Slite vs Notion

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.

Competition

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.

AI

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?

Limitations

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.

Final Thoughts

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? 🤷