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. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

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. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

It's great to be able to host help without any requirement for developers to get involved. It's intuitive to use. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

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). Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

I like that documentation can be composed with simple HTML and CSS. It's good that you can preview the output in the editor. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

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. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

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. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

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 There are also several MadCap Flare help articles online that are out of date (e.g. from 2013) that refer to old processes and are not useful for using the current version - ideally these need to be updated or taken down. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Customizable dashboard, multi-project analytics, source control. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

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. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

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 Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

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. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

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. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

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. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

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. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

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. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

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. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

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. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

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. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

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. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.