The best products come with the best technical documentation! And in this list, we have a collection of the best technical documentation software tools to create awesome user documentation, quick & easy.
Whether the end-user of a product is a technically skilled person or a non-technical, tech documentation and user guides are a way to improve user satisfaction and help them bring the best through your software product.
Several tools will let you create great online user documentation. These software products offer you a way to draft, organize, publish and control the access of the technical documentation of your products.
They are designed to include all the advanced features that you might need to generate and share the technical documentation for your product/services online.
WordPress + BasePress – Free Documentation Software Solution
The simplest of all the solutions is hosting a WordPress website and building a documentation section through the BasePress plugin.
While keeping the process of building technical documentation easier, the BasePress plugins provide you with all the necessary options you need to generate technical information and relay it to the end-users.
This WordPress knowledge base plugin can help you with product technical documents, instruction manuals, product manuals, user guides, repair manuals, or any such documents. BasePress is free, easy to use, and has a lot to offer. It is flexible enough to let you create a technical guide for more than one product.
The free version of this technical documentation software has enough features to let you build full-fledged documentation for your product, and there is a premium version of the plugin that you can upgrade to for advanced features.
There are simple options through which you can create a knowledge base/product category, sections, and then technical documents. All can be managed with simple and intuitive options within this free documentation tools dashboard.
This technical documentation software alternative comes with 3 different options to choose from, there are options to let you manage the colors & icons, and much more.
BasePress allows you to create documents easily without any technical expertise. You can create a clean and professional-looking document using this plugin on your WordPress website. You can use a WordPress plugin for adding a documentation section to your existing website. It is a simple, affordable, and reliable alternative tool for generating documentation.
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Also read: The Best WordPress Documentation Themes For Online User Guides
Whatfix – Advanced Tool For Generating Documentation
After the simplest & free technical software documentation tool in form of the BasePress plugin, the next on our list is the most complex but very smart tool.
For highly professional technical documentation and user guides, that can be used inside or outside the organization, you can rely on the Whatfix SAAS solution.
It is a complete package of documentation solutions as well as for analytics, building, and management feature to not just create system documentation but also aid the overall content delivery and user satisfaction through it.
Whatfix is a way to make sure that the content you create in form of product documentation is presentable and easy to understand. It comes with advanced features through which you can create content that is interactive and interesting.
While other technical documentation software will help you with writing software documentation, Whatfix takes it one step forward and provides you with innovative features to help you train and guide your employees and users to boost productivity with the software product.
This technical documentation software alternative is much more than a browser-based documentation tool and is the best for you if you want to create an advanced system where the users, as well as employees, can learn with not just technical guides, but with interactive methods.
Therefore, Whatfix is much more than one of these technical documentation software solutions. If you just want to create a technical guide instead, you can rely on the other services mentioned in this list.
Besides just end-user software documentation, you can use this productivity tool for training new employees, creating in-house resources that help employee productivity, and reduction in support tickets as well.
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Helpjuice – Product Documentation & User Guides
Helpjuice is a professional tool for generating documentation and analysis. It provides you with amazing features to write content and format it, while also coming with analytic features through which you can measure the impact of your documentation.
One of the highlights of this end-user software documentation tool is that it is highly customizable. You can choose from the available themes to get started with. They offer you advanced free customization of your documentation by the experts.
Even for creating your documentation, there are plenty of editing and writing features. For example, it supports versioning and article history. Embedding images, videos, pdfs, and other files to your document as downloadable material. There are plenty of other features like auto-saving, table of contents, article withing article, access control, and much more.
There are analytic tools to give you information about the page views, search, and other insights about the documents on your site like the success rate, discovering user groups who use the content most, search insights like successful and unsuccessful searches, as well as user insights.
All of this information drawn through your user document guides will help you curate your content to make it more useful and informative. Moreover, if your documentation section is to be managed by a team of people, then you can assign different roles to create and edit the content.
The advanced search features will help your end users find the content of their interest very easily. Besides, there are modern security features that restrict or grant access to certain users to certain controls on the user documentation.
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Proprofs – Technical Documentation Software Tool
Proprofs has a group of services and software products that can help you with customer engagement and user satisfaction. Instead of providing everything at once, packed as a single product, Proprofs comes with straightforward software solutions targeted for special areas.
One of such products is the user manual software by ProProfs. It comes with all the features and analytic tools to let you build and manage end-user software documentation. It even supports collaborative authoring for the knowledge base articles. Even a single article can have multiple contributors assigned to them so that they can contribute to creating a comprehensive document easily.
There is an easy-to-use multilingual editor to create localized user guides. You can easily create rich content with images, text, and videos to make the documentation intuitive for visitors.
Along with document writing, editing, and management tools in this technical documentation software, there are analytic features, to help you get insights into the usefulness of your documentation. There are insights on what people are searching for, the most popular search words, the failed search queries, and other useful insights and reports to help you improve the user manuals.
You can save up to 30 versions of your document and track the previous version, restore them, or edit them. To make sure that only reliable and well-established content is published in your documentation section, you can set the control that the pages are only published after going through the review cycles.
All of the documents and user guides published on the platform are print-friendly and mobile-friendly. They also have a download as pdf option, that of course you can enable or disable.
The process to create and manage the documentation is simple and easy. You can choose from available templates and use the customization options. There are options to import as well as write the documents and publish them and control who can access them.
