Top Free Knowledge Management Software
Check out our list of free Knowledge Management Software. Products featured on this list are the ones that offer a free trial version. As with most free versions, there are limitations, typically time or features.
If you'd like to see more products and to evaluate additional feature options, compare all Knowledge Management Software to ensure you get the right product.
Confluence is an open and shared workspace that connects people to the ideas and information they need to build momentum and do their best work. Unlike document and file-sharing tools, Confluence is open and collaborative, helping you create, manage, and collaborate on anything from product launch plans to marketing campaigns. Find work easily with dedicated and organized spaces, connect across teams, and integrate seamlessly with the Atlassian suite or customize with apps from our Marketplace.
Guru is a real-time knowledge management solution that knows when, how, and where to deliver knowledge to you without you having to look for it. With Guru, you don’t just manage your knowledge; you create a network out of your company's collective intelligence. Guru does this by unifying your joint knowledge and suggesting relevant information to you - all in real-time and in every application you work in. The more you use Guru, the smarter it gets.
Every business needs a playbook. Where's yours? Trainual brings every process, policy, and procedure for every role and responsibility together into one simple app that makes it easier than ever to onboard, train, and scale your knowledge for growth. Thousands of fast-growing businesses in more than 100 countries trust Trainual for their training manuals, playbooks, standard operating procedures, handbooks, how-to's, or whatever else you want to call the magic and operational know-how that is—
Notion is the all-in-one workspace for notes, project management, documents, and collaboration. Tens of thousands of teams and companies around the world use it to keep their employees informed and working together in one place. Based in San Francisco, Notion was founded in 2016. The company builds highly-customizable tools for individuals and enterprises to stay organized in a way that fits their unique needs and workflows. And the product syncs across all devices so you can use it no matter w
Process Street provides businesses with a streamlined, non-technical way to make managing recurring workflows fast, fun, and easy for teams everywhere. Strong company processes are the backbone of any successful business. Without them, a company will struggle and will almost certainly find it difficult to scale. With Process Street you can easily create and customize checklists with text, images, video, and more. Streamline the approval process with conditional logic, automations, and integra
Stack Overflow for Teams is a powerful digital collaboration tool where organizations can share proprietary information and achieve business goals faster, regardless of the team’s location or structure. By empowering knowledge workers with tools that they need to solve problems, companies are able to increase the speed of development cycles and produce features, products and services faster than ever before. Stack Overflow empowers organizations to provide in-the-moment knowledge for fellow tea
Documentation tool for high performing teams. Archbee is the place to centralize your company's information. Unify knowledge in product, engineering, support, marketing, sales. Usecases: • Manage team knowledge • Developer & API docs • Documentation sites • Document internal processes • Collaborate on documents • Onboard & train teammates • Create documentation for your customers • Bring your own domain Integrations: Slack, Airtable, Loom, Trello, Lucidchart, Typeform, Mindmeister, Pr
Obie is the fastest way to capture and access knowledge at work. Individuals that use Obie: - Find documents, notes and wiki articles, faster - Easily capture text snippets for faster reuse - Share documents with colleagues quickly Organizations that use Obie: - Dramatically reduce frequently asked questions - Streamline onboarding and enablement - Decrease time to response and resolution - Experience the fastest way to find knowledge at work
eXo Platform is an all-in-one digital workplace solution that helps you connect, align and engage your teams around a single interface. You can use it to improve company and peer-to-peer communication, boost collaboration and manage company knowledge. To achieve this, eXo Platform offers a rich set of features such as enterprise social networking (people profiles, directory, activity streams, notifications, etc.), corporate or team spaces, document management, content publishing, wikis, calenda
Document360 is a SaaS platform that helps you to build a great self-service knowledge base for your customers and internal users (public or private knowledge bases). Here’s what Document360 offers in terms of functionality: Markdown text editor You don't have to be a developer to pick up the basics. Simple Markdown editor allows you to style a text document using typical formatting techniques including headings, emphasis, lists, images, and links. Category Manager You can create a well-struc
Slab is a knowledge hub for the modern workplace. We help teams unlock their full potential through shared learning and documentation. Slab features a beautiful editor, blazing fast search, and dozens of integrations like Slack, GitHub and G Suite.
