Best knowledge base software for small teams

The best knowledge base software for a small team is Help Scout Docs, if you want your help centre and your support email in one place. Document360 goes deepest for a knowledge base on its own, and HelpDocs is the simplest at a set monthly price. If you want to start for free, GitBook suits developer docs and Notion turns pages you’ve already written into a public help centre.

Below are eight tools for a customer-facing knowledge base, the help centre your customers search, ranked for a founder or a small team. Every price was read on the vendor’s own pages on 25 September 2026, and each one links there. Internal wikis for your own staff are a different list, so they’re left out.

Deacon isn’t on the list, because it isn’t knowledge base software. It’s our product, an AI customer support agent, and it offers the other route. Instead of writing a help centre first, you point Deacon at the docs you already have, and it answers your customers from them in seconds and shows you which questions those docs don’t answer yet. There’s a free plan with no card and no end date.

Knowledge base software side by side

Read the AI column closely, because it’s where the bills differ most. Some vendors charge for each conversation their AI settles, some spend monthly credits, and some keep the AI for a higher plan.

What to look for in knowledge base software

Most of these tools write and publish articles well. Where they differ is in five things, and those decide which one fits you.

• What the price counts. HelpDocs sells plans with a set number of editors, Help Scout and Helpjuice count users, Zendesk counts agents, Intercom counts seats, GitBook charges for each site and each user, and Notion counts members. Count the people who’ll write articles and answer customers, then price each tool for that many.
• Who the AI is for. Some AI helps you draft and tidy articles, and some answers your customers. Check which kind a plan includes, and whether answering customers costs extra for each conversation or comes out of monthly credits.
• Search, and what it tells you. Try a question phrased the way a customer would ask it, not the way the article is titled. Helpjuice, Document360 and GitBook’s paid plans also report what people searched for, which is a list of the articles to write next.
• Your own domain. All eight can put the help centre on your own address, but GitBook keeps it for Premium and Notion charges for it.
• Languages. If your customers write in more than one language, check the plan. Zendesk’s Suite Team has one, HelpDocs’ first plan has three, and Intercom’s multilingual help centre starts on Advanced.

The software is the cheap part. What makes a knowledge base work is writing the answers people look for, and how to write knowledge base articles shows how.

1. Help Scout Docs

Help Scout is a shared inbox for email and chat, and Docs is the knowledge base that comes with it. It suits a small team that wants the help centre and its support email in one product. Its Beacon widget puts article suggestions and a contact form on any page of your site or app.

The free plan gives you 5 users, 1 inbox and 1 Docs site, and the plan table caps that site at 10 articles and the inbox at 100 contacts a month. Standard is $25 a user a month billed yearly, or $30 monthly, with 2 Docs sites and unlimited articles. Plus is $45 billed yearly, or $54 monthly, with 3. Another site is $20 a month billed yearly, or $24 monthly. Standard and Plus have a 15-day trial with no card. Help Scout pricing covers the rest of the bill, AI Answers included.

A Docs site can sit on your own subdomain, such as help.yourcompany.com, and Help Scout’s guide says there’s no additional charge for it. AI Answers replies to customers from your Docs and other sources you add, at $0.75 a resolution on Standard and above, and a new account gets its first 3 months free. A resolution counts only when the customer gets an AI reply and doesn’t ask for more help, search the knowledge base or escalate. You can set a monthly cap, and at the cap AI Answers switches off until the next cycle.

2. Document360

Document360 is knowledge base software and nothing else, built for large, carefully organised docs. A project is one knowledge base, public or private, with its own users, custom domain and branding, and you can run several. Categories, templates, reusable content blocks, review reminders and approval workflows are there for a team that writes a lot.

Its Eddy AI includes AI search and answers with the plan. An AI chatbot that also reads websites, files and Zendesk or Freshdesk tickets is an add-on, and so is its AI Premium Suite for screen captures and interactive demos.

The catch for a small team is the price, because Document360 publishes none. Its pricing page asks what you’re building and says a flat tier “would either overcharge small teams or undercharge enterprises”. The quote depends on team accounts, workspaces, languages, security, whether the knowledge base is public or private, and use of the AI Premium Suite. There’s a 14-day free trial of every feature, and after it you contact the team for a plan.

3. HelpDocs

HelpDocs sells a help centre on three plain plans, and its pricing page says “Self-serve pricing. No sales process.” It suits a founder who wants a quick, tidy help centre and wants to know what each month costs before signing up.

