The moment we read ‘technical writing’, it instantly creates an image of a complex process that involves documenting software, instructional materials, product features, and more.
Technical writing is an art of communicating the most complex ideas and concepts to end-users in a simple and clear language.
This information is written and published in the form of technical documentation that can be easily accessed by customers to troubleshoot issues or understand the process of using a product better.
No doubt writing technical documentation requires expertise, but what’s even more important is that your team is armed with the right technical writing tool.
Picking one tool from a pool of options available online is like looking for a needle in a haystack. To make the task a tad bit easier, we have curated a list of the best technical writing tools that can be of immense help for your tech squad.
What is it that makes a technical writing tool the best?
The best technical writing tool is easy to use, comprises bespoke features, and offers unparalleled functionality. It should integrate with a service for asking questions and creating tickets for unanswered questions, for example - ProProfs Help Desk, Zendesk, Freshdesk, Salesforce Desk, etc. to name a few. The best tool should help your team in all aspects of building an online technical document right from writing and editing to customizing and publishing, and everything in between. Besides, the technical writing tool you choose should enable your teams to work collaboratively, spot knowledge gaps, and improve your technical documentation from time to time.
The table below consists of a summary of features while you can also take a look at details about each of them including their pricing right after the table.
Top 10 Technical Writing Tools and Their Key Features
Technical Writing Tool
Key Features
- 25+ ready-to-use, professionally built templates
- Feedback Surveys
- Built-in forms for tickets
- Integration with ProProfs Help Desk
- Create workflows to allow technical reviews
- Control the visibility of advanced technical content
- Designed primarily for internal teams
- Create technical documentation using templates
- Make your content highly searchable
- Get insights into how your document is performing
- Create different versions of your document easily
- Customize from scratch using CSS
- Export files and import content directly to your document
- Write and edit with WYSIWYG editor
- Create a custom domain for your documentation
- Set workflows to maintain transparency
- Allow multiple writers to work on your document
- Publish your document in different formats
- Take control of the different versions of your document
- Downloadable experience (not SaaS)
- Conventional but simple UI
- Configure fonts, themes, and colors
- Write and edit content with powerful editor
- Compare & restore previous versions
- Create technical document with XML editor
- Integrate with Zendesk, Salesforce, Intercom, and more
- Set workflows to produce error-free content
- Pick your favorite template to create documentation
- Authenticate users with a single and simple log-in system
- Set workflow status for articles
- Customize your content your way
- Control who can do what in your documentation
- Monitor recent emails, work in progress files and frequently accessed docs
- Recover deleted content from the trash folder
- Notify individuals or groups for managing tasks
Now, let’s take a look at the individual features and pricing of the above mentioned technical writing tools.
1. ProProfs Knowledge Base
ProProfs Knowledge Base is a simple yet very powerful technical writing tool. It’s easy to use and doesn’t require technical expertise. This tool can be used effortlessly by people of all skill levels to write, edit, customize, and publish technical content.
This all-in-one software offers an impeccable reporting mechanism, a super-fast search system, smooth accessibility across various devices, and an exceptional user experience. Besides, it also provides unbelievable integrations with popular third-party tools like Zendesk, Freshdesk, Wufoo, etc., and sibling tools - ProProfs Chat and Help Desk.
ProProfs Knowledge Base has been used and appreciated by renowned brands like Acer, Nissan, Duracell, and many more.
Here’s an example of stunning technical documentation created using ProProfs.
Features:
Choose from over 25+ ready-made templates to create a technical document, manual, or help site.
Provide employees and customers anytime, anywhere access to your documentation, manual, or help sites.
Explore a wide array of customization options - fonts, colors, and themes, to design your technical content.
Create technical content in over 90 languages and cater to your diverse audience spread across the globe.
Get actionable insights into how your technical content is performing. Measure its success with metrics like poorly rated articles, failed searches, broken links, and more.
Assign roles such as administrator, contributor, editor, and viewer to different individuals and groups. Define their responsibilities and help them work collaboratively.
Explain the jargon, technical concepts, and provide additional information with the help of tooltips, lightboxes, and popups.
Set rules and conditions to hide or display advanced technical content to a specific audience.
Allow customers to give ratings and drop comments on the articles.
Embed ticket forms anywhere in your documentation to gather customer feedback.
Set workflows to ensure that your documentation is reviewed thoroughly before getting published.
Allow customers to raise tickets for unanswered questions and chat with a representative to get answers by integrating with ProProfs Help Desk and ProProfs Chat, respectively.
Pricing starts at $0
Why Use ProProfs Knowledge Base software?
Easy to Use
The software is designed for the convenience of users with minimum technical knowledge. No hassles of software download or installation. No HTML skills required.
Customizable
You can customize the platform to match your branding. CSS helps you create documentation the way you want. Choose from over 600 fonts, themes, designs, and color schemes to customize your online document.
