9 Knowledge Base Software That’s Worth Your Time in 2024

Are you fond of waiting on salespeople, tech support, or customer service while you're dying to get an answer to your questions?

Yeah, me neither.

In today’s world, the majority of consumers don't think they have the time to wait for help. They want answers and they want them right away.

That's exactly what Knowledge Base Software helps you achieve.

This definitive guide will talk about everything you need to know about knowledge base software. Beginning from the definitions and the pros and cons of different examples, this article will answer all your questions and provide useful information on the matter.

Before you go on with the examples, let’s learn a little bit about what a knowledge base software is. And what kind of qualities make knowledge base software ideal.

What is a Knowledge Base Software?

Do you read instruction manuals?

A book with hundreds of pages with tiny fonts? Hard pass.

Thank God we have knowledge base systems. Unlike manuals, a knowledge base website is much more inventive in that it offers users a place where they can find answers to their questions instantly.

Put simply, a Knowledge Base is an online ocean of information about a service, product, or subject where you can store all the necessary data, open to your customers' access whenever they need it. It's often a part of a company's self-service portal.

And a knowledge base software enables users to easily and quickly access this ocean of information that includes a collection of frequently asked questions, answers, guides, and further info related to the product.

It's a perfect way to advance information collection and organization, and thus, answer the common questions right after the users type a few words related to the issue.

The goal of knowledge base software is to offer information that will allow your customers to have a better understanding of your product and a more insightful experience using it.

Why does your business need a Knowledge Base?

According to Social Media Today, 51% of customers prefer to get support through an online knowledge base. This means that most people do prefer self-help to resolve issues instead of waiting for someone to help them out.

In today’s world, people have high expectations about easy and quick access to accurate information. And to do that, a phone call or an email isn't their first move. They want the answer immediately and without human contact.

This is exactly why knowledge base software is increasingly vital to your business so that you can enhance your modern customer service to be able to offer excellent service.

Because a Knowledge Base is useful for your customers and support agents in that it provides convenience and the level of independence it gives to your customers is unlike anything else.

Let's now get into 4 reasons why your business needs a Knowledge Base, in detail.

1. It's easy to educate customers.

Knowledge bases are invaluable both for you and your customers.

At first, you might think that it will take quite some time for the customers to understand what they should do, but you don't have to think twice because a knowledge base is super easy to comprehend, and pretty fast too. The only question left is ''how?''

How to educate your customers about your knowledge base? Piece of cake.

All you need to do is make sure your support people always mention your knowledge base while replying to a customer problem. They need to link their reply to a helpful solution article.

This way, the number of phone calls from your annoyed customers will significantly drop. And by self-service, they will be able to troubleshoot online. All they need to do is search keywords on your website and they will instantly be bombarded with tons of answers.

This will save them time, and you’ll have more happy clients who are loyal to your service and more likely to recommend you to their loved ones.

Another thing happy clients do is buy more often and even be ready to spend more on your services. And what's even better? They become supporters of your brand.

Remember, especially today, word-of-mouth is an excellent marketing tool that will increase your brand awareness and boost your reputation!

2. It can be used to train staff members.

Another great benefit of a knowledge base is that it helps to dramatically reduce your staff member training and onboarding times.

What does this mean? It means that your process of training new employees will become faster and cheaper because you'll be giving them direct access to all the necessary information with a single click.

Some professional knowledge bases let you create documents for your staff. These instructive documents guide your staff members through a phone call with an angry customer as well as their difficult questions. These documents have proven to reduce training times and enable your support people to get on the phones quicker and with more confidence, resulting in satisfied customers.

Let's think of the opposite scenario.

You have a new employee and he has a bunch of questions on how to do stuff, and he asks his fellow staff members for answers. What does he get? Probably a dozen different or inadequate answers. As this keeps happening, your employee will have his attention diverted from whatever he's responsible for doing to go and try to find answers and this will inhibit his productivity and efficiency as well as distract the fellow staff members.

However, if they can direct customers towards a knowledge base, your support people can then spend more time and effort taking care of complex queries and consequently, less time answering basic questions.

Once you create a good knowledge base, you can finally focus on the important aspects of your work, rather than trying to answer everyone’s questions.

