KnowledgeOwl Reviews

For the most part, this software is easy and intuitive for a non-technical person to use, although it may require a little Googling if you haven't dusted off your HTML skills in recent years. Most of the design is point-and-click; images are uploaded and there is a nice visual editor, similar to Wordpress.

One of my favorite features is the option for the software to "fetch" the colors from whatever web address you enter. This enables the Knowledge Base to basically design itself, all you really need to do is decide where the colors are used and select a layout.

Our initial help center was created using our ticketing software, which seemed like natural thing to do. Except the end result was an outdated flashback, and like most fads from the past, unpleasing to the eye. Anything I did was just putting lipstick on a pig, so that being said, it wasn't going to take much to impress me.

Unfortunately, I ran into formatting issues so I was tasked to call technical support. It seems like a non-issue and for the normal person, it probably is...but I loathe technical support. I would rather go to the dentist than call technical support.

After a few days of trying to figure it out, I was told to stop "procrastinating" and make the call. That was harsh because even though *maybe* I was procrastinating a tiny bit, I was mostly ambitiously learning to make myself a more valuable asset in the future. However, that went awry when I did something that made our help center absolutely horrific. I frantically slammed CTRL-Z over and over again but to my dismay, our help center continued to look like a freak show.

Defeated, I hung my head and picked up the phone.

But, luckily for me, this technical support was not what I have experienced in the past - it was actually a pleasant experience. The errors of my ways were quickly erased into non-existence and our help center bloomed into what it was supposed to look like this entire time. Not only were my failures undone, but issues that I wasn't even aware of (yet) were fixed, too.

I am a writer and its reassuring to know that I have someone technical who can help me so that I can spend my time writing instead of banging CNTRL-Z. It's more efficient than the whole "ambitiously learning" thing.

When looking to replace our current customer support portal, we looked at several options. Knowing that we wanted a self service platform to maintain documentation, videos, demos, etc., Knowledge Owl (KO) came out on top. Their out of the box solution had much more functionality for the money and was solid.

Once we started uploading content, we had several questions as new users typically do, but the team at KO was ALWAYS ready, willing, and able to assist. Not being the most technical person, I never once felt like I was bothering them.

We also had the KO team assist with integrating our ticketing system and mirroring the CSS of our public site. All was fairly seamless and the team was extremely responsive throughout.

Being that we built our KO site as private where our customers need to log in to access company-specific information, we also utilize KO's password management.

Overall, I could not be more pleased with this solution and the KO team. They are really fantastic, extremely responsive. And, they are constantly improving the platform! Great product and Great People! Thank you KO. We look forward to working with you for a VERY long time to come...

It has been great using this program. The support we receive is great. I wish they could come teach our in house IT team on customer service and the need for speed on some fixes. It is nice talking to someone who knows what they are doing and bends over backwards to make you happy. GREAT customer service and a great product.

We'd signed up for KnowledgeOwl (then HelpGizmo) to use as a white-label manual for a product we resell. It's fit very well into that role, since we can customize the help center to only show information related to the product and disassociate it completely from our branding, which has helped a lot for marketing.

The software itself is very easy to use, way easier than something like MediaWiki. The rich text editing and easy image uploads (did I mention they host your media? No hotlinks!) makes writing articles with video/pictures super easy. It's also really easy to update articles, I went and overcomplicated myself when all I have to do is drag and drop the resource I want.

Support has always been wonderful, Marybeth, Pete, and the team are great at communicating changes (like the DNS shift from helpgizmo to knowledgeowl), answering questions, implementing fixes, and basically just being all-around great.

Customization is quick and easy, there are several features we haven't needed to explore but really do make KnowledgeOwl a great drop-in solution for other CRM or ticketing tools. Plus, users can download PDFs of your articles which makes distributing printable documentation even easier.

KnowledgeOwl is a great piece of software that does exactly what it needs to do, and nothing more. It's thoughtless to the point of never being in your way, allowing you to focus on writing and managing articles instead of spending time messing with options and configurations. Plus, it allows users to configure multiple KBs on the same account, so I can manage customer-facing documentation on one KB and have internal, staff-only documentation on another. Yatta!

KnowledgeOwl has become my go-to recommendation for a fast, easy, smart, professional knowledge base system. Give it a shot, I'm sure you'll feel the same way too!

Pros -

Incredibly intuitive
Highly customisable
Strong customer service ethos
Detailed reporting
Huge creative space
Up time - is excellent

NO CONS!