Slite gives your team one place to share ideas, collect knowledge and stay in tune across time and space. Easily spread your docs across your team, catch up on what your team's been working on and give feedback to move your projects forward. Trusted by thousands of flexible and remote teams.
livepro are experts in Customer Experience Knowledge Management and are passionate about improving customer experience. Since 2001 livepro have been delivering a powerful knowledge management solution to customer service centres in all major industries including Banking and Finance, Airlines, Insurance, Superannuation, Education, Health and Government. livepro is feature-rich yet easy to use, delivering answers to agents - not long complex documents to dig through. This makes customer service
Tettra is a simple wiki built for your team to organize and share the knowledge you need to get work done. Tettra was built to be simple, smart, and connected. We have integrations with lots of tools that teams rely on every day, including GSuite, GitHub, Zapier, Wistia, and more.
Customizable online community platform to connect, engage, and retain users. Tribe is a cloud-based online community software empowering the new generation of branded communities. Enable your users to discuss, build valuable networks and connect under your brand. Users can write articles, ask questions, submit answers, create polls, upvote, comment and share multiple types of content. Tribe offers unique value to the clients via the following key elements: - A fully customizable community pla
We work with contact centers, software implementers, and B2B SaaS vendors that need to significantly improve training time and training results. ScreenSteps is designed to support Zero Memorization Training. This is a training methodology where contact center agents, employees, or customers are not required to memorize training information but are trained in how to help themselves when the moment comes. To enable this type of training, ScreenSteps focuses on four types of speed: 1. Speed of A
MaintainX is a mobile-first work order and procedure platform that allows teams to know what they need to do and how to do it. Here's what we digitize and take away from the clipboard: -Maintenance Work Orders -Safety Procedures -Environmental Checklists -Tooling & Gauge Reporting -Preventative Maintenance Procedures -Auditing/Inspection Workflows -Training Checklists We help operational leaders become more efficient by delivering real-time business insights from the field.
SaaS-based SABIO gets the most out of your organization’s knowledge because it’s easy to use, deploy, and administer. SABIO wraps a beautiful interface around a fully-featured solution — with CRM and ticketing app integrations and an API. Find out how powerful easy can be.
Spekit is an in-app learning and digital companion that helps employees learn their tools and navigate process changes by accessing answers and enablement resources in real-time, everywhere they work. Built by sales ops professionals for growing & remote teams, Spekit blends the sophistication of a modern digital adoption platform with the simplicity of a contextual knowledge base for a lightweight yet powerful solution to continuous employee training. As the only Salesforce Certified Pa
GitBook enables teams to easily manage, share and publish their knowledge through a documentation platform designed for the entire organization. Packed with powerful features, GitBook supports any form of rich text, programming languages and visual assets. - Easily create and publish beautiful looking docs without any design or code required - Organize your knowledge and have your team working from a central place - Keep your GitHub workflows in sync with our native integration - Support for bo
Rungway is the comms and engagement platform helping companies to embed connected and inclusive cultures. By transforming how employees share advice and engage with management, staff perform at their best because they feel heard, understood and valued. Accessed via the app or web, individuals on every rung of the ladder can share concerns, thoughts or seek advice with controlled anonymity, enabling them to access the experience and support of the whole organisation - no matter who or where t
The most authentic knowledge management platform for software developers: fast and interactive like a chat but persistent and organized like a wiki. Import from your favorite tools and enjoy the best AI-assisted platform to ask, explain and clarify stuff together.
Elium is a knowledge-sharing platform that helps you easily build a central hub for scaling teams that need to organise and access crucial content to get work done. Burn less time & cash finding the right information, you’ll focus on what’s essential: growing your teams & running your business! Forget about endless informative meetings, exploding mailboxes, overloaded Slack channels and hours spent refinding that file you need “somewhere on the drive”.
