Paligo vs ClickHelp and Document360

Don't compare apples and oranges, they said. I've always wondered why. They are both fruits. Both are things you eat. And digested. And... you know where I could have gone with this...
Of course they are grown in different climatic conditions. But there are so many similarities. 

Which is why we will be comparing Apples, Oranges, and Melons. 

Let's find out which one gets the cherry on the top :)

What we are currently using

We are looking to move out of Confluence(server). I love the functionality, but it's not really an authoring tool. It's such a headache to customise something that's built for collaboration if what you really need at the end is a Knowledge base for end users.
But that's what we've been doing for the past few years. Support was becoming a real challenge (Rolls eyes). And there's a strong push from our IT team to move away from something that required so much of their effort to maintain. We had to move to a cloud solution.

The tools I considered

I'm not going into why I selected these three tools to compare. But these were the three that were left behind after I spread a wide net initially and ended up ruling out several tools along the way. I want to reiterate that this comparison is especially useful if you are moving out of confluence and are looking for an authoring and publishing tool.

I took a demo from each of these vendors. I also played around with each of these tools for a period ranging from two weeks to a month. I found Document360 to be the most easy to learn and the most intuitive. ClickHelp wasn't that difficult either. But it isn't the most intuitive. But Paligo does have a learning curve. Especially if you are used to something like Confluence. And from reviews, I understood that I was not alone. 

Paligo has some very interesting functionality. Imagine being able to reuse content at a step level? Imagine if the tool would prompt you about content that you have already created and suggest reuse?
But it's only an authoring tool Which means you have to fend for some place to host the content you create on Paligo. It's not a big deal. You could just host it on Amazon S3 for all you care. But we'd want to have an environment where we can not only author, but also publish content.

ClickHelp isn't very fancy. It gets things done. But nothing that really sweeps you off your feet. 

Document360 offers you both an authoring and publishing platform. If you were used to Confluence, then understanding Document360 won't be a challenge. The UI is much more intuitive than the other two tools. There are some drawbacks when it comes to functionality, but it's only a matter of time that they will be on par. Or near about there.
They also have an in-app assistant which can bring any content you create on their tool, inside your application. Another thing that I really liked about Document360 was that they offered to help us become successful in using their tool. The other two vendors basically pointed to their Professional Services teams. Even training is charged! Which is bordering the ridiculous. Even if you have a superior product, it just doesn't make a lot of sense to charge me for learning it. It's in your interest that I learn to use it! And use it well. You think about value added services only after initial value is delivered and realised. Not before. 

There's also a huge delay between responses when it comes to question and answers with ClickHelp. And I had a ton of questions. Paligo was more responsive. When the questions were many, we quickly jumped on a call. But Document 360 was the fastest to respond. They also seemed to be in a better position to oblige your requests for functionality. For example, when I checked with Paligo about when they would have a complete authoring and publishing platform. 2020 was the answer. A question to Document360 had answers which had much shorter time frames. In fact, there were a couple of features that were actually shown to me on their dev/testing platform. So their answers seemed much more realistic to me)

When it comes to pricing, no prizes for guessing who wins. Keep in mind that the incremental cost for each writer you add is the biggest in Paligo and the least in Document360. 

But here's an insight on pricing models. Something I heard from our CTO. If you truly want your users to use your product, your pricing model shouldn't say otherwise. If you determine your price by the number of authors, or the amount of content that's created, then you are inadvertently using price to restrict their ability to create content! Don't apply pricing at the point of content creation. Look at pricing at the point of content consumption. More companies would be happy to pay for content that's being used. If your pricing model restricts authors either by the number of authors, or by the volume of content, you are kind of shooting yourself in the foot. (Which is why Whatfix does not charge you by the number of authors or the amount of content.You are welcome to use our product as much as is possible. Chew on that :)

I made a list of criteria that I would use to evaluate each solution. I've listed a few below and mentioned the significance of each criteria.

Criteria

• Editor: Brownie points for WYSIWYG. Must be easy to create and manage. Must be able to go into the code view when necessary.

• Custom Domain: Ability to use a url of your choice for example (support.yourcompany.com) and not have something like your company.atlassian.com. One of the deal breakers for confluence cloud.

• Scalability: Ability to manage a large quantity of content/users/authors

• Vector Graphics: Ability to embed clickable workflows that give you a good 'big picture. Confluence did this beautifully with their Draw.io plugin.

• Entry/Exit: Very similar to scalability, but this is about the ease of getting into and out of the tool if necessary.

• Integrations: Many organizations would want their publishing platform to integrate with their ticketing system.

• Translation: Because not all your users want to learn English!

• Migration Support: When moving out of one tool into another, the support the vendor offers determines how easy or difficult it is to migrate

• Single Source/Variables/Conditionals: Reuse, reuse, reuse
• Internal/External content: For instances where you'd want to show different content to an internal audience as opposed to limited content to unauthenticated external users

• Authoring/Publishing: You wouldn't want to deal with multiple vendors for each activity

• Expand Collapse content: To progressively display information so that you don't overwhelm your users with a lot of content. The expand function in Confluence

• Analytics: Make sure you are not only receiving information on how your content is being created, but also on how it is being used.

