RoboHelp Vs Flare

Recently I needed to choose a help authoring tool for a client. I figured RoboHelp or Flare would do. After reviewing the RoboHelp features list, I downloaded the new version of RoboHelp, part of Adobe’s Technical Communication Suite.

I figured that Flare and RoboHelp would basically be the same now that RoboHelp has added snippets and variables.

Well, amazingly enough (or not), I was not impressed with RoboHelp at all. Even though Flare is a bit more expensive once you purchase the Madpak and Acrobat, I gave these reason to the client for choosing Flare instead of RoboHelp:

• Better integration of snippets, conditional text, and variables
• Better look-and-feel customization of the Web help output and Word documents
• Madcap is a smaller company dedicated to help authoring tools with more current and future offerings, more likely to take improvement requests and respond faster to support questions
• More helpful tools within the product
• Madcap is easier to learn than AuthorIt and gives more advantages than RoboHelp

When I opened RoboHelp, I got the impression that yes, Adobe had lost all its talent to Madcap. Sometimes you get a feeling that a small company is doing something special. For these products, compared with Adobe, Madcap at least has more energy and certainly has more interest in listening to their customers and making a high quality product.

In my review of the products, I checked if RoboHelp could import a Flare project. Ironically (or not) RoboHelp 7 cannot import a Flare project. But Flare can import a RoboHelp project. I found this blog post saying that a lot of Flare customers wanted to move to RoboHelp and Adobe was investigating the business case. In an update to the blog, a third party has posted a migration tool. So, this adds to my impression that Adobe isn’t too concerned with the technical communication arena (which is why they stopped producing RoboHelp for 3-4 years in the first place).