Knowledge Base Software 2024 Showdown: Pros, Cons, and Must-Knows
Drowning in documents? Knowledge base software to the rescue!
Ever feel like your company's info is scattered like confetti after a party? Yeah, us too. That's where knowledge-based software comes in.
We've combed through the options to bring you the 8 best knowledge base tools of 2024. We'll break down the pros, cons, and all the nitty-gritty to help you pick the perfect one.
So grab a coffee, ditch the document hunt, and get ready to empower your team and wow your customers with a knowledge base that rocks.
What is Knowledge Base Software?
Knowledge-based software is a tool that helps you build and manage a digital library of information, often called a knowledge base. Think of it as a central hub for all your company's know-how, such as FAQs, troubleshooting guides, or even internal policies.
No matter how you use it, knowledge-base software can be a game-changer by:
Empowering customers: They can find answers faster, reducing the support load for your team.
Boosting efficiency: Employees can find the info they need quickly, saving time and frustration.
Improving consistency: Ensure everyone has access to the same accurate information.
Types of Knowledge Base Tools
Knowledge-based software comes in two main flavours: those designed for your customers (external) and those designed for your employees (internal). Let's explore the different types within each category:
External Knowledge Bases
Self-Service Documentation: This is the public face of your knowledge base, offering a treasure trove of information for customers to find answers on their own. Think FAQs, troubleshooting guides, and even feature explanations.
Software Documentation: Detailed guides are crucial for software products. Users can find installation instructions, troubleshooting tips, and feature breakdowns all in one place.
Product Documentation: From assembly manuals to usage guides, product documentation helps customers unlock the full potential of what they've purchased, reducing the need for support inquiries.
Internal Knowledge Bases
Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs): These documents outline the exact steps employees should follow to complete specific tasks, ensuring consistency and efficiency across the team.
Employee Handbooks: New hires and seasoned employees alike can find valuable company information in the handbook. This includes company culture, HR policies, benefits, and more details.
Process Documentation: Capturing your company's workflows is essential for smooth operation. This documentation ensures procedures can be replicated seamlessly, even when key personnel are unavailable.
Project Documentation: Keep everyone on the same page! Project documentation centralizes meeting notes, goals, plans, and other crucial information for a clear overview.
Sales Documentation: Equip your sales team with the resources they need to close deals. Sales documentation can include everything from prospecting materials to objection-handling guides.
Also read: Generative AI: Top 20 Powerful Business Uses
Why are Knowledge-Based Solutions Important?
Knowledge-based solutions are important for several reasons:
Empowerment: They put information at people's fingertips, whether it's a customer figuring out a new product or an employee finding the answer to a process question. This self-service approach saves everyone time and frustration.
Improved Efficiency: Knowledge bases centralize information, eliminating the need to hunt through endless documents or rely on colleagues for basic answers. This frees up valuable time for everyone involved.
Consistency: Knowledge bases ensure everyone has access to the same accurate and up-to-date information. This reduces errors and inconsistencies, leading to better overall results.
Reduced Costs: Knowledge bases can significantly reduce operational costs by deflecting support calls and expediting employee onboarding.
Improved Customer Satisfaction: Customers who can find answers on their own time are happier customers. Knowledge bases empower them to solve problems independently, leading to a more positive customer experience.
Knowledge Preservation: When employees leave, their knowledge often goes with them. Knowledge bases capture and preserve institutional knowledge, ensuring it's accessible to everyone, even with staff turnover.
8 Best Knowledge Base Software of 2024
Zendesk-Best for AI-powered Customer and Employee Self-service
Zendesk offers a powerful and user-friendly knowledge base software that can be tailored to meet various organizational needs. Whether used as an internal IT or HR knowledge base or as a customer-facing help center, Zendesk's software is designed to increase efficiency, reduce costs, and deliver exceptional support experiences.
With its built-in AI capabilities, Zendesk provides valuable insights, content generation assistance, and automation features, making it a top contender in the knowledge base software market.
