KnowledgeOwl is a knowledge base software tool that allows you to build your own knowledge base.

From time to time, we’re asked why someone wouldn’t prefer to use a CMS like WordPress instead of paying for a subscription to a product like ours?

Like so many software questions, what’s best really depends on what you need. It isn’t that one thing is better than another, it’s that one thing will be a better fit for your needs than another. And your needs may evolve over time, so a solution that seems a good fit now may no longer be a good fit three years from now.

With this in mind, let’s jump into the differences, pros, and cons of a CMS vs. knowledge base software.

Cost

CMS's like WordPress have the benefit of low upfront costs, which can be particularly beneficial when you’re just getting your company off the ground. WordPress itself is free, and the other features like hosting, domain registration, and plugins are usually quite low cost as well. Startups in their initial stages often don’t need a very sophisticated knowledge base, and a home-built CMS-based solution can usually cover your FAQs and basic instructions. If your company consists of just a handful of employees, you might not yet be at a place where you need a solution that was built with knowledge management in mind.

As your business matures, though, you may find that the CMS route ends up being more costly than a SaaS solution. It’s not usually the tool’s costs directly, but the time and development costs you’ll incur to keep it going, things like troubleshooting different plugins that don’t play well together (and may not be regularly updated) or updating and managing the system itself. These costs can add up pretty quickly as your knowledge base matures and grows in complexity.

If you’re in a place of having a dedicated position for documentation and service, then it might be time to think about a tool created specifically for your knowledge management needs. 

Feature set

Knowledge base websites can have a lot of specialized features that aren’t relevant to other types of websites. There are seemingly infinite types of websites out there: marketing sites, sites for selling physical products, artist portfolios, photo sharing sites. Each one has different feature needs from the other.

Wordpress, Drupal, and other CMS's are more generalized and do a decent job of a lot of things, rather than a fantastic job at a smaller range of things. Once your knowledge base starts to need that smaller range of things to be better, Toronto-based brewery Steamwhistle’s motto of “Do one thing really, really well” applies - it’s often best to find a company that focuses just doing what they do exceptionally well. 

In the case of knowledge base software, we know our customers exceptionally well. We understand technical writers, what they do, and the challenges they face. We develop our product, improving and adding features based directly on the feedback of our customers. You might be able to find a plugin within a CMS that does the trick you want it to do, but when you’re frankensteining a bunch of different plugins, not purpose-built for your needs, and not built by the same people, they may not always come together in ways that you like (or may not work at all). 

It requires a great deal of time and energy (aka: money) to standardize the look and feel of a knowledge base built with a CMS. 

The consistency of your content is truly paramount to it being trusted by readers. Knowledge base software is built for exactly that. The ability to create templates for articles, Versioning control, built-in maintenance reminders and cycles are just some of the features that come out of the box with a tool that’s built specifically for creating knowledge bases. 

Another important feature for a knowledge base is its Search. Knowledge base software, like KnowledgeOwl, has built-in search functionality out of the box. CMSs largely rely on plugins or other tools for this, and you definitely don’t have the visibility in how they work, or the search weight controls we provide. 

All in all, you want your content writers to be focused on creating great content - not finagling with HTML, styling, and trying to make a lot of different plugins and tools work together. That can lead to wasted time and bad experience for both the writer and the readers.  

Service

The previous point feeds directly into this one: service. The exact reason you might have started with the CMS–the cheap, DIY ability to set it up–can become a con. Each of those plugins may require updating or ongoing research to replace (and test) one plugin with another. If you’ve opted to self-host, you’ll also need to handle server and hardware updates on the host machine. With a CMS, you basically are the tool’s service department.

With a subscription software, you can typically depend on their support team should anything go wrong. A SaaS company is monitoring their product 24/7, will fix major issues, and will push out those updates to you – in most cases, automatically, without you having to think about them. They also have a dedicated team and schedule for system maintenance and all the behind-the-scenes work involved in keeping your knowledge base online and running well. 

CMSs that you build as piecemeal don’t have a dedicated support team that can help you if things go wrong. You have to rely on your own ability to dig through disparate plugins and tools to find what is happening should something not work as expected.

The customer support team is an oft-forgotten benefit of a subscription product. KnowledgeOwl support and success owls will help not just with bugs or questions, but also with best practices, design questions, or anything else that will benefit our customers. We want you to be happy with your knowledge base and will do all that we can to make that happen.

Speed

Readers come to your knowledge base to find what they need–generally, as quickly as possible. Your knowledge base is really only as good as your navigation and search are. Whether your readers are your customers or your internal team, you want to give them a fast experience in searching and browsing your documentation.

Because CMS tools often patchwork together different plugins and parts, they can be fairly slow, especially for search results. This is no problem if you have a smaller knowledge base with only a couple dozen articles, but as your organization grows, you may need to seek out a better solution to get the performance you want for your team and customers. 

Security 

CMS's have the added benefit of offering self-hosting for your content. This lets you keep everything in-house, which may make it inherently more secure.

You’ll also need to be sure there are strong security measures in the knowledge base overall. Most SaaS providers offer a variety of access control features, SSO integrations, and/or a dedicated security expert or regular security audits and tests.

The security of a CMS solution tends to decrease as you add more plugins. To have a Wordpress knowledge base with features comparable to a tool like KnowledgeOwl, you’d need to add a number of plugins. There aren’t consistent security standards for how plugins are tested and maintained.