2

We need a help publishing tool that can generate web files as its main output and can publish to other formats as well. Both tools cost US$ 999.99, and MadCap Flare marketing is very aggressive.

The application for which the help is being developed has a Flex front-end and I really liked the output format of Robohelp, as well as its interface. I could write articles in no time and I was able to paste screenshots on it, which is a big deal if you have to write a lot of documents. Flare doesn't let me paste screenshots, there is a capture add-on for 40 bucks but I really dislike the fact that they omitted the capability of letting you paste pics in a help page in favor of their in-house feature.

I was unable to view the generated help from MadCap in IE, it needed an add-on that I was "unable to enable".

I have read a lot of articles that praise Flare over Robohelp, but my impression is that Robohelp is a better tool for our needs.

Any opinions about which tool is the best for this job? US$ 999 is not a big deal and therefore free tools are not better just because they are free.

Ravi Wallau
  • 10,416
  • 2
  • 25
  • 34
  • Help & Manual will probably be our choice for the help tool. IMHO it is better than Robohelp and MadCap Flare. – Ravi Wallau Jan 21 '11 at 01:40
  • RoboHelp is dated and they are not putting the effort into their tool that MadCap is putting into Flare. Their support is fast and immediate. They takes reported bugs and typically resolves them in a timely manner. It is scalable with additional integrated tools. It would be nice to have serious option for an XML authoring tool, but Flare is it right now. – James Wynn Feb 25 '17 at 17:30

2 Answers2

2

I don't want to bash any products, but in my opinion, robohelp is dated. Flare is a better choice if you need a full-time help authoring tool and are prepared for a steeper learning curve. If you want something with sufficient features and intuitively easy to use, then I would recommend HelpNDoc or Help&Manual. Both are similar and much cheaper than robohelp or flare.

jonjbar
  • 3,896
  • 1
  • 25
  • 46
panofish
  • 7,578
  • 13
  • 55
  • 96
0

You can screen shots in Flare, they just need to be saved as an image first and then you can simply drag and drop the screen shot from the images folder into the topic. Madcap Flare is far superior to RoboHelp in every aspect from my exposure to them. RoboHelp is clunky and has an unfriendly UI. Madcap products have a similar UI to MS Word so its all very familiar in its layout. The help and user forums are extensive and the support is first class. I say, you get what you pay for. Help and Manual is by far the simplest of them all, its a WYSIWYG UI and I found it an out of the box solution if you dont want to pay the big bucks. Its lighter on features but you can publish basic files effectively.

Pip Boys
  • 1