learning curve, which can be a challenge for some users, especially those who are new to technical writing or the software. As for the cost, MadCap Flare is a professional tool designed for complex documentation projects, and as such, it may have a higher price tag than other authoring tools. **What problems is MadCap Flare solving and how is that benefiting you?** MadCap Flare solves many of the common challenges faced by technical writers, including Content Management, Multi-channel publishing, Localization support, and Version control. These features are designed to improve the productivity and efficiency of technical writers, which in turn benefits their organizations by reducing time and costs associated with content creation and management. ### 19. MadCap Flare is a comprehensive tool for creating technical documentation and training. **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Ken S. | Content Strategist and Architect, Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** October 02, 2022 **What do you like best about MadCap Flare?** MadCap Flare's ever-growing feature set allows technical communicators to create a range of outputs, from online help to support sites to manuals to training courses. The application includes a library of templates for new users and features like pre- and post-build event commands, third-party plugin support, and macro recording capabilities for more experienced users who need to customize outputs for their organizations and automate frequent tasks. MadCap provides excellent customer support and implementation services. The company has created a broad user community around its software, including an annual conference, a Slack channel, a LinkedIn group, and local user groups. **What do you dislike about MadCap Flare?** MadCap Flare is on-premise software, which might concern customers looking for a cloud-based solution. However, MadCap does offer a cloud-based solution called Central that can be used with Flare. **What problems is MadCap Flare solving and how is that benefiting you?** MadCap Flare allows technical communicators to create various output types (HTML, PDF, SCORM- and xAPI-compliant training courses, and more) regardless of their level of technical knowledge. Flare's single sourcing features allow technical communicators to reuse content they create across outputs, which saves them time and their organizations money (particularly if content is translated). ### 20. Feels half-baked, and doesnt replace Flare **Rating:** 1.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Gideon B. | Head of Product Knowledge, Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** August 02, 2022 **What do you like best about MadCap Flare?** Its online, which makes working with other writers easier, however, this only replaces what Flare never did very well with Git Integration **What do you dislike about MadCap Flare?** 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 **What problems is MadCap Flare solving and how is that benefiting you?** collaboration online publishing is more reliable than Flare was ### 21. Using MadCap Flare since 2017 - happy customer **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** John C. | T, Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** August 17, 2022 **What do you like best about MadCap Flare?** Every employer I've had that uses Flare also purchased Platinum Service. Their support is top-notch and helps with all user levels of capability. The software itself is great, but I would always recommend also having a support package. **What do you dislike about MadCap Flare?** Learning at least a little bit of code is inevitable, and I've worked with many users that are not up to the challenge of deciphering code. Along those same lines, how all the pieces fit together to get the finished product can be complex. If troubleshooting and trying to figure out what's causing an unexpected result isn't your cup of tea, much like any IT field, using Flare may not be one's best choice. **What problems is MadCap Flare solving and how is that benefiting you?** Most Flare users seem to be interested in Flare for the SOP, procedures, or Help Site html output capabilities. I've written for internal, as well as external, users / customers. This software provides a useful way to provide information. ### 22. Great for collaboration **Rating:** 4.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Melodie S. | Technical Writer, Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** August 17, 2022 **What do you like best about MadCap Flare?** 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. **What do you dislike about MadCap Flare?** 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. **What problems is MadCap Flare solving and how is that benefiting you?** It is solving the lack of accountability for completed reviews. I can assign specific people to review content and I can see when they have completed that review. I also like having visibility on all my projects in one location. ### 23. A full-featured docs tool ideal for online and printed outputs **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Kate S. | Lead Technical Writer, Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** August 11, 2022 **What do you like best about MadCap Flare?** I love using Flare for all of my documention needs. I've been using it since Version 6 (so, a very long time), and I don't see any reason to switch to anything else! It is a great tool for online and printed outputs. I've used it at several companies -- both large and small. At my current company, we use it primarily for online documentation, and we manage several different single-sourced outputs. Some of them are translated into a dozen languages, and Flare makes this easy, too. I've never had a documentation problem that Flare couldn't help me solve. I love its snippet and variables functionalities, its built-in analysis capabilities, and its flexible skin editor. All of the new microcontent features are amazing, too. **What do you dislike about MadCap Flare?