We've been with Knowledge Owl since 2014, and have thoroughly loved every day spent with them. We use their product to deliver incredibly important user guides, top tips FAQ's and other general information about our products and services, directly to our customers.

All of this is done through three separate knowledge bases, for three separate products.

The fact that we allow our products to be supported by Knowledge Owl across three separate KB's should indicate to you that we're serious when we say that their product is excellent.

In addition to giving us the creative space and freedom to impart knowledge onto our clients, their customer service has been excellent since day one. I am the person that contacts Knowledge Owl to deal with any situations that may arise around the knowledge bases, but in all honesty - I could probably count on one hand the amount of times I've had to request assistance. The times I have needed to, have been fast and very professional experiences, which is pretty incredible considering we are based across a sea and time zone from them.

As a manager the reporting tools and functions behind the scenes in Knowledge Owls KB's are invaluable. The statistics I am able to gather gives us as a company the ability to see what's - working, trending, missing and important to our clients.

As a long time user, I would have no problem at all recommending their product to another business or nominating them for an award in excellence.

As someone coming from the high-end CMS authoring tools of Madcap Flare, RoboHelp, and HelpStudio, KnowledgeOwl has a lot more of the features that I expect to see from a CMS system with the additional bonus of having a team willing to go the extra mile to implement tweaks for their customers.

It's a perk, especially compared to the stand-alone systems, where "can I do this?" usually returns a response of "you get what you get and LIKE it. Oh, we also just rolled out a $1500 update. Go buy that, it has that little tweak you want. Kind of. But not really. Oh, and you should spend eight hours tracking down a solution to the problem you're having in our forums, because what you want to do isn't part of this release. That's in the next release. We promise."

Not that I'm bitter.

That doesn't seem like much when you're working on a sedate development environment. Having the time to sit down and really chew on some Javascript is part of it, but when your only free time to breathe or do a little research on the site interface issues is during your morning bus commute, it's a huge impact to your daily work routine.

When you're trying to slam out content that changes on a daily basis, not having the time to implement a backend code tweak for your site while keeping up with your dev team's amazing ability to crush deploy deadlines like empty Red Bull cans makes it hard to get those tweaks to your backend integrated in a timely manner. But KnowledgeOwl has been responsive, helpful, and reasonable - to the point where I don't mind waiting a day or so to get an answer back or telling my team "I asked KO about it, they're figuring out a fix for that."

I am not a huge fan of CMS hosting apps and sites from a purist's standpoint, but KnowledgeOwl makes me think I may become a convert.

We looked at many vendors before we evaluated Knowledge Owl, and I can't say enough about our experience working with the Knowledge Owl Team. From day one, the team continues to amaze me with the level of service they provide. They worked closely with us throughout the setup and implementation phase of our Help Center launch and continue to assist with our very custom and individual needs. Kudos to the entire team for always being responsive and helpful, but special thanks to the Knowledge Goddess / Chief Executive Owl, for leading the team.

Knowledge Owl's Marybeth and Pete co-design and troubleshoot any foreseen issues. They are immensely valued and responsive. Their backend is great and intuitive - which makes training staff simple and fast. I would recommend them to anyone.

I found KnowledgeOwl after joining a tech startup as the lead technical writer. At the time, the company didn't have any formal user documentation -- but we did have a support team fielding many repetitive questions, and users who could benefit from formal instruction. Given that we have a single product and it's fairly simple, products like MadCap Flare (which I had used at the previous company I worked for) offered much more than we needed -- and at a much different price point.

I evaluated several other options and ended up selecting KnowledgeOwl given its straightforward pricing plan, easy-to-use interface and immediate publishing abilities. If you need something simple to use and build that offers fairly attractive basic theme choices, then KnowledgeOwl will suit you just fine. It may not offer several hundred output options, but as the world continues to move away from print manuals towards greener, online manuals, in my opinion that factor wasn't important.

The best part about KnowledgeOwl, though, is the customer service/support. I can't imagine any company matching its service/support level. The first few weeks required a lot of customization given the look and feel that my company was going for, and the team over at KnowledgeOwl was with me every step of the way as far as customizing code and so on, in some cases even doing the customization for me as I was in over my head with that level of CSS code! Highly, highly recommended.

