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.
While it's easy to say: great—we created a nice note taking/documentation tool, now what's next to increase our TAM (Total Addressable Market)? Well, project management is a $100bn+ TAM, and projects involve notes and tasks, so let's build a task component to our documentation tool—aaaand Notion was born. Which then naturally evolves into an all-in-one tool, for which you can read our thoughts on that category as a whole here.
That said, what if a team focused specifically on being a better shared knowledge base? Helping your team actually find what they're looking for across the shared company brain, helping your team make collaborative decisions, and just laser-focused on just doing all of that... Better.
That's the lens you should read the comparisons below with—which is the best tool at actually improving your team collaboration and knowledge management?
.svg){kind=icon}
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? 🤷
There is currently no promo code for this app but we are close partners, so if you use the link above to visit the site and then let their team know that Efficient App sent you, you may just get a little something... extra 😉
There is currently no promo code for this app—we'll update it here if that changes in the future!
Get $100 credit (off your first year) by using the code above in your billing area after clicking the link above (new accounts only).
A shared documentation and note taking tool that tip-toes the line of a flexible no-code platform (for teams of all sizes).
Notion is part of a category of apps often referred to as an "all-in-one", for which we aren't particularly fans of.
The main problem we have with this is it feels more like a cop-out when asked to define what you are—we do everything.
Notion started as a team knowledge base app, and that's what it should really be defined as. The problem is, as you're doing well in a single category, some apps decide to double-down, while others look to increase their TAM (Total Addressable Market). Notion is in the latter camp.
We've found that rolling out all-in-one solutions with customers is actually more difficult to get team adoption due to overwhelm.
Take Notion, it's not opinionated. In them deciding to make it super flexible, allowing it to "do anything", it by design becomes overwhelming with time. We know, it'll be incredibly exciting at first—all of the limitless potential! But then that "potential" turns to overwhelm in weeks and months.
What structure should I add these notes in? Should I add tasks here? Or over here? Do I message you on Slack, or @comment you here in Notion? Because it does "everything", it introduces micro-fatigue for doing anything.
Although, if you're looking for an incredibly flexible note taking tool that struts the lines of "no-code builder", where you actually see structure as a negative, then that's where an all-in-one app like Notion will actually shine.
When teams start having micro-success with Notion, they end up trying to use it for everything, and this is exactly where Notion's limitations and flaws are shown.
We're taking customer notes in Notion, what if we actually had our customer's information in Notion as well! Thus the mistake of trying to use Notion as a CRM is born. It will never be a proper CRM. Yes, Notion has relational databases at the core, and a CRM is really just a bunch of relational databases at the end of the day, but the difference here is opinionation and structure.
Versus getting into this point further here, that's where we've written a post explaining why Notion is not a CRM.
Your team is using Notion collaboratively with some of your clients now, eh? That's great! We have a collaborative shared knowledge base, what would make this even better? A project management tool—let's build that right into Notion as well, because tasks are really just line items in a database, right?
Wrong.
The same issue arises as before. What makes a good project management tool like Motion actually good, is the opinionation and structure. You can't just start connecting tasks to customers to notes to videos to XYZ. That's a surefire way to overwhelm absolutely everyone on your team.
The goal of a project manager is to actually get work done—with Notion as a project manager, you'll be spending more time building out a project manager, tip-toeing the line of product manager (instead of project manager).
Here's a more detailed post of our thoughts on how Notion stacks up as a project manager as compared to the leaders on the market.
Choosing to roll out something like Notion across your team requires immense thought, structure, documentation, and training.
So are you trying to build all of this out yourself? And if so, are you a product designer? Do you understand your team's specific needs even better than they do? Or are you just trying to build what you think is needed and then plan to have everyone use it in that way?
If the latter, adoption is more than likely to fail, and you might want to reconsider choosing an all-in-one tool like Notion, and instead opt for something more purpose-built as your team's internal knowledge base like an alternative like Slite.
.svg){kind=small}
There is currently no promo code for this app but we are close partners, so if you use the link above to visit the site and then let their team know that Efficient App sent you, you may just get a little something... extra 😉
There is currently no promo code for this app—we'll update it here if that changes in the future!
.svg){kind=icon}
.webp)
.svg)
.svg)
.svg)
.svg)
%20YouTube.webp)
.svg)
.svg)
.svg)