** If I had to pick one thing, it's only that Flare does have a steep learning curve. It's not a pick-up-and-go software tool. Luckily, Madcap provides great training opportunities within the software (tutorials), in the online help (more tutorials and walkthroughs), and through their training department. It might not be quick to learn, but it's worth taking the time to get to know this software so you can fully take advantage of everything it has to offer. **What problems is MadCap Flare solving and how is that benefiting you?** While MadCap Flare has helped me to solve many documentation problems, it has been most beneficial in helping me single-source my documentation. At my current company, we were keeping all of our docs in several different places. Using Flare let us take all of those separate docs and combine them into a single project, which drastically cuts down on the time to write and maintain the documentation. ### 24. A Great Tool for Single Sourcing **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Oleksandr B. | Technical Writer, Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** August 10, 2022 **What do you like best about MadCap Flare?** 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. **What do you dislike about MadCap Flare?** 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. **What problems is MadCap Flare solving and how is that benefiting you?** * Our team uses Central as our source control solution and main repository. We publish our documentation from Central to our help servers. * We have several technical writers who collaborate via Central. * Product Owners use Central to review doc updates. * We use Central's analytics to see the most common user searches and come up with helpful search suggestions via microcontent. ### 25. Flexible and feature-rich writing tool that can fit many requirements **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Jeff D. | Technical Documentation Team Lead, Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** August 09, 2022 **What do you like best about MadCap Flare?** Because Flare works with HTML, the possibilities are almost endless with what you can achieve with your HTML outputs. Advanced HTML content, such as mega-menus, can be added to your outputs as long as you have the HTML knowledge to create them. From context sensitive in-app help, to regularly updated online help, to static PDFs, Flare can create all the outputs that are typically needed from the same source content with just a quick setup. **What do you dislike about MadCap Flare?** With so many features and options in Flare, it is often hard to find out how to do something without checking the online help or user forums. Luckily there's a great user base that is very helpful when new questions come up. **What problems is MadCap Flare solving and how is that benefiting you?** Madcap Flare is helping us to author and publish user documentation for customers to easily access and search. Flare also makes it easy to keep this content up-to-date with minimal effort. Flare also provides many features and options for improving your content by offering new features such as micro-content for improved search results that allow users to find the info they need with fewer clicks. ### 26. Powerful software for your documentation needs **Rating:** 4.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Nico C. | Team Lead - Education, Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** August 10, 2022 **What do you like best about MadCap Flare?** The flexibility and feature-set of the software. If something is not supported natively in Flare, it's always possible to script it and create features using Javascript or other common web-based tools. Combining Javascript with the native Flare features opens up nearly any possibility. **What do you dislike about MadCap Flare?** The software itself feels old-fashioned and building outputs may take a long time depending on the size of the project and the speed of the computer. In addition, it is only available in Windows with no cloud-based solution. Creating a web-based Flare platform would make the software much more valuable to my organization as most of the company is not using Windows and does not need the entire feature set. **What problems is MadCap Flare solving and how is that benefiting you?** MadCap Flare allows us to create version and platform-specific documentation while keeping it manageable. A small team of 2 technical writers is able to maintain thousands of topics due to single-sourcing. It keeps us working efficiently. ### 27. Flare: An easy to use all-in-one tool that every Tech writer needs **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Rubin K. | Manager - Technical Documentation, Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** August 05, 2022 **What do you like best about MadCap Flare?** - Easy to create a modern-looking responsive HTML5 Online Help. - Great single sourcing tool. Allows you to create multiple outputs with conditions - Proved great search results with Micro-content - Snippets are an awesome way to re-use contents - Easy to use CSS editor - even novice who does not have much experience in coding can create great CSS - Easy to use Skin editor **What do you dislike about MadCap Flare?** - Word outputs had some drawbacks, some of them are being solved in the latest releases (for example, bullets and numbering). But there are still a few issues with Word outputs. For example, the cover page (title page) style which I apply using Page Layout shows up fine in the PDF output but not in the Word output. Can this be resolved? - Can you provide more freedom to the users to edit the skin from the back end? For example, if a UX designer provides a UX prototype for me, I should be able to materialize that from the back end (sig HTML/CSS code) - Unable to provide separate styles for Online Help and PDF outputs when using Expand & Collapse. **What problems is MadCap Flare solving and how is that benefiting you?** - It is great that MadCap Flare comes with r1, r2, and sometimes r3 releases every year which includes several new features and improvements such as the recent addition of elearning in Flare. - It solves the problem of single sourcing and multi-authoring which is either not available or not robust enough (or not easy to use for novices) as compared with the other authoring tools in the industry. - MadCap Flare provides you with the complete suite of products for tech writers including Flare, Capture, Mimic, etc. ### 28. MadCap Flare for Technical Writers **Rating:** 4.