ClickHelp vs. Paligo

ClickHelp is great for both big and small documentation teams. The platform is not too complex to overwhelm a small team, and neither is it too simple for a well-advanced documentation team. Scale ClickHep depending on your documentation needs, and the features are simple to understand. I also appreciate the extensive documentation that is available for new users to ClickHelp. The ClickHelp knowledgebase provides answers to every scenario, use case, feature, and functionality. The ClickHelp support team is also very responsive.

Incentivized

Paligo is particularly well suited for developing similar document sets for multiple products or product lines. It is not a page layout application, so don't expect the same capabilities as popular applications for graphics-heavy documentation. With some up-front time developing good layouts, however, Paligo does manage to create very usable PDF output for customer-facing documents.

Incentivized

• Seamless publishing process for documentation.
• Easy to use WYSIWYG editor for creating content.
• Easy customization of HTML and CSS elements.

Incentivized

• The review mode is super convenient. Comparing a snapshot of the previous versions with the current one clearly outlines the respective changes and reduces the necessary content to review tremendously.
• The option to reuse text fragments is another handy feature. Text fragments will be updated whenever the original text fragment is altered is also extremely helpful.
• Managing a content's structure was never easier. An intuitive drag & drop functionality allows you to design your document's structure however you like.
• You can also fork content, in addition to reuse text fragments. This is another helpful option that no longer requires you to create repetetive chapters over and over.

Incentivized

• The See Also element should be able to automatically update when a new topic is added. Currently, we have to manually remove and re-add the element to do that.
• Ability to host image files externally (eg. S3, Dropbox), like it is done for videos. This will help save storage.
• Image files from imported projects are always duplicated, perhaps a bug, but it needs to be looked into.

Incentivized

• The amount of CSS/JS required to customize a site's appearance can be cumbersome
• Product documentation can be lacking, specifically with integrations; in some cases, support offered no real help when trying to solve a problem with an integrated service
• Some features require extensive development experience to use, which can sometimes be an obstacle to less-experienced team members

Incentivized

Paligo single-sources beautifully. Allows for customization. Has the best translation features. Has the best support services.

Incentivized

Generally, I'm very happy with Paligo and the productivity gains that I get from using it. There are a few arbitrary limitations on structure, and when applying conditional formatting, that I don't really understand. Unlinking / editing reused text uses this broadly inscrutible colour-coding that I just hate. It would be nice to double-click a component, make edits, then respond to a popup asking if I want to confirm the edit for all linked content, or unlink this instance. Likewise converting from an informal topic insertion to duplicates of its raw contents.

Incentivized

So far, support has been excellent. They reply very quickly and give in-depth replies. Solutions advisors and account managers have also been very responsive and clearly focused on creating the best experience for implementation. And that's only when the answers can't be found in excellent product documentation. The online training class and tutorials are also very good.

Incentivized

Everything went well

Incentivized

ClickHelp provides an extensive array of features compared to what we used previously. The WYSIWYG editor is so simple, yet brings with it really cool content editing elements. Publishing content is straightforward with ClickHelp. I can publish a part of a document for partial updates, or create a new publication. I get to host multiple versions of one product documentation based on the software versions we support. The analytics provided is also very insightful.

Incentivized

Paligo gives you the benefits of a fully integrated XML content database, making the whole package much easier to setup and use than a system using Oxygen. It's much easier to set up and far less expensive than Adobe's XML offerings. The cost is comparable to MadCap, but all our content was already in Docbook, so the transition to Paligo was nearly seamless.

Incentivized

• We are able to cater to all our end-users regardless of the software version they are using, simply because we are able to provide multiple product documentation versions.
• Our documentation publishing time was reduced significantly due to the smooth process on ClickHelp.
• With one platform where all our product documentation can be housed, we are expanding technical documentation to other products.

Incentivized

• Positive - has allowed us to create templates for integration documentation. this has greatly sped up our process for creating articles for each of our integrations, which we haven't had up to this point.
• Positive - has created greater alignment between the self-service content team and the marketing team.
• Positive - has introduced a review and feedback workflow for our content creation that was not available in ZenDesk. The feedback directly in the app allows me to pinpoint comments about text and other elements so my writers can address them directly and become better writers in the long term.
• Negative - long ramp up time due to a completely different approach to creating content. My team was training in early August and we have not yet published our new help center (though, to be fair, it is a lot of content that had to be completely rewritten)
• Positive - any UI updates only require updating a single image, which has saved us dozens of hours of updating already.

Incentivized