Organizations looking to manage their online documentation or knowledge bases for their products and services to support their customers and employees are left with too many platforms and tools in the market. Some organizations use WordPress as a web content management and intend to use the available plugins. If you are one such organization thinking of using one of the widely used WordPress plugins – BetterDocs, to manage your online knowledge base, we recommend you read this blog.
You can use such plugins and leverage the WordPress platform; you may perceive having several advantages. You should assess if configuring and maintaining such plugins, which still are not feature-rich and demand WordPress skills, really outweigh using ready-to-use software like Document360, which could help you to establish and maintain your content in no time at a lower operational cost than depending on WordPress skills and letting you focus on your core business.
Introduction
Businesses are widely considering improving their customer and employee experience. In this thriving era of digitalization, people seek information and omnichannel support. Businesses prioritize the need to make information available online about their products and services.
One of the practices is to use WordPress to build a full-fledged business website to a simple blog and even WordPress as a knowledge base that serves information about the products on the website. It becomes difficult to manage as the content grows and to meet the internet nuances to make your content relevant a customer searches.
As technology and practices evolve, organizations understand the need for better online content management tools. Organizations that use WordPress started using specialized plugins like BetterDocs, to manage their knowledge base.
In one of our previous blogs, Using WordPress as Knowledge Base, we discussed the various aspects of using the WordPress platform to manage your knowledge base and how an enterprise-grade, ready-to-use knowledge base software like Document360 will be more advantageous.
In this blog, we shall discuss the potential advantages of Document360 over a specific WordPress plugin BetterDocs to manage the knowledge base.
A knowledge base is a centralized repository of information that helps your customers and employees find answers to their support questions by themselves.
Knowledge bases also have evolved to make the information readily available not only as web pages but also through different channels by integrating with chatbots and ticket deflectors by automatically providing relevant answers to the support tickets even before the support agents pick up the tickets.
What is BetterDocs plugin in WordPress?
BetterDocs is one of the widely used WordPress plugins that helps businesses to create & organize their documentation page and manage their knowledge base. It provides basic capabilities that facilitate their content management teams with document authoring and management.
Why should Document360 be considered compared to BetterDocs?
Suppose your business is extensively using WordPress for other purposes. Consider using one of the widely used plugins for managing knowledge bases, which is just another online content. WordPress is built with too many other web content capabilities, and managing knowledge bases is one of the capabilities. Though the plugins look good, they may only serve a very fundamental purpose; as your content grows, it is very likely as your product & services and your content management teams grow, you may be challenged with the limited capabilities.
Software like Document360 is purpose-built for knowledge base management and complements your content management team to effectively manage your knowledge base. The following factors may help you understand why you should consider Document360 than BetterDocs.
Getting started
To get started with the BetterDocs knowledge base, you should have a paid subscription to WordPress. BetterDocs is a plugin in the WordPress ecosystem and is provided by one of the leading WordPress-based product companies.
Once the plugin is installed, you may have to proceed with a series of configurations and setup before you can start authoring articles. License management and activation is another process you may have to follow if you intend to use the PRO version.
Your hosting options for the Knowledge base through BetterDocs depend on the hosting configuration of your WordPress site.
Getting started with Document360 is super easy. You just need to sign up and start authoring your articles immediately. Your knowledge base is available literally in minutes.
Interested in Document360 Knowledge base? Schedule a demo with one of our experts
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WordPress expertise required
BetterDocs, as a WordPress plugin, will need WP developers to configure and manage the knowledge base, especially when setting up, making any changes like themes, creating, publishing, and maintaining it.
Document360 doesn’t require any such technical staff. It is built with content writers’ experience as a focus, and it is easy to adopt and use. It can be used by any technical writer who has used documentation tools like Microsoft Word or Google Docs.
Pricing and total cost of ownership
BetterDocs is a WordPress plugin and is NOT free. Though there is a free plan, the feature set is very basic, and the Pro version has different pricing plans. One must be aware WordPress platform charges are applicable and recurring.
It doesn’t stop there; you may need to manage a team with WordPress developer skills that add to the operational cost.
Document360 is a SaaS product with different pricing plans to suit your needs. No additional skill sets are required, hence no extra cost for any technical support teams.
User experience
BetterDocs, as a plugin, is deeply integrated into the WordPress platform. So, the user experience focused on knowledge base management will be restricted. Users may need help navigating the WordPress platform, switching pages for content generation, and other configurations. Frequently used options may either be hidden or demand navigation.
In Document360, the portal is built to provide a first-class experience to manage the content of the knowledge base. The options required to manage any resource, like categories or articles at focus, are available on that page.
Information Architecture
Information architecture focuses on organizing, structuring, and labeling content effectively and sustainably. The “parts” of your knowledge base are made up of the article content and categories. The way these are linked creates a cohesive system in which users can learn to find content independently. Within the limits of WordPress UX, BetterDocs provides content categorization and templates. Content management is restricted to basic capabilities like adding an article to a category, moving to another category, etc. The content structure could be more precise, with different levels and hierarchies. As the volume of content grows, the hierarchy and structure of the content organization get complex. This is where the challenge arises.
Document360 provides better UX in terms of content organization and management. It is feature-rich with advanced content management capabilities like –
- Categorization of content
- Replication of articles within categories
- Content reuse with templates, variables, and snippets, glossary
- SEO management
Documentation
Documentation means the capability to author and manage content in your knowledge base. Content writers use sophisticated tools to author content and expect similar experiences.