We needed a replacement for Crowdbase which is turning off their platform at the end of the year. After a through search for a replacement, Knowledge Owl came out as the clear winner on every one of our requirements. First and foremost, we needed the ability to mimick the look (to some degree) and interaction behavior that our users had become used to in Crowdbase. KO provided this. The KO feature set is actually overkill for our needs, but very solid and not so granular that a none coder can't get things done without support. However, when you need support, KO REALLY shines. They are a relatively small organization, but growing, so they can really provide personal service. If KO can find that magical balance of growth (which will come just based on how great a platform it is), and continue the quality of service, they will own the knowledge base space.

The first thing to know about the KnowledgeOwl product is that the team behind it is really dedicated and extremely responsive. Whenever I've had an issue, they have been right on top of it and that's worth a lot.
Combine this with a really simple and rock-solid product, and you have a real winner. We deployed a new product knowledgebase in less than 30 days from start to production with KnowledgeOwl. When we needed tweaks to the mobile view, they were able to immediately help. When we suggested new features, they were quick to give us a delivery date and put them in queue.
The product is very easy to set up, even simpler to maintain, and (most importantly) it is stupidly simple to use. Simplicity is key as far too many other products we evaluated had a lot of legacy UI or other complexity which served as a barrier to entry for the end-user.
If there was any difficulty it's with uploading images to be used. The files are uploaded to a library and then transferred to the website through an automatic process. Usually this is instantaneous, but if you upload a file with the same name or do something else weird then it can take several minutes to straighten out. That's a fairly minor concern in a product that can do so much with such a responsive staff.
Our technical team uses the knowledge base every day. What more can you ask of a product?

I use this software to create lessons for internal and external viewing. It is really easy to use and creates really user friendly and professional guides.

I use Knowledge Owl for a number of inter-connected knowledge bases, and I love how easy it is to maintain them. Not only am I able to use the same article in multiple sites, and have those articles update by updating just one of them, I'm able to insert custom content into one or more without affecting the rest. It allows me to create a custom experience without maintaining multiple versions of essentially the same information.

The platform is very easy to use, but powerful. And I cannot say enough about the tremendous support we've received getting up and running with Knowledge Owl. The answers are quick, complete, friendly and right on the money. No matter what I'm asking, even if it's filling a gap in my HTML skills, I always get quick help with a solution.

KnowledgeOwl offers a feature set and an ease of use that is better than it's competitors. Other systems are complex and can be overwhelming. With KnowledgeOwl, I was able to jump right in and begin creating content with no training; it was very intuitive and easy to learn!

There are many features I like about KnowledgeOwl. I can single source screenshots so they get replaced quickly and easily through the articles, I can create snippets to help save time and effort with repeating content, I can add synonyms to keywords to assist with search capabilities and I can publish multiple outputs.

The need for responsive design arose as new devices with differing screen sizes and resolutions appear. KnowledgeOwl address this need and I consider responsive output as a significant feature!

There isn't much I don't like. There is opportunity for improvement with formatting capabilities and adding an import existing content feature.

The tech support is fantastic. They are quick to respond and provide excellent guidance and assistance to ensure my questions are answered or my issue is resolved in a timely manner.

We're well into the process of obsoleting and migrating components of a large set of hard-to-maintain legacy docs and Helps, and implementing a more nimble approach that allows us to provide our customers and dealers with the information they are asking for. KnowledgeOwl is proving to be a robust and easy-to-use authoring tool that lets us generate and deploy critical information quickly on an as-needed basis and then continually improve and expand on the topics as time and resources allow. As the sole writer at my company, I really appreciate the ease (and enthusiasm) with which non-writers can dive right in and start generating content, allowing me to focus on editing, writing overview and bridge topics, adding links and keywords, assigning new topics to subject matter experts, and so forth. The KnowledgeOwl authoring environment is intuitive, easy to use, and feature-rich. The UI is straightforward---it's all right there in front of you. KnowledgeOwl is saving us time and effort and aggravation, and it's very rewarding to be able to respond so quickly to requests for information.

I have a very positive experience with KnowledgeOwl so far (using for 6+ month now). We are expanding our documentation very quickly, thanks to the intuitive web site and editors. We have a team of editors, and the ability to provide a group based reader accounts to our customers makes it easy to create customer specific areas. Something we were looking for a long time.
The support is quick to reply and there are more features in development. My favorite is ability to use REST API to get a list of suggested articles by a keyword, and show that inside of our own web application to help our users. I'm looking forward to the Word document import (on their roadmap), so we can accelerate porting our old documentation.