XWiki is a powerful Open Source collaborative platform allowing companies of all sizes to save time and money while enhancing collaboration on both team and organizational level. Being focused on strengthening communication and efficient collaboration, XWiki redefines the value of business knowledge by allowing any user to access critical information in a fast and efficient way while reducing the organizational silos. Email overload and loss of important knowledge when someone leaves the company
Cronycle is an all in one tool for content curation, content collaboration and content distribution and sharing. Cronycle set of structured Topics span across 50K+ deep domains to give an immediate kickstart for research & curation. Content discovery is made easy with recommended sources like related topics, RSS and Experts on Twitter. Receive newsletters and aggregate Google Alerts into feeds, with the aforementioned sources brings comprehensive coverage of the domain in less than an hour.
Bring your team's playbook together in one place. Method Grid provides a highly flexible, yet incredibly simple grid system to capture your repeatable best practice (knowledge, processes and methodology) and to manage/track your team's workflow/progress. The simple grid system allows you to map anything your team does and the flexible grid elements allow you to display your content in a way that best suits your team - text areas, images, videos, internal and external links, documents, checklists
Twine is an intranet for the modern workplace. Bringing your people, content and ideas together in one place with apps such as a Knowledge Base, People Directory, Form Builder, Blogs, Groups and more. These play nicely with your existing systems too: sign-on using Okta and Active Directory, pull in files from Dropbox, Google and Box, and much more. It's all built on a modular basis, so you can pick and choose the features you need and start building your ideal digital workplace.
ProProfs Knowledge Base Software is a powerful tool used to create a private and public knowledge base for employees and customers, respectively. It helps in reducing customer tickets, improving internal team collaboration, streamlining business processes, and improving customer service. By providing centralized access to information across multiple devices and browsers, ProProfs ensures that information-gathering gets simple and seamless for both employees and customers. The software supports 7
REWO is a plug & play end-to-end video SOP platform that transfers knowledge up to 12x faster than traditional documentation methods. REWO drastically improves capturing, visualizing and communicating knowledge to anyone within the company’s ecosystem.
ProcedureFlow is a reimagined knowledge base. It makes the most complicated information easy and intuitive to create, maintain and use, even in highly regulated and complicated industries. By providing every employee with the exact information they need to handle any scenario, employees can be confident in their abilities from day one on the job. ProcedureFlow allows organizations to leverage the knowledge and expertise of their top performers, and put it into the hands of every employee, improv
Top 10 Free Knowledge Management Software in 2021
- Confluence
- Guru
- Trainual
- Notion
- Process Street
- Stack Overflow for Teams
- Archbee
- Obie
- eXo Platform
- Document360
Learn More About Knowledge Management Software
What is Knowledge Management Software?
Knowledge management tools are used by companies that wish to make the most of their employees’ varying levels of skill and experience. The software provides a common gathering place for teammates and remote coworkers to benefit from processes and workflows that have been documented, such as onboarding documents, frequently asked questions, and more.
These tools are especially helpful when onboarding new employees and as well as when saying goodbye to veteran employees. No one likes repetition, and knowledge management tools keep the old to inform the new. They help keep large teams on the same page, decreasing the chances of misinformation and easily avoidable errors.
Key Benefits of Knowledge Management Software
- Easily organize large volumes of various data types
- Access advanced insight, knowledge, and experience over time regardless of role
- Encourage collaboration through accessibility of information
- Give or strengthen structure of standard processes
- Increase communication among disparate departments
- Retain company knowledge after specific intelligence has moved on
- Provide a self-service knowledge base for users of a product or service
Why Use Knowledge Management Software?
Knowledge management software has both internal and external use cases. Some companies use knowledge management software as an internal database for employees to reference. Other businesses will use knowledge management software as an external reference for customers.
Retain Information — Knowledge management solutions are often used to onboard new employees. Administrators and HR coordinators can keep training presentations, printable document files, dress code and conduct handbooks, and more in folders that are accessible by members of the company. This decreases the frequency with which employees reach out to ask questions such as which holidays they receive off and just how casual are casual Fridays.
In the same vein, long-term employees who retire or move on to their next opportunity don’t take all of their knowledge with them. The questions they’ve answered and the files they’ve uploaded remain accessible within the tool until an administrator deems them outdated or unnecessary. This is especially helpful for companies with unique processes that rely on informed employees to help troubleshoot and solve problems. With a knowledge management tool, the expertise remains with the organization.
