Best Help Authoring Tools
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Compare the Top Help Authoring Tools as of June 2025
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What are Help Authoring Tools?
Help authoring tools (HAT) are software solutions used to create and publish user manuals, online help systems, FAQs, and other types of documentation for software applications, websites, and products. These tools allow authors to design, write, and structure help content in a way that is easy for users to access and understand. Features of help authoring tools typically include a WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) editor, multi-format export options (e.g., HTML, PDF, CHM), built-in templates, search functionality, and support for multimedia integration (such as videos and images). These tools are essential for creating in-app help, troubleshooting guides, and product documentation to improve user experience and provide support. Compare and read user reviews of the best Help Authoring Tools currently available using the table below. This list is updated regularly.
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1
FlowShare
miraminds GmbH
FlowShare® documents every step you take in any software, then delivers a branded process manual you can use to train your staff. FlowShare is a one-of-a-kind documentation tool that runs in the background, automatically documenting every action you take, creating step-by-step guides for your staff to train themselves on complex tasks and processes. It's fast, gets your documentation done in just hours, instead of days or weeks, works with any type of software on Windows and saves time and money training staff. You get easy to distribute accurate information with all of your guides looking great - no matter who creates them! FlowShare AI-Powered assistant provides 24/7 instant help, ready to guide your end-users through troubleshooting and problem-solving independently and enhances your team's ability to adapt and grow with your tech stack. FlowShare Portal provides a Central Knwoledge Hub, making the solutions and step-by-step guides readily accessible.Starting Price: €39/month/user -
2
Document360
Kovai
Document360 is an AI-powered Knowledge base platform designed to streamline knowledge management in organizations. It helps teams create, manage, and publish content effortlessly, ensuring clarity and accessibility for users. Use Cases Knowledge Base for Customers and Teams: Offer a seamless self-service experience with AI search, auto-tagging, and analytics to boost productivity and reduce support queries. IT Documentation (Including API Docs) Simplify technical documentation with markdown support, version control, and API-friendly features like code embedding and AI-driven insights. Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs) Maintain consistent workflows with centralized SOPs, AI content suggestions, and easy updates for team alignment. User Manuals Deliver user-friendly manuals with customization, localization, and AI tools for faster, polished content.Starting Price: contact us -
3
ProProfs Knowledge Base
ProProfs
ProProfs Knowledge Base is a knowledge management software used to create highly-searchable online FAQ’s to improve customer service and reduce tickets. ProProfs helps centralize access to all your files, documents and how-to articles ensuring they can be accessed across multiple devices and platforms. Organizations can easily share important information to train their sales, customer service and support teams. It is also an effective method for introducing new hires to company procedures during the onboarding process. ProProfs Knowledge Base improves productivity by making it easy for employees and customers to instantly find what they're looking for, whenever and wherever they need it. ProProfs Knowledge Base Software eliminates the need to answer the same questions over and over again.Starting Price: $6 per user per month -
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ClickHelp
ClickHelp
ClickHelp is an AI-powered online documentation tool used by software companies around the world to create user manuals, knowledge bases, FAQs, tutorials, etc., and publish them instantly on their portal. ClickHelp requires no installation, runs in a web browser, and is accessible from anywhere in the world. Supports Mac OS, Windows, Linux platforms. Here is how ClickHelp makes your tech writing more effective: *Easy to use WYSIWYG topic editor, as well as HTML source mode. *Single-sourcing and content reuse. * Simple customization. *In-depth analytics and reporting. *Readability scores and metrics. *Easy importing and exporting. (Import from Microsoft Word, HTML, Markdown, RTF, CHM, ODT, etc. export to CHM, HTML5 Web Help, PDF, DOCX, etc.) *Translation ecosystem to create multi-language documentation. *Machine translation support. * RTL language support. * Audit trail and IP Allowlist. * 2FA Integrations: Zapier, Google Analytics, Google Search Console, etcStarting Price: $185/month -
5
Archbee
AiurLabs