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Kathryn P. | Senior Technical Writer, Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** January 16, 2018 **What do you like best about MadCap Flare?** I love the ability to build PDF, HTML, and Microsoft word outputs with the same HTML content. It's a great platform for collaborating with my coworkers and team. It makes it very easy to work remotely. The ease of use and the ability to learn new things while working in code view has helped me be a better tech writer. With the snippet and variable functionality, it makes it much easier for us makes rolling changes across our content. **What do you dislike about MadCap Flare?** Some of the user interfaces take a little bit of research to use but work great once you get the hang of it. The constant platform updates sometimes contain bugs when they are first released. I would really appreciate more options when it came to outputs as well and the ability to integrate with Kustomer would be appreciated. **Recommendations to others considering MadCap Flare:** Go to the training or take the training they offer. Go and get MAD certified after using it for a couple years. **What problems is MadCap Flare solving and how is that benefiting you?** It helps us push PDF and HTML outputs using the same HTML content. Only need to write once and can output the content multiple ways. It allows us to interact remotely and work on similar content. It also allows us to create versioning control for our content. With flare we are backed up to GitHub so we are able to keep track of when changes were made and who made the changes. ### 29. An excellent all round authoring tool with obvious and natural caveats **Rating:** 4.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Sam D. | Tech Writer, Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** August 04, 2022 **What do you like best about MadCap Flare?** Versatility - The sheer number of publishing mediums available, with ease of build and publishing. It is surely my preferred way of managing end to end documentation needs for organizational projects. True single sourcing - You can see your content changes reflected in real time the moment you save press Save. Instead of other competitive authoring tools that require you to perform certain iterations before you could hope to see the changes. Made life much easier. Easier publishing methods - define variables, set TOCs and output path. Sit back and see it working in glory. Surely much better curve than doing book based printing and god forbid if you forgot to uncheck Print to File there. Keyboard oriented commands - so glad they let the escape key sit in peace and gave us usual key combinations to carry out frequently done tasks. Super user-friendly and fast to achieve your deadlines. Support team - raising bugs with crash reports, makes the support team actually respond and tell us the steps needed. Much appreciated. **What do you dislike about MadCap Flare?** Unstable - I might be overstating this but the number of times it crashed on me while I was obliviously lost in the middle of something - is uncountable. The support team, no doubt, responds to each bug I raise. But if I have to clear the analyzer, user and output folder before doing a project. I think that calls for a little tightening of the ends. Sometimes the crashes are so persistent, that I can't do anything other than to kill Madcap from the Taskbar and hope against hope, my last inadvertent save was effective. Pure Development-oriented messaging - Not exactly a con, but this is as close to an authoring IDE as you can come to. Pretty evident from the error messages it throws up. From "...must be 248 characters or less" to intimidating "Object reference not found" -- me being from the technical side of the deal, can still manage to read through. Some of my team members with core writing experience were not so amused by witnessing such errors and apparently, they still get nightmares of build paths being more than 248 characters. Publishing on the web server is a hit or miss. Sometimes it works, and other times sit simply and keep waiting for a response. That makes it much more time efficient to manually go and do the task instead of waiting for it to complete. No perpetual license anymore - the major cons, the introduction of a subscription model is a straightaway hit at the lesser mortals individual authors like us who lived on the hope of eternal existence for a software. Just like how some photography lovers still use Photoshop 7.0 without breaking a sweat. Learning curve - new users migrating from much easier-on-eye UI tools (Word, WordPad, etc) might need a stent for their arteries after seeing the spectacle it first throws at your face upon first loading up - TOCs, Targets, Projects... But on the flip side, that's where the joy lies in exploring it. Project migration from Framemaker/word - still not perfect. Indentation and alignments are big misses that make it a completely foregone conclusion to think about it. Maybe I did it wrong but each time I attempted this, I thought about those stents too! **What problems is MadCap Flare solving and how is that benefiting you?** Single sourced - Truly. Excellent application of variables, snippets, and conditional tags. Perfect implementation. I dread going back to the previous setup. Great methods for publishing outputs. Takes a lot of load off my chest - as in another major competitor tool, trying to configure variables, paths, and all that process can be undone by a single checkbox that you forgot to select. So much for validation and integrity testing. Much better execution here in Madcap. ### 30. Powerful documentation software with some frustrating flaws **Rating:** 3.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Carrie L. | Technical Writing Manager, Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** August 04, 2022 **What do you like best about MadCap Flare?