Key Features:
AI-Powered Tools: Zendesk's AI capabilities empower organizations to gain insights into customer search behavior. The software also utilizes generative AI to transform bullet points into comprehensive guides and adapt content tone to match your brand.
Conversational AI and Semantic Search: Zendesk's AI can create conversational AI responses for automated support interactions. Additionally, the software employs semantic search technology, understanding the meaning behind search queries, even without exact keyword matches.
Team Publishing and Content Blocks: Zendesk simplifies content management with Team Publishing, allowing teams to collaboratively review, approve, and publish content. The Content Blocks feature enables the creation and placement of dynamic content blocks in relevant articles.
Multilingual Support and Self-Service Portals: Zendesk facilitates global knowledge management with the ability to create language-specific versions of articles in over 40 languages.
Robust Security Features: Zendesk prioritizes data security, offering features such as two-factor authentication, single sign-on, and IP restrictions to safeguard sensitive content from unauthorized access.
Pricing: Starting at $55 per agent/month, billed annually. A 14-day free trial is available.
Pros
Highly Customizable: While requiring some initial training, Zendesk's extensive customization options allow you to tailor the platform to your specific needs and workflows.
Efficient Ticketing: Zendesk excels at handling large volumes of tickets. Features like pre-built templates that personalize responses can streamline the process.
User-Friendly Interface: Despite its customizability, Zendesk offers a clean and intuitive interface that minimizes new agents' onboarding time.
Cons
Costly & Scalability Issues: Zendesk can be expensive, and adding more team members might require additional approval processes, hindering easy scaling for your customer support needs.
Inconsistent Lead Management: Some users have reported occasional issues with lead management, where leads added to the system might not always show up. This can create gaps in your sales pipeline.
Implementation & Complexity: Transitioning from another platform to Zendesk can be cumbersome, with a steeper learning curve due to the software's range of features.
Frequentli- AI Powered Self Service System
Established in 2023, Frequentli is a leading player in the self-service customer support industry. Their mission is to create cutting-edge software that combines creativity, innovation, and high performance.
With a diverse team of skilled software engineers, user experience designers, and industry experts, they transform ambitious design concepts into practical solutions. Their software goes beyond problem-solving; it anticipates customer needs, delivering a seamless and intuitive self-service experience.
Frequently.ai you create a public knowledge base, making it easy for your customers to find answers to FAQs and troubleshoot issues independently, which can save them time and reduce support inquiries.
By continuously improving and staying ahead of technological advancements, Frequentli is definitely one of the best AI tools for higher revenue in 2024. The dedicated customer support makes it more efficient, user-friendly, and accessible than ever before.
Key Features of Frequentli:
User-Friendly Interface: The Frequentli widget seamlessly integrates into your website, providing customers and support agents with an intuitive and user-friendly experience.
Continuous Improvement: Frequentli leverages customer interactions to refine its AI algorithms, ensuring increasingly accurate and relevant responses.
Customization Options: Tailor the customer support experience by customizing the widget's appearance, behavior, and integration to align with your brand and website.
Analytics and Insights: Gain valuable data and insights on customer interactions, identifying trends, common pain points, and improvement opportunities.
Easy Setup: Setting up Frequentli is a breeze. Simply enter your website URL or upload documentation, allowing the AI to crawl and understand your content.
Multiple Installation Options: Choose from flexible installation methods that best suit your business's needs.
Pros
Enhanced Customer Experience: Frequentli's AI-powered self-service system offers a user-friendly and easy interface.
Increased Efficiency: Frequentli provides instant and accurate product information, reducing the need for manual customer support.
Customization: Frequentli allows businesses to customize the widget's appearance, behaviour, and integration options, aligning it with their brand and website.
Cons
Language and Cultural Limitations: Frequentli's effectiveness may vary based on the language proficiency and cultural context of the customers it interacts with. It may struggle to understand certain dialects, regional nuances, or cultural-specific queries.