Documentation tool for high-performing teams. Archbee is the place to centralize your company's information. Unify knowledge in product, engineering, support, marketing, sales. Use cases: • Manage team knowledge • Developer & API docs • Documentation sites • Document internal processes • Collaborate on documents • Onboard & train teammates • Create documentation for your customers • Bring your own domain Integrations: Slack, Airtable, Loom, Trello, Lucidchart, Typeform, Mindmeister, Prezi, Miro, Google Docs, Google Sheets, Google Slides, Figma, Invision, Framer, Abstract, Marvel, Github, GraphQL, Swagger/Open API, Numeracy, Mode Analytics, Codepen, Intercom, Google Analytics.Starting Price: $60 per month -
6
MadCap Flare
MadCap Software
Whether you need to create technical documentation for online help, software and API documentation, policy & procedure manuals, knowledge bases or user guides, MadCap Flare allows you to create, manage and publish content to a variety of formats, including print, online, desktop and mobile.Starting Price: $1799 Perpetual License -
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Help Generator
Help Generator
The Help Generator provides help authoring tools to create chm help files, browser based help and printed user documentation. The modern, Office style, help editing environment has many features to make you highly productive and guarantee quality output. Edit using WYSIWYG (HTML) Help Editor with the modern Windows fluent ribbon. Use the Help Generator help authoring software to create the standard windows help files, also called chm files or compiled html help file, and browser based help for any windows application. The Help Generator add-in makes for each form in your application a descriptive topic page which include a title, screenshot with image map and sections for all controls. The pages generated by the add-in are been automatically integrated with your application so that you have instant F1 support for context sensitive help. Add-in versions are available for Visual Studio .NET, Visual Basic 6 and Microsoft Access.Starting Price: $37 one-time payment -
8
Doc-O-Matic
Doc-O-Matic
Use Doc-O-Matic to effortlessly and reliably create source code and API documentation and author general purpose documentation in a multitude of formats and styles in the shortest possible time. Doc-O-Matic takes source code and comments, adds conceptual topics and external input and produces documentation from it. With its single-source approach, Doc-O-Matic generates many different kinds of output from a single documentation base. Doc-O-Matic produces HTML-based Help files including HTML Help, Help 2, Help Viewer 2.x and browser based Web Help. Doc-O-Matic also creates printable documentation in PDF and RTF formats as well as XML output ideally suited for post-processing. Documentation created with Doc-O-Matic is feature rich out of the box. It provides collapsible and tabbed sections, automatically cross-links the entire documentation, including source code. Your Help bridges the gap, truly integrating into pre-existing library documentation.Starting Price: $49 per user -
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snazzyDocs
snazzyDocs
Create documentation with technical-free writing, and effortless hosting. Write the way you’re used to! Format and style your text just like a word processor. No complicated syntax if you don’t want it. Publish instantly with a single click. Structure chapters, sections and pages effortlessly. Concentrate on your product. With no coding experience required, delegate writing to absolutely anyone! Documentation software with super easy hosting. Use your own custom domain, or create one with us. Choose a theme, add your logo, and customize to match your brand or website. Get help from others on your team. Restrict access, assign roles and user privileges. Easily make documentations private and password protected for internal or personal use. Publish fearlessly knowing previous work is safe and backed up. Download or restore anytime. The documentation software that makes docs easier.Starting Price: $9.99 per month -
10
WebWorks ePublisher
WebWorks
WebWorks helps you increase your product value by reducing the time it takes to publish, increasing time spent on building value in the documentation sent to your customer. One-Click Publishing is the optimal documentation publishing workflow because of its speed and accuracy. Create, generate, deliver, those are all the stages of One-Click Publishing. A simple workflow that is agile, flexible and intelligent so you can focus less on publishing and more on creating your message. ePublisher delivers One-Click publishing through a customizable template we call ePublisher Stationery. ePublisher Stationery holds a set of instructions defining the publishing process. Once designed and saved, a stationery can be shared among others in the department to decrease the work load. With ePublisher Designer, you can customize your stationery to your specific publishing needs making it the fastest most scalable workflow to deliver product ready document sets.Starting Price: $25 per month -
11
HelpNDoc
HelpNDoc