** Flare is a great single-sourcing tool; we often have to create different flavors of the same documentation for multiple audiences, and Flare makes it easy to share core content but condition differences for different audiences. I also appreciate Flare's ability to track changes - while this is such a basic feature, it's one that I've weirdly found missing from some other programs we've considered for documentation. It's great to be able to hop into the code for individual topics and make changes there when you can't quite get formatting to work in the text editor. We've also had great success with some unique, user-friendly Flare features for our help sites, like microcontent and glossaries. Overall, Flare has been a very functional tool for creating our help documentation; while we've occasionally considered alternatives, we haven't found anything that quite stacks up. **What do you dislike about MadCap Flare?** There are a few frustrating roadblocks we've encountered with Flare, and have not been able to resolve even with the platinum-level help of MadCap Support. One of those problems is seemingly basic flaws in the MadCap search functionality on our help websites; for example, a space in a search phrase is treated as a Boolean "AND," so that users entering more than one word in the search box will ONLY get results if those results contain ALL of those words (and there is no easy way to change this). MadCap also has supposedly built-in support for a few tools that we really wanted to use, including ElasticSearch and a connector to Salesforce, but we've ultimately found those tools to be flawed or unreliable (e.g., MadCap only supports a very outdated version of ElasticSearch, which we won't implement for security reasons). We've also had constant trouble with source control (Git), particularly with creating or loading others' new branches for Flare projects, and have to use manual command-line intervention (external to Flare) to get this essential feature to work reliably. **What problems is MadCap Flare solving and how is that benefiting you?** Flare helps us single-source help documentation for multiple audiences, including B2B and B2C users. This allows us to be more efficient and consistent in how we write about our products. ### 31. Mad for Flare **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Kristin L. | Technical Writer, Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** August 04, 2022 **What do you like best about MadCap Flare?** I have worked with Flare for about seven years and the best part of it is how it aids in efficiency in documentation. I maintain a help file with thousands of topics and being able to make use of snippets, variables, master pages, page layouts, conditional text... (the feature list goes on and on) makes a huge difference in the amount of time I spend updating and building content. I love how flexible Flare is and how I can leverage my content in so many ways. **What do you dislike about MadCap Flare?** I have bronze level maintenance which includes unlimited email support and I have not had much luck with it. I have had intermittent success with getting answers from support on my issues and typically turn to the user forum instead so I can get timely help. Also Capture, which works inside of/integrates with Flare is incredibly clunky. **What problems is MadCap Flare solving and how is that benefiting you?** I am so excited that Flare has introduced elearning features! I will absolutely be making use of those in the near future. I am so glad to know that my task of building a comprehensive training suite to accompany the OLH will be so much easier because I can use content I already have inside Flare to build SCORM-compliant training. ### 32. A powerful, flexible and features-packed authoring tool **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Michele P. | Contet Strategist and CMS/CCMS Consultant, Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** August 03, 2022 **What do you like best about MadCap Flare?** A very easy-to-use/understand authoring tool. It's not a database-based CMS, it's a file-based authoring tool/CMS, so it is very flexible and lots of customization can be made by yourselves if you have some CSS and HTML knowledge. If you have a developer in your team you can do A LOT more than what you have out of the box. **What do you dislike about MadCap Flare?** Not as "solid" as a database-based CMS/CCMS. Being file-based you could reach a performance limit if projects become huge. I don't like that translation processes are managed with MadCap Lingo which is another software, separated from the source Flare project in the Flare UI. This can increase complexity and brings some process limitations. For very complex environments, a "proper" CMS/CCMS could be a better choice. **What problems is MadCap Flare solving and how is that benefiting you?** It's a relatively low-cost solution to manage documentation in a professional, modular, flexible way. Compared with other software of this kind, the learning curve is very short and allows teams to adopt the tool and processes usually faster than other softwares. In our technical documentation consulting company we use Flare a lot to produce PDFs in whatever format and responsive HTMLs. ### 33. Powerful publishing tool that can keep you busy though, when it comes to optimizing basic details **Rating:** 4.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Niels G. | Systems Analyst, Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** August 03, 2022 **What do you like best about MadCap Flare?** MadCap Flare can be used in a DevOps manner with nightly builds of the documentation. Automated processes can be designed around it. The HTML-based sources allow editing via search & replace, which is useful when we need to "correct" structural aspects. The support of source control and CSS is a powerful technology behind Flare, which offers quite some possibilities. Basic HTML5 output with responsive design can easily be created with a decent out-of-the-box online search. Sharing the same content in different outputs (PDF and HTML5) is a great pro. **What do you dislike about MadCap Flare?