
Ask HN: SaaS companies, what do you use for user documentation? - tonytpa
Do you use an existing solution or have you created your own?<p>How do you like the solutions you have tried?
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zapperdapper
It depends on so many factors, such as the company, open source or not, the
scale, the range of products, size of the doc team, whether you want
developer/API and user documentation. It also depends how you define user!

You could use something like GitHub markdown/GitHub pages. You could use
something like Markdown and a custom script like I do for my website (source
code in my GitHub). There are solutions like Sphinx (as used by Python) or
Jekyll for building a static docs site. You could also use Hugo static site
generator etc. etc. - there are many tools out there. These are simple
solutions but it ranges up to heavy weight tools like DITA/DocBook (not that I
am recommending those in this case).

Also take a look at readthedocs.org.

If you are documenting a SaaS REST API Swagger has become something of a
standard.

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toobulkeh
Zendesk has a decent Knowledge base system. Intercom is slick, but expensive
if you're trying to be frugal. Discourse is the best forum on the OSS market.

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mattbgates
I usually just create a FAQ page with questions I would likely ask. For most
of my projects, I actually have my sister beta test for me. While she knows
how to use a computer, she is not very tech-savvy, so if she questions
something, I know I have to redesign it to make it easier.

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matchmike1313
Do you mean for help desk articles about the software? If so, we use
Intercom's Educate product and love it.

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tonytpa
Yup, help desk articles, videos, etc. Anything designed to help users learn
and progress through the software and ideally reduce churn.