Sprout is $99 a month billed yearly, or $129 monthly, for 5 editors, 3 languages and 1,000 AI credits a month. Bloom is $239 billed yearly, or $299 monthly, for 15 editors, 20 languages and 5,000 credits. Anyone reading your help centre is free and unlimited on every plan, and you pay only for editors, the people who log in to write.

Every plan has a custom domain and Ask AI, which answers customers’ questions in plain language from your published docs and links the source article. Ask AI runs on the same monthly credits as drafting and rewriting, and you can add more at any time. The Lighthouse widget puts your help inside your app. There’s no free plan, only a 14-day trial with no card, and its Greenhouse program gives companies under 3 years old with 5 or fewer employees 50% off any plan for two years.

4. Helpjuice

Helpjuice sells customisation. Its pricing page says that when you sign up, “we’ll literally handcraft your knowledge base design”, and every plan includes that, along with analytics on what your customers read and search for. It suits a team that wants the help centre to look designed without doing the design.

The prices are monthly, with no yearly rate on the page. $249 a month covers 30 users and 12 GB of files, and its AI Suite, with the AI writer, AI search and AI chatbot, is marked “Not included”. The AI starts on the $449 plan, for 100 users, and $799 a month removes the user limit. A user is anyone who can log in to the knowledge base.

A custom domain such as help.yourcompany.com is set up in its settings, with a free SSL certificate, Helpjuice’s help centre says. The 14-day trial needs no card. When it ends, the account goes inactive until you choose a plan, with nothing deleted.

5. Zendesk’s help centre

Zendesk’s help centre suits a team already running support on Zendesk Suite, because the articles sit in the same product as the tickets, the chat and the AI agents. It isn’t on Support Team, the $19 plan, which is email and ticketing.

It starts on Suite Team, at $55 an agent a month billed yearly or $69 monthly, with 1 help centre in 1 default language and standard themes. Suite Professional, at $115 billed yearly or $149 monthly, gives you up to 5 help centres, over 40 languages and custom themes. The trial is 14 days of Suite Professional.

Host mapping, which puts the help centre on a subdomain of your own, is on every plan. Zendesk’s plan comparison lists Generative search, which puts an AI answer at the top of search results, on every plan too. Its AI agents are billed per automated resolution, at $1.50 committed in advance or $2.00 pay as you go past what the plan includes. Zendesk AI pricing explains that bill, and Zendesk competitors sets Zendesk against other helpdesks.

6. Intercom’s help centre

Intercom is a chat-first helpdesk, and its help centre suits a SaaS team that already talks to customers through Intercom. Every plan includes a help centre and Fin, Intercom’s AI agent.

Essential includes a public help centre, at $19 or $29 a seat a month billed yearly, depending on which side of Intercom’s price test you land, or $29 or $39 monthly. A private or multilingual help centre needs Advanced, at $85 a seat billed yearly or $99 monthly. A help centre for each of several brands needs Expert, at $132 a seat billed yearly.

Fin bills $0.99 an outcome, at most once a conversation. An outcome counts when a customer confirms the answer helped, doesn’t ask for more help, or Fin completes a procedure you’ve set up, handoffs included. The help centre can sit on a subdomain or a subpath such as yourapp.com/help, Intercom’s guide says. There’s no free plan, only a 14-day trial with no card.

7. GitBook

GitBook is built for product and developer docs, with Git sync, interactive API playgrounds and preview deployments on every plan, the free one included. It suits a technical product whose help centre is mostly guides and API reference. Every plan also publishes an llms.txt file and an MCP server for your docs, so AI tools can read them.

It charges for each site and each user. Free is for one person, with full-text search but no custom domain and no AI search. Premium is $65 a site a month billed yearly, or $79 monthly, plus $12 a user billed yearly or $15 monthly. It adds your own domain and AI search, which gives your customers short answers in the search box.

Ultimate, at $249 a site a month billed yearly or $299 monthly, adds the AI Assistant, a chat sidebar that answers from your docs and other sources you connect, and lets you embed it in your own site or product. Premium and Ultimate come with a 14-day trial. What to look for in a documentation AI assistant sets GitBook’s assistant beside the others.

8. Notion

Notion is a workspace for notes and docs, and any page in it can be published as a website with Notion Sites. It suits a founder who already writes in Notion and wants a public help centre for nothing.

The free plan publishes unlimited pages on a notion.site address, with search engine indexing. Plus, at $10 a member a month billed yearly or $12 monthly, adds site customisation, covering the header, favicon, theme and Google Analytics, and Notion’s help centre lists a search box for visitors among the header settings. Your own domain is an add-on, $8 a domain a month billed yearly or $10 monthly, and it’s the only way to turn off the “Built with Notion” watermark.