HelpNDoc provides all the tools necessary to write complete help files and documentations. From the table of contents to the final documentation layout, everything is included in HelpNDoc. HelpNDoc’s user interface has been carefully designed to be clear and effective, the various tools are grouped using the popular ribbon design first introduced by Microsoft Office, contextual elements such as picture or table editing operations will only appear when needed thus greatly simplifying the overall experience. All the necessary tools needed to create great documentations are built right in HelpNDoc, the table of contents editor, WYSIWYG topic editor, keywords editor and library are some of the features provided to ease-up the process of writing amazing documentations and are an integral part of the HelpNDoc environment. HelpNDoc includes a feature-packed word processor which makes you feel instantly at home.Starting Price: €149.50 one-time payment -
12
MadCap Central
MadCap Software
Secure cloud-based authoring, collaboration, workflow and project management for technical writers and documentation teams. Content and project management just got easier. MadCap Central is the only cloud-based solution that allows your team to easily track and manage tasks, organize workflows, schedule and automate processes, host and publish content, and extend your authoring capabilities with integrated subject matter expert (SME) contribution and review. MadCap Central provides a secure cloud-based content and project management environment integrated with powerful on-premises authoring and publishing. MadCap Central’s user interface makes it easy to organize your content, projects, teams and users. A customizable dashboard makes working personalized and efficient. With extensive project and content management capabilities, you can upload projects, import projects from other users, assign users to specific projects, set project statuses, receive notifications for activities, etc.Starting Price: $109 per month -
13
HelpSmith
HelpSmith
Complete help authoring tool to create CHM HTML Help files, Web Help systems, printed manuals, Adobe PDF documets, Microsoft Word documents, and ePub eBooks from a single source. If you are looking for a help authoring tool to create a CHM help file, online Web Help system, or PDF manual, you can consider HelpSmith which provides a rich feature-set from the powerful word processor to write help topics, to the built-in screenshot tool with the possibility to create help for dialog windows automatically. Using HelpSmith, you can create a CHM help file, a fully responsive Web Help system compatible with desktop computers and mobile devices, Printed Manual, PDF document, ePub eBook, and Microsoft Word document from a single source help project. You can write topic content using a built-in word processor that includes a spell checker with dictionaries available for many languages.Starting Price: $199 one-time payment -
14
Adobe RoboHelp
Adobe
Your favorite software to create Help, policy, and knowledgebase content. Now also on Mac. Easily get started with intuitive authoring based on HTML5 and CSS3. Create Microcontent to fuel next-generation media like AI-powered chatbot engines and more. Effortlessly ingest modern formats like Markdown, and legacy formats like Word and HTML5. Create immersive content using rich media. Make your review cycles seamless with out-of-the-box online review. Manage document versions with leading collaboration and source control platforms. Single-source publishing to any screen, device, and format of your choice. Deliver exceptional and dynamic content experiences with Frameless Responsive HTML5 output. Create and deliver exceptional Help, policy and procedure, and knowledgebase content with Adobe RoboHelp, now also on Mac. Author Microcontent to fuel chatbots, featured snippets in search results, and more.Starting Price: $29.99 per month -
15
Dr.Explain
Indigo Byte Systems
Create effective help documentation for your users by next week. Dr.Explain is a help authoring software to easily create help files, end user documentation and on-line help manuals in CHM, PDF, WORD & HTML formats automatically. You have a great product, but users keep asking the same questions every single day. Your email inbox is full, and your support team is overloaded. Your product is polished, but you have to spend all your time on calls. You receive constant requests for online demos. Create user-friendly help docs for your customers with Dr.Explain in just a couple of days and cut your support team’s workload by up to half. Help your customers make the most of your product without needing help from you, saving you time, money, and effort. Create help documentation just once with Dr.Explain and then publish it in various formats, from a help center built into your desktop or mobile app to an online repository integrated with your website or SaaS solution. -
16
Helpinator
Helpinator
