And to go on accessing that, not many of them are willing to dial a number and get on a phone call. They expect to find the answer immediately, which is why you need a knowledge base. A knowledge base created with the help of a wiki can boost customer satisfaction and also help your team better organize essential content. For those of you who don’t know what a “wiki” is, it’s a server program/website that helps users effectively collaborate and structure content efficiently. Just like how Wikipedia is built, you too can build a similar one but for your business purposes. You can either go for a hosted (SaaS) wiki platform or a self-hosted one, but I prefer the former. Here’s why.
No stress about setting things up
If you’ve ever set something up from ground zero, you know the hard work it takes. With a self-hosted wiki solution, you’d have to figure your own way out to set up everything properly. Whereas, on the other hand, a hosted solution will come pre-built with everything you need, so there is nothing that you need to set up.
Saves time and energy
It’s a clear fact that making something from scratch takes a lot more time than having it right in front of the plate. With a hosted solution, you can quit the time-consuming setup and maintenance part and directly jump to what is important – using the platform. A brighter side to this is, that you can use that free time actually to do something productive for your business.
New updates and bug fixes
With a self-hosted wiki solution, you’d have to take care of your updating and bug fixing, if any. On the other hand, a hosted solution takes care of all that. The only work you do is, use the platform and maybe tweak things a little bit here and there to better match your business style. That’s it. Let’s explore the following wiki hosting platforms.
DokuWiki by Kamatera
Kamatera is quite generous here by offering DokuWiki hosting for a 30-day free trial. It’s a wiki platform written in PHP, allowing you to deploy it without a database. This open-source software works on plain text files, and I’d say its syntax is quite identical to what MediaWiki is using, which is excellent.
Yesterday I submitted my first PR to the project. Hopefully first of many. Feels awesome to give back!#Hacktoberfest #php — SyntaxSeed (Sherri W) (@SyntaxSeed) October 3, 2019 After the free trial is over, you can choose a paid plan depending on your requirements.
Document360
Document360 is a great internal wiki tool that helps teams collaborate, share, track, and manage all company knowledge in one place. It’s the perfect platform to host your wiki and easily share, and edit information about how-to guides, company policy procedures, training documents, process documentation, onboarding, and various other workplace documents. Also, you can brand the wiki with your logo and other identifying information. Some cool features include:
Markdown editor for efficient and structured writing. It allows you to create unlimited posts and organize them by category Different access levels on each file to help your team collaborate effectively Powerful Google -Like- Search to browse through files and folders and provide employees with what they are looking for quickly and easily. Versioning & Rollback, ability to roll back to previous versions as and when required.
Document360 is trusted by 1000s of customers, including Customer.io, Datree.io, Harvard University, Monday.com, Mambu, and Stackify.
Vultr
It takes one click to deploy Mediawiki on Vultr, the open-source software that powers Wikipedia. This versatile application can help you build collaborative content for a knowledge base, documentation section, or even news portals without being a web designer. Some of the many features of this software include:
Discussion among users Interlinking Media embeds Edit and format content as per your exact needs Easy and smooth navigation
You can deploy Mediawiki globally, all thanks to their 17 different data center locations. It’s also important to mention that their API and control panel is super easy to manage and intuitive, so you can spend less time managing the infrastructure and more on coding.
A2Hosting
Another very well-known hosting provider, A2Hosting’s wiki solution, can help you form your chosen wiki platform, such as MediaWiki, DokuWiki, or TikiWiki. This hosting provider is known for its rapid fast servers because they know even a second delay in loading time can impact your bounce rate. Also, they’re quite affordable compared to the other hosting providers. Worth checking out.
Zoho Wiki
If you have very particular and specific needs for your team, then Zoho Wiki is great for that. It makes knowledge management for teams literally a breeze. It lets you build workspaces and pages, assign users specific tasks, and even tweak the portal to your needs. All in all, you can create a knowledge base, keep your content well secured, match your brand, and use their robust editor to create content and various widgets with ease.
XWiki
With XWiki’s cloud hosting, you don’t have to worry about hosting, upgrades, maintenance, and backups. All of that is taken care of by them. You can get started with their smallest plan and upgrade as you go when the requirement gets higher. It is open source and has features like:
24/7 monitoring Timely backups No cloud lock-in Ability to create personalized apps for your requirements Can handle millions of pages Expert support
— OpenSourceInitiative (@OpenSourceOrg) February 11, 2020
Nuclino
If you put a lot of emphasis on productivity, then Nuclino might just be the one you’re looking for. Their company wiki makes it super easy and feasible to access documents and information within one platform. Just like any other wiki platform, Nuclino helps connect knowledge across all team members with the use of internal links. It is way better than having separate folders, files, or documents all scattered around. Also, with the help of clusters, also known as hierarchical tags, you can display the same page on different search queries so that it becomes easier to find them. This solution overall is fast and makes collaboration a total breeze.
