--- title: MadCap Flare Reviews meta_title: 'MadCap Flare Reviews 2026: Details, Pricing, & Features | G2' meta_description: Filter 491 reviews by the users' company size, role or industry to find out how MadCap Flare works for a business like yours. aggregate_rating: rating_value: 4.4 review_count: 491 scale: '5' date_modified: '2026-08-09' parent_category: name: Development url: https://www.g2.com/categories/development --- # 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:** 491 ## 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 praise the **exceptionally user-friendly content management** of MadCap Flare, streamlining documentation tasks with ease. (2 reviews) - Users benefit from the **exceptional efficiency** of MadCap Flare, streamlining authoring and documentation tasks seamlessly. (2 reviews) - Users admire the **user-friendly platform** of MadCap Flare, which simplifies documentation tasks and enhances workflow efficiency. (2 reviews) - Users praise the **exceptional customer support** of MadCap Flare, highlighting responsive assistance during complex challenges. (1 reviews) - Users appreciate the **customization options** in MadCap Flare, which enhance flexibility and creativity in project development. (1 reviews) - Ease of Learning (1 reviews) - Users find MadCap Flare to be **exceptionally user-friendly** , streamlining authoring and documentation processes with ease. (1 reviews) - Easy Implementation (1 reviews) - Easy Setup (1 reviews) - Features (1 reviews) **What users dislike:** - Users face a **steep learning curve** with MadCap Flare, making it challenging to recall processes without regular use. (2 reviews) - Users find **MadCap Flare's complexity** challenging, especially when they aren't using it regularly, but can overcome it quickly. (1 reviews) - Users find the **entry and travel costs** for MadCap Flare conferences prohibitively expensive, limiting accessibility for many. (1 reviews) - Users find the **learning difficulty** of MadCap Flare challenging, especially when not used regularly between projects. (1 reviews) - Users report that **performance issues** can arise in MadCap Flare, particularly with large projects experiencing 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. 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. ### 2. 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. ### 3. 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. ### 4. 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. ### 5. 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. ### 6. Great sharing function and change tracking, needs more per-company config options **Rating:** 4.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Laura O. | Senior Technical Writer, Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** August 08, 2022 **What do you like best about MadCap Flare?** The ability to have the whole team pull projects from the latest version. This is our preferred venue for a large, thorny project that regularly has six contributors. **What do you dislike about MadCap Flare?** I'd like a per-company option to set up something like folders-- all the projects affiliated with Project A in one area, Project B in the next folder, etc. That would make it easier to assign permissions and even to locate projects rather than searching by product. The flat view of everything in one pool isn't great. We also checked out the associated review tool and found it lacking in features. **What problems is MadCap Flare solving and how is that benefiting you?** It's very useful for storing projects. We tried storing projects in Sharepoint early on, and some team members still do, but the file merge/duplication issues made it unusable for some. I also prefer Central's cleaner version history interface. ### 7. Awesome product - efficient and effective output to multiple channels **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Keith W. | Technical Author, Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** August 02, 2022 **What do you like best about MadCap Flare?** Madcap Flare is a fantastic product that I've been using for almost three years. Its single-sourcing abilities mean I write my content once and use it many times. My outputs can be for multiple audiences and across multiple channels. My audience love the search facility. It's a truly easy product to use, especially if you have used other technical authoring software. **What do you dislike about MadCap Flare?** Some people say that there is a steep learning curve, but to be honest, I didn't find that. It's a little expensive, but you do get what you pay for - a quality product with excellent support. **What problems is MadCap Flare solving and how is that benefiting you?** Madcap enables me to rapidly deliver content to my customers. It enables me to reuse the same content for several products. Layouts make the whole web experience for customers great without little effort once set up. ### 8. MadCap user since 2010, and still loving the product! **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Tracey Y. | Documentation Manager, Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** August 02, 2022 **What do you like best about MadCap Flare?** I love that MadCap Flare lets me do both WYSIWIG and code-level editing for my online help content, and that it now also supports eLearning. It will much more efficient to source all of our content in one app, instead of trying to maintain it in two separate tools. **What do you dislike about MadCap Flare?** I am so busy with content creation that I haven't had time to explore the full suite of MadCap's capabilities. Much like my smart phone, I know that it has depths I haven't had a chance to plumb yet. **What problems is MadCap Flare solving and how is that benefiting you?** The biggest problem was that for a long time, MadCap Flare didn't support eLearning content. Now that it does, I am campaigning to have our eLearning team bring their content into Flare, so that we can all use the same tools, reposititories, snippets, and more. ### 9. A Decent Starting Point But Buggy **Rating:** 3.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Hannah G. | Technical Writer/Editor, Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** August 04, 2022 **What do you like best about MadCap Flare?** The single sourcing is a huge bonus. Variables, snippets, and conditions are all game changers for big documentation packages. The interface is mostly easy to use. **What do you dislike about MadCap Flare?** It's definitly HTML focused and print output options are poor compared to Microsoft Word or Adobe products. Inserting images results in very poor image quality. MadCap Capture is a joke--don't use it. Their Flare Helpline is hit or miss on whether they will be able to actually help or not. **What problems is MadCap Flare solving and how is that benefiting you?** It's trying to provide an easier method for dealing with technical documentation that enables consistency and multiple outputs. It helps me manage very big technical manuals, where Word would just crash if the document was that size. The single sourcing is clutch in keeping consistent terminology and objects. ### 10. Capable topic-based authoring and publishing platform **Rating:** 3.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Peter R. | Principal Programmer Writer, Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** August 22, 2022 **What do you like best about MadCap Flare?** MadCap support is without fail quick and capable. Helpful and enthusiastic user community. Good tutorials and training videos. Fairly capable and complete support for topic based authoring and publishing. If you need a lot of re-use and don't want to use Adobe FrameMaker, Author-it, or a DITA-based CCMS, this is the obvious alternative. Lots of nifty built-in writing and analysis tools. Almost all Flare project and content files are XML-based and 'hackable'. Integration with several source control systems. **What do you dislike about MadCap Flare?** The webhelp/portal output is heavily based on a somewhat outdated tech stack (jQuery). For integration into other portals or content delivery platforms like Fluid Topics, you can output clean XHTML, but might have to re-implement some features. The built-in PDF rendering engine is a bit cumbersome wrt font configuration. We need CJK, Arabic, and Cyrillic as well as Latin scripts and had to implement some less-than-obvious workarounds. To me, the basic editing features are a bit clumsy and inconsistent compared to, say Adobe FrameMaker or Arbortext Editor. Some re-use features, for example redefintion of variables, can become unwieldy in large projects. In large projects (many thousands topics), several features -- including editing -- get bogged down. The user community is small compared to DITA and/or Adobe Framemaker. Few suppliers of plug-ins and add-on tools compared to DITA and/or Adobe Framemaker. Flare file formats are essentially undocumented. The support for XML Schema is not even halfbaked. Flare API documentation is rudimentary. **What problems is MadCap Flare solving and how is that benefiting you?