Your company is in a sorry state when vital knowledge is stored inside your team member’s heads. Any time someone has a question, they have to track down the relevant expert and ask for time out of their busy day to get help. In very small teams this process might be sufficient, but as your team grows this knowledge inefficiency starts to become a very huge problem.
That’s where tools like Guru come in. They were built to encourage teams to take company knowledge from the hands of individuals and store it in one centralized location. These internal wikis become a single source of truth that everyone in your team can refer to. It matters less when key team members leave since their knowledge has been stored for the future.
You might be wondering if you should invest in a tool like Guru. Will it be a good fit for your team? Read on to find out more about Guru and all the Guru competitors out there.
What is Guru?
Guru is internal wiki software that works with your company’s unique workflows to capture and store knowledge for your team. Guru works well with the apps you already love to combine all your disparate sources of knowledge into a single knowledge base. Guru organizes your knowledge into cards, boards, and collections so users can browse the knowledge base to find what they need. Cards can be easily formatted with images, videos, and tables to bring your content to life.
Guru comes with a feature to verify your knowledge so that users can trust that the content is the most up-to-date. Guru regularly prompts experts to verify the information so your knowledge base always remains accurate. This is what sets Guru apart as Knowledge Management software that enables your team to collaborate more effectively. It’s easy to set permissions for who can access particular cards, boards, and collections so you can manage your knowledge. You can link cards together so you can show users relevant knowledge that they might not have discovered otherwise.
What Does Guru Offer?
Simple editor
With Guru, the editor is very simple to use as a WYSIWYG with straightforward formatting options. If you can use Google Docs, you can use Guru’s editor. Guru’s editor allows you to insert special links to other Guru cards, although if more than one card has the same name this feature becomes a little confusing. When you create your card, you can set the interval for when the verification status needs to be reviewed, ranging from a week to a year.
Collaboration with Slack
One of the principal advantages of Guru is its powerful integration with Slack. Guru allows you to capture information directly from the Slack interface where your experts are fielding questions. Using the integration, you can create a new card and configure the settings, all from within Slack. You can also easily answer questions asked in Slack with a Guru card so your team isn’t fielding repetitive questions.
Knowledge alerts
Knowledge alerts allow you to see who is and isn’t consuming critical content. You can send out a message to groups alerting them to view your content.
Duplicate content detection
It’s important to make sure that every card in your collection is unique. Guru’s AI detects any duplicate content so you can take action to keep your knowledge tidy.
Organizing content in groups
As we’ve mentioned, Guru gives you extensive opportunities to categorize your content. A single unit of content is called a card. Guru cards are then grouped into boards, which are likely subtopics. Then boards are organized into collections
Analytics
Guru offers analytics down to the card level so you can see which users have viewed a card, who has copied it and who has added it to their favorites. Guru keeps track of which cards have been verified and which have become out of date.
Limitation of Guru as a Holistic Knowledge Base Solution
No private hosting
Guru must be hosted on their own servers so it’s not possible to make Guru privately hosted. All of Guru’s servers are hosted by Amazon Web Services, however, so you can rest assured that your data will be kept secure.
Limited content editing and formatting features
With Guru, you are limited to basic content editing and formatting features. There is a small range of colors to choose from when changing the color of the font, for example, and you can only change your headings to H1 to H3.
Can’t create public or customer knowledge base
With Guru, you are restricted to creating an internal knowledge base that sits within the Guru software. To access your content, you need to invite team members to collaborate within Guru, meaning that it’s impossible to create a public knowledge base for your customers. You can however share individual cards with a publicly accessible link in case you want to provide access to users outside of your organization.
Limited customization
You can’t customize the look and feel of your Guru knowledge base. It’s hosted within Guru’s interface so you have to make do with the style that Guru has chosen. You also can’t create a custom domain for your knowledge base because you have to log into Guru to see your collections.
Versioning only, don’t have a rollback option
Guru lets you access the version history of your cards to see what changes have been made but you don’t have the option to rollback to previous versions.
What are Top 8 Guru Alternatives?
