What is a knowledge base? Kinds and examples

A knowledge base is a collection of short articles that answer the questions people ask about a product, kept in one place where they can search it. Each article covers one question or one task, such as how to export your data or what happens when a payment fails. A knowledge base for customers is usually published as a help centre on your own site, at an address like help.yourcompany.com. A team can keep a private one for itself too.

For a founder without a support team, a knowledge base is how you stop typing the same reply every week. Write the answer once, and every customer who finds it is one email you don’t have to send. Deacon is an AI customer support agent that answers your customers from your own docs, in a chat on your site, in seconds. It has a free plan.

What goes in a knowledge base

Most knowledge bases for a software product hold the same six kinds of article. Here is what each one answers, with a title it might carry.

Three kinds of knowledge base

The phrase is used for three different things, and search results mix them up.

• An external knowledge base is written for your customers and published where anyone can read it. It’s the kind this entry is mostly about.
• An internal knowledge base is written for your own team, such as how you deploy or how you handle a refund request. It usually lives in a wiki such as Notion or Confluence, behind a sign-in.
• An AI knowledge base is the content an AI agent answers from, cut into passages it can search. Your external knowledge base is often the biggest part of it, next to your website, your files and answers you’ve written.

How knowledge base tools organise articles

Most knowledge base software sorts articles into two or three levels, and each tool names the levels differently. These are the defaults in three well-known tools, from their own guides, read on 7 October 2026.

In all three, the articles sit at the bottom. Freshdesk keeps its knowledge base under a menu called Solutions, which is why its help articles have /solutions/ in their addresses.

For a small product, fewer levels work better. With 20 articles, one row of five or six headings, such as Getting started, Billing and Integrations, lets a customer see everything at a glance. Add a second level when one heading holds more articles than fit on a screen.

Knowledge base vs help centre, FAQ page, documentation and wiki

These words get swapped for each other. This is how they usually differ.

A small SaaS often starts with an FAQ page and grows it into a knowledge base once the answers need steps and screenshots.

How to tell whether a knowledge base is working

The most useful measure for a small team is coverage, the share of customer questions that an article you’ve already published answers.

Take your last 50 support emails and chats. If an article already answers 30 of them, your coverage is 30 ÷ 50 × 100, or 60%. The other 20 are the next articles to write.

The 30 matter too, because each one is a customer who wrote in although the answer was already published. When that count is high, people can’t find your articles. A clearer title, the customer’s own words in the first line or a link from the screen where they get stuck will do more than another new article.

Coverage sits beside deflection rate, the share of questions answered before they reach you, and both are part of customer self-service.

Starting a knowledge base without a support team

You don’t need knowledge base software on day one. A few pages on your own site are enough to begin, and you can move them into a tool later.

1. List every question customers asked you this month, in their words.
2. Write one article for each question that came up twice, and title it with the question.
3. Answer in the first line, then give any steps as a numbered list.
4. Link each article from the place in your product where people get stuck.
5. Write a new article the second time a new question arrives.

How to write knowledge base articles has six before-and-after rewrites to copy. When you want a help centre of your own, the best knowledge base software compares eight tools for small teams.

A knowledge base your customers can ask, with Deacon

A knowledge base only helps the customers who find the right article. Deacon lets them ask instead. It reads your knowledge base and the rest of your content, then answers your customers in a chat on your site, in seconds, at any hour and in the language they write in.

It learns from pages on your website, uploaded files, text you paste in and answers you write yourself. Files can be PDF, Word (.docx), text, Markdown, CSV or HTML, up to 10 MB each. A PDF of up to 200 pages is read in full, each page as an image, so a scanned manual works too, and a longer one is turned away with a note to split it into parts. You don’t need a help centre first. When you sign up, Deacon reads your home page and up to four main pages, such as pricing and help, and can answer within a minute or so. Knowledge base chatbot shows the whole process.

It fills the gaps in your knowledge base as they show up. When your content doesn’t cover a question, Deacon says it doesn’t know instead of guessing and asks for the visitor’s email, so you can reply yourself. The question then waits in Conversations with an Answer this button. Write the answer once and it becomes part of what Deacon knows, so Deacon can give it to the next customer who asks, and Save & check shows you the reply Deacon now gives. That’s your coverage going up without a new article.

It also tells you which article to write next. Topics group similar questions and count the people who asked, so you fill the gap with the most people behind it first.

Knowledge on each plan is counted by the text Deacon takes from your content, not by file size. The free plan holds 1 MB, which is about 67 pages of docs. Starter holds 15 MB, about 1,000 pages, and Growth holds 50 MB, about 3,330. Every feature is on every plan, and the free plan needs no card and has no end date.