We believe there are better options available in this category, read below to learn what this software does well, and what they could do better. ⤵
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The team knowledge base/documentation category is an interesting one. Particularly because it seems that time-and-time again, the most successful apps in this space (e.g. Notion + Coda) have a hard time... Well, staying settled in this specific category.
This is also what makes it so interesting for an incumbent to come in and take it over by, well... simply focusing on shared team knowledge management 😅 like that of Slite.
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Slite is a shared team knowledge-base platform for teams of all sizes—document, communicate, make decisions, and work asynchronously.
You're probably just learning about Slite after having heard of the all-in-one tools like Notion and Coda (amongst the many other team "knowledge base" apps on the market), and wondering which is right for you.
If you're truly looking for the knowledge base "category defining" app—there's no one better than Slite. They are actually moving this category forward in what it traditionally has meant to be a shared team knowledge base/documentation tool.
What we actually love most about Slite is their simplicity and focus. They have the cleanest UI/UX of all the tools we've tried in the space. And while you can still modify the design, your team will never get lost in the formatting, nor can you actually make a document look bad in Slite (unlike competitors).
It's pretty heavily focused on being your team's shared knowledge-base and asynchronous collaboration tool. Think: finding information across your shared team's brain, making decisions, and being able to easily reference how and why decisions were made with Slite Discussions:
Think of a Discussion as a referenceable email thread with key stakeholders that ultimately has a decision. Imagine new team members could not only see what your internal processes are, but even how the decision was ultimately made to get there? Yeah, that stuff currently gets lost in old Slack and email threads. What if it it didn't have to be that way?
Working on large internal projects? Notes are in Slite. Brainstorming marketing ideas? That's in Slite too. Important discussions being had? Move those from Slack to Slite. You can even invite external stakeholders (e.g. customers/contractors), and they can easily collaborate with your team without much of any friction.
Notion and Coda have developed over the years more and more into database tools (similar to the likes of Airtable), evolving outside of the documentation side of things. Some people love these tools for that reason—we do not. People report Notion and Coda becoming too complex and slow to load in time. The question becomes more of "should we use Notion for this"? Because while it can be used for many things, rarely is it the actual right tool for the job. As they are trying to be all things to all people, it results in them being "not great" at most things.
A team using Slite on the other-hand know exactly when they should and shouldn't use Slite. While the use-case can extend out a bit more than just team documentation (e.g. we even use Slite for quick proposals—as it's a super quick to template and to throw thoughts together—before sending them off to a potential customer). Although it becomes quite apparent when you should instead use a more structured Proposal / eSignature tool like PandaDoc—which is a good thing.
Slite actually had one of the first true examples of how AI will evolve a category for the better. While Notion went the direction of "now you can generate content using AI!", Slite was more of the mindset of "hold on, the actual problem is that we, as a shared team, already have so much information. Some outdated and requires updating, some entirely outdated and should be ignored. What if we could help you sort through all of this information to help your team find the actual answers they are looking for?
Here's an example of the Ask by Slite product in action, notice how it writes an answer based on the various sources of information in the knowledge base while showing which part has come from each document?
The only downside currently is that Slite does not have an developer API (so you can't build custom integrations with it)—and while we'd love to have these capabilities to integrate Slite a bit deeper into our other tools, we haven't found that to be too large an issue for the way we recommend teams use Slite.
I mean it's what we ultimately chose for our internal team knowledge base after using all of the competitors on the market for years.
What ultimately made the decision for us? Well, we had Slite set up alongside Notion and Coda, and we just naturally gravitated toward Slite, whether it was building out a collaborative work environment for our customers, or just internal blog posts and documentation.
We just found that we could get in, get work done, and get out. Whereas accessing internal documentation in Coda was super kludgy as you're jumping between documents, almost like using Google Docs as a knowledge base, which made things quite disjointed.
Slite just got out of the way while enabling us to get our work done in an enjoyable way. So if you're feeling overwhelmed in Notion, maybe the answer for your team is actually opinionation and simplicity? 🤷
Coda is a flexible document tool that struts the line of no-code (you can use it for building micro apps).
We used to be huge fans of Coda for internal documentation and shared customer documentation. When it first came out, it was competing with Google Docs, and it was just better on every single front. And to that end, it still is.
We mainly used it as more of a collaborative project manager mixed with knowledge base solution, to where we'd spin one up when beginning work with a new customer, and it'd be the sole place we'd communicate and document.
The friction point grew over time as documents increasingly felt separate from one another. Jumping between internal documentation and customer documentation was like moving in and out of folders in Google Drive, and quickly searching across all of this was just too much.
That and the team at Coda decided they were going to double-down more on the no-code and database functionality of Coda and less on the knowledge base/documentation side of things.
I must admit, they did an exceptional job at this—in terms of re-thinking Google Docs and turning it into something that's just better in all ways, they accomplished that and more. It's just also with that, they began strutting the line of an all-in-one tool, to which if you've read enough on the site, you'd see that this is a category we see poised with issues.
We've gotta hand it to their team, if you want to dip your toes into the no-code world, there's probably no better entrance than Coda. They have a deep library of concept apps, it was genuinely one of the first tools that really got me thinking in the no-code headspace.
If you're technical enough to understand formulas in Google Sheets, you can do some pretty cool things with Coda. We almost see Coda as more of a playground, a fun place to learn and experiment. If you have a non-standard process that genuinely fits outside that of what other more structured tools offer, it might be worth giving Coda a shot.
This is also the area that's quite difficult though, just because they show you in their templates area that you can build a CRM or Project Manager in Coda, doesn't mean you should.
So while we encourage you to experiment with Coda, we just highly encourage you not to go overboard—if you find yourself trying to recreate an existing solution like a CRM or task manager, take a step back and re-evaluate, as you may be using the wrong tool for the job.
The most direct competition Coda has is probably Notion, as they both started out in the documentation/knowledge base area, and evolved their database functionality to a level of no-code builder capabilities.
We've seen some companies do some incredibly impressive things with Coda—heck, we were one of them. What we see with tools like this though is they start out with a clear focus and purpose—let's build an MVP for a non-standard process we have going on in our company, one that no other tool on the market fits into.
And we agree with that premise! Where it falls apart is shortly after that, when the team starts seeing the capabilities of Coda, and begin rebuilding all other systems into Coda. The exact same reason why we don't recommend using Notion as your CRM is the same reason we don't recommend using Coda as your CRM.
Why is this relevant? Well it's because we've seen way too many well meaning companies using Coda for one division (e.g. marketing), and a CRM for another division (e.g. Sales), and then someone wants the two systems integrated together (totally fine by the way)! What comes next is the problem...
There's then this person that has the "smart" idea of:
"Why don't we remove our reliance on our CRM and instead just build it directly into Coda? How hard can it really be?"
And that's where all hell breaks loose. Not immediately, but rather 1–2 years later when the team finally realizes that they made a huge mistake.
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