** End-user documentation and context-sensitive help for a large and complex Video Management Software product with 2 or 3 yearly releases, translated into up to 17 languages. The re-use features help reduce localization turn-around time and cost. ### 11. Great platform for managing multiple private web-based outputs **Rating:** 3.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Information Technology and Services | Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** August 11, 2022 **What do you like best about MadCap Flare?** Central gives me full control of the building and publishing of our outputs to unique, vanity URLs for different projects/customers without the need for any intervention from our IT/dev teams. There doesn't appear to be any comparable tool on the market that provides this secure web publishing ability with so little effort, never mind that it's integrated with the tool in which the content is created. **What do you dislike about MadCap Flare?** Central currently lacks SSO support for users already logged into our software, who then need to log into a separate Central account to see the documentation; this has caused a lot of pushback from our business team about the lack of a seamless user experience, but we work to make the documentation worth the effort. Sometimes the load on the Central servers is high and the response time, especially for building, is slow. The UI for some of the functions is less than fully intuitive, particularly around defining users and teams; it would be nice to be able to sort/filter users by team. Finally, the review process is clunky, especially when pulling submitted reviews back into Flare, where the merging is a bit of a mess. **What problems is MadCap Flare solving and how is that benefiting you?** It solves the issue of managing multiple outputs - different projects, different versions - that are permissioned only for the intended users without needing an in-house web development team to support the hosting. The SME review process aside, it gives us an easy way to publish staged output for general review before publishing to client-facing sites. ### 12. Great solution for our authoring processes **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Computer Software | Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** August 11, 2022 **What do you like best about MadCap Flare?** I'm using Central for several years now. It is a great solution that improves supports co-operation between our Technical Writers and improves our authoring processes. In addition, Central allowed us to reduce costs, since we no longer need hardware to keep our online help up and running. **What do you dislike about MadCap Flare?** Reviewing using Central could be more improved. For example, it would be a big improvement if 'printed' documents 'as is' could be reviewed within Central. Currently, it is only possible to offer the reviewers one or more html's with a very limited layout. This way you can quickly lose the overview of the content to be reviewed. In addition, if you already invited reviewers for reviewing the html-file, and you want to invite an extra reviewer afterwards, this extra reviewer is reviewing another copy of the html-file. Reviewers that are separately invited to review should be allowed to see the same html as the reviewers formerly invited (also, see their annotations). With one html-file to be reviewed, this is not a huge problem, however, with multiple files you quickly lose overview. **What problems is MadCap Flare solving and how is that benefiting you?** We no longer need hardware to maintain and host our online help. Co-operation between our Technical Writers has improved consideratly thanks to Central. Thanks to the sync-option, our Flare-projects are always backed-upped and can be shared between our Technical Writers. ### 13. A writer's best tool **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Mechanical or Industrial Engineering | Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** August 03, 2022 **What do you like best about MadCap Flare?** The project management and source control tools have been the most helpful! Creating a site is easy and quick, and we're finding we use this feature frequently for customers to release "à la carte" content. The Teams and User Management system has also been helpful, as we have many different stakeholders. Finally, source control through Flare has been a breath of fresh air vs. the alternative. We used to get a lot of GIT-related errors, and that mostly feels like a thing of the past. **What do you dislike about MadCap Flare?** No SSO support yet, but I've heard this feature is coming! Also, expenses to fully utilize features. Our license didn't come with SME seats, so these must be purchased as an add-on. **What problems is MadCap Flare solving and how is that benefiting you?** Central has made source control, content management, and hosting easier for us. In addition, I believe it will eventually streamline the review process with SMEs. Our team feels more productive. Thanks, MadCap! ### 14. Great tool for output management **Rating:** 3.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Leisure, Travel & Tourism | Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** August 05, 2022 **What do you like best about MadCap Flare?** The greatest feature is the possibility to build your output and host it on the MadCap servers, which for me is very efficient and practical. I don't think competitors have this feature and it was my win-deal when selecting the tool. **What do you dislike about MadCap Flare?** * time of loading when deleting builds * the fact that you can select up to a certain number of builds to delete and if you exceed this number, the trash bin icon greys out and you can easily miss it (then you have to unclick the builds that exceed the threshold and you have no idea how many it actually is) * so many fails on delete builds procedure **What problems is MadCap Flare solving and how is that benefiting you?** A good point is that you keep the history of your project in one place and you can just revert any time you want or track your changes back. It doesn't benefit me much in particular due to dual-bounding to GIT, but still this is a good feature. Personally for me, it answers the need to maintain a website available for external customers. ### 15. Incredibly powerful, but the learning curve is a doozy **Rating:** 3.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Computer Software | Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** August 04, 2022 **What do you like best about MadCap Flare?** Single-sourcing - can have different "targets" for HTML vs. PDF, but also targets for different subsets of content, such as different audiences or different products. Ability to use their interface to set building blocks (style sheets, various elements of a page) - or open any file and edit directly Lots of features for every conceivable situation. Despite the criticisms about hypercomplexity and learning curve, most daily work is quite easy. Hire yourself an experienced setup person and you're golden. User community is beyond compare. **What do you dislike about MadCap Flare?** Learning curve is ridiculous and the help is unhelpful. They don't actually teach you the hard stuff, only the most simplistic situations. That is if I can even find the explanation in their **thousands** of pages of documentation. It helps to know Flare's jargon before you go looking. But—oh no!—you don't know the jargon until you find it in the documentation. Or, the documentation will tell you about a feature—for example, their system variables—but not explain their special way of using system variables in your code. Email support folks often quote the documentation, which again covers only the easiest or surface part of the process. While they are friendly and try to be helpful and on some occasions have saved my butt, most of the time I have to figure it out by myself or from the user community. Importing your big Word manual is tricky, tricky, tricky. By my 4th or 5th time I got it down, but I had to learn all this myself. **Recommendations to others considering MadCap Flare:** When you read reviews that say "this was great once we had it set up," what that really means is that you'll tear your hair out getting it set up. If you can afford Platinum support, go for it. Better yet, have an expert consultant do it for you and then teach you how to use it going forward. **What problems is MadCap Flare solving and how is that benefiting you?