3. It's great for knowledge retention.

Another factor that makes Knowledge Base so great is that it prevents knowledge loss.

I hate to break it to you but yes, knowledge does get lost and unfortunately, people are not permanent.

What does this have to do with you?

Think about your most knowledgeable employees for a second. Your sidekicks. Your partners. Your go-to people.

They're usually the ones that everyone turns to when they have questions, right? Well, one day, these people won't be there with you, they might leave, retire, get promoted, switch departments, etc.

This is exactly why you should have your data properly documented. Because, when these employees leave, their invaluable knowledge goes away with them. This is even more crucial when your business operates as a SaaS. It can become more important to document everything in case you want to sell your company someday, you'll easily have access to the collection of information and share it with the new owners.

We don't even have to go that far, your existing employees can also go through these guides and tutorials when they need to deal with problems in the system.

In conclusion, a knowledge base is a flexible tool that anyone -literally anyone- can use to track old problems or to create new processes in the company. Everyone will have quick access to information and thus, increase productivity. It will act as a central database of information, consistently moving forward and feeding knowledge retention.

4. It's great for Search Engine Optimization.

What more can Knowledge Base do for you?

Last but not least: discoverability!

A knowledge base will give your business a great boost in SEO, it's a great way to dominate Google and crush your competitors by ranking well. It helps you cover every keyword that might be related to your product so you can rank for specific search terms like questions related to your product's capabilities.

Why is SEO important?

When someone is interested in your product or software, whether they are a customer or not doesn't matter. And it also doesn't matter if your website is super easy to navigate or deeply engaging. Chances are, these people will still reach out to page one of Google for answers first.

It's always been this way, and it's most probably not changing in the near future.

That’s why creating and enhancing an SEO-friendly knowledge base for your audience's needs can be such an amazing game-changer not just for support or help but also for your brand awareness.

SEO gets on pretty well with the use of images and videos, so if you make sure that your Knowledge Base includes engaging multimedia that makes the users easily follow and understand the information that they're exposed to, there's no doubt that you'll rock that SEO.

This will not only help your customers find answers for help more quickly and easily, but it will also help you create a better customer experience, and decrease support requests and costs.

What to look for in a Knowledge Base Tool

In this section, we're going to you save you time and tell you in advance what you should be looking for in a Knowledge Base Tool.

These will be the essential factors in a proper Knowledge Base Tool that make it worth your time.

Here you go.

1. Easy Authoring

Knowledge Base tools are supposed to save us time and energy. That's what we've been talking about repeatedly until here.

So, what we need to be looking for in a KB Tool will of course have something to do with it helping us handle things quickly.

That's why your Knowledge Base Tool needs to provide ease of use; it needs to provide convenience, it needs to make it easy for you to create documents for the knowledge base with the help of a decent editor.

So, in order for you to have a knowledge base that provides valuable service, you need to have content. And to have content, you need your people, your team to be able to create that content.

This means you ought to make sure that your software comes with an easy-to-master editor that allows them to add, arrange and manage text as well as images, videos, and/or screenshots.

Something that is designed and written easily, will be understood and digested easily. Everything eventually connects right there!

2. Easy Maintainence

A good Knowledge Base tool and easy maintenance are like bread and butter. They go great together.

A proper Knowledge Base tool that you're looking for needs to provide easy maintenance when you wish to update the existing knowledge base and/or resolve issues that might arise.

So, it should be well-organized and easy for you to locate the problem and work on it.

Why is easy maintenance important again?

If your content gets old as time passes, people will eventually forget it even existed in the first place. To avoid this, you can create new articles for your knowledge base as you come up with new features for your product.

You need to be an active developer of your documentation so it's consistent, up to date, and continues to serve your customers’ needs for a long time.

And obviously, this process will become much easier and smoother for you if you go for a knowledge base tool that provides easy maintenance for you along the way.

3. Friendly and Fast for the End-User

Let's back up for a second and think. Whatever we're trying to achieve, whatever we're trying to offer, they all link to our desire to provide a great user experience, right? We want our users to be happy and satisfied clients, that's why we try hard to make things more engaging, easier, and faster for them.