Robust Reporting
Insightful reports provide you a comprehensive view of how your documentation is performing. Get actionable insights into the number of searches performed, articles read, popular and poorly rated articles, and much more.
24*7 Support
Worry not, regardless of when and where you get stuck. Aside from the self-service support, you can also get in touch with them to clear your queries.
Trusted by Global Brands
Thanks to the software’s awesome performance it has assisted businesses across the globe to address their concerns, both relating to customers and employees effectively.
2. Confluence
Confluence is another great technical documentation tool built primarily for internal teams. Cloud-based and feature-rich, it works great for knowledge management, project collaboration, and employee engagement.
Everything can be created collaboratively with the help of Confluence, from something as simple as meeting notes and company announcements to complex documents like project plans and strategies.
The tool is noted for its amazing templates, team collaboration options, advanced security, and powerful integrations.
Features:
Create your own template or pick your favorite one from the template library and start writing content instantly.
Make your content easily searchable with Confluence’s robust search mechanism.
Analyze user engagement and know about the number of pages created, updated or viewed, and keep improving your document’s performance.
Track previous changes made to a page, compare different versions of the page, and restore a previous version.
Integrate with your favorite third-party tools as well as in-house tools to get added benefits.
Pricing:
starts at $0.
3. Document360
Document360 is a cloud-based tool that can be an asset for your technical writing team. Simple yet powerful, this tool comes with a user-friendly interface and comprises awesome features that help your team write, edit, collaborate, and publish content effortlessly.
If you have a knowledge base created using some other tool and want to migrate it to Document360, the tool provides easy options to migrate from over 100 sites.
Features:
Have multiple versions of your articles. Restore to a previous version whenever you want.
Get instant search results as you start typing in the search bar.
Write content using Markdown editor. Use shortcuts to expedite the process of content creation.
Customize your document with CSS, add fonts, colors, and give the desired look to your content.
Export and import content with a single click.
Pricing:
starts at $49/project/month.
4.KnowledgeOwl
Cloud-based, 100% customizable, and easy to use, KnowledgeOwl is loaded with features that help you construct technical documentation with ease. It’s an all-encompassing tool covering features around various aspects of technical writing.
The tool lets you write and customize the content, manage users, capture feedback, and keep your content secure. Its unique features and simple user interface make it one of the best technical writing tools in the market today.
Features:
Write content the way you would on Microsoft Word. Edit, format, and style your content easily using this online editor.
Choose from 6 article status - draft, ready to publish, rejected draft, published, needs review, and deleted while writing articles.
Set up a custom domain for your technical document and give it an identity of its own.
Create different versions of articles, restore to a previous version, or publish the latest version instantly.
Pricing:
starts at $79/user/month.
5.Help+Manual
Help+Manual is packed with powerful features that work together to simplify documentation for you. The tool's highlight is its comprehensive suite of features that help you with multi-user editing, translation management, project management, slideshows, and much more.
Help+Manual’s plug-in system is quite commendable as it allows third-party software firms to add their plug-ins directly to Help+Manual. The tool offers two plug-ins with DeepL and PDF Peer Review.
Help+Manual’s latest version is available for download now.
Features:
Allow multiple authors to work on your document at the same time.
Create different versions of your document, restore to a previous version, compare two versions, and much more.
Write once and publish in multiple formats - HTML help, Web help, PDF files, or ebooks.
Translate your document with tools like SDL Trados easily.
Pricing:
Available on request
6.HelpnDoc
What makes HelpnDoc one of the best technical writing software is its ability to produce documentation in multiple formats - HTML sites, PDF files, ebooks, Word Docs, and more. The tool allows you to write and import content, export files, customize as you like, and publish instantly. Loved by some of the world’s leading brands, HelpnDoc is noted for its powerful editor that powers you with the ability to write compelling technical content.
The downside is its user interface that is simple but conventional at the same time. Unlike other similar tools, HelpnDoc doesn’t offer a cloud-based experience, meaning you will have to download and install the software to use it.
Features:
The complicated task of technical writing gets extremely effortless with HelpnDoc’s simple user interface.
Give your technical document a personalized look by changing its fonts, colors, paragraph styles, and much more.
Templates can be reused for creating different documentation, so you don’t have to start everything from scratch.
Write and customize the content, add headers and footers, table of contents, and change title styles easily.
Pricing:
starts at $0.
7.Paligo
A compilation of stellar features, Paligo helps you create and deliver excellent documentation in minutes. This cloud-based technical manual writing software helps you with topic-based authoring, content reuse, one-click publishing, and team collaboration. The tool is powered by amazing integrations with tools like Zendesk, Freshdesk, Salesforce, Memsource, and many more.
Features:
Set conditions to filter content specific to a particular product, audience, market, etc.
Make technical writing effortless with the tool’s easy-to-use editor.
Integrate with Memsource to manage your translations and avoid content duplication.
