Don't compare apples and oranges, they said. I've always wondered why.
Of course they are grown in different climatic conditions. But there are so many similarities. They are both fruits. Both are things you eat. And digested. And... you know where I could have gone with this...
Which is why we willbe c omparing Apples, Oranges, and Melons .
Let's find out which one gets the cherry on the top :)
What we arecurrently 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 thatwere 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 alsoplayed 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 onPaligo . 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 drawbackswhen 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 anin -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 responseswhen 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 arekind 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 toevaluate each solution. I've listed a few below and mentioned the significance of each criteria .
Here's the comparison I created. Let me know if I missed anything. Or got something wrong. Idid involve the vendors as well , but made several more changes
* 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
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.
Which is why we will
Let's find out which one gets the cherry on the top :)
What we are
We are looking to move out of Confluence
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
I took a demo from each of these vendors. I also
But it's only an authoring tool Which means you have to fend for some place to host the content you create on
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
They also have an
There's also a huge delay between responses
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
I made a list of criteria that I would use to
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
of your choice for example (supporta url . .com) and not have something like your companyyourcompany . .com. One of the deal breakers for confluence cloud.atlassian
- 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
you don't overwhelm your users with a lot of content. The expand function in Confluencethat
- Analytics: Make sure you are not only receiving information on how your content is being
but also on how it is being used.created,
- 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
Mobile devicesusing
- Workflow: You'd want to have some kind of environment to host and review content before
. Sorely missed this in confluence.it is published
- 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
. The abilitya big one stuff at a global level without having to go into each document.to quickly change
- 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
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?search
Here's the comparison I created. Let me know if I missed anything. Or got something wrong. I
* 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.