That being the case, a good Knowledge Base cannot be 100% complete without a good UX.

So how do I achieve a good UX?

Aim for clarity.

Creating a clear and easy-to-navigate Knowledge Base helps users find what they need faster, and consequently leads to great experiences. Make sure your Knowledge Base tool is based on clarity, simplicity, and tempo. Always keep in mind that users do not have the time or patience to try to understand how to navigate a website, product, or application to accomplish tasks or find answers.

Ensure ease of use.

A user-friendly KB means that it is well designed and easy to navigate. It doesn't give people a hard time trying to figure out what to do next. It always consists of simple yet effective steps. This can be achieved by tagging knowledge base articles to improve search functionality and make them easier to access.

Speed over anything.

Remember, users, don’t want to use a website they can’t interact with quickly and effectively. What all your users expect is to be able to quickly absorb information and take instant action afterward. This can be achieved by including internal links, allowing users to quickly jump back to a wider section of the knowledge base.

4. In-depth Analytics

A good knowledge base tool doesn’t just help users learn about a product or service. With the help of feedback interaction and content analytics, knowledge base systems also help support teams and managers learn about how customers use the product.

And the feedback and in-depth analytics matter a lot because, without them, the chance to improve the knowledge base content and consequently the customer service dramatically drops.

How do they make us achieve so much?

Well, with conducting analytics, you can learn which knowledge base tools perform better and receive more positive feedback. This will allow you to keep improving your knowledge consistently and create more helpful walk-throughs.

Analytics can help measure the success of your service and determine how it’s being used, and with the help of them you can answer questions like:

• What is being viewed the most?
• What is being asked for the most?
• What is making customers suffer the most?

All this data can help you make improvements to your knowledge base content - and turn your knowledge base into an even more valuable service offered by your business.

What if you could implement your knowledge base, with your web product?

I know what you're thinking...

"Oh, so it's possible to create a knowledge base in my product?"

Not necessarily, there's a better practice.

Your product is already complicated as it is, so adding a knowledge base section to it is a no-no.

What you can do is use a smart widget called a Resource Center and integrate it with your online knowledge base, so your users can access and browse it in your product.

Just like how GroveHR uses a Resource Center in their platform:

The best part?

You can also convert your knowledge base articles to on-screen interactive guides without any coding, with a digital adoption platform like UserGuiding.

Try for yourself?

To help you save time and energy we rounded up some of the best knowledge base system software. Whether you have a SaaS startup or a single product website, this list consists of the best knowledge base software that's worth your time.

Let's take a closer look at them.

Best Knowledge Base Software

1- Document360

Document 360 is regarded as the best knowledge base software for enterprise companies.

It is an extremely simple software designed merely for ✨creation✨. The software is trusted and loved by many leading businesses such as Microsoft and Harvard University.

It's a cloud-based app and it features a wonderfully minimal, appealing, and clean user interface for making knowledge bases be it private or public.

With Document 360, you can set up self-service knowledge bases for your customers and private knowledge bases for your team, if you wish.

The platform works entirely online and enables you to access it even from your mobile devices worldwide. All you need to do is sign up for an account.

Document360 Key Features

• An easy-to-use markdown editor
• User feedback
• Real time search engine
• File manager
• Version control
• Robust Categorization
• Content Management
• Community Forums
• A clean and minimal interface
• A beginner-friendly setup process

Document360 Pricing

Document360 offers separate pricing plans starting at $99 per month with 2 team accounts and 50GB storage.

And it goes all the way to $499 per month for 10 team accounts, which can be suitable for you if you have a larger enterprise.

Pros

• Document360 is very easy-to-use and mainly focuses on content and comes with a simple user interface to handle your knowledge base.
• The platform's editor offers markdown for easier writing and editing.
• The real time search engine supports auto-suggestions when typing in the search box, increasing the chance to give more accurate answers.
• You can create private knowledge bases if you wish, for your team's access only, as well as public ones.
• The platform gives you in-depth analytics to help you collect feedback.

Cons

• When compared to WordPress or ZenDesk, Document360 doesn't have as many features.

Zendesk Pricing

ZenDesk offers separate plans for its tools.