Overreliance on Self-Service: Some customers may still prefer human interaction or require more complex assistance. To accommodate diverse customer needs, it is important to balance self-service options with alternative support channels.
Bloomfire- Best for Internal Knowledge Sharing
Bloomfire is an internal knowledge base platform designed to break down information silos and empower employees to find the knowledge they need quickly. Here's what makes Bloomfire unique:
AI-powered search: Bloomfire's search engine goes beyond text, indexing, and even video content for comprehensive knowledge retrieval.
Personalized feeds: The platform uses user activity to recommend relevant content, helping employees discover valuable information they might not have actively searched for.
Social knowledge sharing: Bloomfire fosters a community-driven approach to knowledge management. Users can ask and answer questions, like and share content, and interact with each other on social media.
Crowd-sourced FAQs: Bloomfire allows teams to collaboratively build a repository of best practices by creating and sharing FAQs.
Bloomfire caters to companies that create a lot of video content and those that value a social, interactive approach to knowledge sharing. However, with pricing starting at 50 users, it might not be the most suitable option for smaller teams.
Pros
Intuitive Interface & Powerful Search: Bloomfire is praised for its user-friendly design and robust search functionality.
Excellent Customer Support: Their dedicated customer success managers go the extra mile to ensure a positive experience, from initial implementation to ongoing feature adoption.
Versatility & Knowledge Sharing: Bloomfire is valued for its flexibility and ability to centralize various types of content. Users appreciate its ease of use and liken it to a "content Google" for their workplace.
Cons
Limited Customization with Learning Curve: Bloomfire offers some company branding options, but advanced features require clunky HTML tools. This creates a potential hurdle for users.
Search Engine Limitations: Lack of user-friendly tools for building product taxonomies. This could hinder information discovery, especially for users who rely on specific product knowledge within the platform.
Saving Issues: Some users have reported occasional issues with saving posts, forcing them to re-enter information.
Notion-Best for Team Collaboration
Notion is a well-presented knowledge base software that combines the functionalities of a knowledge base and project management tool. Its user-friendly interface enhances the experience of creating documentation and allows for flexible formatting options.
Key features of Notion include:
Flexible Content Creation: Notion empowers you to create a variety of content formats within your knowledge base. Text documents, kanban boards, checklists – it's all at your fingertips.
Enhanced Knowledge Discovery: The platform prioritizes clear connections and easy navigation, ensuring users can find the information they need quickly.
Integrated Project Management: Assign tasks to team members, set deadlines, and track progress directly within your knowledge base, streamlining collaboration and workflow.
While Notion offers a free tier for personal use, collaborative features require a paid plan starting at $8 per user per month.
Pros
Unmatched Flexibility: Notion offers exceptional versatility. You can create anything from simple notes to complex project management systems, to-do lists, and even personal wikis.
Ease of Use & Scalability: Many reviewers highlight Notion's user-friendly interface and intuitive design. This makes it easy for beginners to learn quickly while offering advanced features.
Enhanced Collaboration & Integration: Features like task assignment, progress tracking, and seamless integration with other popular tools like Calendly and Google Sheets.
Cons
Complexity for Task Management: While Notion offers project management features, some users find its flexibility to be a double-edged sword. The sheer number of options might make it difficult for straightforward task management.
Potential for Distraction: For users with attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), Notion's vast features and customization options could be overwhelming.
Overreliance on AI Writing: The new AI writing assistant in Notion is a powerful tool, but some reviewers express concern about becoming overly reliant on it.
Also read: How to Choose the Best Knowledge Base Management Software
Nuclino- Best for Project Management
Nuclino simplifies knowledge management by centralizing all your important information in one place making it one of the best project management. This eliminates the need for juggling multiple tools.
It lets you create rich documents and manage projects, incorporating text, images, videos, and even tasks for a more engaging user experience. Real-time collaboration allows everyone to see changes as they happen, fostering seamless teamwork.
Nuclino goes beyond basic knowledge storage with its AI-powered features. This intelligent assistant helps users structure documents, generate ideas, write content based on keywords, and even summarize notes.