Most required capabilities like the following are not possible or not directly available.
1. Version management
Content writers would like to fork multiple versions of the document and manage the history of the changes. Version control is not native to BetterDocs; you may need to depend on external plugins to manage versions at the WordPress level.
Document360 provides advanced version management at the article level.
While working with multiple versions of the articles, the authors would require the capability to compare the differences between each of the versions.
2. Localization and Translations
Making your content available in multiple languages is essential if you want your knowledge base to cater to visitors from different locales. BetterDocs leverages WordPress Multilingual Plugin (WPML) for this purpose, which comes at an additional cost and managing the license.
Document360 provides advanced localization and translation services within the portal itself. You can choose and pay based on the requirements.
Editor
Though BetterDocs leverages one of the best editors in the market, it is not very well integrated within the content management portal. Users will be navigated to a different page altogether, which is not a native experience. Organizing the article within the category and managing them is also not intuitive.
Document360 provides one of the best editor experiences with advanced block editor capabilities and formatting utilities.
Technical writers also want markdown and HTML-based editing experience as well, Document360 provides such editor capabilities.
Article redirection rules
As we manage web content, the articles get referred to hundreds of external sites over time. One cannot avoid a scenario where the article URL may require a change after some time based on the change in context. In such cases, the backlinks to this article from other sites may result in broken links. It is not possible to fix this in BetterDocs.
Document360 provides a article URL redirect feature that would be helpful when you change a specific article’s URL, and the same article URL has been referenced in different articles in your knowledge base.
Workflow management
Suppose you have any internal processes for the content team to follow, from drafting content until it gets published to ensure it is well-reviewed and approved. Though BetterDocs leverages the pending review capability of the editor, more is needed. Workflows in Document360 create various stages or checkpoints and help track an article/category page from the initial draft (New article) to a published one.
Article status and review reminders help in setting and representing the status of an article and help teams keep their articles up to date by alerting team members when an article is ready for review.
Users & Security
A single person does not usually manage a knowledge base or content. There may be at least two or more people working on this. Large enterprises have different teams with proper team structures to manage the content. This necessitates user management and security.
BetterDocs leverages the roles and user access management within the WordPress platform. This may be insufficient.
Document360 on the other hand, has meticulously developed user management and security capabilities.
1. Team collaboration
Often, one or more authors will work on a single article. They may co-author the article, review it, make corrections, etc. Document360 provides in-article discussion capabilities to collaborate with co-authors to discuss the portion of the content with references.
2. Content access
You should restrict access to your content management team members only to certain categories and not all. This granular level of content access restriction is not possible with BetterDocs. Document360 allows you to configure this at the user level and to create roles and assign access policies.
3. Secure access through Readers & Groups configuration
Though you can set the access level for an article, whether it is public or private, in BetterDocs, it is not intuitive. You cannot review and manage the access. Document360 allows you to manage reader roles, and content permissions and audit the same. You may also want to restrict access or allow self-registration for email from certain domains and IP-based restrictions.
WordPress can be open to access or restricted, but Document360 offers custom secure access to the knowledge base. You can have a limited knowledge base for internal users like employees and an open one for your customers.
Backup and Restore
BetterDocs leverages backup and restore capabilities that are available within the WordPress ecosystem. It may require further configurations or integration with other services or site hosting providers.
Document360 provides best-in-class backup and restore capabilities that are native to the tool and better auditing focused on the knowledge base content. You can back up and restore to the required point in no time.
Integrations and Extensions
You may want to expose your rich knowledge base to visitors through various tools and channels. For this, you will need integration to make that information access seamless. BetterDocs doesn’t have extensive support to share their content. You may need to use available plugins that will help you expose the WordPress content.
Document360 has integration to hundreds of external tools and services that work hand in hand with your existing applications.
Help center capabilities
One critical use case of the knowledge base is instantaneously providing your support Though BetterDocs does provide live search capabilities, it is a reader experience. This doesn’t make the content available to your support agents.
Document360 integrates with your existing help desk, analytics, commenting, chat, and translation products both ways.
API Docs
As a knowledge base, you may not only restrict to provide general content but also API-related information about your products and services. BetterDocs doesn’t provide API documentation capabilities.
The API documentation feature in Document360 provides a complete solution for creating and managing API references. With this feature, you can create high-quality API documentation that helps your users understand and consume APIs effectively.
AI capabilities
Almost all products and services are now considering AI features. WordPress platforms and editors are also experimenting with AI tools. BetterDocs, as such, has not released any AI features.
Document360 has already released a few AI capabilities that will complement the content writers with identifying the right title for the content, preparing precise summaries from the long content, recommending relevant tags to related articles, and helping generate proper SEO descriptions.
These features are seeing faster adoption with our existing customers.
The above-discussed features are just a few to compare Document360 directly with BetterDocs. Once you explore Document360, you will appreciate the rich features that simply empower your content management teams.
Final remarks
Document360 is one of the most sought-after tools if you are looking for a comprehensive knowledge-based solution. Your cost of customer services can be significantly reduced by allowing your users to leverage self-help using a knowledge base that offers quick responses to their queries.
Moreover, it enables you to create a knowledge base that streamlines internal communication between different teams. You can use Document360 to manage your knowledge base without relying too much on IT experts.
On the face of it, given your alternatives with WordPress, it may look like a costlier option. Still, if you can start using it and experience the focus on knowledge base management, you will appreciate the value for the money.
An intuitive knowledge base software to easily add your content and integrate it with any application. Give Document360 a try!
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