MadCap Flare Reviews & Product Details

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. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

On large projects with many topics and assets, Flare may occasionally experience slow performance or lag, especially during builds. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Branching is making our lives so much easier. Also the support from Keaton is amazing! Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

There is a definite learning curve, but that time is well spent. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Single sourcing

Flexibility in managing templates and styles

HTML5 templates

Top Nav functionality Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Integration with TFS

Issues with formatting tables Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

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. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

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. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

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. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Nothing as such, Flare is a great tool and easy. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

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. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

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. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

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. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

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. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

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. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

It's not simple to learn and can frustrate the beginner but the support guys make it all work Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

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 Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

It crashes on rare occasions for no apparent reason

The find/replace functionality is not very useful Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

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. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

The interface can be little more user friendly. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.