Key features of Nuclino include:
AI-powered Knowledge Management: Use AI to assist in creating structured documents, generating ideas, writing content, and summarizing notes.
Granular Access Control: Set access restrictions to control who views, edits, and contributes content.
Real-time Co-editing: Multiple users can work together, editing and commenting on documents simultaneously.
Version History: Track changes and revisions over time with the article version history tool.
Content Templates: Get started quickly with a collection of templates for wikis, product roadmaps, and handbooks.
Pricing: Starting at $0 per month with limited features. A 14-day free trial is available.
Pros
Easy to Use and Edit: Nuclino is super easy to create and edit content, which makes it efficient for building a knowledge base or collaborating on projects.
Secure and Flexible: Nuclino offers both secure access to internal documents and the ability to create public pages.
Responsive Customer Service and Development: Customer service is helpful and considers user suggestions for new features.
Cons
Limited Integrations: While it integrates with Airtable, Nuclino reportedly lacks connections with many other project management tools.
Scalability Concerns: Expensive for large teams or companies with extensive data storage needs. It seems better suited for small—to medium-sized companies.
HelpJuice- Best for Content Management
Helpjuice offers knowledge-based software to empower businesses with content management. It features a supercharged search engine for knowledge bases, allowing users to find information instantly.
Authors can leverage the WYSIWYG editor for effortless content creation and publishing. AI-powered assistance recommends article topics and suggests improvements. Data-driven analytics provide insights into popular articles and user searches for informed content strategy.
Finally, customizable themes and multilingual support enable a branded and inclusive knowledge base experience.
Pros
Easy to Use: The interface is familiar and intuitive, making it easy for anyone to create and edit knowledge-base articles, similar to using common word processing software.
Highly Customizable: Offers extensive customization options, allowing you to tailor the look and feel of your knowledge base to perfectly match your brand identity.
Great Customer Support: Users consistently praise Helpjuice's customer support team for being responsive, knowledgeable, and able to resolve issues quickly.
Cons
Limited Search Functionality: While some users find the search to be sufficient, others mention it could be improved, potentially leading to difficulty for users finding the information they need.
Tricky Interface Elements: Some users find the constant pop-up in the dashboard to be distracting and unnecessary.
Limited Content Management Features: There have been mentions of difficulties managing images within Helpjuice, with a lack of folder systems leading to cluttered storage.
Confluence- Best for Remote Workers
Confluence is a document collaboration and sharing platform built for remote teams by Atlassian, the company behind the project management tool Jira.
You can create team spaces to organize projects and set permissions for different articles. Confluence integrates with other Atlassian products like Jira and Trello, making it a central hub for teams already using that ecosystem.
Go beyond simple document storage. Confluence allows the creation of documents with rich features like tables, teammate tagging, schedules, and comments, fostering interactive knowledge sharing.
It offers a free plan for up to 10 users, making it accessible for small teams. Paid plans start at $6.05 per user per month.
Pros
Streamlined Project Kickoff: An extensive library of templates provides pre-formatted structures for various documents and projects.
Real-Time Team Collaboration: Confluence is cloud-based, facilitating seamless real-time teamwork. Teammates can work on documents simultaneously.
Effortless Knowledge Sharing: Confluence allows easy integration of rich media like images, tables, and attachments within documents..
Cons
Learning Curve for Feature Exploration: Without proper training or guidance, users might miss out on valuable functionalities or struggle with unexpected complexities.
Search Functionality Limitations: Users report encountering inaccurate results or experiencing slow search times, particularly when dealing with large knowledge bases.
Document360- Best for free public knowledge base access
Document360 is a strong option for creating both internal and public knowledge bases. This user-friendly platform offers a WYSIWYG editor or Markdown support for content creation and a powerful AI-powered search function to help users find the information they need quickly.
Document360 empowers content creators with features like AI-assisted article titling, summarization, and tagging.