** Going from Word to a CSS/HTML platform is a game-changer. Single-sourcing, not just for different formats (HTML, PDF, CHM) but for different audiences, means I don't have to update a bunch of different documents. Flare automatically filters the appropriately-tagged content into the correct target outputs. A modular approach, where (for example) images are separate from "topics" (individual web pages), makes updating easy. ### 16. Does a lot for our team but bugs and design issues interfere with my work **Rating:** 1.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Computer Software | Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** August 04, 2022 **What do you like best about MadCap Flare?** Flare is a full-functioned CMS that can take on large projects and produce quality documents. **What do you dislike about MadCap Flare?** Frankly, Flare is buggy and full of poor UI issues and other things that are daily annoyances to me. Example: The cursor sits to the right of where it should be, making it hard to position it properly with a pointing device. The auto-space feature is a good idea, to prevent duplicate spaces. But too often it makes it easy to get just the opposite: No space where there should be one. Worse, a bug sometimes makes it so that I can press the spacebar all I want, but Flare refuses to add a space until I delete the word and retype it. These kinds of bugs are everywhere, and really detract from my confidence in Flare. I have had constant problems with corrupt files ... constant. I learned that I cannot create new topics by duplicating an existing one and clearing out content ... instead, I have to go to the trouble of creating a brand-new topic. It's another constant annoyance where I have to work around some problem with Flare that shouldn't happen in the first place. Perhaps this is an aspect of our team's application of Flare, but my well-powered laptop is always chugging and working hard whenever I use Flare. It just doesn't feel solid, or well-designed, or frankly, very viable as a product, and I wish we were using something else. One more thing: We are using an older version of Flare because a simple bug that we have asked Madcap for months to fix still isn't fixed. Yet another daily annoyance. **What problems is MadCap Flare solving and how is that benefiting you?** This is a question for my manager. She would say that it offers a way of managing all of our content and producing HTML code plus PDF documents while offering conditioning, the formatting we need, etc. For me it is what I use to do my job. My main concerns are the ways in which Flare gets in my way, causes me problems, or makes my work harder (see above). ### 17. It works but there are some substantial hurdles **Rating:** 2.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Libraries | Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** August 04, 2022 **What do you like best about MadCap Flare?** Collaboration, single sourcing text, publishing, and source control generally work well. Conditioning text for different outputs works really nicely. If you're willing to put a good amount of time into optimizing things (including tasks like editing Flare's JavaScript files), a lot of the limitations can be worked around. **What do you dislike about MadCap Flare?** There are a handful of nearly deal-breaking limitations, most notably when it comes to searching. Flare gives you three built-in options for searching sites you publish: Madcap search (their first party offering), Google search, and Elasticsearch. With the Google search option, it's puzzlingly not possible to disable ads, making it useless in many cases. Elasticsearch would be a good option, but Flare only supports a version several years behind the current version. Madcap search is mostly okay but has a few embarrassingly bad quirks. Most glaringly, the search treats certain words, including "not" as Boolean operators. Searches containing "not" or "NOT" such as "can not log in," will pull articles that do contain "can" and do not contain "log in;" likely the opposite of what the user wants. Moreover, starting a search with "not" breaks this logic so such searches will throw an error and not be completed. These Boolean operators can’t be turned off. There is an option to edit "stop words," words that are ignored when searching. However, this doesn't exist within the program. You need to manually edit a string in the middle of a random line of a JavaScript file then setup a post-build script in Flare to propagate that setting to your site. Ironically, the Boolean words like "not" are included in the stop word list, but that doesn't stop them from functioning as Boolean operators. Words on the stop words list can't contain spaces or most special characters. You can also create synonyms, words to be treated as other words when searching. This is a menu within the program; however, synonyms also don't work if the word contains a special character or a space. If a synonym contains an invalid character, Flare will still let you add it, it just won't do anything when searching, so you almost need to verify changes you make within the program to ensure they actually do something. People on the message boards have been asking for some of the same features for years without any results, which legitimately makes me concerned if any of the glaring flaws with the software will ever be addressed. **What problems is MadCap Flare solving and how is that benefiting you?** MadCap Flare allows my team to collaborate on documents and publish them to a suite of help sites. However, it sometimes feels like we have to fight with the program to get the results we want. ### 18. A comprehensive writing solution **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Suzanne P. | Technical Writer, Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** August 03, 2022 **What do you like best about MadCap Flare?** MadCap Flare makes it easy to keep our content well-organized. From advanced CSS features to highly modulable project structure, it gives us the flexibility to do things our way and offers many features that help us create content faster and more consistently. **What do you dislike about MadCap Flare?** Being a powerful software, MadCap Flare can be difficult to learn. Starting a new project can feel overwhelming when we are not sure how to do it. The support resources are great, but you might need to search a bit through user forums and blogs. **What problems is MadCap Flare solving and how is that benefiting you?** MadCap Flare allows us to have all of our support content in one place, and then produce the required documents in various formats (e.g. online, PDF, etc.) based on our needs. As such, we only need to update our content in one place when new features are released. Brand image management is also a lot easier: we can create templates as projects so that all our documents have the same look and feel. If changes are made to the brand, we can simply edit the template and recreate all our documents in a matter of minutes. ### 19. Could be better **Rating:** 2.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Computer Software | Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** August 03, 2022 **What do you like best about MadCap Flare?** I like the fact that updating of crosslinks within content is automated, and the Project Organisation vs Content Explorer views are useful. The text editor view is handy for when you manage to delete one end of a tag somehow or other and the XML editor throws a fit and won't let you fix it, but you need to know XML/HTML to use it effectively. **What do you dislike about MadCap Flare?** 1. Flare throws a fit if file content changes under its feet, i.e. it will freeze and have to be killed by Task manager if I check out a different branch of content to the one I was previously working on (this sometimes happens even if none of the files that have actually changed are open in Flare). Since most people who use single sourcing for documentation will require version control and source files are therefore likely to be regularly replaced without notice, this seems something of an omission. 2. The Styles pane is a pain in the neck. It responds apparently at random to where your cursor is and what you've selected and usually manages to offer entirely the wrong set of options to choose from. It would be nicer to have tabs for, say, span styles, paragraph styles etc. **What problems is MadCap Flare solving and how is that benefiting you?