Introduction
Businesses of all sizes launch hundreds and millions of products and services each year in the market—of which only a few are successfully sold and consumed by the customers.
While the value you offer through your product is important—a large part of the product sales success depends on how easy and convenient it is to use. According to a survey, 97 percent of users say “ease of use” is the most important quality for mobile applications, and 55 percent of customers returned a product as they didn’t fully understand how to use it.
This is where a well-curated, easy-to-understand, and simple user manual greatly improves customer satisfaction and reduces abandonment rates.
Customers turn to user manuals whenever they face difficulty understanding the products and processes—before even turning to your customer support team.
This is why many businesses are leveraging different tools and manual creation software to create user manuals that save customers’ time and make them happy.
But what are these user manual tools exactly, and how to select the best software for creating manuals for your business products? Let’s find out.
What is a user manual software?
A user manual tool is an online manual creation software that helps you generate user manuals and instructions guides for your products and services.
It provides complete customisation abilities, allowing you to edit, write, and design the manual’s content per your specific needs. Besides helping you design and create user manuals, the online manual software also helps publish and manage user manuals across multiple platforms and devices.
For instance, an important feature of user manual software is the categorisation system—which lets you add a content table with sections and subheadings to enable seamless navigation and ease of use for your customers.
So, the right user manual tool will help you create a well-drafted product manual, which will enhance customer experience by:
- Assisting customers during onboarding with step-by-step processes and instructions
- Making doubt resolution and problem-solving a breeze for customers—without expert invention.
- Improving your response time — allowing customer support staff to refer to the comprehensive user manuals to solve customers’ queries quickly and efficiently.
Thus, a powerful and detailed user manual helps customers understand products and assists employees and support team members better answer customer questions—without making them wait too long.
How to choose the right user manual tool?
Finding the right user manual creation software can be a game-changer for your business and the product journey.
Here are some important criteria you should consider when selecting a user manual software per your needs.
Ease of use
The user manual software you choose should be easy to use, set up, configure, and install and come with a user-friendly interface—allowing you to start using the manual creation tool immediately without technical or expert assistance.
Features
Your top choice of manual software should have all the essential features to help you create structured, customisable, searchable, and responsive online user manuals.
Free trial version
A credible user manual tool should come with a free 15 to 30 days trial version so you can thoroughly test out all the essential features and see if they match your requirements—before fully committing and investing your hard-earned money into it.
Cost
It’s recommended to go through different tools and their plans and choose the best value for your money with all the essential features—without any hidden costs.
To further facilitate the process of finding the right user manual tool, let’s look at the most popular and feature-packed manual creation software available in the market.
8 Best user manual tools to use in 2023
Every business’s and product team’s need for an effective user manual tool differs.
So, if you wish to create user manuals from scratch or need software to update or share user manuals across multiple platforms specifically, here’s a list of the best tools you can try for your specific requirements.
1. ClickHelp
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G2 Rating: 4.8 out of 5
Capterra Rating: 4.7 out of 5
ClickHelp Pricing: You can try the tool’s free trial, but it essentially comes in four different paid plans depending on the number of topics. For instance, while the Essentials plan costs $55/mo for 150 topics, the Enterprise plan costs $139/mo for 6000+ topics.
ClickHelp Overview:
ClickHelp offers intuitive and time-efficient software for creating online user manuals to build user guides that meet your customer and team’s needs.
By time-efficient, we mean—you can save up to 20 percent of manual user guide creation time, which is excellent for eCommerce businesses that continuously keep launching new products.
It’s perfect for teamwork — where all your product team’s SMEs, developers, technical writers, and reviewers can work in the same workspace, saving all the comments and changes in the portal.
Suppose all your customers and products require the same user manuals. In that case, ClickHelp lets you create multiple versions of the manuals with its single-sourcing and content reuse features—keeping the initial user manual content in one place.
What we love:
- Update an existing user manual to release its new version in seconds.
