Paligo Reviews 10

It's currently the best web-based CCMS out there. Despite some UI flaws, its DocBook and Asciidoc support is very solid, and with OpenAPI 3.0 import Paligo has become even more appealing to software companies. Best of all: their support team is incredibly helpful and responsive, to the point that they'll implement new features following your feedback if need be!

We are really happy wth the product and the company. We've been up and running on Paligo since May, moving from a fragile Flare/laptop/Bitbucket infrastructure to this simple cloud/browser based one. The product, even at its young age, has been a godsend in terms of simplifying authoring, improving the look of our published documentation, and almost eliminating system administration. As a vendor, Paligo is super supportive and easy to work with.

Pros:

Support—The Paligo Support team is among the best I've encountered. Quick to respond, knowledgeable, and focused on happy customers not just closing tickets.

New development—Paligo has introduced a number of new features over the year that I've been using the application—features that make the documentation more robust and features that improve my experience as an author. Also, when support issues are bugs, Paligo tends to be extremely quick to investigate and implement a fix.

Cons:

Author customization—While Paligo offers a decent amount of out-of-the-box customization for outputs (PDF, HTML5, Zendesk), some things require paying Paligo for one-off customization. (Side note: With the new development noted above, I have seen new options become available over time.) Also, it can be unwieldy to manage common changes desired across multiple stylesheets and layouts.

Learning curve—Paligo was relatively painless to learn for basic authoring and publication. The help is OK, and as mentioned above Support is excellent. However, I've noticed I'm continuing to learn the best practices, which sometimes means reworking what I have already done. And I'm probably unaware of a number of things that would be helpful to making the most of the Paligo experience.

At first, I found it really difficult to wrap my mind around the difference between a typical Word environment and a content authoring tool. But once I took the intermediate training (with Mike, who is an excellent resource for this company and has provided Support even after my training), I find myself enjoying the abilities it gives me to really structure my content in a way that users can consume more easily.

I have learned to love Paligo. I come from a more unstructured world (Word or Flare), so I had to learn the rules, but it is so much better and easier to maintain.
The help topics are not detailed enough, but Steve (one of Paligo's staff) helped me, when there was a need, with patience :)
If you need to use Zendesk as your end container for your help center, then I unreservedly recommend Paligo, where you can export their bells and whistles to Zendesk.

Paligo is a great tool if your organization is serous about producing structured help content. Of all the XML-based structured authoring tools I've used (which is most of them), Paligo is the easiest to use.

Nicholas's comments about Paligo on Trustpilot are somewhat valid. The image size not adapting to your settings is somewhat annoying. But, the WYSIWYG features are fine. Paligo is used for managing your content, not your style. You can easily apply CSS classes to your content in Paligo, and let your stylesheet do the work. When writers over rely on character styles, it drives me nuts. Paligo limits the amount of character styles that are available to you, and I think this is a good decision.

While not perfect, Paligo can import content from a huge variety of sources. This was extremely helpful for my team, because we needed to import a ZenDesk, Confluence, and Word library into Paligo when we were building our library.

Paligo can also publish to a zillion different formats, which is incredible. If you build your articles and publications right, you can really achieve a technical writers dream platform using Paligo.

Over the last few months, I've grown to like Paligo. I still don't like it as much as I could, but that has potential to change.
Let me start with the negatives:

1. As an experienced Technical Writer, it's fairly obvious to me that Paligo was created by Developers, for Developers. How many Technical Writers were consulted in the process of development?
In my line of work, I find I need to emphasise again and again that many Technical Writers, particularly those like me who come from a non-IT, multi-disciplinary background, do not have extensive experience in XML, and our attention is already spread thin enough that we do not have the time or inclination to devote ourselves to mastering XML. We are writers, not coders.
We're very nearly in 2019, guys. The era of having to fine-tune content by hand-coding in HTML and XML should have ended long ago!

2. Having to toggle between the Content Manager and a document's Structure view to build document structures and sub-structures is also a pain. In Word 2010 onward, you have the option to manipulate a document's structure directly through the Navigation view.

3. Another thing that really grates me is editing a document and not immediately knowing what I'm going to get in terms of a workable result. This particularly applies to image sizing - In Paligo, you have to manually specify the size of each image by entering a set value, if you don't want the image to default to the size specified in the Layout template. But how many people are able to say offhand, with any accuracy, that an image with a width of 250-point is going to occupy a known amount of space on an A4 page?
MS Word has the option of clicking-and-dragging to re-size images. Paligo needs a 100% representative WYSIWYG editing view - not just more WYSIWYG editing controls.

4. Speaking of WYSIWYG controls, Paligo needs a much wider selection of them. MS Word is the standard-bearer in this regard, and has been for eleven years now. There is no excuse not to learn from that.
Falling back on a user's skill at XML is a cop-out.

5. I don't know if any other Paligo users would concur, but for me, an offline Paligo application would be fantastic.
I'm based in South Africa. Here, we pay a premium for internet connections that are of sub-standard speed, bandwidth and reliability. Service interruptions are frequent, and when they happen, it would be great to continue to use Paligo uninterrupted, having it upload all edits when service is resumed.

6. There are also some infuriating bugs that cause relevant content to be hidden and/or irrelevant content to be shown in Review mode. This causes unnecessary friction between authors and reviewers by making it seem as if the author's fact-checking was sub-standard.

On the plus side, and discounting what I've said above, Paligo is a vast improvement over Adobe Framemaker.
A major bonus is that when I change the locations of resources such as images or topics, Paligo never breaks internal links to those resources. This is a major area in which Framemaker falls flat, and was a problem at my last job to the point where it influenced the layout of my documentation.

Always adding features and great CX

It's great to see Paligo always adding features to the platform. You get a few major updates a year and usually there's something for everyone. It's one of the more polished web-based CCMS/topic-based authoring tools out there.

If you want to keep your authoring tool deployment relatively lightweight while also bringing in outside contributors/SMEs by giving them access to a lighter editing interface, then Paligo is a good tool for the job. Existing tech authors will need to be re-trained a bit to learn how to best leverage Paligo's implementations of reuse, but that goes for any new tool.

Paligo also has some of the better customer support out there for topic-based authoring and help-authoring tools. They've been willing to engage with our team and understand our needs and develop features that will help our business succeed. Other companies will jot down a feature request and you'll never hear anything about it again unless it affects hundreds of customers. I hope Paligo continues to grow, and as it does that it keeps the great CX it has today.

As a company, Paligo has the very best Support I have ever seen in more than 20 years working with authoring tools and platforms. They have provided fixes and new features within hours. When a question requires analysis, they offer answers only after testing.
As a tool, Paligo fit my needs perfectly. I love that it is based on DocBook (portable), that it single-sources to help desk articles, that my team can edit the XML or work in WYSIWYG as each desires, that it publishes with predictability (problem with other CCMS vendors that tried to enable variant publishing), and much more. I love that it is cost effective and easy to sell to my purchasing department.

The Paligo documentation tool is excellent, a unique combination of features that enable you to construct modular documentation with as much re-use as you can implement. Installed in "the cloud", it is available from wherever you login, and this means that you get immediate access to new features and fixes.

The support team are great at helping newbies get up to speed, in turning user issues into fixes, and user ideas into new features. There is also an active user community that also chips in with support.