** It does single sourcing of docs content. This allows our Technical Communications team to work alongside our software engineers and to cross-reference their tickets in our view of the version control system. This helps us organise our workload and keep abreast of progress on the engineering side. ### 20. Makes topic reviews so much easier! **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Insurance | Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** August 03, 2022 **What do you like best about MadCap Flare?** Central makes it so much quicker and easier for me to send out topics to Subject Matter Experts (SMEs) for review and then incorporate amendments into my project. The interface is simple and intuitive - and my SMEs seem to find it easy to use too. **What do you dislike about MadCap Flare?** The default column order for the 'Reviews' pane in Flare isn't useful for me, so I rearrange it... but Flare won't save my preferences. The next time I go to Flare, the columns are back to the default order. Since using Central, I've found that Flare is slower to open and use because it seems to want to keep syncing with the cloud. Sometimes I can't move or rename files, which I also think is to do with the syncing. But maybe this is something I'm doing wrong?! I'd love for Central to help me monitor reviews. Currently, I send the topic from Flare to the SME and then send a separate email to them with instructions and deadline date. I then manually check for responses and chase the SME. It would be great if I could customise the email sent from Flare to include all the information I need to send. It would also be great if Central could note the deadline date and let me know when it's passed so I can chase the SME (or even better, it could send an auto reminder!). **What problems is MadCap Flare solving and how is that benefiting you?** I need to send a large number of Flare topics to many different SMEs on a regular basis. Before Central, I needed to export the content to Word, email it to the SME, they'd mark up changes and send it back, and then I'd make the changes in Flare. That was very time-consuming! However, with Central, I can simply send the topic to the SME and then choose whether or not to incorporate their amendments into my project. I also love that I get 'Phrases with No Results' analytics - this has helped me make improvements so my readers can find what they're looking for. ### 21. The Great Content Slayer **Rating:** 4.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Cherie W. | Contract Content Developer, Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** August 02, 2022 **What do you like best about MadCap Flare?** Decent CMS; multiple output support (targets); variables/conditions; configurable workspace; Customer Support; snippets; localization support; embedded Capture; WYSIWYG HTML; powerful UI with many features; hearty XML/HTML platform; great indexing/glossary creation tools **What do you dislike about MadCap Flare?** Crash loops; steep learning curve; dismal GIT source control support; vague build errors ("Referenced Object Unavailable" ... ugh); no link to Flare Slack (and jumping to the proper channel would be AWESOME); forgets "saved layout" though it's selected (have to reselect to reapply, and then it sometimes doesn't get it right); it may take years to learn all features; convoluted print master page layout; just copy and paste from Word, don't import! **What problems is MadCap Flare solving and how is that benefiting you?** Allows us to create content in one place and update multiple pages/topics. Its solid connection to Central is helping us to update content in near real-time while working with DEV. It also gives us a nice sandbox for SME reviews. This, along with release notes automation, helps us keep our content fresh. ### 22. Works as expected and meets my current requirements **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Philanthropy | Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** August 02, 2022 **What do you like best about MadCap Flare?** - Customer service is awesome - Tool works as expected, meets my current requirements - Really liked the Madcap Capture app that came with it, very useful - Liking the multi-language capability - not needed yet but will likely need in the future - loved the videos that were available online **What do you dislike about MadCap Flare?** - I think the interface looks a little dated. I don't have an issue with it, but when it comes to socializing the app with colleagues, that's the first impression that comes up. - For some reason, sometimes I'll use it and every typed letter takes a while to enter. may be my computer? other times, it's not an issue. all times, the xml editor (showing the tags) has no such delay/latency issues -while I loved the videos, I realize many were out of date, referred to previous versions - an updated collection would be great **What problems is MadCap Flare solving and how is that benefiting you?** I had a number of manuals (12+) that needed updating and were in Word. It was a nightmare trying to keep updating common sections and screenshots. I know folks use Flare for web but I use it for PDFs and love it. Flare plus Capture really saved me a lot of time and made me more productive! I can also build new manuals based on existing sections! It's made manual upkeep much more enjoyable! ### 23. Best for content management **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Computer Software | Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** August 02, 2022 **What do you like best about MadCap Flare?** I've used/implemented MadCap Flare at 5 different companies since 2015. Flare is the best tool I've encountered for complex software that requires strong documentation content organization and reuse capabilities. One set of source files can be used to generate documentation in multiple output formats. Flare offers native support for many different types of source control. I can publish HTML5 help to my deployment pipeline directly from within Flare. Flare offers wysiwyg editors for html topic content, responsive content formatting, and CSS, which is helpful because it means you don't have to be a web developer to use it. Offers many bells and whistles for modern documentation authoring, like links/cross-references, related topics, microcontent search capabilities, native support for SOME types of video embeds, dropdowns, conditional text. Great community help in terms of blogs, forums, user conferences, and template site offerings. **What do you dislike about MadCap Flare?** Sometimes the relationship with source control acts up and requires tapping in your IT team to troubleshoot. It's an extensive, robust solution, and it's getting more expensive, so it's a tough sell to keep your license current at software companies that have a budget. Flare has no user analytics, so you can't see how people are using the documentation without adding third-party analytics. Great for creating an extensive online help site, but not great for offering field-level help or walk-throughs right in the product, which is what many users want today. **What problems is MadCap Flare solving and how is that benefiting you?** content organization, content reuse, easy online help site deployment ### 24. Happy MadCap user for 15 years **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Lisa H. | Experience Content Manager, Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** August 02, 2022 **What do you like best about MadCap Flare?** My top 3 favorite capabilities of MadCap Central are analytics, cloud reviews, and sites. The analytics are simple, meaningful, and actionable, answering important questions like exactly what words and phrases do our users search for? Which searches yield no results or too many results? Do we have micro content set up for those words and phrases? Cloud reviews allow us to get feedback from virtually anyone in our organization and lets them use a lightweight interface to provide edits and comments. When you make tech reviews easy like thath it's much easier to get tech reviews! And sites make it easy to share internal previews when we aren't quite ready to stage or publish the content. **What do you dislike about MadCap Flare?** Due to our security model we aren't able to use Central for publishing directly to our user community so we only publish for internal site reviews. But we configured an easy "set it and forget it" publishing mechanism with Git and a build machine license. Pro tip - always keep your build machine license and MadCap subscription versions in sync! **What problems is MadCap Flare solving and how is that benefiting you?** MadCap Central analytics help us deliver the content our users are actually looking for, not just what we think they're looking for. So we don't waste time creating or maintaining content that isn't helpful. And our users trust that they will find the information they need. Bonus points for "search phrases with no results" that identifies potential content gaps and drives smarter phrase/answer pairing for micro content. ### 25. So much potential. Looking forward to the future. **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Hospital & Health Care | Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** August 02, 2022 **What do you like best about MadCap Flare?