You need to subscribe to the $89 per month plan if you want access to the knowledge base tools.

To get 24/7 customer support from ZenDesk, you need to subscribe to the $149 per month plan.

Pros

• Zendesk comes with a throughout list of tools -a complete suite-  that enable the user to create a functional customer support system.
• Zendesk not only lets you create knowledge base systems but it also enables you to manage customer support tickets, feedback, chat and more.
• Zendesk offers some advanced tools such as a CRM called Sunshine. Sunshine lets you manage your customers, too.
• Zendesk comes with a greater design; it offers modern and catchy knowledge base designs.

Cons

• In return for these services, Zendesk asks for a high price.
• Because it has an advanced system, the platform takes a little time to master.

2- Zendesk

ZenDesk is a complete suite of tools and software primarily created for companies for managing everything about customer support. The platform works entirely on the cloud and offers many services no matter how big or small the business is.

It offers knowledge management software that is easy to customize and use - it works as an internal knowledge base, an IT knowledge base, a support team-only knowledge base as well as a customer-facing FAQ tool. And because it’s always ready for access, customers and support teams can use the self-service portal to find the right answers to their questions, anytime.

It's one of the best experts available today, especially for very large teams. So, if you're interested, you can get started with ZenDesk by signing up for an account and following its step-by-step instructions later on.

Zendesk Key Features

Zendesk's key features include full-text search, customer feedback, customizable branding, categorization, community forums, a self-service portal, content management well as AI bots and search engines.

Its system is simple to use and accessible for everyone, and it lets you translate your articles into over 40 different languages, which will make you globally recognized and understood by customers better.

Zendesk offers its users pre-made templates to make their jobs easier, and support tickets for you to manage your customers.

Furthermore, the system provides you with insights on certain gaps in content and helps you focus on areas where you need to come up with new KB content.

3- Helpjuice

Helpjuice is a wildly popular SaaS platform and it functions as a standalone knowledge base software service that focuses primarily on design and collaboration.

It's commonly used and loved worldwide and it's mostly known for its special features and beginner-friendly user interface.

The platform's main goal is to offer ease of use, further customization tools, and fast responses to users' support tickets.

To give it a shot, all you need to do is sign up and create an account. Then follow the step-by-step instructions to create your knowledge base.

Helpjuice Key Features

• The platform allows multiple people to collaborate on articles.
• Offers great customer support service. Even promises 5-minute response to support tickets.
• Provides free customizaton for users to build their knowledge base fast and easily.
• Offers an advanced editor that enables users to edit typeface, layout and colors.
• Lets users see the past versions and revisions of articles to make them keep up with recent changes.

Helpjuice Pricing

Helpjuice pricing plans begin at $120 per month for 4 users max.

$200 per month for 16 users.

And $499 per month for unlimited users.

Pros

• It's beginner-friendly. It features a very simple interface and a beginner-friendly editor. Beginners can use this editor to create, format and edit content with minimal effort.
• Helpjuice is positive that its search engine is as functional as Google search.
• It has a theme catalog that consists of dozens of themes to customize your design.
• The platform offers deep insights into the statistics of your knowledge base.

Cons

• The price. At $120 per month, Helpjuice is the most expensive option that you can get. Which is not so great for small businesses.

4- Hubspot Service Hub

HubSpot’s Service Hub is a cloud-based platform that brings all customer service data and channels together into one common area. The product is wildly trusted by all sizes of businesses for its knowledge base, conversational tools, help desk center, feedback surveys, analytics, and more.

Service Hub’s Knowledge Base offers functionality with which you can easily build a library of solution articles so customers can help themselves out.

Getting started with ServiceHub is also super easy; all you need to do is create a free account or schedule a demo to get help from the HubSpot team to walk you through the Knowledge Base.

Once you get involved, you'll see that HubSpot is primarily designed to make it easy for you to get started, whether you have experience with creating a knowledge base or not.

Hubspot Service Hub Key Features

With Service Hub, you can customize the look and vibe of your pages, make adjustments, and change structures to do well on SEO. You’ll also get built-in reporting dashboards that provide you with in-depth analytics to manage your performance and focus on areas that need attention.

