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 August 2026 Questions 44 Answers 88 Vendors named 99 Top-10 repeatability 9/10

Free to read, raw data included.

Is one of these knowledge base tools and team wikis yours?

The board is re-measured every month. For $9.99 a month you get one email when your own row moves — your rank and answer count, who took the mentions you were absent from, and which of the 44 questions started or stopped naming you. Leave your address and I reply by hand with what your row reads today. What is in it, and the $29.99 one-off report →

Nothing is charged and nothing starts — I reply by email. Your address is used to answer you and to set up billing; it does not go on a list.

Two conditions on every number below

These 44 questions are one family of phrasings — knowledge base software — and every number below is conditional on them. A differently worded family about the same products — a different size of buyer, a different budget, a different constraint — is a different measurement and can come back naming a different set of products. All 44 questions are printed in full below, so you can see exactly what was asked before you read what came back. We have measured how big that can get, on two of our own boards: SuiteCRM is named in 83 of the 132 answers on /c/crmctx/ and in none of the 132 on /c/crm/ — same products, same day, same extraction, asked differently.
The engine columns below are not one instrument. Perplexity (sonar) searches the web while it answers and returned the sources used beside every one of those 44 answers — that column is what gets retrieved. Gemini (gemini-flash-latest) was called through its API with no tools and the near-empty system prompt quoted in the method below, so it answers out of the model’s own weights — not one of those 44 answers came back with a source. That column is what the model already remembers. Both are worth counting and they are not the same measurement: a product can be named often by what the models remember and rarely by what they retrieve, or the reverse, and the totals in the Answers column add the two together.

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. Click a vendor's name to see which of the 44 questions named them, and click one of those to read the answer it was counted from, word for word.

#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 $29.99 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.

These 44 questions are one phrasing family, not every way this market gets asked about. The family is knowledge base software — that is the wording they were written from, and it is counted back against them here: 26 of them contain “knowledge”; 23 of them contain “base”; 22 of them contain “software”, and 33 of the 44 contain at least one. A different family about the same products — a different size of buyer, a different budget, a different constraint, different words — is a different measurement, and it can come back naming a different set of vendors. This board is this family, measured. It is not the whole market.
  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, and a trailing “by company” is dropped. This run collapsed 18 spellings onto 7 of the rows below: “Confluence”, “Confluence (Atlassian)” and “Confluence (Enterprise Plan)” are one row — the one the table prints as Confluence. An edition name is folded into its product when it is that product’s name followed by a further word, and the plain name is at least three times as common. This run folded 9 such names, among them “Confluence Cloud Enterprise” counts as Confluence and “Notion AI” counts as Notion. A name that merely begins with the same letters is a different product and keeps its own row. 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.

Beyond those folds a product is counted as the engines spelled it, and two rows in the table are never merged into one. When a product has been renamed or acquired and the engines still answer with both names, both names keep their own row: this page carries no hand-maintained list of who is now who, because that list would be a human claim about a mechanical count and nothing here could check it. What it has instead is the answers. Where an answer itself writes two of the rows below as one product renamed — the construction “X (formerly Y)” — the line beside those rows quotes that sentence and gives the overlap and the total, so the union is on the page. Nothing else produces that line. Two rows being named in the same answers does not, however often: the engines answer in shortlists, so the leaders of a category are named together whatever they are called. No answer in this run wrote two rows below that way, so no row below carries that line.

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 August 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.

What Perplexity was reading. It is the only one of these engines that returns a source list, and the markers in its answers above — [1], [2] — point into it. Every URL it cited, with the title, date and the excerpt it actually retrieved, one JSON object per answer: run A · run B. Join on index to the answers file, and read [n] as citations[n-1]. Perplexity returned a source list on 44 of its 44 answers. Gemini returned no sources at all — no citation, grounding or search-result field of any kind appears anywhere in its API response, on any of the 44 answers it gave. That is a fact about the engine, not a gap in this page.

The sources behind the answers

Run A's 44 Perplexity answers cited 864 URLs across 266 distinct domains. Below are the 75 that were cited in three or more separate answers. Citations counts every URL from that domain, so a domain cited three times in one answer counts three times; Answers is how many of the 44 answers cited it at all.

DomainCitationsAnswers
reddit.com6540
gitnux.org2927
slite.com2525
peoplemanagingpeople.com2121
youtube.com2117
ferndesk.com1716
g2.com1714
wifitalents.com1616
zendesk.com1616
clickhelp.com1514
proprofskb.com1512
assembly.com1313
ones.com1310
gartner.com1212
bloomfire.com1211
worldmetrics.org1111
knowledgebase.com1010
herothemes.com109
stonly.com109
learn.g2.com108
document360.com99
knowledgeowl.com99
siit.io99
blog.hubspot.com88
cxeverywhere.com88
monday.com88
zipdo.co88
slack.com77
featurebase.app76
softr.io76
en.wikipedia.org75
knowledge-base.software66
mintlify.com66
technicalwriterhq.com66
docmost.com65
docsio.co65
eesel.ai65
tango.ai64
axerosolutions.com55
capterra.com55
desk365.io55
f6s.com55
freshworks.com55
happysupport.ai55
helpscout.com55
js.wiki55
medium.com55
usepylon.com55
zapier.com55
gethelpable.com54
clickup.com44
dokuwiki.org44
egain.com44
fabric.so44
gitbook.com44
guideflow.com44
linkedin.com44
kmslh.com43
scribe.com43
atlassian.com33
bluetweak.com33
dev.to33
getflowshare.com33
getguru.com33
helpjuice.com33
mangoapps.com33
news.ycombinator.com33
nuclino.com33
producthunt.com33
productlift.dev33
sourceforge.net33
sparrowdesk.com33
thecxlead.com33
thedigitalprojectmanager.com33
typemill.net33

A domain missing from this table was cited in fewer than three answers, or was never cited at all — the run A file linked above is the complete list either way, and it is the only way to tell those two apart. Cited is not endorsed: a page the engine retrieved is not a page that recommended anyone, and this counts what was read, not what it said.

The answer a vendor panel shows you is read straight out of the run A file linked above — the page fetches the one line it needs and displays it unaltered, so what you read there and what you get by downloading the file are the same bytes.

What one line of each file holds, and the terms you may re-use them under — the raw answers may be re-used in any medium, commercially and inside open-source software, with attribution.