This is one of the easiest to use software documentation tools to build and manage technical documentation effortlessly.
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Document360 – Online Documentation Software
With Document360 you can create a private or public knowledge base, or software technical documentation which is easy to use, both for the document editors as well as the customers looking for answers.
The tools available with Document360 technical documentation software allow you to create any kind of technical help material like how-to & setup guides, user manuals, troubleshooting articles, tutorials, reference materials, system documentation, release notes, and much more.
The included FAQ module will help you create documents in question-and-answer format. There is a feature-packed inbuilt editor for the content creators to use, and options to create and add new documents on the go.
Create as many categories as you want and manage an organized product documentation section. Even if you are relying on some other Online documentation tool, and want to transfer your user help and support system to document360, there is a flawless migration system.
The inbuilt analytic and reporting system will help you find out internal reports on how the help articles are performing and will ultimately help you with decision making to see that you improve your documentation.
There is also an interesting tool called knowledge base assistant, which is a widget that can be embedded into your website, or SAAS product so that the users can even search and find answers from there.
With Document360, you can effortlessly create protected or public, internal or external system documentation with a custom home page and domain.
Document360 For Internal & External Documentation
ClickHelp – Online Software Technical Documentation Tool
ClickHelp is a custom online documentation tool to let you create, publish and deliver support and technical help documents through a single portal.
The collaboration options in this technical documentation software will help multiple members of the team work together to create comprehensive knowledge & help articles and document their part effortlessly. Moreover, the included reporting and analysis module will help you with insights to improve your documentation.
Clickhelp will save you the time and effort required to improve customer satisfaction by providing them self-help materials to reduce the support tickets.
If you already have your content ready in any other document format like MS Word, or OpenOffice, you can easily import it into your Clickhelp portal. Moreover, there are many customization options to visually enhance your tech help portal and create interesting content with videos, forms, and efficient navigation.
Moreover, there are access control options, and a system to manage the roles and permission to access, edit or manage the technical help documents.
To manage the look and feel of your product documentation, you can use the visual settings available for the admin, or CSS. You have full reader UI customization options to enhance the user experience. In fact, you can choose from 6 unique reader UI templates for different types of documents.
ClickHelp makes generating content faster and more efficient with support for cross-project content reuse with the help of snippets, variables, and conditional content. The analytics will provide you with content metrics like readability, time to read, word count, page views, and more.
ClickHelp is one of the most powerful and flexible technical documentation software for internal as well as external online technical documentation.
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Tettra – Internal Company Technical Documentation
We have included Tettra in this list for those who want to create technical documentation limited to the internal use of their company. It is basically a company wiki software that allows you to build an internal knowledge base and is an advanced version of an internal technical documentation software.
However, there are instances when it becomes vital for companies to create and manage internal documentation of processes and guides to help the employees make the best use of the internal tools as well as maintain uniformity in the procedures.
Such systems are most popular with companies having remote teams where it is vital to provide some type of documentation and self-help materials to the employees to improve their productivity and train them. Tettra is one such tool for internal documentation and knowledge base.
Tettra has an internal system to store and reuse repetitive questions. Therefore the FAQs have the solution stored for the next time the question is asked. A collaborative approach where the teammates can suggest the missing content and thereby help you increase the usability of your system.
There is also an inbuilt system that helps you identify content that is stale and unused so that you can clean up your online documentation. There are many other features like an efficient search system, import options, and migration support.
There are a few access control options, and also supported integrations with services like Zapier, G Suite, etc. Tettra is a simple and efficient solution to strengthen your team’s knowledge and improve their efficiency by consolidating and sharing knowledge in form of technical documentation.
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Confluence – Team Collaboration & Knowledge Sharing
Confluence is more of a collaborative tool, where different employees or a company can share, discuss, and contribute to creating a central knowledge repository. However, such a repository can also be a tech support guide, user manuals, and support material.
Where the general technical documentation and user manuals are authored by some limited team members, the confluence is a way for the entire team to contribute to the knowledge base.
Confluence is a complex system, that helps you keep things centered and check that everyone on the team is on the same page. It helps with project management, collaborative work, team chat, message sharing, etc.
The main elements of Confluence are – pages & spaces. The pages are where the team members can create and share technical details about the products, and the spaces are where projects and teams are managed.
There are page templates, advanced search, and support for creating pages in a hierarchical model. So that content can have sub-content and can be easily related to each other. Moreover, it supports real-time editing, commenting, and an inbuilt notification system through emails.
Confluence comes with access control capabilities and a few personalization options too. It can be used as a software development documentation tool where the team can update the progress and development details about a project.
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Conclusion
What is a great product with astounding features without a technical guide and documentation to explain to people how it works and how to make the best use of it?
One of these technical documentation software can be used to create effective online documentation, that will help you convey the technical information to your users.
For all the people trying to use the product, the user guide helps by providing information about the general process of usage, limitations, applications, troubleshooting, and other tips and tricks so that maximum productivity can be harnessed.
Even for technically skilled people, expert programmers, technical documentation will help them understand the product and product capabilities better.
Therefore, for any user group, the application and use of technical documentation may be different, but still very significant.
Perfect technical documentation that is written using some awesome technical documentation tools, and one of these technical documentation software products that can add value to your product and increase user satisfaction eventually.