** Project management and source control tools are very good with great integration into Madcap Flare. Building sites is very quick and super flexible to meet the needs of our complex release cycle. User management is also very easy to maintain. Setting up source control through Flare is much easier than using a third-party source control provider. **What do you dislike about MadCap Flare?** Reviews in Central need to be modernized to support stylesheets, variables, and snippets. The Review process in Flare needs to be updated from the legacy email-centric tools to more closely follow the Central process. We need dashboards to monitor the progress of all reviews. Central also needs Single Sign-On to make user management even easier. **What problems is MadCap Flare solving and how is that benefiting you?** Madcap Central makes it very easy to produce and publish content in a very fast-paced agile development process. We have improved our collaboration with software development to externalize our help and move it to the cloud. This helps us make updates and customer-specific improvements on the fly, without having to wait for the next software release. ### 26. A great tool for authors to create useful and effective materials **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Computer Software | Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** August 02, 2022 **What do you like best about MadCap Flare?** There are many features I like about Flare but it shines with its single sourcing features. Features like snippets, variables, and conditions significantly reduce my workload and allow me to create print, web, and now eLearning materials from the same content. A single tech writer on our team is able to support about 18-20 developers thanks to features like this. I also really enjoy features like the link viewer which let me see where content is linked to/from which is very helpful when documenting products that frequently change and require updating. The built-in analysis tool is also something I use frequently to help maintain my project and ensure there are no broken links or any other issues. The analysis tool is also useful for suggesting single-sourcing opportunities. Beyond those features, managing the content is a dream in the XML editor. You can easily apply common styles, move content around, and add cross-references/hyperlinks without corrupting the document or styles. Maintaining our company's branding and adhering to our style guide is a no-brainer with Flare as you can set all that up with templates, stylesheets, and page layouts. You really can do a lot with Flare and there's definitely a reason why so many writers prefer it. MadCap also does a phenomenal job at providing free training for getting started using Flare. The online guides are excellent tools and their bank of recorded webinars is also super useful. Thanks to these resources, I was able to train a new junior writer on our team in a few days with minimal effort on my part. **What do you dislike about MadCap Flare?** Flare can be intimidating to new users simply because there's so much you can do with it, but there's lots of resources to help out with that. One thing I wish MadCap would do is update their screen capture software that comes with Flare. It works really well when used with Flare but I wish it had better editing capabilities and a few other features like for SUI and translating strings in captures. **What problems is MadCap Flare solving and how is that benefiting you?** We have a plethora of products that share a lot of common information yet are of course nuanced enough to need their own specific documentation. Flare allows us to single-source and save time when it comes to that common information and flag the content that is nuanced so it appears only where it should. Without it, we'd be writing the same thing in multiple documents making maintenance a time consuming nightmare. It also allows us to meet the need to have both web and print versions of the same content, again without any duplication. ### 27. MadCap Flare **Rating:** 4.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Computer Software | Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** August 02, 2022 **What do you like best about MadCap Flare?** There is a fairly large learning curve with using Flare, but once you get the hang of it, it is a great software for building a help file. There are probably a lot more things I could learn to do to make it easier, but the things that I do know how to do are very helpful in making our company help file. **What do you dislike about MadCap Flare?** There really isn't much I dislike about the software. The only thing I would comment on is how much training needs to be done to use Flare. Even though it does so much, it takes a while to get the hang of it. But, there are videos and articles that help with questions. **What problems is MadCap Flare solving and how is that benefiting you?** We create a help file for every version of our software and we use Flare to create and compile a chm, web, and pdf help file every time. We are able to edit and build on previous versions which makes it very easy to create a new one. ### 28. Useful Documentation Tool **Rating:** 3.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Computer Software | Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** August 02, 2022 **What do you like best about MadCap Flare?** Helps to create different outputs The variable functionality comes in handy. Reduces a lot of manual work. **What do you dislike about MadCap Flare?** The formatting is restrictive at times. There is an option to generate on-demand PDF for HTML FILES however the cross-links in the PDFs do not work. For a large online help it is nearly impossible to sit and manually add external links to each and every cross-reference; it kind of defeats the whole purpose of the functionality. Sometimes the outputs get generated without any errors but the outputs do not reflect the results as desired. The customer support is not at all accessible, it would be great if there is live chat support so even if I am unable to call them, I have an alternate for quicker communication. Pop-up texts could be a bit neater. It looks very cluttered when applied to a text. **What problems is MadCap Flare solving and how is that benefiting you?** Madcap solves the problem of creating large online help and content management with one authoring tool. I can create PDF, Word, HTML5, etc. outputs with one tool instead of searching for different tools. I can create as many variables and apply them and make changes in one go. ### 29. MadCap Flare Review **Rating:** 4.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Cheryl C. | Content Manager, Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** August 02, 2022 **What do you like best about MadCap Flare?** There is support everywhere for MadCap and the support team is excellent. They reach out even when you've forgotten about your initial request. **What do you dislike about MadCap Flare?** here are complexities in Flare that prevent me from using the tool in its entirety. I understand stylesheets, but Flares menus can make it a tough task to decipher **What problems is MadCap Flare solving and how is that benefiting you?** When I changed laptops at work, I was not able to reactivate Capture and Mimic. As much as I tried working with my organization and Flare's support, the issue still exists. Unfortunately, I instead use TechSmith's Snagit tool to capture my images. I would like to dabble in Capture a bit more, but I gave up and decided to just move on. It was taking too much of my time to troubleshoot, so I had to do what works for me now. Meanwhile, I am curious to use MadCap's other software, but if I'm having trouble with this, I can only imagine how Central, or any ot the others would work for me. ### 30. MadCap meets my needs **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Defense & Space | Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** August 02, 2022 **What do you like best about MadCap Flare?** Flare is easy to use, and I can generate output in a reasonable amount of time. Previously we used FrameMaker, and it took a lot longer to generate the PDF and help output. **What do you dislike about MadCap Flare?