Best Help Authoring Tools (HAT) And Software will be described in this article. As you are probably aware, producing help documentation for your company is essential as it improves customer satisfaction and expedites the support process. Unlike your support staff, your help documentation is always available and can instantly address your clients’ most urgent inquiries. You can scale your business more successfully and save money on customer support expenses.
Best Help Authoring Tools (HAT) And Software In 2024
In this article, you can know about Help Authoring Tools here are the details below;
Sadly, a lot of consumers discover that the company’s help centres are difficult to navigate, which causes them to either contact support or become dissatisfied customers. Your more seasoned users may find it annoying to read through endless, pointless paperwork, while other consumers may find the technical terms bewildering.
It’s not simple to write user documentation that works, but most businesses can manage it. Selecting the appropriate Help Authoring Tool is essential if you want to host the greatest documentation possible.
What Is a Help Authoring Tool?
A range management system that promotes the creation, administration, and distribution of help documents is known as a Help Authoring Tool. The Help section of a business website or an internal knowledge base within the organisation is typically the final product of a Help Authoring Tool.
Component Content Management Systems (CCMS) are more sophisticated than simpler systems and can be used as Help Authoring Tools. Typically, the features offered consist of:
- WYSIWYG editor for text, code, picture, and video editing
- Multi-author capability that facilitates the creation of collaborative material
- Bringing in and removing documents
- End-user interface that may be altered to match your brand
1. Document 360
More than just a tool for help authoring, Document360 enables you to quickly and simply produce FAQs, instruction manuals, user manuals, and product documentation. You can get started right away with the user-friendly interface as soon as you sign up for an account.
The multilingual possibilities that Document360 offers you to develop a knowledge base of material to assist your clients with AI machine translation are what really set it apart. Provide your multilingual assistance documentation to your international clientele.
Document360 is not only a tool for knowledge bases. It works flawlessly with all of your other favourite apps, including chatbots like Intercom, LiveChat, and Zendesk as well as support desks like Freshdesk and Zendesk.
Document360 features:
- Use the Markdown text editor to format your material with common elements like lists, headings, and italics.
- Use a category manager to arrange your material into a hierarchy with up to six tiers.
- Customise your landing page by adding links, your logo, your brand’s colours, and unique CSS to your knowledge base.
- Versioning – rollback and versioning enables you to view each knowledge base article’s change history and roll back if needed.
- Analytics: use advanced analytics to comprehend how well your knowledge base is performing.
- Microsoft Word document import and export capabilities
- Produce in several forms, including Word, Markdown, HTML, and PDF.
Price:
begins at $149 per project per month and offers a 14-day free trial with full forum access. You are able to view them here.
2. ClickHelp
Installing ClickHelp is not necessary; it is a fully functional Help Authoring Tool that operates directly in the browser. Authoring assistance content from a single site allows for simple team collaboration.
Using this programme, you can manage all of your technical material in one location and produce manuals for many software versions, internal and external instructions, FAQs, Knowledge Bases, Tutorials, API Docs, and much more.
With the help of snippets, variables, and conditional blocks, you can reuse your material across the documentation with ClickHelp’s dynamic content support for single-sourcing, which will save you a tonne of time and work.
Clickhelp features:
- Translation module: easily build a multilingual support website
- Simple exporting and importing: export from CHM, HTML, RTF, and Microsoft Word
- ODT and export to CHM, DOCX, PDF, HTML5 Web Help, and
- Strong full-text search with support for wildcard search that makes it simple for users to locate content
- Reporting enables you to assess team performance and examine user behaviour.
- Context help: Make your applications more context-sensitive
Price:
begins at $55 per month for each author.
3. MadCap Flare
For technical communicators, MadCap Flare is a very popular help creation tool that offers topic-based XML authoring and publishing. Flare aims to maximise the value of your documentation through multi-channel publishing and content reuse.
MadCap Flare’s capacity to publish material to a variety of media, including the web, print, desktop, and mobile, is what gives it its power. The fact that Flare is a sophisticated tool with a high learning curve is one of its drawbacks. It’s not a piece of software that can be learned quickly.
The simplicity of importing material from a variety of inputs—including Microsoft Word and Excel, Atlassian’s Confluence, Adobe RoboHelp, and more—with a drag-and-drop process is what distinguishes MadCap Flare.
MadCap Flare Features:
- A customisable interface for producing technical documentation, e-learning courses, and learning and development initiatives is called advanced content authoring.
- With topic-based authoring, your information is arranged into reusable sections that may be utilised for a variety of purposes, including sophisticated user manuals and getting started tutorials.