The free plan provides a good starting point for small businesses with public knowledge base needs, while paid plans offer additional features and user capacity. However, it's important to note that the free plan only supports public knowledge bases.
Pros
Highly Customizable: Users praise Document360's ability to personalize the knowledge base with custom branding and folder structures. This allows for a seamless integration with your existing website's look and feel.
Seamless Integrations: Document360 integrates well with various popular customer support tools, streamlining workflows and centralizing information.
Cons
Limited User Management: Some users have reported occasional glitches when assigning users to specific groups, requiring retries.
Lacks Spell Check: The absence of a built-in spell checker can be a minor inconvenience for some users, potentially leading to typos in published content.
What to Look For in a Knowledge-Based Software?
Here are some key factors to consider when choosing knowledge-base software:
Functionality:
Content Creation: Look for a platform with a user-friendly interface that allows content creation through familiar methods like WYSIWYG editors or Markdown support.
Content Management: Consider features like version control, categorization, and tagging for easy organization and retrieval of information.
Search Functionality: A powerful search function is crucial for users to find the information they need quickly. Look for features like AI-powered search that can handle typos or variations in search terms.
Collaboration: If teamwork is essential, consider features that allow real-time co-authoring, commenting, and user permission management.
Usability:
Learning Curve: A simple and intuitive interface is key for user adoption. The software should be easy to learn and navigate, even for non-technical users.
Customization: The ability to customize the look and feel of your knowledge base is a plus. This allows for better integration with your existing branding.
Deployment and Scalability:
Deployment Options: Consider if you need a cloud-based solution for remote access or an on-premise option for stricter data security.
Scalability: Choose a platform that can grow with your needs, accommodating more users, content, and future functionalities.
Additional Considerations:
Integrations: Does the software integrate with your existing customer support tools, project management platforms, or other relevant software?
Security: Evaluate the platform's security features to ensure the protection of sensitive information within your knowledge base.
Pricing: Compare pricing plans and features to find a solution that fits your budget and requirements.
FAQs
Are there Free Knowledge-Based Software?
Yes, there are free options for knowledge-based software. However, these often have limitations on features, storage, or user numbers. Consider your needs carefully to decide if a free plan offers enough functionality for you or if a paid plan with more features is a better long-term solution.
What is the Best Knowledge-Based Software for Management?
Some popular options f praised by management teams include Frequentli.ai as the best self-service customer service system, Helpjuice for its ease of use and customization, and Confluence for its powerful collaboration features.
Is Guru knowledge base free?
es, Guru offers a free plan for knowledge base management. Here's a breakdown:
Free Plan: This plan allows for up to 3 users. It includes core features like a browser extension, integrations with collaboration tools like Slack and Microsoft Teams, and the ability to schedule content verification.
Paid Plans: Guru offers paid plans with additional features and functionalities if you need more than 3 users.
Does Zoho have a knowledge base?
Yes, Zoho actually offers two knowledge base solutions:
Internal Knowledge Base with Zoho Learn: This feature within Zoho Learn is a platform designed for internal knowledge management. It allows you to create, share, and organize information for your employees in a user-friendly format.
Customer-Facing Knowledge Base with Zoho Desk: Zoho Desk's customer support software includes a built-in knowledge base module. This allows you to create a public knowledge base that your customers can access to find answers to frequently asked questions.
How do you create your own knowledge base?
Gather info: Figure out what your audience needs most and brainstorm easy-to-understand explanations.
Pick a platform: Free or paid options exist, so consider features, budget, and team size.
Build and publish: Craft clear content, add visuals, and organize it for effortless user searching.
How can I create my own AI?
Building your own AI is complex but achievable with dedication. First, define a goal – what specific problem do you want your AI to solve? Then, learn about machine learning concepts and choose a platform with training tools. Finally, gather relevant data to train your AI and monitor its performance, making adjustments as needed.
Learn more about generative AI and how it works. Check out this blog about the What are the Differences Between Generative AI vs Traditional AI?