** I experience a number of errors every day where there's a notice that Flare had a problem and it offers me the chance to submit a ticket. I know that when I submit a ticket, I'm going to get the standard response of: delete the Output and Analyzer folders, clean my registry, and so on. Rarely has my problem actually been addressed and resolved, so I don't bother submitting tickets for those incidents anymore. I just live with that dialog and click the Don't Send report button whenever it comes up. **What problems is MadCap Flare solving and how is that benefiting you?** It's easy to use. We were using Structured FrameMaker before, which I know fairly well but presents a steep learning curve for people who haven't used it before. It's easier to get people up and running with Flare. Additionally, we have a number of methods for content reuse (shared content, conditions, variables). Processing that from FrameMaker, with the third-party tools and plug-ins that we were using, was a tedious process that required a writer to be hands-on for the whole time. MadCap Flare includes tools that allow us to reuse content, and we can generate the output with a single click of a button. It then runs in the background, unlike FrameMaker, so we can work on other things while generating output. ### 31. Powerful tool that offers a lot of good functionality **Rating:** 4.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Computer Software | Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** August 02, 2022 **What do you like best about MadCap Flare?** Flare offers a ton of configuration options and makes it easy to reuse content. I have been consistently impressed by the innovations that Flare provides. and the educational resources they provide to their users. **What do you dislike about MadCap Flare?** There is some basic functionality that I think could be improved. For example, there is currently no way to change the layout of a page mid-topic. This is essential when you have wide tables that you want to display in both print and web media. This functionality has been available in Microsoft Word for years. The roundabout solution is to have your table in a separate topic or to use conditions to display the table elsewhere, but for software that specializes in content reuse, this seems like a critical user experience issue. Despite this, I submit feature requests and bug reports consistently, and many of my suggestions have been implemented when new features come out. So, while there are still areas for improvement, I appreciate MadCap's willingness to listen to user feedback. **What problems is MadCap Flare solving and how is that benefiting you?** MadCap Flare allows me to reuse content in multiple outputs and automate tasks that would take me a long time to complete without Flare. I especially appreciate that Flare automatically updates my links when I move files or change filenames. ### 32. Document management system that gets the job done. **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Package/Freight Delivery | Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** August 02, 2022 **What do you like best about MadCap Flare?** MadCap is pretty much the only system out there that allows the most versatile and robust authoring and document management. It has an unlimited number of features you can choose from to create your super-customized workflow, document design and control. It's very well thought through and way ahead of any other document management system on the market. PDF creation of a large and elaborate manual is just a click of the button. **What do you dislike about MadCap Flare?** It is far from perfect. The system runs only on Windows. If you want it to work on a Mac, you will need to use Parallels Desktop or something similar. The UI is a bit dated. The screen is very complex, which makes work on small monitors almost impossible. **What problems is MadCap Flare solving and how is that benefiting you?** We were able to create a solid workflow, which makes it easy for us to author multiple documents with reusable content while keeping uniform design and version control. MadCap automated functions, which simply don't exist in other authoring systems, save us plenty of time and effort. ### 33. The best keeps getting better **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Garry S. | Technical Writer, Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** August 02, 2022 **What do you like best about MadCap Flare?** Madcap Flare has been my goto authoring tool for 5 years or more. I appreciate the ease of use, and the support from both Madcap and the Flare community at large. **What do you dislike about MadCap Flare?** I find that the tool has a couple of quirks that interrupt my workflow sometimes. The main one is the inability to import a word document into a project bound to a Team Foundation Server. I mentioned it to Madcap support and they made note of it. **What problems is MadCap Flare solving and how is that benefiting you?** I create numerous help documentation in a variety of formats (Online, Word, PDFs). The main benefit of Flare is the ability to generate output in all those formats using a single set of documentation. ### 34. MadCap Flare **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Orysia K. | Technical Writer, Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** August 05, 2022 **What do you like best about MadCap Flare?** The tool helps create impeccable help systems that can be customized to suit any needs. An appealing interface is really powerful once you undergo proper training and get accustomed to it. Not that easy to learn for new users, though. **What do you dislike about MadCap Flare?** There are some minor bugs. For example, when typing and adding a space, the space gets stuck and won't add/remove. Also, sometimes when you resolve conflicts, the code gets corrupted and extra meaningless code elements are added, preventing the file from being saved. **What problems is MadCap Flare solving and how is that benefiting you?** In our company, we care about the usability of our products. Customizing our HTML5 help with JS helps make it more appealing, user-friendly, and easily searchable. ### 35. Best Single-source multi-output authoring tool with good customer service **Rating:** 4.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Pavan K. | Senior Technical Writer, Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** August 05, 2022 **What do you like best about MadCap Flare?** Single-source: Add the content once, and reuse it. For repetition, use Snippets. For controlling output, use Conditions. PDF Conversion: The existing HTML template can be reused with minor style settings for PDF conversion without having a designated Style sheet along with TOC and Bookmarks in PDF format. This really helped with our project. Customer Service is good: If I am struck somewhere in my project, the email service of Madcap Flare helps us to figure it out and fix the issue and sometimes through a Phone call from the Madcap Rep. **What do you dislike about MadCap Flare?** There are a few more options added in the recent 2022 version and so much to know. I am probably not taking full advantage of the product. Tutorial Videos regarding Context Sensitive Help are few and can be enhanced. Tutorial Videos using the MOBILE style and its detailed process can be created and enhanced. **What problems is MadCap Flare solving and how is that benefiting you?** - ### 36. Best single-sourcing authoring tool which gives you the flexibility to do more **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Mehul S. | Associate Manager - Technical Writing, Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** August 02, 2022 **What do you like best about MadCap Flare?** I am a huge MadCap Flare fan and I can go on and on about the wonderful features that it provides. There are innumerous features of MadCap Flare that I like, but if I have to list a few, they would be: 1. The single-sourcing feature 2. The ability to personalise skins, templates, css, and so on. 3. The linking options. **What do you dislike about MadCap Flare?** There isn't much to not like about Flare, but I'd really like a bundled option of buying MadCap Flare and MadCap Central together, as branching is an important feature that Technical Authors use for most projects, given the number of customers and releases. Everything else is just perfect. **What problems is MadCap Flare solving and how is that benefiting you?** MadCap Flare gives us the flexibility to have multiple authors on a single project without causing the overwriting issue. It also helps us single-source content for different output types in the same project. ### 37. Full service documentation tool featuring powerful search **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Kate M. | Sr Manager, Product Documentation, Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** August 01, 2022 **What do you like best about MadCap Flare?