We’ve come up with a list of top Guru competitors for you to consider.Document360
Document360 is a robust internal wiki software perfectly suited for growing teams. It’s great for private wiki or customer knowledge base. When using it as an internal wiki for your company you can store all your company’s knowledge as well-organized articles. You also have the option to make your wiki private public or a mix of both. Style your wiki with branded colors or a custom domain. Customize your header and footer navigation with links, call-to-action buttons, or social icons. You can rest assured that your own personal knowledge base will adjust to users’ screen sizes so they can view it on any device.
User’s Opinion on Document360
“Easy to use, yet powerful, and the readers love it!”
Document360 is easy to use, yet powerful – think clever tables, video embedding, etc. I love that you can import a Word document and that it can then automatically be split up into smaller articles. We are also very happy that Document360 enables us to have multiple KB versions – to align with our software versions. Also, the KB organization is important for us and works very well in Document360 – with categories and multiple layers. Our readers, in turn, are specifically happy with the search functionality and the (automatically generated) tables of content that track where you are in an article.
Source: G2 crowd
Also Read: Document360 – The best Guru alternative for you
Kipwise
Kipwise is a lightweight company wiki solution with integrations and built-in workflows to power collaboration and productivity. One of Kipwise’s most useful features is the ability to suggest relevant content while you’re working in other apps. If you’re responding to a customer ticket on Intercom or replying to a client email on Gmail, Kipwise can bring up relevant knowledge in your knowledge base without requiring you to search manually. This saves untold amounts of time in your workflow processes. You can embed documents, spreadsheets and files from other storage platforms such as Google Drive and OneDrive, and make edits on Kipwise Pages.
User’s Opinion on Kipwise
“Kipwise is a good tool to explain internal day to day processes.”
I greatly enjoy the article format and simplicity of the documents. It makes it very easy to follow a bulleted list of instructions and allows for greater detail to be fleshed out. I love the ability to enclose links to other articles that pertain to relative information, both internal and external. I love the slack extension.
Source: G2 crowd
Groove HQ
Groove is shared inbox software that was built for teams who are ready to upgrade from using email for their support tickets. Groove comes bundled in with a customer-facing knowledge base that you can use to create self-service content for your users. You can use Groove to deflect more customer tickets and save time for your support team. It’s easy to customize your Groove knowledge base to make it match your brand, using your own domain, logo and brand colors. Groove’s analytics give you insights into article performance metrics, most searched terms, most viewed articles, and article suggestions.
User’s Opinion on Groove HQ
“Great for Team Based Communications – But Wait”
I love the simple layout that Groove has, the time to train a user to get on Groove is minimalist. I also like the fact that it is setup like an email client and you can create the first ticket for the consumer from here only.
Source: G2 crowd
Trello
Trello is essentially project management software that helps you track tasks using cards, lists and boards. Trello has many collaboration options such as the ability to add users to cards, set due dates, attach files, and more. Using Trello enables teams to enhance their productivity because they can easily see what needs to be done. Users can share knowledge on Trello easily and record vital information on cards for others to share. Power-Ups make your Trello experience even more powerful with integrations for popular apps such as Gmail, Teams, and Slack.
User’s Opinion on Trello
“Trello integration with Jotform works great”
Trello makes processes so quick and efficient. I have a dashboard for personal clients and another for corporate clients. It’s so easy to add basic client information to a card then drag the card to the appropriate column. Between Trello, Zapier, and Jotform, forms and letters get sent to my clients quickly with minimal work from me. It’s made my life so much easier.
Source :G2 crowd
ProofHub
ProofHub is a project planning software with everything your team requires to get more work done faster, together. ProofHub gives teams a centralized workplace for task lists, workflows, discussions, gantt charts, calendars, documents, and more. It connects with other popular apps like file storage, accounting, invoicing software, to name but a few. The advantage of ProofHub is it combines the capabilities of multiple tools into one software that is easy to use. ProofHub promotes collaboration and team unity through assigning personal tasks or assigning them to multiple team members. You can prioritize tasks with deadlines, time estimates, and labels, and break them down into smaller tasks.