** CSS is complex, and it seems like the Flare UI offers thousands of options that originate from CSS, which are supported by Flare, plus a few add-ons that are specific functionality of Flare. Often, when it comes to layout issues, in particular in print, these cannot be solved by Flare but then require some workarounds to harness CSS (again in our experience with a focus on print). Indeed, workarounds can often be found, but are cumbersome to implement in existing large documentation projects. If your project grows over time, you need to manage past versions for longer periods and want to maintain a very nice output (be it accurate print or just the one HTML5 feature that you still be missing), be prepared for refactoring tasks. Unexpected issues must often be faced on the side. In contrast, if you only have to deal with short-lived smaller projects, you will probably feel happy to improve with each iteration of a new project. **What problems is MadCap Flare solving and how is that benefiting you?** Madcap Flare helps us manage about 60 documents with ~5.000 pages (in PDF) across multiple release versions (since 2016), where we started parallel publication in HTML5 only recently. ### 34. Still top of the list - after 30+ years **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Thomas B. | Owner and founder, Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** August 03, 2022 **What do you like best about MadCap Flare?** What makes Flare stand out is its open file structure. It allows me to do whatever Flare allows me to, and on top of that also integrate into almost anything and develop around it. I do not have to wait for help, development, or design. It's all in the box. This, for me, is one of the important areas where it differs from "closed" CMS systems. In those I need to reach out for help if I have to dive deep and do the unexpected. That help often costs - if can even be done. In Flare I can do it myself. I have tried them all (or at least a whole bunch). Ranging from Ventura, FrameMaker, ST4, Paligo, AuthorIt and more. Flare sort of sums it up. I have yet to find a job which Flare cannot solve. **What do you dislike about MadCap Flare?** Only a few important nitty gritty things are missing: full support for CSS3 and the ability to link to files outside of a project and having them be part of the project. Apart from that, I'm pretty happy. **What problems is MadCap Flare solving and how is that benefiting you?** A whole range of problems or challenges. Particularly in the world of regulated documentation for medical and machine production, and the vast amount of variations this often requires, Flare stands out. It might seem complicated. But the other option is not to be able to at all. The structure and functionality of Flare, combined with its single-sourcing capabilities, have also meant a huge reduction in translation costs. Huge like in HUGE! ### 35. A comprehensive single-source multi-output authoring tool with great support. **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Tamar M. | Technical Writer, Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** August 03, 2022 **What do you like best about MadCap Flare?** Single-source: Write once, reuse content. Snippets for repetition, conditions for controlling output. Good support: If something is not working in my project and I send in a question, someone emails me back, looks at my project, and helps me figure it out. XML-based: If something does not look right in my topic, i can switch to the XML view, get at the nuts and bolts, and tweak what I need. **What do you dislike about MadCap Flare?** There are so many options and so much to know. I am probably not taking full advantage of the product. It took me a long time to get used to the fact that a document is made up of many files, each covering one topic/section. **What problems is MadCap Flare solving and how is that benefiting you?** Create a comprehensive help center, with search built in, that I can upload as-is to the cloud. Use the same files to also create a PDF guide. This very simply enables me to do my job. ### 36. Madcap Flare does the job well **Rating:** 4.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Jen v. | Technical Writer, Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** August 03, 2022 **What do you like best about MadCap Flare?** Flare has an easy-to-use interface and is fairly simple to set up (once you learn how). It has great features like single-sourcing, conditions, and variables, which allows content re-use and dynamic text. It's a stable product - we have no issues with generating builds. We have used it to produce this site: https://docs.eseye.com. **What do you dislike about MadCap Flare?** We don't use the Source Control feature, as we prefer to keep software that does something well separate from each other. We haven't had a good experience and won't try again - I'd prefer that Madcap focussed on doing the authoring tool stuff better. For example, you could work on ensuring that top-nav and side-nav have the same features; including a wizard for cookie popups (which are mandatory in Europe); providing more seamless integration with the cloud (like being able to set up cloud search engines easily instead of Madcap Flare search engine); including PDF and other file content in the search function. **What problems is MadCap Flare solving and how is that benefiting you?** We produce content for external and internal customers, as well as provide white label content for resellers. Flare enables us to educate our different customers in a fairly seamless way, reusing content that is fit for purpose depending on the audience. We create both web output and PDFs using Flare. For example, our Push API has a PDF manual: https://docs.eseye.com/Content/Resources/Files/8725-Push-API-Developer-Guide.pdf but is also available online: https://docs.eseye.com/Content/API/Push/PushAPIIntro.htm. We like the flexibility that Flare offers - at some point in the near future we will host Swagger output within our online help site, so our APIs will have an interactive sandpit. All sewn together neatly by Flare. ### 37. Do yourself a favor and use Flare **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** John A. | Technical Writer, Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** August 02, 2022 **What do you like best about MadCap Flare?