** MadCap Flare has so many great features- it's hard to list them all. Easy to output docs with single-source content, powerful search engine included in HTML output, no developers required as tech writers can design their own templates and set up. Easy to implement translations and feedback widgets. **What do you dislike about MadCap Flare?** Haven't found anything so far. Have been using Flare since 2014, and MadCap has been responsive to enhancement requests. **What problems is MadCap Flare solving and how is that benefiting you?** Our doc team is self-contained, meaning we don't have to rely on outside developers to make changes, we can self-publish at will and keep our content current and timely. We are a highly successful team at our company. ### 38. Still learning it as I go **Rating:** 4.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Kathy H. | Documentation and Training Manager, Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** August 03, 2022 **What do you like best about MadCap Flare?** I like the simplified source control, compared to using a third party tool like GitHub. I like having the peer review option, but I'm still just working through learning on how to use that properly myself. **What do you dislike about MadCap Flare?** The login interface with Flare; I'm struggling to find my username in Central and where to submit it Flare so that I can login if missed on first attempt when logging into Flare. **What problems is MadCap Flare solving and how is that benefiting you?** It's helping me avoid having to produce Word or PDF outputs just to send to someone to review my in-progress work. It's still a struggle with so few licenses, but it's better than nothing! ### 39. Flare is an excellent tool for technical communication and publishing **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Loryn J. | Learning & Development Manager, Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** August 01, 2022 **What do you like best about MadCap Flare?** Powerful control over content use and reuse, styling and multi-format publishing. **What do you dislike about MadCap Flare?** There are a handful of typographic details not fully exposed to the stylesheet. Document compilation and publication can be slow when using a very high level of content reuse. **What problems is MadCap Flare solving and how is that benefiting you?** MadCap Flare allows me to document my company's product line, maintaining documentation across multiple product lines, with multiple versions (e.g. customer-specific customisations), across multiple formats. I'm able to produce online documentation, replete with search, micro-content, and video, as well as PDF-specific publications of the same document. Flare also allows me to leverage this content for publication as an LMS target for on-demand training. ### 40. Easy to use authoring tool that helps your create a highly interactive digital knowledge repository **Rating:** 4.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Mohammed Z. | Tech Expert, Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** August 05, 2022 **What do you like best about MadCap Flare?** - Single sourcing - Easy to author content - MadCap Central has been improving in terms of available features **What do you dislike about MadCap Flare?** - License cost seems to have increased - Vendor is good at responding to queries but not proactive enough to reach out to customers for feedback or discuss the product roadmap - It would be nice for MadCap to create some easy to use templates for new customers who are just getting started **What problems is MadCap Flare solving and how is that benefiting you?** Helps us in capturing all the SMEs knowledge and converting it to a digital platform that can be easily accessed by all users at their point of need ### 41. Happy with my switch **Rating:** 4.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Writing and Editing | Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** August 02, 2022 **What do you like best about MadCap Flare?** What I like the most about MadCap Flare is its capabilities. As someone who just recently switched from another documentation program, I see many more options that I did not see in other programs. **What do you dislike about MadCap Flare?** There are parts of Flare that I find very difficult to work with. Coming from another very user-friendly platform with impressive and simple UX design, Flare is lacking significantly. I find that there are very long wait times and a lot of lag between different switches within the platform. I find it very frustrating when working with branches, that it does not make it clear when working on main branches instead of your own. **What problems is MadCap Flare solving and how is that benefiting you?** MadCap Flare has helped me with organizing the many products that our company has. We have been able to create a nice help documentation website to help users with our products. ### 42. Works well, but needs more features. **Rating:** 2.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Mark M. | UX writer, Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** August 04, 2022 **What do you like best about MadCap Flare?** It's great to be able to host help without any requirement for developers to get involved. It's intuitive to use. **What do you dislike about MadCap Flare?** It can be slow to load some pages, and we need more features around reviews. For example, if an SME starts a review, it would be good if an Admin can close it. Useful in case the SME leaves the company or changes roles in the business (or just plain doesn't do it). **What problems is MadCap Flare solving and how is that benefiting you?** It allows us to host help without the need for developers to get involved. And it's a great way to back-up and share project files. ### 43. WYSIWYG with some options **Rating:** 3.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Utilities | Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** August 15, 2022 **What do you like best about MadCap Flare?** I like that documentation can be composed with simple HTML and CSS. It's good that you can preview the output in the editor. **What do you dislike about MadCap Flare?** I don't like that the editor makes unexpected whitespace changes while saving. Since we keep docs in our code repo, docs changes have to be code reviewed. It would be nice if indentation was easier to control for our code standards and readability. Also, the preview doesn't always accurately represent the sizes of images in the rendered document. **What problems is MadCap Flare solving and how is that benefiting you?** Flare replaces a custom tool chain that one of our developers produced in-house before leaving to work somewhere else. No one here knew how to work on that code, so it stagnated until we recognized the value of having dedicated documentation software that would stay up-to-date with our requirements. ### 44. Must-have software for technical authors **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Computer Software | Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** August 03, 2022 **What do you like best about MadCap Flare?** You can tag your content to show it to some customers and hide it from others, which allows you to use the same topic for different customers and customise it. This saves so much time when it comes to needing to write and edit your topics. **What do you dislike about MadCap Flare?** There is a steep learning curve, and the online help needs to be simplified a little. There are also several MadCap Flare help articles online that are out of date (e.g. from 2013) that refer to old processes and are not useful for using the current version - ideally these need to be updated or taken down. **What problems is MadCap Flare solving and how is that benefiting you?** It helps me create my own online help websites and quickly convert them into PDFs. It is extremely customisable once you learn CSS and it is quick and easy to update topics. ### 45. Great suite of tightly integrated, feature-rich products, stellar support, reasonably priced. **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Banking | Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** August 02, 2022 **What do you like best about MadCap Flare?** Customizable dashboard, multi-project analytics, source control. **What do you dislike about MadCap Flare?** I've found working with review packets difficult. The setup wasn't clear and user docs didn't help. The biggest challenge was getting SMEs to actually use it. It seemed to confuse them because it isn't the familiar and comfortable Word. I've had to stop using it because of that and because since I have only 2 seats and 7 SMEs, there was a bottleneck. With the other issues, buying more reviewer seats didn't seem reasonable. **What problems is MadCap Flare solving and how is that benefiting you?