Best Knowledge Base Apps 2023

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? 🤷

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.

When To Use It

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.

When Not To Use It

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.

Competition

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.

Final Thoughts

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.

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.

Team Adoption

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.

When To Consider

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.

Limitations

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.

Final Thoughts

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.

Superlist is very much still in private beta, but we recently got access and have some initial thoughts. I do want to preface this with the following: I have been extremely excited to check this tool out. I've been on the waitlist for 2–3 years, checking in with them monthly about getting access.

The largest appeal is that it was created by the team behind Wunderlist (which is a task manager that was sold to Microsoft in 2015 for between $100–200m). So if there's a team that understands task management deeply, it's this team.

They've even teased Superlist at Google I/O 2022 on stage, as an example of a tool built in Flutter (an open source framework by Google for building beautiful, natively compiled, multi-platform applications from a single codebase). This is important because this means everyone gets a native app—imagine having native MacOS + iOS + Android + Windows apps all generated from the same codebase.

This was the largest appeal, alongside the sheer beauty of their marketing site and in-app teaser screenshots:

They have this concept behind endless sub-tasks and collaboration, even tying in external tools like Gmail and Slack (as seen in the screenshot above).

In playing with it though, the allure of "how would some of the team that created one of the most successful task managers of our time re-think task/project management from scratch", is kind of a letdown so far to be honest.

They've been hyping up what they've been building for nearly 4 years now, to only just begin letting people in to use it, and it feels incredibly pretty—amazing UI/UX interactions. Heck, even marking a task as "complete" and "incomplete" plays the most relaxing noise (and it changes each time).

I think we're seeing what happens when you get tens of millions of dollars in venture backing and some of the best designers in the world to focus in the UI/UX. I mean heck, just go visit their website, it's incredibly beautiful.

I just fear that they spent too much time building in private, trying to get every UX interaction to be amazing, and not enough on actually being a useful and differentiated project. Genuinely trying to not be too hard on them since it is still in beta, but I also can't give them too much lax because they've been building in private alpha for so many years now. I think they should have launched way sooner and gotten product feedback from more teams using it. It's almost like they are afraid to launch and not be perfect because of all the eyes they have on them.

I even feel like the fact they have so many native integrations out of the gate (like Gmail/Slack/Google Calendar) is somewhat of a red flag... No products should wait until they've integrated with everything before releasing, because I'm willing to bet you a lot (as someone that literally builds integrations for teams of all sizes) that your end-users had a different idea of what "integration with XYZ software" means to them as compared to what you've put together.

Differentiation

I'm really struggling here with this one. Beautiful UI/UX is incredibly important (especially for a product person like myself), and yet here it is, and I'm just left wondering what it's trying to be.

They are sorta going for this task manager-focus meets Slite, Notion, and Coda but once you enter the documentation category, you're against big competition that has essentially outgrown that category and has evolved more into no-code tools.

I feel like modern day task/project managers have evolved over the past couple years more into this daily planner/calendar-focused time management platform space (e.g. Motion), they understand that getting meaningful work done is more complex than just building out beautiful task lists.

I just feel like the project management landscape has changed, and Superlist is still building for the older days of Todoist/Wunderlist/Trello/etc. and if this released back then, it'd have taken the world by storm! We just aren't in that world anymore though. To not have your team's calendar at the core of getting work done, I can't help but feel like you're missing a huge boat here.

Scalability

With the task list approach, I do have concerns about how this will scale across large teams. I also have a bit of concern with how much focus they are putting on personal/work coinciding, because what makes a great personal task manager does not make a great team-focused task manager.

Personally, I prefer to use my project management tool like Motion/Asana for work only—and yes, with Motion being more tied to my calendar, and my calendar being my day (which is a mixture of personal/work), it does feel more natural to throw a personal task or two on there, but using it as my main note taking/task management app for personal would be a mistake. Also, what happens if you leave the company and all of your personal tasks/notes are in there?

I just have some concerns around the scalability of the UI/UX when you're trying to focus on personal (prosumer?) and work, but what I've seen is it's better to focus on one main persona first and foremost. Questions start coming up around how I can ensure that my work doesn't get access to my personal tasks/notes if I leave, and now Superlist has to invest all of this time into personal/work account security management, further pulling them away from the ideal customer profile (being teams at companies).

Final Verdict

The truth of the matter is that I just had higher expectations with how long they've been working internally on this. They probably spent a lot of time on the last 20% polish and integrations side of things, and I just don't feel like that's enough to encourage a team to switch over from say Asana or ClickUp.

I genuinely feel like they need to think more about calendar at the center. Project management is just so much more than just tasks, notes, comments, and deadlines. People have meetings and so much more time complexity that actually affects getting work done. We're going to continue using and recommending Motion for that reason.

Although I genuinely hope to be proven wrong! I love this task management space and I'm always on the lookout for teams that are reinventing the space and thinking differently about what makes task management what it is currently today.