** Flare works the way I think, by clearly dividing the way content and display are defined yet having the logical connectors to show how the two elements are connected. Flare provides a variety of information containers; I can control how information is presented in dynamic ways through related search terms and when needed as static content. The MadCap development team is constantly improving the software giving me new ways to present my content, the support team is quick to provide usable solutions when I am stuck, and the training and customer success team is spectacular. I can’t say enough good things about the Flare product and the MadCap team. **What do you dislike about MadCap Flare?** The complexity of Flare can be a bit daunting at first. There are a lot of settings and functions to play with and get used to. They make it easier with some useful context help, the support team is great, and for sure take the intro class and watch the videos. **What problems is MadCap Flare solving and how is that benefiting you?** Presenting a cohesive operations manual instead of a disjointed pile of Word documents makes it easier for our teams to find out how to do those tasks that are rare yet complex. The ability to interconnect and relate content like glossary terms and see also topics is a huge help to our users. ### 38. All your data/tasks/builds in one place **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Tricia S. | Technical Writer/ Illustrator, Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** August 02, 2022 **What do you like best about MadCap Flare?** 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. **What do you dislike about MadCap Flare?** 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. **What problems is MadCap Flare solving and how is that benefiting you?** I am a department of one, with occasional contributors. Our project database is stored in Central, and is accessible by other authors even if they don't work with Flare all the time. I also appreciate the Review feature where our SMEs can review and comment on topics one at a time. I can accept or reject these changes, and bring them back into Flare, without having to re-type or re-format content from a PDF or Word or other format. ### 39. Flare is exactly what my team needs **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Christina M. | Technical Writer, Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** August 02, 2022 **What do you like best about MadCap Flare?** I love how easy it is to update my files and send them to my team for review. There are a ton of extra features that help me complete my work efficiently. I also really like their support team. We can call in and get someone knowledgeable on the line or at least a feature request submitted pretty easily. **What do you dislike about MadCap Flare?** There's just so much that Flare is capable of that I lose track of some of the features. There's also been some issues when trying to keep our files on OneDrive that have caused odd, random problems that are hard to track down and fix. They also really push MadCap Central, which is understandable, but my company doesn't use that. **What problems is MadCap Flare solving and how is that benefiting you?** MadCap Flare has made it super easy for our team to single-source our content and re-use as much as possible. Flare has also made our review process so much easier. We were sending each other PDFs and then entering our edits into Flare, now we use their review packets and are able to easily accept and reject changes right from Flare. We are saving a ton of time now. ### 40. Using Flare in a one writer shop **Rating:** 4.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Erika F. | Technical Writer, Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** August 02, 2022 **What do you like best about MadCap Flare?** Flare exports to many outputs. The files are managed well, and the variable/conditional text functions work well in a shop with many variant documentation products. The base XHTML allows export to other tools (if necessary), with specific MadCap functions labeled for use with scripts for cleanup. Plugins are available to export to Markup. Source Control tools using GIT are easy to follow and use. **What do you dislike about MadCap Flare?** Skin selection is not the broadest, and personalizing skins past the Flare basics is difficult. I wish Flare would incorporate more 2 column skins and not have a full width header. **What problems is MadCap Flare solving and how is that benefiting you?** I am a single writer in a small company that handles products that interface together. In addition, some products have multiple variants that are slightly different. With the tight timeframes, and use of variables and conditions to handle the variant documentation, I'm able to meet my deadlines. With the topic based approach, it forces me to evaluate topics for reuse in other products. The source control for GIT makes it easy for me to checkin and out the topics to work on and manage multiple development branches. ### 41. Technical documentation all in one place **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Gabrielle C. | Product Design Engineer, Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** August 02, 2022 **What do you like best about MadCap Flare?** MadCap Flare provides us with the tools to source all our technical documentation across multiple programs from one place. The alternative of keeping separate Word documents or sharing Google Docs would be incredibly difficult to keep track of and MadCap Flare offers easy collaboration within the company. This is beneficial for remote employees as well since everyone can access the same files. **What do you dislike about MadCap Flare?** The one downside that I am personally experiencing with MadCap Flare is the inability to authenticate with my GitHub personal access token. Since GitHub does not allow for logging in with a password for third party applications, we have needed the interface to update within MadCap Flare to allow for inputting PATs. **What problems is MadCap Flare solving and how is that benefiting you?