Trouble determining which software to use

Hi all,

I am a manufacturing engineer at a company that makes relatively complex scientific equipment. We have large and complex assembly documentation. Unfortunately, our group only has Word. Over the years, as variants of certain equipment were introduced, rather than creating new assembly documentation, they added the variant using a colour-coding system. Many years later, these complex documents have half a dozen variant with every colour of the rainbow through the assembly procedure.

This makes follow and updating these documents error-prone.

I've convinced the poeers that be to invest in more robust document creation software.

Our User Manual writer currently has a license for Madcap Flare so I was initially drawn to using it. However, it seems like it might be overkill?

Are there more lightweight/cost-effective options that are well-suited for my use case?

Primarily, it needs to be able to conditonalize content and output it to seperate documents, it needs to have varibale creation and reuse for stuff like part numbers, and some rare larger content reuse though that may not be necessary. We are a relatively small team, 3-4 of us would be using it so collaboration tools are not necessary.

I'm trying to avoid something that is too "doc as code" since that could be a large barrier of entry for some people on the tram, whereas a GUI would be preferred.

Thanks for the feedback!