Last but not least, you can import articles with a single click from other tools, create templates, and start giving answers to your customer’s questions!

Hubspot Service Hub Pricing

It starts free, but if you want access to Knowledge Base, you need to go with Pro or Enterprise plans.

$63.99 per user/ month for the Pro plan.

$39.99 per user/month for the Growth plan.

$11.99 per user/month for the Basic plan.

Pros

• It comes with a multi-language support, enabling customers to find answers in their preffered language.
• It's user-friendly and easy-to-customize.
• It includes all the tools a customer service team requires. Comes with help desk, live chats, and surveys.
• Provides in-depth analytics for you to find out what terms your customers are searching for, or what they view the most.
• Provides control over deciding who gets access to articles. You can make them private or public.

Cons

• It is slightly expensive. It does start free, but Knowledge Base is only accesible for the Pro and Enterprise plans, which are slightly expensive for small business owners.

5- ServiceNow

ServiceNow is a platform that helps companies digitize and manage their workflows, operations, and employees more efficiently. It provides an environment to automate business processes and does a great job providing the best services to customers, encouraging the specific practices to help them handle management.

The platform is especially ideal for creating onboarding workflows and transitions in that it's a platform that's more suitable for relatively larger businesses.

It also will walk you through the process of building up your knowledge base on the cloud as well as your automated workflows and customer support system.

Here are more of its key features:

ServiceNow Key Features

• The platform comes with an app store with integrations primarily made for creating advanced databases.
• You can set a private knowledge base for your team only, or make it public to serve more cutomers. It's all up to you.
• The platform sticks with an old-school design, giving that old familiar and user-friendly vibe. Also includes many helpful features for customizing your knowledge database.

ServiceNow Pricing

ServiceNow doesn’t give information about its pricing on the website.

You’ll have to reach out to the sales team to get further info. But, according to GetApp, pricing starts at $100 per month.

Pros

• The platform comes with a suite of advanced tools. You can use Servicenow to offer better customer support these tools such as chatbots or automated workflows in addition to knowledge bases.
• The systems offer an excellent search function that makes connections between previous issues, and thus, provide better and innovative outcomes.
• With machine learing, ServiceNow offers similar articles related to customers' problems and offer them fast solutions and prevent further incidents as well.

Cons

• Becuse of so many tools and app engines combined, the platform might be confusing or even overwhelming for small startups and businesses owners.
• Their pricing is well hidden from the public, which does not really make customers happy.

6- Notion

One of the experts of internal knowledge bases is Notion.

But what is it, exactly?

Notion is a note-taking application that offers databases, set reminders, and calendars. It allows its users to keep their notes in an organized way. The note pages can be strengthened or fixed in terms of visuals and usability with its features.

It comes as a great option for creating an internal knowledge base because it allows the users to use Notion as a notepad, project management tool, or a writing space.

Thanks to its flexibility, you can make checklists, Karban boards, and text documents.

You can also assign tasks to other users and set due dates for these tasks.

Here's what is more to it:

Notion Key Features

The platform's key features are categorization, markdown editor, built-in search, and content management.

Notion Pricing

Notion is a freemium product; however, it makes money from users who want access to the extra features.

There are options that users can choose from. If you're going to go Personal Pro, the price is $5 per month with unlimited guests and file uploads.

If you want to use Notion with your team, the price is $10 per month; this gives you unlimited team members, admin tools, and sharing permissions.

It is free if you have a student email address.

Pros

• Notion is user-friendly, has an appealing design.
• Notion is compatible with many different devices.
• Has an interface with a built-in customization that enables users and teams to organize work and project and keep them in order.

Cons

• It takes quite some time to set up, specifically for teamwork.
• Search and navigation requires enhancement.
• Copy/paste sometimes don't work well.

7- Atlassian

Atlassian is an Australian software company that improves products for software developers, project managers, and other development teams.

It's best known for its issue-tracking app, Jira, and wiki product, Confluence. These services are used by thousands of teams worldwide and Atlassian continues to create amazing products, practices, proven methods, and guides for all teams.

Over 150,000+ customers are currently using Atlassian to strengthen their teams and motivate them forward.

Why is it loved so much?