** MadCap Flare is solving the problem of coordinating all technical documentation for the several software programs our company produces. Most of the software share similar technical resources, so it's helpful to have one place to store the information and update. ### 42. Flare review **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Liven T. | Senior Technical Writer, Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** August 02, 2022 **What do you like best about MadCap Flare?** I've been using Flare since 2012 and I like it because I find that single sourcing content is so useful and efficient. Other things I like: Exporting projects to use as a template, creating multi-version and multilingual product documentation, translation is simple as there are many translation suppliers who work with Flare, ready made templates available on the website, tutorial videos are excellent (yay Paul!). There's lots to learn and I like that. **What do you dislike about MadCap Flare?** It's a steep learning curve for Flare. However, the range of tutorial videos these days is impressive. It's been really expanded since 2012. I pick and chose what I want to learn when I need it. **What problems is MadCap Flare solving and how is that benefiting you?** The consistency and quality of the documentation I produce is high; it goes back to single sourcing :-) This makes it easy to update information in one place without a need to remember and track down information scattered in various places. ### 43. Pretty Good **Rating:** 3.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Priya R. | Senior Technical Writer, Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** August 01, 2022 **What do you like best about MadCap Flare?** 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. **What do you dislike about MadCap Flare?** 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. **What problems is MadCap Flare solving and how is that benefiting you?** MadCap Central is the place where we store our largest and most collaborative projects. Its data capacity smoothly handles our company glossary and some of our biggest how-to guides. ### 44. Flare enables you to generate high quality HTML5 help output **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Patricia H. | Manager, UX & Docs, Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** August 03, 2022 **What do you like best about MadCap Flare?** Their Technical Support is great! They are available to answer your questions very quickly (with Platinum support) and are very helpful. **What do you dislike about MadCap Flare?** We import content from Adobe FrameMaker, so we do not use the Flare content editor. At first glance, the Flare content editor seems a bit confusing, but if I used it more frequently, I'm sure I would learn it and become efficient. **What problems is MadCap Flare solving and how is that benefiting you?** We are able to import content from both Adobe FrameMaker and DITA projects from oXygen XML Author and generate identical output (using Flare). That is a great feature because we have technical writing teams at different locations. Also, when your company acquires new companies, Flare's ability to import multiple different types of content enables you to generate consistently branded output without going through a long conversion process. Flare supports importing content from Author-it, CHM, Confluence, DITA, Doc-to-Help, Excel, FrameMaker, HTML, HTML Help, Markdown, RoboHelp, and Word. ### 45. Powerful, Complex and missing some key features **Rating:** 1.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Telecommunications | Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** August 07, 2022 **What do you like best about MadCap Flare?** Madcap Flare creates reusable and online content. **What do you dislike about MadCap Flare?** Does not have WYSIWYG Numbering and sub-numbering/lists is sometimes complex. e.g., if you want to skip paragraphs in the numbered or bulleted list. If it is not intuitive (but needs to be taught, then there is a problem in the GUI) Export to Word/RTF does a poor job The text editor is a poor technology that came out 40 years ago in the original Word Perfect. **What problems is MadCap Flare solving and how is that benefiting you?** Madcap Flare solves reusing content for different products and it is the tool we use to publish our content online ### 46. Easy to Learn, Easier to Use **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Christina M. | Technical Writer, Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** August 02, 2022 **What do you like best about MadCap Flare?** Each update the Madcap Flare team provides seeks to make use of Madcap easier and fit the needs of their users. For example, formerly building targets for TOCs took forever (literally 20+minutes for some of my coworkers)-- new advanced options allow users to only build what is directly linked to a TOC rather than the entire project. Also, Madcap Flare is easy to learn how to use and has a robust community of users who are often easy to ask questions of. **What do you dislike about MadCap Flare?** The set up in terms of creating the git branches was not something I'd ever had to do before, but following the SOP on how to do it made enough sense, but still wasn't ideal. **What problems is MadCap Flare solving and how is that benefiting you?** Note the Target building improvement above. Aside from that Madcap Flare gives me a single location to build and publish content for a website within the company that is globally utilized. ### 47. Easy to Use Source Control For Flare Projects **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Rosa D. | Senior Technical Writer, Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** August 09, 2022 **What do you like best about MadCap Flare?** 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. **What do you dislike about MadCap Flare?** Sometimes building the site from Central seems to take much longer than when I build on my local machine. **What problems is MadCap Flare solving and how is that benefiting you?