Notion AI works inside your workspace, as a limited trial on Free and Plus and in full on Business, at $20 a member a month billed yearly or $24 monthly. One thing to check before you publish. Notion says a published page’s metadata includes the names, profile photos and email addresses of the Notion users who contributed to it.

Free knowledge base software

Three of the eight have a free plan that doesn’t run out, and each stops somewhere different.

• Help Scout’s free plan gives you 1 Docs site of up to 10 articles, 5 users and an inbox for 100 contacts a month. Its plan table lists AI Answers from Standard.
• GitBook’s free plan is for one person, with a published site and full-text search, but no custom domain and no AI search.
• Notion’s free plan publishes unlimited pages on a notion.site address. Site customisation and your own domain need a paid plan.

The other five offer trials instead. Document360, HelpDocs, Helpjuice, Zendesk and Intercom each give you 14 days, and HelpDocs, Helpjuice and Intercom ask for no card. If you have a dozen common questions rather than a hundred, an FAQ page on your own site may be all the knowledge base you need for now.

Deacon, if you’d rather not build a knowledge base

Every tool above asks you to write a help centre first. Deacon starts from what you already have. It isn’t knowledge base software, and it doesn’t publish articles or host a help centre. It’s an AI customer support agent that answers your customers in a chat on your site, in seconds, at any hour and in whatever language they write in.

It answers from your website, which it crawls so you can tick the pages worth answering from, and from PDF, Word, Markdown and other files, text you paste in and answers you write. If you already have a help centre, Deacon can crawl it like any other site. When nothing you’ve given it covers a question, Deacon says it doesn’t know instead of guessing, and asks for the visitor’s email so you can reply.

Then it shows you what’s missing. A question your docs didn’t cover waits in your dashboard with an Answer this button, and what you write becomes part of what Deacon knows, so it gets better the more you answer. Save & check shows the reply Deacon now gives and how many other open questions your answer covers. Topics group similar questions and count the people who asked, so you can see which answer is worth writing next.

Every feature is on every plan, the free one included. Free gives you 50 answers a month and 1 seat, with no card and no end date. Starter is $50 a month, or $40 a month billed yearly, for 1,000 answers a month and 3 seats. Nothing is billed past a plan’s answers, and no plan upgrades itself.

Which one fits you

Start from where your customers ask for help today and who will write the articles.

If they email you, Help Scout gives you the inbox and a Docs site together, free for up to 5 users. If you want a help centre on its own at a price you know in advance, HelpDocs is the simplest, and Document360 goes deepest if you’re happy to take a quote. Helpjuice is for a team that wants the help centre designed for it. If you’re already paying for Zendesk Suite or Intercom, use the help centre that comes with it. GitBook fits a technical product with API docs, and if you already write in Notion, a Notion Site gets you a public help centre today for nothing.

If you answer support yourself and a help centre keeps slipping down the list, Deacon answers your customers from the docs you already have and shows you which answers are missing. It works beside any of these tools as well, reading your help centre like any other site. Customer support tools shows where a help centre sits among the other tools a small team uses.

Questions about knowledge base software

What is knowledge base software?

Software for writing, organising and publishing help articles that customers search for themselves, usually as a help centre on your own address. It’s the main tool of customer self-service. Most of it now adds AI, either to help you write the articles or to answer customers from them.

What’s the best free knowledge base software?

For a customer help centre, Help Scout’s free plan is the most complete, with a Docs site, 5 users and an inbox, though its plan table caps the free site at 10 articles. GitBook’s free plan suits developer docs written by one person, and Notion publishes unlimited pages for free on a notion.site address.

Do I need a knowledge base if I use an AI chatbot?

Not always. An AI chatbot needs something to answer from, but that can be your website, your files and the answers you write rather than a help centre. A knowledge base earns its place when customers want to browse and read for themselves, or when you want those pages found in search. AI knowledge base explains what an AI agent actually answers from.

Is Deacon a knowledge base?

No. Deacon doesn’t publish articles or host a help centre. It’s an AI customer support agent that answers your customers in a chat on your site, from your website, files, pasted text and the answers you write. If you already have a knowledge base, Deacon can learn from it as a website.

Can Deacon answer from my existing help centre?

Yes, if it’s public. Deacon crawls it like any other website, lists the pages it finds, and answers from the ones you tick once you press Retrain agent. One crawl reads up to a hundred pages. It doesn’t connect to a help centre’s own system, and nothing is re-fetched on a schedule, so when you change an article you fetch that page again by hand. How to set up an AI chatbot for documentation walks through it.