• Version Control: If to err is human.then Version control is salvation. You shall know the truth, and the truth will set you free :)

• Responsive: More than 10% of our users access help using Mobile devices

• Workflow: You'd want to have some kind of environment to host and review content before it is published. Sorely missed this in confluence.

• Support SLAs: We had to always wait 24 hours before we received any response from the support team at confluence. Many organizations want global customers, but don't want to provide support when it is needed.  

• Ability to collect Feedback: Again sorely missed in Confluence. Gave us only a binary yes or no kind of feedback. But for feedback to be effective, you'd want to collect user speak verbatim.

• Find and Replace: This is a big one. The ability to quickly change stuff at a global level without having to go into each document.

• Keyboard Shortcuts: Makes the solution more accessible. Improves productivity.

• Pricing: Most bang for the buck. Look at incremental costs.

• Notifications: The ability to watch, monitor and receive alerts when content is changed.

• Storage Space: If you use heavy graphics and multimedia in your content, make sure you consider the amount of space they provide.

• Single Sign On: Ensures users can use existing credentials to log in. Removes one hurdle to getting people to create content.

• Search: What search engine is each vendor using? How much control does it give you in getting your audience to see the tree that fell in the forest?

Here's the comparison I created. Let me know if I missed anything. Or got something wrong. I did involve the vendors as well, but made several more changes

Criteria	ClickHelp	Paligo	Document360
Editor	Wysiwyg (unstructured)	Wysiwyg (structured)	Mark down (Wysiwyg RTC*)
Custom Domain	Supported	Supported	Supported
Vector graphics	Supported	Not supported, (Steve offered to look into it)	Supported
Scalability	Different plans as you ramp up authors and content	XML (Best)	Supported with different plans
Entry/Exit	Somewhat.	Beautiful!	Supported (to evaluate)
Integrations	Plugin with Zendesk	Integrates with Zendesk	Plugin with Zendesk
Translation	Output files need to be translated and then imported	Integrates with Translation memory or sends XLIFF files to a TMS	Not supported
Outputs supported	Supports HTML5, PDF	similar	similar, Doc
Migration support	Partially supported significant effort to clean up Contact Professional services for customization	Very clean import. Hierarchy maintained, Contact Professional Services for home page design, etc	Free import support
Single Sourcing/ Content Reuse	Basic	Available at step level. Very advanced	Not supported
Publishing	In built	Need to purchase 3rd party platform or use own server	In built
Expand Collapse	Supported	Supported	Not out of the box
Analytics	In built + Google Analytics	GA and Mixpanel	In built
Version Control	article level	Component level	Supported in code view as well!
Mobile	Supported	Responsive	Responsive
Workflow	Partial	Supported	Supported
Learning Curve	Moderate	Steep learning curve	Easy to use
Collaborative	Better (has higher number of reviewers)	Yes	Possible
Simultaneous Edits	Check in/Check out	Check in/Check out	Possible
Navigation	Customizable	Customizable	No limits
Feedback mechanism	Thumbs up/down + integration Disqus	possible	Out of the box + integration with Disqus
Find and Replace	Not retrospectively	Powerful retrospective search and replace	Supported
Keyboard shortcuts	supported	supported	Supported
Support	Email (24hrs-48 hrs)	Support on every plan, SLA varies by plan	Email, phone, Zoom
Pricing	~2.5k+6 authors	~5k 2 authors	1.2K with 5 authors**
Content Staging for review	Possible	Possible	Supported
Watch/ Notifications	Supported	Supported	Supported
Storage	10 GB	30GB	25GB (Expandable)
In-app assistant	Supported	Not supported	Can display content inline on your application
Variables	Supported	Supported	Not supported (RTC)
Conditionals	Supported	Supported	Not supported (RTC)
Internal/External content	Supported	Supported	Supported
Single Sign On	Supported	Supported	Not supported (RTC)
Search	Full text search	Supports multiple options including Algolia & Elastic Search	Algolia

* RTC (round the corner - part of roadmap, available shortly)
And which one did I select? Why? Guesses? Use the comments :)

What I particularly like about Document360

• There's a nifty view in the admin panel that tells you about all the features that they have and how many you have actually used. Really cool way to realise how much is still left behind on the table. But the thing is - you can still do something about the features that you haven't tried out.
• I like that we don't have to go into edit to see the article history. I also love it that they give you the ability to view differences across both the code view and the rendered view. 
• The ability to mark an article with a 'new' badge so that it becomes easy for end users to know what content has been recently added.

Important: Document 360 is priced per project. A project can be considered a URL. If you have an external and an internal audience, then that's ideally two projects. It's not as clear as you'd hoped it would be in the pricing details, even though they do mention it's a per project cost.