Which knowledge base software do AI answer engines actually recommend?

When an SMB buyer asks an AI assistant which knowledge base software to buy, a shortlist comes back. We asked 44 different phrasings of that question across 2 engines, 88 answers in total, and counted every product named. This is the result. Nobody paid to be on it, and no vendor list was written in advance — the 99 vendors below are simply everyone the engines named.

Run 3 Aug 2026 Questions 44 Answers 88 Vendors named 99 Top-10 repeatability 9/10

Free to read, raw data included. What is for sale — $9.99/mo monitoring for a single vendor.

The leaderboard

“Answers” is how many of the 88 answers named that product. Share is the same number as a percentage. The two right-hand columns split it by engine. Every row has its own link — the # beside a vendor name gives you something like connexion.me/c/knowledgebase/#confluence.

#VendorAnswers ShareGeminiPerplexity
1Confluence#5056.8%2624
2Notion#4753.4%2918
3Document360#3843.2%2117
4Guru#3034.1%2010
5Slite#2326.1%149
6GitBook#2022.7%146
7Zendesk Guide#1719.3%710
8Wiki.js#1011.4%46
9BookStack#910.2%45
10Helpjuice#910.2%27
11Nuclino#910.2%27
12Slab#910.2%36
13Mintlify#89.1%35
14Freshdesk#78.0%34
15Help Scout#78.0%43
16Zendesk#78.0%25
17Docusaurus#66.8%42
18Coda#55.7%50
19HelpDocs#55.7%23
20Outline#55.7%50
21ReadMe#55.7%32
22XWiki#55.7%14
23Helpable#44.5%04
24MkDocs#44.5%31
25Tettra#44.5%13
26KnowledgeOwl#33.4%03
27Stonly#33.4%03
28Zoho Desk#33.4%12
29Atlassian Confluence#22.3%11
30Bloomfire#22.3%11
31Docmost#22.3%02
32DokuWiki#22.3%02
33Ferndesk#22.3%02
34Freshservice#22.3%11
35HelpKit#22.3%20
36HubSpot Service Hub#22.3%20
37Intercom Articles#22.3%20
38IT Glue#22.3%11
39MadCap Flare#22.3%11
40MediaWiki#22.3%02
41Microsoft 365#22.3%20
42ONES Wiki#22.3%02
43ONES.com#22.3%02
44Paligo#22.3%11
45PHPKB#22.3%02
46Process Street#22.3%02
47ServiceNow#22.3%02
48SweetProcess#22.3%02
49Adobe RoboHelp#11.1%01
50AllyMatter#11.1%01
51Desk365#11.1%01
52Docsio#11.1%01
53Doction#11.1%01
54Documize#11.1%01
55eGain AI Knowledge Hub#11.1%01
56Fabric#11.1%01
57Fini#11.1%01
58Google Docs#11.1%10
59HappySupport#11.1%01
60HelpCenter.io#11.1%01
61Helpdesk App#11.1%01
62Heroic Knowledge Base#11.1%01
63HubSpot#11.1%01
64Hudu#11.1%01
65Intercom Knowledge Hub#11.1%10
66Jinba Flow#11.1%01
67Jira Service Management#11.1%10
68Jira Service Management + Confluence#11.1%01
69KMS Lighthouse#11.1%01
70Kommodo#11.1%01
71KPSOL Universal Knowledge#11.1%01
72LeafWiki#11.1%01
73Loop#11.1%10
74ManageEngine ServiceDesk Plus#11.1%01
75Microsoft SharePoint + Microsoft Purview#11.1%10
76Microsoft SharePoint / Viva Topics#11.1%10
77Microsoft SharePoint/365#11.1%10
79ONES Wiki/ONES.com#11.1%01
80ProProfs Knowledge Base#11.1%01
81Quip#11.1%10
82Reattend#11.1%01
83Redocly#11.1%10
84Salesforce Experience Cloud#11.1%10
85Salesforce Knowledge#11.1%10
86Salesforce Service Cloud#11.1%01
87Salesforce Service Cloud Knowledge#11.1%01
88ServiceNow Knowledge#11.1%01
89Sphinx#11.1%10
90Stoplight#11.1%01
91Swagger/SwaggerHub#11.1%01
92SwaggerHub#11.1%01
93Tango#11.1%01
94Tutorial.ai#11.1%01
95Typemill#11.1%01
96Vidocu#11.1%01
97Viva Topics#11.1%10
98Waybook#11.1%01
99Wikmd#11.1%01

What is free, and what is for sale

Everything above is free and stays free — the leaderboard, the method, all 88 raw answers and the machine-readable ranking, published in full at the bottom of this page. No vendor paid to be listed, no vendor can pay to move, and nothing here goes behind a login later.

What is for sale is one vendor's row, watched: $9.99 a month to be told when your rank moves, who took your mentions, and which phrasings started or stopped naming you — the board is re-run monthly and you get what changed. A one-off $199 deep report on a single row is the other option. What is in each →

Method

Every claim on this page is reproducible from the files linked at the bottom.

