Best Scribe Alternatives: 5 Tools to Create Step-by-Step Guides

Scribe is a popular documentation tool for creating step-by-step guides with annotated screenshots, neatly formatted text, and other media. 

Since its official launch in 2021, Scribe has gained over 700,000 users—all thanks to its quick guide creation process, multiple customization options, and easy sharing capabilities. The low price point and collaboration features have also contributed equally to its success. 

But is Scribe really the best tool for making step-by-step guides? Not 100%. 

In this article, we’ve shared our honest review of the five best Scribe alternatives. Before we jump to these reviews, let’s first discuss why Scribe might not fit the bill for your needs.

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Here’s when Scribe isn’t the best choice for you 

After thoroughly testing Scribe, we understood its ideal users and the most important use cases. Based on this analysis, we believe Scribe may not be the tool you’re looking for if you want to:

• Create interactive product/team documentation that goes beyond how-to guides and shares more context
• Repurpose guides into different content formats and engage your audience at multiple touchpoints
• Use advanced customization options to create more polished guides at a lower price point
• Fine-tune your content to match your branding and include your logo and color without Scribe’s branding 
• Work with a limited budget and you can’t invest it on a tool made only for creating step-by-step guides

While Scribe offers so many capabilities, the tool still falls short in some of these aspects to meet your expectations. If you want any of the above features, you need to check out our five best Scribe alternatives.

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5 Scribe alternatives to create step-by-step guides and SOPs

Here are our five top picks for tools you should try instead of Scribe. 

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🗒️ TL;DR

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1. Floik: best for creating interactive documentation

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Floik is a versatile tool to create step-by-step guides and convert these guides into video tutorials or clickable demos. 

You get all of Scribe’s key capabilities for editing a guide, formatting the text with a WYSIWYG editor, sharing links + embeds, and performance analytics. 

But Floik takes an edge over Scribe with its multi-format content creation functionality. Instead of juggling multiple tools—one to create how-to guides and others to create explainer videos—Floik works as a one-stop solution for making product showcases and documenting your workflows. 

With Floik, you also get better branding options to align every guide’s  look and feel with your brand identity. You can also add a custom domain to get on-brand URLs.

More importantly, Floik’s generous free plan allows you to edit guides using several features that are gated in Scribe, such as:

• Blur and redact information
• Add steps and upload screenshots
• Reorder, delete, and edit individual steps 

Here’s a step-by-step guide made with Floik:

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You can convert the same guide into a video or an interactive demo. Here’s a clickable demo guiding you through the same process:

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2. Tango: best for advanced customization options

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Tango is another popular Scribe alternative with over 300,000 users. The tool offers a more intuitive design for step-by-step guides with UI elements and editing options like action boxes, annotation tools, cropping screenshots, and freehand drawing tools. 

You can also add a step anywhere as a heading, a callout box, or a newly captured step. Everything is customizable and its WYSIWYG editor lets you embed code, add a code block, and include quotes as well.

With Tango, you can convert a how-to guide into a guided demonstration where end-users have to click through each step to get a more hands-on experience. 

But a few areas where Tango falls behind is its branding capabilities. Whether you share, embed, or download a guide, you’ll have to work with Tango’s logo and colors everywhere. This user described it as ‘over the top’.

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3. Folge: best for lifetime access license 

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Folge is an app-based Scribe alternative that works with a downloadable desktop app. You can download and use this software for free or buy a lifetime license for $75.

While its price point is much lower than Scribe (and most Scribe alternatives), Folge’s capabilities don’t really match up to the tool. It has a fairly basic interface and its automation functionality isn’t as sophisticated as other tools. 

You have to manually add the text for each step and describe it in detail. You can edit screenshots with a bunch of features, like annotations, blur, tooltips, highlights, etc. However, editing is pretty time-consuming and not as intuitive as Scribe. 

Folge also lets you export guides in seven formats—more than any other tool. But these exported files don’t look as appealing or even well-formatted.

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4. Iorad: best for integrating content with multiple tools

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Iorad is another guide creation tool where you can convert a guide into multiple formats. This browser-based tool works exactly like Scribe—switch on the browser extension, start recording, and generate a guide in seconds. 

The tool isn’t as intuitive to operate and you have to spend some time exploring the product to properly understand its functionality. But once you get a hang of it, you can create guides and convert them into different formats to let end-users slide, watch, or click through your guides.

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With a massive integrations library, Iorad lets you share and track content on various tools, like Canva, ClickUp, Confluence, Intercom, HubSpot, and more. 

But one of its biggest downsides is the pricing. The free version lets you create unlimited tutorials available for public access. If you want to share this content privately or work with a team, you have to pay a starting fee of $200.

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5. Guidde: best for making chapter-based videos

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Guidde is a documentation tool for creating step-by-step guides and chapter-based videos. When you make a how-to guide, the tool presents the content in two formats: the usual step-by-step breakdown (like Scribe) and a video with each step denoting one chapter.

Editing content in Guidde takes time because the editor isn’t super seamless. You have to manually edit the guides a lot because it doesn’t automatically zoom into the screen or capture text contextually. 

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But Guidde’s smart sharing capabilities make it a good tool to try. You can quickly copy the code for embedding guides anywhere, like Zendesk, Webflow, Salesforce, etc. The tool also supports Markdown for platforms like GitHub, Bitbucket, ClickUp, and more.

Its pricing is almost the same as Scribe with the exception of a text-to-speech voiceover function and more video features in the Business plan. 

Make the switch from Scribe with an informed decision

If you’ve been using Scribe for a while and missing a few features we listed above, you don’t have to compromise anymore. We shortlisted the five best Scribe alternatives after looking at tens of documentation tools for creating step-by-step guides. 

Our unbiased reviews reflect our first-hand experience of trying each tool as a new user and testing every available feature.

So, stop searching for Scribe alternatives on the internet and make an easy switch based on these reviews.