** By using Central, we no longer have to rely on our DevOps to create a deploy an environment for us to publish documentation. This helps us by reducing dependencies on other departments and reducing costs. Additionally, we can quickly deploy new documentation and have a foundation from which to scale as our products change and develop. ### 48. Good tool for a team **Rating:** 3.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Caroline C. | Product Content Manager, Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** August 09, 2022 **What do you like best about MadCap Flare?** 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. **What do you dislike about MadCap Flare?** 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. **What problems is MadCap Flare solving and how is that benefiting you?** Easy reporting so that I can review my documentation and ensure the right content is included. The repository is also very good and saves me from using GIT for source control. ### 49. Flare: A collection of pros & cons **Rating:** 3.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Chaitanya S. | Senior Technical Writer, Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** August 05, 2022 **What do you like best about MadCap Flare?** The feature of XML is the most useful feature, it simplifies formatting and makes document update simpler. **What do you dislike about MadCap Flare?** A few things that I disliked about Flare was, when I generate online output. I get all the files despites turning off the variables. Even in my firm, we rely on flare solely for offline documentation, but for online, we still don't rely on it. Flare can use major ugrade for online documentation, as per latest trends. Also, the transformation of word to flare doesn't work as expected. There should be tutorial videos in the help section to describe this feature and describe this conversion process in detail. **What problems is MadCap Flare solving and how is that benefiting you?** Documentation for our business products is being done on Flare. And the process is smooth for the online documentation. I think business performance is not that smooth, since business as preferred markdown for their online documentation portal. ### 50. MadCap Flare User **Rating:** 4.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Daniel M. | Documentation Manager, Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** August 02, 2022 **What do you like best about MadCap Flare?** The Flare interface includes many context menus that can be used to understand how the file you are working on (whether that be a topic, table of contents file, target, snippet, page layout etc. ) is related to other files in the project. **What do you dislike about MadCap Flare?** Occasionally the screen sort of 'seizes up' and momentarily turns black, and during these episodes one cannot be sure what exactly is happening, or even whether the program is about to crash (which it sometimes does). Generally though, these incidents are uncommon. **What problems is MadCap Flare solving and how is that benefiting you?** A significant portion of the documentation that is generated by our company is found in more than one target document. With Flare, it is quite straightforward to implement a single-sourcing strategy, so that whenever any of this 'shared content' content needs to be updated by our subject matter experts, it can be done once, in a single file. ## MadCap Flare Discussions - [How to enable/ perform case-sensitive search in Flare?](https://www.g2.com/discussions/how-to-enable-perform-case-sensitive-search-in-flare) - 1 comment, 1 upvote - [Can I try it out in my environment?](https://www.g2.com/discussions/can-i-try-it-out-in-my-environment) - 1 comment, 1 upvote - [What training resources are available?](https://www.g2.com/discussions/what-training-resources-are-available) - 1 comment, 1 upvote - [What licensing options are available?](https://www.g2.com/discussions/what-licensing-options-are-available) - 1 comment, 1 upvote - [If our team uses Flare, what can we expect in terms of the return on investment?](https://www.g2.com/discussions/if-our-team-uses-flare-what-can-we-expect-in-terms-of-the-return-on-investment) - 1 comment, 1 upvote - [View MadCap Flare pricing details and edition comparison](https://www.g2.com/products/madcap-flare/reviews?section=pricing&secure%5Bexpires_at%5D=2026-05-13+08%3A52%3A19+-0500&secure%5Bsession_id%5D=1f63e4cc-de7c-4bbf-b4e4-67ce97e4bd0a&secure%5Btoken%5D=8c1b2efab024c0c9a108db15c1a63b977e1a70b2274b1027e816ebc81d8d3cd3&format=llm_user) ## MadCap Flare Integrations - [Agentforce Sales (formerly Salesforce Sales Cloud)](https://www.g2.com/products/agentforce-sales-formerly-salesforce-sales-cloud/reviews) - [GitHub](https://www.g2.com/products/github/reviews) ## MadCap Flare Features **Content** - Content Authoring - Rich Text Editor - Versioning - Plug-ins/Widgets/Apps - Approval Process - Content Scheduling - Asset Management - Internal Search - Content Repository **Design** - Graphics - Templates - Themes **Design** - Breadth of Pre-Built Templates - Mobile - Branding/Themes - Customization **Collaboration** - Multi-User Collaboration - Real-Time Communication **Platform** - User Community - SEO - Flexible Navigation Structures - User, Role, and Access Management - Enterprise Scalability - Internationalization - Dashboards and Reports - API / Integrations **File Types** - Export - Import - Web Publishing **Edit & Revise** - Revision History - Suggestion Mode - Document Editor **Agentic AI - Web Content Management** - Cross-system Integration - Natural Language Interaction **Integrate & Embed** - Calendar - Website - Applications **Operating System** - PC Operating System - Mac Operating System - Linux Operating System **Generative AI** - AI Text Generation - AI Text Summarization - AI Text-to-Image - AI Text-to-Speech - AI Image-to-Text **Agentic AI - Document Creation** - Proactive Assistance ## Top MadCap Flare Alternatives - [ClickHelp](https://www.g2.com/products/clickhelp/reviews) - 4.8/5.0 (64 reviews) - [Document360](https://www.g2.com/products/document360/reviews) - 4.7/5.0 (499 reviews) - [Microsoft Word](https://www.g2.com/products/microsoft-word/reviews) - 4.7/5.0 (1,981 reviews)