User’s Opinion on Proofhub
“The tool helped us reduce the complexity of remote work for our cross-functional teams.“
The best part is the tool’s diverse features for remote communication. We have multiple teams that work remotely and it has become easier to manage internal communication, tasks and updates using the software. Earlier, we were using Skype and emails for communicating with remote members but it often was hard to manage. With Proofhub, we can onboard members to a single account and get them collaborating faster. We also liked the workflow feature and the fact that each task list can have a separate workflow.
Source: G2 Crowd
Asana
Asana is project management software that is aimed at remote and distributed teams, enabling your entire organization to focus on its goals, and projects. Asana also functions as a collaboration tool, enabling you to coordinate team tasks so every team member knows who’s working on what. Use Asana to share feedback, files, and status updates, benefiting from a complete view of work so teams complete the right tasks at the right time. You can either organize your work into Kanban boards, timeline view to keep you on schedule or view your team’s work in one shared calendar.
User’s opinion on Asana
“Best management + collaboration tool for organisations and teams“
Asana articulates the way where team collaboration happens in the real-life into a single app. Especially the way it handles tasks visibility, milestones tracking, team reviews and appreciation, and so much more. It keeps the team on the same page. Other than that, It’s easily accessible across the web and mobile, so that when I’m traveling, I can still keep track of the notification
Source: G2 Crowd
Seismic
Seismic is a market leader in enablement, helping organizations to interact with customers, empower teams, and stimulate revenue growth. The Seismic Enablement Cloud™ is a unified enablement platform that gives customer-facing teams the right skills, content, tools, and insights to grow and win. Seismic allows teams to build, maintain, and manage content so that they can find and share personalized assets with customers easily. Seismic offers analytics that enables teams to see when and for how long customers have viewed their content. You can use Seismic to search for relevant content and keep it organized in categories, allowing employees to share knowledge with one another.
User’s Opinion on Seismic
“Sharing Digital First – helping others access information quickly.“
Seismic offers several ways to access sales information that prospects, customers, and employees need to know about our products and services. With Hubs and landing pages that easily navigate the materials, getting where you need to be quick – and when talking to prospects and customers – being organized and quick to respond with information and resources is vital in setting the stage for future opportunities.
Source: G2 Crowd
ClearSlide
ClearSlide is the most comprehensive platform for sales enablement and engagement that brings together content, communications and actionable insights. You can organize recommended content and team collections to ensure they can be discovered. This makes it simple for teams to collect and personalize content that is always up to date. ClearSlide offers real-time engagement analytics that gives you visibility into every customer interaction – that gives your team the most essential engagement insights to make more informed business decisions.
User’s Opinion on ClearSlide
“Facilitates lots of presentations and other communications“
The assortment of decks is quite enormous. There is a slide template for almost every business purpose. The user tools for editing slides are user-friendly for me. I like the way our decks can record viewer information to analyze feedback we can use for statistics and adjustments to other decks.
Source: G2 Crowd
Final Verdict: Which Guru Alternative Should You Go For?
All of these Guru alternatives support Knowledge Management in some way. The tools may help to improve collaboration, knowledge sharing, and project management. Guru is a good choice if you want a simple wiki tool to share your knowledge in cards and collections.
If you want something a little more robust, go for Document360 which offers extensive customization capabilities and a customer-facing knowledge base. In Document360, you have the benefit of a highly intuitive workflow that allows content authors to publish content with ease.
Also Read: 7 Best Archbee Alternatives for 2022
For teams who are interested in project management, Asana and Trello are top choices. They are built with many features that simplify task tracking and collaboration. For high-performing sales teams, you should think about Seismic or ClearSlide.
Whichever tool you choose, it should help your team reach new heights of productivity and efficiency. When knowledge is made visible, you can overcome communication hurdles and work more effectively as a team.
An intuitive wiki software to easily add your content and integrate it with any application. Give Document360 a try!
Get StartedFrequently Asked Questions
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What is Guru used for?
Guru is a collaborative knowledge management solution that integrates with your workflow to keep the information you need at your fingertips at all times. With Guru, your customer-facing teams can easily access information from across your organisation in order to provide excellent customer support.
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What are the limitations of Guru?
Guru limits you to establishing an internal knowledge base that is housed within the Guru software. It only provides basic content editing and formatting features.
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