Because it does a tremendous job helping teams create, discuss, organize, and complete work easier and faster. Let's dive more into the platform's key features and take a look at the pricing as well.

Atlassian Key Features

Access over 55 million textbook solutions and expert Q&A, plus step-by-step walk-throughs.

Guaranteed Availability

We offer a financially-backed SLA of 99.95% uptime with our Jira and Confluence Cloud Enterprise plans, so your teams can count on reliable products that allow them to focus on your organization's objectives.

Atlassian Pricing

Atlassian comes free for small teams to plan and track their workflow. But it can be used for up to 10 users.

The standard plan is $7.50per user (average)$75 a month. This is ideal for growing teams with up to 20,000 users.

The Premium plan is $14.50per user (average)$145 a month for 20,000 users. But the dependency management tool comes advanced here.

Pros

• The platform is always up-to-date
• It requires less administration
• Can be accessed from any device
• Has a flexible monthly plan

Cons

• With regular plans, testing before the updates is not possible
• Costs can rise quickly

8- Proprofs Knowledge Base

ProProfs Knowledge Base is a powerful tool that’s wildly recognized for its advanced features, smart settings, and easy integrations.

The tool offers great help when it comes to setting up a knowledge base as well as documentation, manuals, help sites, and FAQs.

It helps you from the very beginning; content authoring, maintaining, designing, and customizing your content and then finally making it public.

The software is very easy to use; no coding skills are required and it is compatible with powerful tools like Zendesk, Freshdesk, Wufoo, Salesforce and Google Analytics.

The convenience, comfort, flexibility, and security provided by ProProfs Knowledge Base make it one of the favorites of both small and large enterprises.

Proprofs Knowledge Base Key Features

The platform enables its users to:

• View the website on all devices and browsers.
• Create online FAQs & more.
• Make customizations with your logo and colors.
• Restrict access and user roles.
• Upload articles, videos, guides and more.

Proprofs Knowledge Base Pricing

ProProfs comes with two major plans:

Essentials for $6/20 pages/month

And Premium for $12/20 pages/month. It also offers a Forever Free plan that offers merely a few basic features.

Pros

• The platform provides a simple user interface which is easy to use. Setting up a knowledge base might never have been easier.
• It has a very wide variety of features. It's got everything covered from content authoring, publishing and customization.
• It integrates well with other tools such as Zendesk, Freshdesk and Google Analytics.
• It's pricing is simple. It only offers two plans.

Cons

• Resulting from its advanced customization, the time-to-master might take a little long since the users may require to have some knowledge of scripting to make use of everything.

9- HelpScout

Help Scout is a customer service platform, and there's a part of the platform which is our knowledge base software: it's called Docs. Docs is functional, easy-to-use knowledge base software that helps you build up internal and external knowledge base articles in just a few minutes.

Helpscout is regarded as the best knowledge base software for customer support.

This is no surprise since the platform enables its users to quickly attach images and videos to articles to make them more engaging, easy-to-follow, and digestible. And they also get to access Beacon. By using Beacon, they are able to place widgets on any page that they wish on their website so the visitors can instantly be directed to the knowledge base library.

Last but not least, once you sign up for Help Scout, you instantly get access to the entire customer support service for about the same cost -maybe less- as most standalone knowledge base software out there.

HelpScout Key Features

Help Scout is a cloud-based help desk solution that assists small businesses and small teams manage their customer relationships and workflows. HelpScout looks like a personal email in design and doesn't consist of any ticket numbers, case numbers, or impersonal templates.

HelpScout Pricing

Basic - $8 per user per month; up to 10 users

Standard - $20 per user per month

This plan works well for businesses with a significant number of tickets and multiple teams. The features include analytics, automation, and multiple integrations.

Plus- $32 per user per month

This plan offers additional functionality for even larger teams and includes advanced analytics tools. 

Pros

• The platform offers an easy set-up interface
• Low price
• Excellent customer service

Cons

• Fewer features
• Fewer Analytics tools

Conclusion

Now that you have a wider understanding of Knowledge Base Software, you can now decide what the best option for you is. Remember, it’s totally up to you to determine what’s best for your business. Be sure to digest all options before you pick software to create your knowledge base.

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