WYSIWYG editor, no need to know HTML or any other markup language. Built-in content elements like figures, code snippets, step-by-step guides, videos, FAQs and quizzes. Supports a whole lot of outputs, including Markdown, DocBook and DITA. Store all languages in one project file. No need to maintain separate projects for each language your project supports. Has a number of built-in tools like screenshot capture, tutorial maker, FAQ and Quiz makers, GIF recorder and more. Crate technical content like a pro, even with zero experience in technical writing. No more steep learning curves of professional technical writing tools. Helpinator hides complicated things behind an easy to understand UI. Tools like built-in phrase expander allow to write faster. Step-by-step guides and annotated screenshots make it easy to understand your documentation. Effortlessly create good looking documentation.Starting Price: $99 per year -
17
Corilla
Corilla
A blazing fast markdown editor in the cloud. Built by technical writers to improve the UX of our daily content workflow and remove the complexity of actually writing. Same-page authoring and team draft links. Designed from the ground up to improve the collaboration between writers, developers and the entire organization. Maintain your content in a dedicated repository with powerful search and tagging plus the security of full version control. Freedom from duplicate files or ambiguous version names. Modular content publishing allows you to choose your flavour of topic-based authoring and single sourcing to maximize content re-use. No more dead-end wikis. Your internal documentation has never been more discoverable or dynamic. Company-wide private documentation or role-specific guides for new hires or reporting in just a few clicks. Unlimited documentation hosting with the option of custom domain, integrated publishing to external services or self-hosting.Starting Price: $45 per month -
18
Help+Manual
Help+Manual
Help+Manual is a full featured documentation tool that is as easy to use as a word processor, yet much more powerful, it gives you the power of a true WYSIWYG XML editor and puts all the tools that you need at your fingertips. This is combined with powerful features for generating and editing help and documentation files, including full support for multimedia and complex modular projects. Whether you publish documentation for desktop or mobile, iOS or Android, Windows help or PDF user manuals, it is always a breeze with Help+Manual! But single source is much more than just outputting the same information to different formats. Mark content with conditional tags to create different outputs for each publishing channel, no post-processing is required. Help+Manual handles the complexities of documentation generation for you. Power users, however, can get under the hood and manipulate topic and layout templates and more. Help+Manual gives you the best of both worlds.Starting Price: €498 one-time payment -
19
HelpXplain
Help+Manual
In Technical Documentation, we often need to explain multi-steps procedures. We use bullet lists, we add screenshots and text. The more we add, the more likely it is that our readers will lose track. An Xplain, as we call it, is a series of slides freely arranged on a huge canvas to spark your creativity. HelpXplain is perfect for slideshows embedded into web pages and technical documentation. Create animated step-by-step tutorials and quick instructions in minutes instead of hours. The magic is in the method, HelpXplain animates a series of simple screenshots, each of which can be edited or replaced at any time. HelpXplain can also record multi-page screencasts of programs on your computer screen that run in autoplay mode like a video. Recording and editing them is massively easier and less stressful than trying to create a video! All Xplains are 100% standards-compliant HTML5 and Javascript.Starting Price: €199 one-time payment -
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Tridion Docs
RWS
RWS is the global leader in content management and translation technology and services — more than 80 of the top 100 global companies work with us. Tridion Docs is our DITA-based Component Content Management System (CCMS). It allows you to optimize and automate complex content processes at scale and with confidence. You can author, review, localize, manage and deliver information using structured content and AI to create technical documentation, policies, procedures and other types of critical and regulatory content. Tridion Docs also enables easy information discovery and automated delivery of the right information to the right recipient using AI-driven recommendations, so employees, business partners and customers gain easy access to the information they need in the moment. Outperforming the competition Independent analyst firm, Ars Logica, scrutinised Tridion Docs’ performance and found it outperformed the competition in 8 of 11 categories. -
21
Author-it
AuthorIT Software
Author-it cloud based component authoring solutions are purpose built for the needs of key industry sectors and their specific applications. As the only truly integrated end-to-end platform of its kind, we deliver user experiences specialized for the problems they solve and help bring content to life. Importing from Word, web, or legacy help systems is simple. Content is broken down into components automatically and stored in our Component Content Management System for reuse, versioning, translation and more. Invite non-technical writers and SMEs to collaborate securely without any coding with the Author-it end-to-end CCMS authoring solution. Discuss and approve changes in real-time, taking the bottlenecks out of the reviewing process.Starting Price: $200.00/month/user -