Archbee
Used by companies like Portfolio box and ColorElephant, Archbee provides a handful of interesting and useful features that’ll only make your business collaboration easier. Their editor is similar to Slab’s, and it prevents conflict of saving the same file by different members. Moreover, you can:
Embed diagrams Share documents Access code editor to come up with programs in real-time Instantly search for files and information View stats for every member
You can get started for free.
Confluence
Atlassian’s Confluence can be essential to form your teamwork and collaborate effectively. Using it, you can create a super-simple knowledge base for your team to find answers under one roof. Apart from that, you can create meeting notes, project plans, and establish your fully functional workspace. In return, your team can make announcements and receive feedback from everyone. This helps validate worthy ideas and concepts. One thing that I like the most about this service is, it has templates for almost every purpose. You don’t need to write and share something from scratch. Just use the templates, fill in your details, and you’re good to go. Confluence is used by over 40,000 customers, which includes the likes of Audi, Hubspot, and Blend.
Notion for Wikis
Compatible with Mac, Windows, Mobiles, and Web, Notion for Wikis is another great option for teams and individuals. Be it documents, notes, goals, or company practices, you can store everything for easy access. With their drag-and-drop editor, you can instantly add files, multimedia, and a lot more. This service is suitable for anyone and everyone because you don’t need even a single bit of technical knowledge. And same is the case with their collaboration section. You can add comments, mention members, share files, and even bring everyone together to discuss important details. The ability to embed over 50 different apps makes it a cherry on top.
Papyrs
Another service that offers drag and drops editor, Papyrs is one that is tough to beat on this list. It’s wise to say their features are carefully crafted to not bow down against other services because they have literally everything you might be looking for. You can drag and drop notes, files, documents, forms, and other elements to your members. At the end of the day, you can seamlessly view reports and analyze your workflow. Their search feature is one handy tool to find out where your files are located and access them at any given time. Overall, there’s just too much to it, and you can try them all out with their 15-day free trial.
AllAnswered
A flabbergasting all-in-one knowledge management system, AllAnswered goes by its name. It answers all your questions with their service. You can have the force of a community, wiki, Q & A section, and workflow mashed into one system. And the best part? You can get access to them all for one single affordable price. To sum it up, you can share knowledge, host questions and answers, create new and updated information, and save up a ton of time with the help of their artificial intelligence. Before committing to their paid plan, you can use their free trial.
Kipwise
With the ability to integrate with Slack, Kipwise does put collaboration on steroids. Their quick search feature lets you find desired stuff all while you’re conversing or even while replying to a ticket, saving you a massive amount of time. Some other features include:
Ability to remind teammates with a snippet about using the search feature before asking any questions Assign specific questions to specific members to handle Assign members to review content to make it’s up-to-date Create stunning structured content Access templates to save uptime Embed elements from a variety of sources
With all those awesome features, it’s pretty hard not to schedule a product demo.
Slab
Slab lets you organize your content and pin the most important ones to the top for easier access. Team members can comment, create new content, and hold discussions, all in real-time. A brilliant feature worth talking about is the WYSIWYG editor. Not only is it super easy to use, but it also recognizes duplicate content and prevents the creation of more copies accidentally, even if two different members hit “save” simultaneously. There’s very little room for errors with Slab. With their search function, you can look for essential data quickly and integrate a bunch of third-party apps for the enhancement of features.
SlimWiki
SlimWiki stands out a bit from the crowd because they put a lot of attention to the design and user experience, helping you concentrate more on business. Usually, when we hear the word “wiki,” probably a boring visualization can be seen. However, such is not the case with SlimWiki. They have a stunning layout and typography that can massively increase productivity among members. Not only that, but you can also share files and view page edit history. Every piece of your data is kept secure and private, so there’s nothing to worry about. SlimWiki works with mobile and as well as desktop.
Conclusion
I hope the above list of Wiki hosting solutions can help you decide better what’s best for your business. Some of them come with full-blown collaborative systems, while some don’t. Depending on your requirements, you shall easily find your match. Alternatively, you can explore self-hosted wiki software to see if that works for you.