** It would help me identify unsuccessful search terms to apply to my topics if I could get the time to dig in. It would also help to identify areas were staff may need additional or refresher training. Again, if I weren't an overscheduled lone writer who desperately needs a co-writer. ### 46. Best of it's class **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Denice S. | Manager CRM Documentation, Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** August 02, 2022 **What do you like best about MadCap Flare?** The basics are easy to learn and apply. I have several new writers that started over the years and within a couple of weeks were productive and using Flare confidently **What do you dislike about MadCap Flare?** Ironically, the Help/Documentation is not easy to use and the search is terrible. I know search has been an issue for Madcap for years so hopefully they can partner with someone to make it better. **What problems is MadCap Flare solving and how is that benefiting you?** We are able to use MadCap Flare to publish all our documentation. Once setup with Git and Jenkins, it's an easy publishing process. Makes my life easy! ### 47. MadCap Flare saves time and money **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Sebastjan B. | Documentation Specialist, Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** April 05, 2022 **What do you like best about MadCap Flare?** The most useful feature is using the same topics in different documents. Also, snippets are an easy way to avoid mistakes: you can edit the info in one snippet and the change is propagated to the entire set of documents where the snippet is used. Let me give you an example: let's say our software used to support Windows 7, but Microsoft removed support for it and we followed the suit. We recommend using Windows 8.1 and later. I only need to replace Windows "7 and later" with "8.1 and later" and the change is seen all over our documentation. This way we saved a huge amount of time; not to mention eliminating the chance of error. Picture formatting is on a whole other level compared to MS Word. We can tweak every little detail making sure that the look and feel between PDF documents and online content is completely the same. **What do you dislike about MadCap Flare?** After three years of using MadCap Flare, I can't think of anything that I dislike. But if I think back, I would say a big obstacle is the learning curve. It took me about 3 months to grasp the basics. Writing the content is easy, the same as in Word. Formatting is also rather easy. But publishing... We did a little bit of forward-thinking and purchased Platinum support. With the phone support, Flare gurus were able to crack even the hardest of the nuts. **Recommendations to others considering MadCap Flare:** I strongly recommend Platinum support. This way you can call their gurus directly, and so far (about 10 to 15 calls) they have solved every problem I had. **What problems is MadCap Flare solving and how is that benefiting you?** We have a set of documents for different types of users with different access rights. We can write a single document and condition out the content (within the same topic) that isn't applicable to a certain type of user. This way we have basically one document but what users see is the content that they are supposed to see. For us, it's a huge amount of time saved. And time is... . ### 48. Powerful and Reliable Documentation Tool for Collaborative Single-Source Publishing **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Computer Software | Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** August 03, 2022 **What do you like best about MadCap Flare?** The best feature for me is the integration with GIT so our team can easily work on big projects together. We also love it, that we can publish our user manuals in several formats - PDF, HTML5 etc. **What do you dislike about MadCap Flare?** We are having problems using the HTLM5 Online help, which is context sensitive, together with the new Microsoft Edge browser, which is becoming mandatory to support. However, it is very difficult to get the context-sensitivity to work with it and there are no alternative online help formats. **What problems is MadCap Flare solving and how is that benefiting you?** It solves the problem to work on the documentation of a product as a team. We can all work on our topics and they are then all added to the table of contents of Manuals, Release Notes, Patch Notes and other documents. ### 49. Extremely flexible CMS with a very comfortable learning curve. **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Bob H. | Graphic Designer 2, Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** August 02, 2022 **What do you like best about MadCap Flare?** I really liked how customizable their templates were. I was totally green at "responsive website design" but their templates and the CSS was very powerful. **What do you dislike about MadCap Flare?** It took me a while to get my 6 levels of bullet points right but even that wasn't more than a day to sort out. I got help from Platinum support too. **What problems is MadCap Flare solving and how is that benefiting you?** Most of the issues were on our end and not understanding the depth and breadth of the software. Central was the icing on the cake, allowing full team collaboration. ### 50. Flare does the job well **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Catriona B. | I, Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** August 03, 2022 **What do you like best about MadCap Flare?** inbuilt features, like mini TOC, related topics control, bookmarks work great and save the faff of doing this manually. Snippets and Variables are also incredibly important to me as I use snippets a lot for content across multiple pages and variabes a lot in conditioning content. **What do you dislike about MadCap Flare?** don't fully support Display attributes in custom stylesheets, the search function doesn't always return all matching results. Also flare's built-in tools such as unused files isn't always accurate. **What problems is MadCap Flare solving and how is that benefiting you?** Flare just does more than other similar documentation writing solutions ## 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?page=2&qs=pros-and-cons§ion=pricing&secure%5Bexpires_at%5D=2026-08-13+00%3A39%3A21+-0500&secure%5Bsession_id%5D=8b03281c-0e98-484f-bad3-39c10d769d97&secure%5Btoken%5D=d8ada0552b19b3f602a3f930ee4eaa88c0db933f96377667e68f419f1ed2415d&format=llm_user) ## MadCap Flare Integrations - [GitHub](https://www.g2.com/products/github/reviews) - [MadCap Flare Online](https://www.g2.com/products/madcap-flare-online/reviews) ## MadCap Flare Features **Additional Functionality** - Third-Party Integrations - To-Do List - @mentions - Single Sign On - File Management - Activity Dashboard - Drag & Drop - Alerts/Notifications - Prioritization - Access Controls/Permissions - Screen Sharing - Content Management - Brainstorming - AI Copilot - File Transfer - Calendar Management - Status Tracking - Real-Time Notifications - Version Control - Task Management - Activity Tracking - Real Time Editing - Communication Management - Chat/Messaging - Tagging - Generative AI - Assignment Management - Task Scheduling - Project Management - Collaboration Tools - Workflow Management - Secure Data Storage - File Sharing - Document Storage - Task Progress Tracking - Discussions/Forums - Commenting/Notes - Reporting & Statistics - Contact Management - Video Conferencing - Progress Tracking - Mobile Access - API - Document Management - Customizable Branding **Content** - Content Authoring - Rich Text Editor - Versioning - Plug-ins/Widgets/Apps - Approval Process - Content Scheduling - Asset Management - Internal Search - Content Repository - SEO Management - eCommerce Management - Forms Management - Campaign Management - Media Management - Drag & Drop Editor - Audio Editor **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 **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 - Social Media Integration **Additional Functionality** - AI/Machine Learning - Reporting/Analytics - Collaboration Tools - Image Editing - Website Publishing Options - Chatbot - Content Publishing Options - Text Editing - Access Control - Website Accessibility Tools - Content Delivery - Content Personalization - Configurable Workflow - Generative AI - Alerts/Notifications - Video Editing - AI Copilot - Performance Testing - Activity Monitoring - Multi-Channel Distribution **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) - 4.7/5.0 (65 reviews) - [Document360](https://www.g2.com/products/document360/reviews) - 4.7/5.0 (529 reviews) - [Microsoft Word](https://www.g2.com/products/microsoft-word/reviews) - 4.7/5.0 (2,016 reviews)