- Micro content is brief, self-contained information that can be utilised to support AI and machine learning applications.
- Pre-built project templates: With hundreds of pre-installed templates, you may quickly produce print- and web-based outputs.
- Collaboration capabilities: cloud-based workflows that facilitate contributions and reviews for collaborative authoring
Price:
$149 for per user every month.
Additionally, read our piece on the top substitutes for Madcap-flare.
4. Adobe RoboHelp
Using Adobe RoboHelp, a robust help authoring tool, you can produce a variety of documentation for HTML5 output, EPUB 3, KF8, and MOBI files. RoboHelp stands out as a real HAT since it makes it simple to export documentation and allows you to have many user manual editions.
Once more, RoboHelp is not a simple tool to use. Because of its extensive feature set, RoboHelp takes a while to become comfortable with before you can start creating your documentation.
RoboHelp provides intelligent content reuse, allowing you to modify material once and have it reused across various locations by using global snippets. For even more adaptability, combine content from several sources and build new snippets inside of already-existing snippets.
RoboHelp features:
- Conditional content usage: establish guidelines and apply them to specific content, such a term, phrase, or topic.
- Single-sourcing is the practice of altering a snippet only once and using it for several outputs.
- Micro-content authoring: creating brief, relevant material for search engines, social media, in-context assistance, highlighted snippets, FAQs, chatbots, and other applications.
- File import: easily import from Markdown, HTML, and Microsoft Word
Price:
$29.99 a month.
5. Paligo
Authoring technical documentation, policy and procedure manuals, knowledge management, and other materials is made possible with Paligo, a Component Content Management System (CCMS). Paligo stands out for having all the tools you may possibly need in one place for the authoring process. Also check Pogoplug Alternatives
When producing your material, our Help producing Tool ensures correct structure, consistency, and flexibility by using an XML source format. Structured authorship ensures the long-term worth of your material and facilitates its reuse.
Another topic-based authoring tool that lets you release your documentation in a fraction of the typical time is Paligo, which has intelligent content reuse. It facilitates teamwork through a cloud-based CCMS.
Paligo features:
- Single-sourcing is intelligent content reuse that enables you to reuse text fragments, blocks of material, components, and dynamic variables to reuse content at scale.
- Paligo’s user-friendly XML editor facilitates the rapid creation of structured material through structured writing.
- Content can be published to many platforms such as HTML5, SCORM, PDF, Zendesk, and Salesforce via multi-channel publishing.
- Versioning enables you to compare versions and makes it simple to keep track of changes made to your material. Version history and rollback
- Import current documentation: Paligo provides an easy-to-use migration procedure from a variety of platforms, including MadCap Flare, Microsoft Word, DITA, DocBook, HTML, Zendesk, and Atlassian Confluence.
Price:
begins at $179 per writer each month.
6. HelpNDoc
The goal of HelpNDoc, an easy-to-use and simple help authoring tool, is to generate documentation for several outputs from a single source. Markdown documents, PDF and Word documents, ePub and Kindle eBooks, HTML and CHM help files, and much more are supported by HelpNDoc.
HelpNDoc is quite simple to use; if you can operate a word processor and a web browser, you should have no trouble picking up the basics of this programme. You’ll be astounded at how fast you can begin producing a diverse range of platform-responsive documentations.
HelpNDoc’s simplicity of use compensates for its lack of strength in comparison to some of the other solutions on our list.
HelpNDoc features:
- Easy-to-use interface: HelpNDoc’s features are presented in a ribbon style, with certain elements only showing up when necessary.
- All of the tools required to create documentation are integrated, including the library, WYSIWYG subject editor, keywords editor, and table of contents editor.
- Modern word processor: HelpNDoc’s word processor has all of the features you’ve grown accustomed to from programmes like Microsoft Word.
- All media assets, including documents, movies, photos, HTML code snippets, and variables, are controlled via the media library system.
Price:
begins at no cost and has restricted features and adverts.
Final remarks
As you are now aware, there are numerous Help Authoring Tools on the market, and they are all a little bit different from one another. If you’re considering making an investment in a HAT, it’s worthwhile to test out a few different options to determine which one best fits your business. See the tutorial “What is Help Authoring Tool” for additional details. Also check Eloomi Alternatives
Keep in mind that you might not require every feature of a programme like Adobe RoboHelp or MadCap Flare. For your documentation demands, take into consideration Document360 if you’re searching for a straightforward knowledge base solution. Without having to deal with the hassle of learning a complicated technology, you will be in complete control of your material.