- It provides deep analytics and reports with insights into your team’s productivity and how customers interact with your user manuals.
- You can publish manuals online or in PDF format.
What can be improved:
- Difficulty inserting videos in the .mp4 and other formats in the user manual.
2. Scribe
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G2 Rating: 5 out of 5
Capterra Rating: 4.5 out of 5
Scribe Pricing: You can use Scribe for free, but it also offers paid plans with premium features like customisable screenshots, branded guides, and knowledge base integration.
Scribe Overview:
Scribe is a fast and easy automated tool that captures your web and desktop processes to generate a step-by-step guide and user manual for your products.
All you’re required to do is turn on your Scribe recorder and walk through your product’s use and workflow to make it automatically generate a step-by-step manual with text and screenshots.
It’s one of the fastest technical documentation and user manual creation tool —saving time spent creating a guide manually by 93 percent — boosting productivity and process consistency.
What we love:
- Helps boost customer onboarding and adoption with detailed manual documentation.
- You can answer the repeat “How do I…” customer questions in seconds.
- Let you empower and train team members or new hires to learn key product processes, allowing them to easily get familiar with the products and their use cases.
What can be improved:
- Aside from some awesome features like branding and image edits being Pro only features, the 5 out of 5 ratings speaks for itself.
3. Document360
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G2 Rating: 4.7 out of 5
Capterra Rating: 4.7 out of 5
Document360 Pricing: It’s free for up to five team accounts, 1 GB of storage, and 50 articles. You can benefit from additional premium features and advanced storage options from its paid plans.
Document360 Overview
Document 360 is a knowledge base platform that lets you create a self-service knowledge base, product help documents, and user guide manuals for your customers and employees.
It offers impressive customisation options—allowing you to design your user manuals with branded colours, custom domains, social icons, and call-to-actions that best match your brand style.
It also comes with a responsive and AI-powered search engine that facilitates finding context-sensitive results in seconds.
What we love:
- Let you view the manual’s change history with the rollback and versioning tools.
- Multilingual support to serve and create user manuals for global customers.
- Allows you to create product manuals with simple tree-view navigation—helping customers easily move from one section to another.
What can be improved:
- Comes with content import restrictions for platforms like WordPress.
- The setup process is complicated compared to other tools.
4. Dozuki
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G2 Rating: 4.5 out of 5
Capterra Rating: 4.3 out of 5
Dozuki Pricing: Dozuki comes at custom pricing, and you can request the pricing information by submitting a few essential personal and business details.
Dozuki Overview:
Dozuki is an online manual software designed to create industrial processes and documentation to help customers train and upskill employees and facilitate their training programs.
Its intuitive authoring system makes it easy to add images and videos to your user manuals to improve the clarity of critical product workflow.
The unique feature of Dozuki is its version control and workflow approval system that easily lets you track the content quality and improvement feedback from frontline operators.
What we love:
- Ability to choose from over 100 languages in a single click.
- Real-time in-app and email notifications allow you to stay up-to-date with the manual creation process.
- Software systems integrations — allowing you to connect Dozuki to your Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP), Quality Management System (QMS), and Learning Management System (LMS) systems.
- Provides granular-level control to manage access and edit permissions to your product user manuals.
What can be improved:
- Restricts flexibility as Dozuki follows a fixed-templated format.
- You can’t edit the existing document without creating another version.
- Limited image customisation options.
5. HelpDocs
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G2 Rating: 4.4 out of 5
Capterra Rating: 4.1 out of 5
HelpDocs Pricing: It offers a 14-day free trial, with paid plans starting from $69/month.
HelpDocs Overview:
HelpDocs is a highly customisable manual creation tool that offers blazing-fast and SEO-focused templates to create user manuals for your customers.
Its WYSIWYG editor with drag-and-drop functionality makes creating and rearranging content within your user manual a breeze. It also provides multiple custom formatting options—including headings, call-outs, code blocks, and ordered and unordered lists.
