Knowledge Management Software Overview 2021

The cloud collaboration market is absolutely booming. While 2020 has been hard on many, working from home has sparked a growing interest in productivity tools in general, and in knowledge management products in particular. That’s understandably required when you can’t just look up from your desk and ask your co-worker to email you that document you’re looking for.

I created this overview as an orientation for people looking to make sense of the content and know created in their organization. It is comprehensive, but by no means exhaustive. I sometimes disregarded nuances in the name of simplicity, or neglected detail in the name of brevity. I hope to fill any gaps in follow-up posts.

Before we dive in — full disclosure: as the CEO of TagBox, a content management platform, we’re a part of this Future-of-Work surge. However, this overview is non-promotional. In fact, this is the last I’ll mention us. This post is merely a recap of literally thousands of hours of market research and personal experience with many of the fantastic products in the field. I’ll even make the horrible marketing blunder of praising a few potential competitors.

A bird’s-eye view of the cloud collaboration market

This overview by Wavestone is the best one I know of cloud collaboration. Most companies will use a mix of these products, and the products often integrate to give a more complete experience.

Knowledge management mostly lies in the top half of this chart:

• File storage: necessary but insufficient — it works well for the individual, but even small teams of 10 struggle to collaborate with it, leading to email overload, missed information, and overall lack of sync between team members. Still, it is the clear go-to solution for small to medium teams.
• Enterprise collaboration: these tools enable collaboration, but are all often incredibly cumbersome, and are therefore only deployed in large enterprises, and even then are often underutilized. They take months to implement and usually require a knowledge gatekeeper to coordinate usage.
• Content creation: every organization should choose how limiting it would like to be in content creation. A wider range of content creation tools will be less limiting on the individual but will hurt collaboration, while keeping content creation to a single tool might not be sub-optimal for specific uses.

Knowledge Management Category Analysis

We analyzed each category by 7 parameters:

1. Implementation effort
2. Ongoing overhead
3. Customer size
4. Internal/external use
5. Individual/collaborative
6. Level of automation
7. Main purpose (e.g. sales enablement)

Deep dive by category

Cloud Storage

Cloud storage is a necessity for every company, large or small. For small and middle-sized companies, it is often the only tool used for knowledge management and collaboration.

Pros:

• easy to use
• integrate well with many content types
• work great for personal use
• sync with local storage on personal devices

Cons:

• hierarchical structure leads to hundreds or thousands of subfolders
• Not suited for collaboration past 10–20 team members
• often limited to a certain eco-system (MS cloud, G-suite)

Key Players:

• Google Drive
• Dropbox
• OneDrive
• Box

Most suitable for:

• Full solution for individuals or very small organizations (up to 10 people)
• Storage solution for small-medium sized teams (10–200)

Enterprise Collaboration

Enterprise collaboration tools are robust and highly customizable. They are a platform on top of which organizations can, given the time and resources, create any type of collaboration hub they’d like.

As stated earlier, the main drawback of existing enterprise collaboration platforms is the fact that they are heavy, difficult to implement and difficult to manage. They are therefore rarely used in SMBs, and are often misused in the enterprise.

Pros:

• highly customizable
• allow different ways of collaboration
• integrate well with storage infrastructure

Cons:

• bulky and overcomplicated
• require a gate-keeper to manage usage
• ill-suited for SMBs
• expensive and often requires a long implementation process

Key Players:

• Sharepoint (clear market leader)
• exo
• Confluence (an enhanced wiki with broad collaboration features)

Most suitable for:

• Very large enterprises with a knowledge management team
• Technical documentation (Confluence)

Wikis

Wikis, as their name suggests, let organizations build their very own “Wikipedia” sites — usually text-based pages with the option to comment.

This is by far the most crowded category with new startups. There are many great wiki software out there, but in my opinion, they work well mostly for very specific use-cases.

Pros:

• beautiful and intuitive
• great for small or rarely-changing external knowledge bases
• act as a single source of truth

Cons:

• onboarding has the overhead of recreating existing content within the wiki
• require everyone on the team to conform to a single tool for everything, and therefore is difficult to implement, especially in highly-distributed or non-technical teams
• hierarchical structure leads to hundreds or thousands of subpages
• usually require a gate-keeper to coordinate usage, or they can get disorganized quickly

Key Players:

• Notion
• Slab
• Tettra
• Bloomfire

Most suitable for:

• Customer-accessible Help Centers
• Small collaboration projects
• Personal knowledge management (Notion)

Unified Search

An on-the-rise and still underused category. These tools connect many different sources to help you find content quickly. They can be implemented for a specific individual or as an organization, helping the users find content from cloud storage, emails, project management tools, and more.

Pros:

• relatively easy to use and implement (depending on your sources)
• work great when actively looking for something specific

Cons:

• do not expose you to relevant content that you’re not looking for
• many platforms are not smart enough, and only search by title
• like any fully-automated system, they often miss important content

Key Players:

• FYI
• Elastic Enterprise Search
• Zest
• Station

Most suitable for:

• Personal use — best for finding content you know exists but not sure where
• Organizational use — finding answers to questions from multiple sources

The following table summarizes my conclusions:

What do you think? Let me know if this was helpful. I’ve personally tried all of these tools and many more, and I’m considering a deep-dive into some of them. Also, I’m sure I missed many other tools — feel free to fill the gap.

And as always, 👏👏👏 help to spread the word around!