The engines

Gemini (gemini-flash-latest), Perplexity (sonar). Each was called through its public API with a near-empty system prompt — “answer the user's question directly and concisely” — and nothing else. The engines were not asked to produce a list, rank anything, or name vendors. Steering them toward a list would have manufactured the thing being measured.

The questions

44 distinct phrasings of one purchase decision, written before any measurement was run. No vendor name appears in any of them.

  1. What is the best knowledge base software for a 50-person company?
  2. Best internal wiki for engineering and product teams
  3. We're a 30 person startup and team knowledge is scattered across Google Docs and Slack. What knowledge base should we buy?
  4. Recommend a customer-facing knowledge base tool for product documentation.
  5. affordable knowledge base software for small business
  6. What knowledge base tools do growing software companies actually use?
  7. Best internal knowledge management tool for remote teams
  8. Which documentation platform is best for developer APIs and technical specs?
  9. We need a company wiki to store standard operating procedures. What software should we get?
  10. Top customer self-service help center platforms
  11. What knowledge base software integrates well with support ticketing platforms?
  12. Best knowledge base software for non-technical employees to write docs
  13. What software should we use for a private employee knowledge base?
  14. Recommend an easy-to-use team wiki software for a small agency.
  15. We are scaling past 100 people and need a single source of truth for company docs. What tool is best?
  16. Best hosted documentation tool for SaaS user guides
  17. What is the best enterprise knowledge management software?
  18. affordable wiki software for small business
  19. What documentation software do technical writers recommend for software products?
  20. Best tool to create a public help center and knowledge base
  21. We need an internal wiki that supports markdown and fast search. What should we buy?
  22. What software should a customer success team use to build a self-service knowledge base?
  23. Best internal documentation tool for a 200-person company
  24. Which knowledge base platform offers the best access permissions and page verification?
  25. What knowledge management software is best for financial services compliance documentation?
  26. We are tired of outdated documentation. Which knowledge base tool forces regular content reviews?
  27. Best AI-powered knowledge base software for internal company search
  28. Recommend a modern alternative to legacy enterprise wikis.
  29. What knowledge base platform is best for managing both internal team docs and public support pages?
  30. Best lightweight wiki tool for fast startup documentation
  31. What is the most secure knowledge base software for healthcare HIPAA compliance?
  32. Which customer help center software has the best SEO for public user guides?
  33. We need a knowledge base that allows external clients to access custom portals. What should we buy?
  34. Best collaborative documentation tool for cross-functional teams
  35. What knowledge base software supports multi-language support articles?
  36. Which team wiki software has the best search functionality?
  37. What is the best self-hosted or open-source knowledge base software for enterprises?
  38. Recommend a knowledge base platform for a remote customer support team.
  39. What software should we use to organize internal SOPs and onboarding docs?
  40. Best knowledge base software with rich media and video embed support
  41. What knowledge base software is best for IT department procedures and troubleshooting guides?
  42. Which team wiki is easiest to migrate existing documents into?
  43. We need a knowledge base tool with strong version control and page history. Recommendations?
  44. Best knowledge base platform for small business customer support teams

How the vendor list was built

Each of the 88 answers was read back and every named product extracted. The vendor list is discovered: a product appears here if and only if an engine named it. Counted are internal and external knowledge bases, team wikis, customer documentation platforms, knowledge management systems, and broader suites whose knowledge base or documentation module was named. Excluded, even when named: full customer support ticketing platforms, generic personal note-taking tools, project management systems, cloud file storage services, enterprise search engines, learning management systems, intranet platforms, web CMS platforms, team chat apps, and companies named only as an example user.

Spelling variants of one product are folded together — “Document360”, “Document 360” and “Document360 KB” are one row, and a trailing “by company” is dropped. An edition name is folded into its product when the plain name is at least three times as common, so “Notion Plus” counts as Notion and “Confluence Enterprise” counts as Confluence. No pair was merged by hand in this category: every fold above is the rule applied mechanically, with no human judgement about who is who.

A product is counted once per answer, however many times that answer mentions it.

Is this stable, or is it noise?

The entire run was repeated a second time, same 44 questions, same engines, independent calls. The top ten came back 9/10 identical. What moved: Wiki.js (8 in run A) dropped out of run B's ten and Help Scout (9 in run B) took that place. by position, BookStack was 9 in run A and 8 in run B. Run B named 98 vendors over 88 answers against run A's 99. The tail moves; the head does not.

A leaderboard whose top ten reshuffles between runs would not be worth publishing, so this check was run before the page was, and the page ships only because it passed.

What this is not

This measures what two answer engines said on 3 Aug 2026, in response to these questions, through their APIs. It is not a quality ranking, not a review, and not advice on which knowledge base software to buy. A product can be excellent and rank low here — that gap is the point.

The raw data

All 88 answers, verbatim, one JSON object per line: run A · run B. The per-answer extracted product names: run A · run B. Machine-readable ranking: ranking.json.