Its typo-tolerant intelligent search feature makes HelpDocs unique, allowing customers to search and get the desired results within milliseconds.
What we love:
- Lets you customise your user manuals with HTML, CSS, and Javascript.
- Provides analytics to monitor the user manual’s performance, traffic, and usage.
- Provides third-party integrations with tools like Lighthouse, Slack, and Intercom.
- Provides a bot that translates 100 articles per month without changing the formatting in different languages using Machine Learning algorithms.
What can be improved:
- Limited file import and export options — allowing you to only export the user manual in PDF format or an Excel file.
- Comes at a slightly higher pricing end.
6. Speachme
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Speach Pricing: You need to contact the sales team to get a custom quote for your business.
Speachme Overview:
Speachme is an effective video platform that lets you embrace a unique way of creating user manuals for employees and customers—through videos.
Creating video content provides numerous benefits to brands regarding customer interaction and satisfaction. Hubspot’s video marketing statistics suggest that 40 percent of marketers claim that helping customers understand the products is one of the biggest benefits of video content marketing—and 36 percent of marketers claim that it promotes better customer engagement than other forms of marketing.
Speach helps you in both — allowing you to record and edit your user manual video using 10+ tools and making it more interactive by adding quizzes, voice-over, images, slides, documents integration, and CTAs.
What we love:
- Lets you translate the video content and add subtitles in 30+ languages.
- Lets you easily embed the training and user manual videos in existing tools and systems, like LMS.
- Meets GMP and FDA compliance requirements.
What can be improved:
- Some may require time to get familiar with its user interface and functionalities.
7. Paligo
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G2 Rating: 4.7 out of 5
Paligo Pricing: You need to request a demo to know the custom pricing per your business requirements.
Paligo Overview:
Paligo is a Component Content Management System (CCS) that lets you create user manuals, technical documentation, a knowledge base, and policies and procedures.
It’s a collaborative tool that allows collaborators, like technical writers, developers, and SMEs, to create, manage, edit, translate, and publish user manuals from a single space.
Some of its unique features include topics-based authoring, content sourcing, and reuse — accelerating the process of creating manuals. Besides, it allows you to publish user manuals across channels like print PDF, HTML5, and SCORM.
What we love:
- Provides an easy-to-use XML editor for structured authoring
- Provides on-demand scalability.
- Provides top-notch security and high reliability with 99.99 percent uptime.
What can be improved:
- Difficulty and errors with importing documents, including missing images and editing required for word documents with tables.
8. Nuclino
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G2 Rating: 4.7 out of 5
Capterra Rating: 4.6 out of 5
Nuclino Pricing: It’s free for up to 50 items with 2GB storage. You can choose paid plans to get premium features like unlimited items and advanced security controls, starting at just $5 per user per month.
Nuclino Overview:
Nuclino is a collaborative manual creation tool providing a unified space to reduce context switching and silos when creating projects, documentation, and user manuals.
It’s a simple and clutter-free tool that lets you create content faster with Markdown commands and add text, images, code blocks, videos, and files to your manuals. Its top features include auto-saving, instant search, and keyboard-first design — making it easier to work with slash commands and hotkeys.
What we love:
- Real-time document collaboration with the ability to add comments and track changes.
- 40+ applications integration with apps like Slack, Figma, Google Calendar, YouTube, and Microsoft Teams.
- Optimised for mobile — Android and iOS versions.
What can be improved:
- It’s only ideal for companies with smaller databases, and the tool lags and suffers as the company’s needs grow.
Conclusion
User manuals are indispensable for product teams of IT companies and eCommerce businesses — hence investing the right amount of time, money, and effort into creating them is important.
With the number of tools available, the one you choose should depend on your specific requirements. So, analyse things like the level of personalisation required, whether you prioritise team collaboration or a responsive tool, and choose the best tool that best fits your needs.
If you need automated user manual creation software to boost your team’s productivity, check Scribe and its features and pricing.
