ClickHelp

Pros

• That this is an SaaS is so convenient for me. I've looked at other authoring tools in the last couple of years, even bought one that ended up sitting on the shelf because of the complexity of getting it off the ground.
• Amount of functionality and customizability is fantastic. At first this can be slightly overwhelming; I wanted to get right into the "create my guide" mode, but how my org. is going to use ClickHelp required many hours of thinking, tinkering, and seeing how various projects would publish out to online and how I was going to set that up for the end user. Having all of the settings and ability to mod look and function, etc., has been great.
• Customer service and support is stellar. Even when a problem is resolved, the team has written back to me because they're wanting to make sure, first, that it stayed resolved, and second, to ask a few follow-up questions about my incident in order to help them troubleshoot and ensure it doesn't happen to other customers as well.

Cons

I would like templates that aren't as boxy as the six offered. I've used the templates as a starting point but in the end so heavily modified them that they're not at all what I started with. I would have liked something with an interface that feels more 2019 rather than have a web look/feel that's mid- to late aughts. But I can't have it all.

Pros

- Accessibility: the fact that the tool is online means that it is reachable from any platform no matter where you are, which is a great advantage compared to other offline writing editors.
- Structurality: the tool is nicely structural and well arranged - it is always clear where to go/what to click on depending on what the user wants
- Plenty of features: the tool itself presents a plethora of features that would be otherwise done by extrenal/3rd party programs - such as editing of inserted images, tables, etc.
- Great customer support: quick and helpful in their communication
- Plenty of learning materials: even though it might not be clear at the beginning sometimes how to do what exactly there are plenty of learning tutorials which make your work easier and even teach you a few tricks

Cons

There are some small things that could be improved (such as the size of the actual content writing window, TOC to the content writing table ratio, etc.), however, I would be just nit-picking at this point :). The biggest struggle for me, however, is moving of the Chapters in TOC - one wrong move and everything can go awry :(

Pros

The single source concept - one database of topics which can be published in various formats, some parts can be tagged not to be published in some output versions. Especially nice tool for creating on-line help. In addition to unlimited formatting options (css) definable in various Styles, there are those smart web objects like drop-down texts, pop-up windows, embedded topics, links to other parts of the book or other files, pictures, videos.
I also appreciate the cloud concept - every change can be quickly updated for all readers, authors can login everywhere, no software to be installed, no updates, patch sets, service packs.
And of course the mighty user rights configuration - both on the editor/reviewer side and the audience side.
Icing on the cake is the reader's feedback - for each topic the authors can see the total number of its readers and number of their thumb ups/downs.

Cons

Sometimes there are too many user controls and options. Like on ancient Japanese hi-fi, while the user actually needs only the on/off switch and volume knob. And I'm afraid that ClickHelp makes me feel like learning HTML (although I have enough experts all around).

Pros

Having tried out several others, ClickHelp was the most intuitive and easy to use, plus it offers reviewer workflow that many competitors do not. They have several how-to videos but I didn't need many of them because the layout is elegant and easy to figure out. Of course I had a few questions, and our account rep was very responsive and helpful. Likewise I found a few small bugs but support fixed them within days both while we were still in trial and after purchase. Since it's hosted, the fixes were immediately applied to our portal, so no cumbersome installs to get a feature fixed. It was also very easy to import an existing Word doc, maintained styles, auto-separated into the appropriate topics, then re-exported to Word looking very similar to original.

Cons

Every once in a while it does seem to run a little slow. For example, I may be editing multiple topics, navigating around a lot, and sometimes when I click "Unlock & Edit" on a topic it might hang. I usually have to go back to the dashboard and try again a time or two, and then it keeps working. Also reviewer process is a bit clunky, but otoh, very few competitors even have this feature.

Pros

I was able to come to speed quickly with ClickHelp and it had all the features I needed for a complete help system. ClickHelp customer support is just incredible, I'd give it more than 5 stars if I could. Their responsiveness is a rare find in today's customer service world! Pricing is also excellent - compared to competitive products, ClickHelp packs a lot in for the cost.

Cons

I have no Cons that I can point to. There are some features of the package I do not need, so therefor do not use, so my review does not cover everything. I also have a small team, which this product is well-suited for.