Rollback to a previous version, track changes, compare versions, and much more.
Integrate with your favorite tools - Zendesk, Salesforce, Intercom, Algolia, Mixpanel, among many others.
Pricing:
starts at $159/user/month.
8.ClickHelp
What makes ClickHelp one of the best technical writing software is its easy, flexible, and browser-based nature. The tool works great on multiple platforms and browsers like Chrome, Firefox, Mac, and Microsoft Windows, and generates documentation in various formats - PDF, HTML5 help file, MS Word, and more. With over 25000 users in its kitty, ClickHelp is certainly growing at a fast pace.
Features:
Set workflows for your articles and keep them in sync with internal processes, to ensure that error-free content is published.
Pick from 6 documentation templates provided by ClickHelp and start writing content instantly.
Change the style, domain name, colors, fonts, and themes of your documentation to give it the desired look and feel.
The tool teams well with over 20 popular tools like Google Analytics, Zendesk, Salesforce, Live Chat, Google Translate, and more.
Authenticate readers and authors with a single log-in system before they access your documentation.
Pricing:
starts at $50/user/month.
9.Plan.io
Plan.io is a cloud-based tool that is trusted by global firms to manage business information and ensure that it is easily accessible to their target audience. A versatile tool, Plan.io, helps you in issue tracking, project management, version control, file syncing, and more.
Designed for project managers, teams as well as startups, this tool is extremely effortless to use, keeps the chaos at bay, and provides a secure system for data protection.
Features:
Assign roles and permissions and exercise full control over who is responsible for what.
Create workflows to maintain clarity and transparency regarding the status of a particular task.
Use the variety of formatting features to style your content and give it a professional appearance.
Create parent and child pages and a table of contents to shape your document in the way you want.
Pricing:
starts at 149€/month
10.Doccept
A multi-user document management solution, Doccept encourages organizations across industries to go paperless by managing documents online. Doccept is one of the best technical documentation tools to store business information for an extended period securely. Right from creating and editing to storing and retrieving documents, Doccept gets you covered.
Features:
A centralized dashboard to provide you a peek into the on-going activities - recent emails, frequently seen files, work in progress articles, and much more.
Send prior notifications to an individual or group regarding a particular task.
Allow admins to see who made changes to the document and when.
Move all deleted documents to a secure trash folder and recover content easily.
Create new document versions and keep track of the modifications made.
Pricing:
Available on request.
Tools to Improve Your Technical Writing Experience
The tools listed above help you in all facets of technical writing - content creation, editing, customizing, publishing, and many more. But is that all?
Technical writing is also about nitty-gritties like proof-reading the content, adding screenshots, and editing images and videos.
Here’s a list of other important tools that can enrich your technical writing experience.
1. Screen Capture Tools
Snipping Tool
Developed by Microsoft, Snipping Tool provides an easy way to take a snapshot of a part of your screen or your entire screen. You can then make changes to the screenshot, save and directly upload it in the document you are creating.
Awesome Screenshot
This is an amazing tool that makes it possible to capture all or a specific part of your screen, record screen, add annotations, edit the capture, and share it instantly.
2. Image Editing Tools
Adobe Photoshop
One of the most popular photo editing software, Adobe Photoshop, is perfect for giving clarity, color, tone, and perfection to your pictures. Fix the aesthetics of your images, save them, and then directly upload them to your technical document.
Adobe Illustrator
This is one of the best vector graphics tools that is used widely for creating mobile and web graphics, logos, icons, billboards, packaging, and more. Adobe Illustrator can take the design of your documentation one notch higher.
3. Spell Check Tools
Grammarly
A stellar digital writing tool, Grammarly uses AI and Natural Language Processing (NLP) to provide you suggestions for grammatical errors, issues related to paragraph and sentence structure, vocabulary, writing style, and much more. You can also run a plagiarism check on Grammarly to identify copied content.
4. Video Editing Tools
Adobe Premiere Pro
Have a video to upload in your document, but it’s not in the right shape? Adobe Premiere Pro can help you out. Polish your videos, edit them from any device and then share it on any platform you want.
OpenShot
This easy to use video editor is another excellent option to trim videos, edit and polish them, adjust colors, brightness, tone, give 3D effects, and much more. If you have got any videos to be added to your document, fine-tune them with OpenShot and enhance their appeal to make the right impact.
Ready to Adopt the Best Technical Writing Tool?
- So, now you have a complete list of the 10 best technical documentation software. Compare features, pricing, and understand how they can help you before zeroing in on one.
- Picking one tool is definitely challenging, especially when each one offers something unique. The only way out here is to identify your requirements and shortlist a few tools that you think best meet your criteria. Post that, go through their trial versions, if they offer, and make the final decision based on your experience with the product.
- If you are still confused, we’re here to help. Give us a call at our toll-free contact (855) 776-7763, and one of our human support team will help you make a wise choice.