KnowledgeOwl is a fantastic KM solution. When researching different products in the market we had a long list of requirements, I couldn't believe how many KnowledgeOwl was able to tick right out of the box. Its intuitive, easy to use and excellent value for money.

From our perspective KnowledgeOwl is by far the most cost effective KM solution available. It was also super easy to implement with relatively no support required from our IT department. Information stored on the platform is backed up daily and the level of customer support that has been offered to us to help tailor the platform to our specific needs has been second to none (especially considering the fact we're in completely different time zones).

Utilising KnowledgeOwl has assisted our business unit to achieve immediate efficiencies and tangible cost savings. The best part is, it just keeps getting better and better with upgrades occurring to the platform on a regular basis. If you're looking for a highly effective KM solution I couldn't recommend this knowledgebase highly enough!

The Knowledge Owl team is consistently providing the space for iteration and brainstorming to integrate new features, functionality, and improve usability. They're willing to pick up the phone any time we need help, have ideas, or just have questions about the limits we can push our own website. For instance, I needed help figuring out how to track autocomplete searches within Google Analytics reports, and they went ahead and set up event tracking for us.

Knowledge Owl provides the support and structures to allow for growth and scalability for our organizational needs. I feel like they provide the platform that will adapt to the chaos of non-profit work at any given moment. From styles, themes, reporting, article writing, user permissions, tagging, and editing, Knowledge Owl's knowledge bases will be able to pivot alongside our own ever changing work.

We chose KnowledgeOwl because out of everything on the market, it offers the most bang for your buck and lowest barriers to getting started. Customer service is friendly and extremely responsive, and we were up-and-running in no time at all. It also offers more in-depth customization and organization features than many other products on the market at a much better price point. The simple, intuitive interface for adding articles makes onboarding very easy.

The reason it gets 4 overall stars and not 5 is that adding your own CSS can be a pain. It's possible to write your own CSS for your site, but you have to dig into the pre-baked CSS inside the theme and override it piece-by-piece. There also isn't any documentation about their classes, so this can be time-consuming to figure out. If they offered a "blank slate" template that just gave you the basic elements of a help site (navigation, search bar, article content) then let you style them yourself from the ground up, it would be an easy 5 stars.

I like how easy it is to create a very organised datebase. There are only few things that could be better, but overall I recommend this software to everyone!
1) it isn't possible to move several articles together into a new sub-category, which could save time when reorganising;
2) over time it's annoying that you need to save your changes in articles and that the default is always "draft". I have to save 2 times to be able to get it into the database. If you do many entrees that takes time.

Moving all our internal and external guides on to KnowledgeOwl has transformed our ways of working and hugely reduced the amount of time we devote to one-to-one support.

KnowledgeOwl includes a great range of functionality, enabling the creation of everything from very simple 'PDF' style guides to complex resources integrated into other systems. We are still discovering more capabilities and our knowledge base resources keep getting better because of them.

Pros:
Straightforward interface, easy to produce impressive resources with little previous experience, very customizable, lots of great advanced features, keeps improving, fantastic customer service.

Cons:
As part of the on-going evolution of the product, parts of the user interface change, which can result in a bit of re-learning how to do some things on occasion (a small amount of pain for the associated system improvements).
Exported PDFs do not maintain the fonts used in the on-screen knowledgebase.

We have been actively working with the nice folks at KnowledgeOwl since September 2015. We selected them after an extensive evaluation process conducted over the previous summer. As with any evaluation, you have to find the right balance between features, support, and price and we felt that KnowledgeOwl, overall, had the best marks over all three categories.

Implementing a solid knowledge base is a TON of work - even if we don't want to believe that at the outset. We have found the steady progression of improvements and ever present support to make a huge difference with us getting our knowledge base up and running.

I am quite confident that as they grow and expand, they will continue to improve the product and be a great resource for how best to implement a knowledge base.

I've been using KnowledgeOwl for more than a year now and can simply say that it does cover all of our Knowledge-base requirements.

Some o the main things that I like:
- It's easy to use
- highly customisable
- drag-drop to add files,easy to link images/documents
- It supports various visibility settings, which allows us to have internal and external information
- The comments feature enables discussions, sharing knowledge
- The categories are a great way of organising articles and the search is very accurate

Last but not least it's responsive, which makes it usable on mobile and tablet.

Overall, I would recommend this product to anyone who is looking for a content management software, which can be used for multiple purposes.