Efficiency — Organized, documented knowledge means less time spent asking and answering questions and more time working on the tasks or projects at hand. With so much company information available digitally, employees spend less time having coworkers walk them through explanations manually. With open forums and FAQ pages, those in need have an abundance of eyes on their questions. More people having access to a question means a faster response time, as well as more voices to weigh in on a solution.
Users can upload documents and files to the knowledge management solution straight from their file storage or digital asset management accounts. Integration with these types of software products increases efficiency because users don’t have to perform the processes manually.
Users can also tag coworkers within comments on files or generate a link to send others straight to a document they need to see. This saves the time spent searching through information, allowing users to find and bookmark files quickly, keeping them for future reference.
Customer Service — An FAQ is named such because customers typically have the same questions about a company or product. A knowledge management system can serve as an easy customer service tool where customers can look up frequently asked questions or how-tos on a company’s website. This method of customer service can prove to be much cheaper than a help desk and can drive down call traffic.
Task Management — Knowledge management tools help users figure out how to reach goals, and some do so with specific task management features. Although task management software is a category all its own, it is also a functionality that lies within multiple other types of software. Many knowledge management tools have features that can provide transparency into project or task completion. Tagging features within documents allows users to pass files or documents on to those whose attention they require.
Who Uses Knowledge Management Software?
Businesses from across the spectrum utilize knowledge management software to organize their internal practices and external knowledge bases.
Onboarding Employees — Knowledge management software is also helpful in the process of onboarding and training new employees. Instead of taking hours out of the day to respond to every new thought and question that arises, new employees can look to knowledge management software for answers. They can search within the tool to see if the information they seek has been documented before. This encourages an environment where employees seek answers first and ask questions later.
Veteran Employees — Knowledge management software helps companies retain information that valued employees, managers, and other company members have developed and recorded over time. This is useful for businesses that don’t want to lose or misplace knowledge when an employee inevitably moves on to another company or to a role within the same company. Information can be archived so even old, outdated information can be stored for future reference.
Customers — Customers with questions about a product or service will often turn to a company’s website for a knowledge base on their offering. This knowledge base can be built by the company themselves or with additional insight from other customers. Customer insight is crucial since they share the same perspective and can provide other customers with advice with that perspective in mind.
Kinds of Knowledge Management Software
Knowledge management tools can look very different based on their intended use case. Those meant for internal use will offer a different set of features compared to those intended for external use. However, at their core, these tools are essentially the same in how they create, store, and look for content.
Internal Knowledge Base — The most common usage for a knowledge management system is for internal information and practices. Internal knowledge bases will often require a login from a company email or from an email given express access to the knowledge base. Companies will use knowledge management systems to archive repetitive tasks, business practices, and company information.
External Knowledge Base — External knowledge management systems are often hosted on a company’s website or on a separate website solely devoted to the knowledge base. Unlike internal knowledge management tools, these usually don’t require a login. While some knowledge bases are curated solely by the company itself, some will allow users to post tips or answer questions other users have. This creates a knowledge base the average consumer can contribute to, engaging them with the product in unexpected ways.
Hybrid Knowledge Base — While most knowledge management systems can be used internally or externally at a company’s discretion, some products host both and intentionally provide different functions for each type. These products are dual-sided, with one set of features for internal use and another for external use. This makes for one cohesive knowledge base solution, both internal and external, hosted through one application.
Knowledge Management Software Features
Q and A — Provides forums where employees of various levels can share expertise and processes.
Searchable — Incorporates a search bar to help navigate users to appropriate content.
Public vs Private — Offers the choice to make a conversation private between specified contributors or open to the public.
File Viewing — Stores and readies various file types for viewing.
Tagging — Allows users to tag one another in file data or comments for easier search and referencing.
Upload — Lets users upload documents, photos, and various other file types from their personal devices for greater knowledge sharing.
Link Sharing — Lets users direct one another via customized links, foregoing a lengthy search process.
Comments — Allows users to leave notes or comments on various file types for eventual reference.