22
MkDocs
MkDocs
MkDocs is a fast, simple and downright gorgeous static site generator that's geared towards building project documentation. Documentation source files are written in Markdown, and configured with a single YAML configuration file. There's a stack of good looking themes available for MkDocs. Choose between the built in themes, mkdocs and readthedocs, select one of the third-party themes listed on the MkDocs Themes wiki page, or build your own. Get your project documentation looking just the way you want it by customizing your theme and/or installing some plugins. Modify Markdown's behavior with Markdown extensions. Many configuration options are available. The built-in dev-server allows you to preview your documentation as you're writing it. It will even auto-reload and refresh your browser whenever you save your changes. MkDocs builds completely static HTML sites that you can host on GitHub pages, Amazon S3, or anywhere else you choose. -
23
Daux.io
Daux.io
Daux.io is a documentation generator that uses a simple folder structure and Markdown files to create custom documentation on the fly. It helps you create great looking documentation in a developer friendly way. The navigation is generated automatically with all pages that end with .md or .markdown. To sort your files and folders in a specific way, you can prefix them with a number and underscore. Full access to the internal API to create new pages programatically. Work with pages metadata. 100% mobile responsive, 4 built-in themes or roll your own. Functional, flat design style, optional code float layout, and shareable/linkable SEO friendly URLs. Supports Google Analytics and Piwik Analytics. Change the output format. It is recommended you set only formats that support the live mode as this will also be read by the integrated web server. And you set the other formats (like confluence) only by command line. -
24
GenHelp
FraserSoft
GenHelp and GenHelp Pro are new generation tools to assist in documenting code and creating help files. They take source files and import them to produce a file that can be used to create several forms of documentation. The files provided can then be shipped out with components, giving a much more professional product. GenHelp can also produce simple normal help files without requiring knowledge of rich text coding. GenHelp is the basic version which imports Delphi/Object Pascal and C++/C files along with comments. It can produce WinHelp and simple Html output. This allows help files to be created for Delphi 3-7 and C++ Builder 3-6 as well as other IDEs. GenHelp Pro is the fully featured version which supports all versions of Delphi/C++ Builder/RAD Studio up to and including XE10. It has a 'Template' based help generation system so that any format of Help file is possible. At present HtmlHelp 1, HtmlHelp 2, Rich Text based manuals and Html output for Web sites is supported. -
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ONePUBS
ONEIL
ONePUBS is a technical content publishing system that allows you to take control of your technical data and streamline the delivery process. Easily deploy product support material that matches product configuration, even during change cycles. Content is delivered to the secure web, client, or print environment of your choice. ONePUBS uses XML for standards-based content development, translation, and localization support, media management, and version control. This solution easily integrates with other ONeSOURCE content management modules and your existing business systems, too. Maximizes technical data and optimizes production workflow with systematic management, tracking, monitoring, and reporting capabilities. Complete system compatibility with proven processes and the ability to repurpose legacy data. Interoperability with Enterprise Resource Planning systems reduces drain on engineering resources. -
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Contenta Publishing Suite
RWS Group
Deliver the most accurate and up-to-date technical content possible. Our publishing suite for S1000D is an industry-proven publishing solution for technical content, with functionality optimized for each step of your publishing process. Manage complex technical documents and deliver critical information so that you can meet objectives, reduce mean time to repair (MTTR), and keep assets up-to-date and deployed. Getting started with S1000D is painless with our easy-to-learn tools. Streamline your S1000D project startup efforts by as much as 70% with SDL S1000D Foundation Suite. Our unique startup solution and services make it easy to build a compliant, solid foundation for any S1000D-based project. Create, edit, manage, and publish your data using one of the industry’s easiest to use common source databases (CSDB) to increase content accuracy and faster delivery across your content life-cycle.
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