How KnowledgeBase Manager Pro Stacks Up Against Competition
Knowledge Base Software Review and Comparison
The chart below gives a side-by-side comparison between Knowledge Base Manager Pro and major competitors.
KnowledgeBase Manager Pro | Competitor(s) |
|---|---|
| Web 2.0 and AJAX Interface Optimized for everyday tasks with quick and responsive interface based on modern AJAX technologies and designed by real professionals in usability. Most actions performed x-times faster than in old fashioned web applications. Yes, you should be a little prepared to utilize all the benefits of such application. Just open your mind and try everything you see in application work area and you’ll be amazed how easy, fast and responsive the KnowledgeBase Manager Pro is! | Old, Tortoise Speed Applications Yes, they can have pleasant graphical interface, just to attract novices. But they have nothing between powerful applications with really useful interface. This is a marketing trick. However the most important, they also have old fashioned technology when any operation requires reloading the whole page just to get new set of data or move from management of one item type to another. In addition many operations require several such reloads, dramatically reducing work performance everyday! |
| Easy KB Structure Management With KnowledgeBase Manager Pro you have categories and articles management in one place as both are main items of your knowledge base. Here you can always add new category, move it or rename just in one click! As well you can browse your KB articles, sort, filter and search them easily and even show articles from several categories at once. Here you can also perform group operations, importing and more. Managing KB structure and articles is so easy and fast with KnowledgeBase Manager Pro! | Separate, Hard Management You have to make many operations browsing through different modules. Want to add, rename or move a category.. yep you should go to appropriate module then and perform dozen of operations with page reloads. This is true almost for anything in the application(s). |
| Easy Access to Article Attributes and Linked Information Just open an article in view or edit mode and all attributes and linked content available in tabs: Advanced (Advanced Article Attributes), Custom Fields, Attachments, Related Articles, Auto-Related Articles, Comments, Negative Article Rating and Comments, Version History etc. You can easily browse whole information linked to the article and change it if you need to. | Divided by Modules You can’t just open an article and view all the content that is linked to it as well as you can’t edit it right there. So, you need to do more movements to get what you want. |
| Advanced Custom Fields Much more custom field types available, like: WYSIWYG, Check boxes, Radio Buttons, Select Lists, Multi-Select Lists, Combo boxes, Number Fields, URL Links, Date and Time Pickers, besides standard text custom field type. You can make any custom field to be required to be filled, for internal use only or searchable both in front-end and back-end separately. There are dozens of other options available that vary with field type. | Simple Custom Fields or Not Available In most cases just text and select fields available (if any) without any additional options like required, searchable, etc. |
| Article Drafts You can easily create a draft article that will be visible to current user only. Thus you can always have your ideas, or changed but not published articles in your KB. | NO Drafts You can’t just add a draft article idea that will be visible to you only as well as you can’t edit published articles without publishing of these changes. |
| Article Auto Saving Great feature if you forgot to save long article while typing it online. | NO Auto Saving By loosing important information you’ll understand that is it very important feature for any content driven application. |
| Fast and Optimized Search KnowledgeBase Manager Pro’s team always thinks about huge loads and huge data sets as well as quality and relevance of search results. Thus every function optimized to be stable and fast in enterprise environment. Search speed and its relevance is what we have explored the best and implemented in fast and reliable search across KnowledgeBase Manager Pro. | Slow and NO Relevance We have examined all applications to be slow in search and producing not relevant results. This is a bogus bug in enterprise or huge loaded environments. You or your clients should be able to find what they need and get results in a reasonable time! |
| Full-featured Operations in Front-end You have all editorial features for articles and categories available in public area. Thus you can easily add or edit a category or an article or any of its attributes as well as linked content within front-end part while viewing your knowledgebase. | Either Limited or Not Available You can just edit title and content of an article but you can’t attach files, add related articles, moderate comments or change article attributes etc. |
| Tree View Categories in Front-end In some cases it is the best way to represent information and navigation within knowledge base or online documentation. | NO Tree-view or Buggy and Slow Few implementations that we have found are slow and not cross browser. |
| Powerful Bulk Operations Bulk operations available for all data in KMP. There are plenty of bulk operations for main items like articles. You can perform dozen of bulk operations on articles quickly and easily. With article bulk operations you can change: category, access permissions, author, date created, rating, number of views, publishing and expiration dates, mark article as featured, as well as copy, move and delete articles. | Just Delete or Not Available But what if you want to move some articles from one category to another, copy them or change attributes quickly? Their solution is to open and edit articles one by one! Not an option! |
| Article Recovery Useful if someone suddenly deleted wrong article or simply you want to restore accidentally deleted article. It is also useful if novices have access to knowledge base and deleted something important. | NO Article Recovery Article has been deleted for some reason? Just forgot that you had it as you can’t restore it at all! |
| Remote Publishing You can publish whole knowledge base, one of its categories with or without subcategories, one single article or the block with auto-suggested articles from your knowledge base based on the content of the page on which it will be loaded. Publications can have their own language, style and settings. All changes made in your knowledge base immediately available in appropriate publications. | NO Remote Publishing |
| Module Quick Search Quick search available in all modules for all types of data in KnowledgeBase Manager Pro. It’s useful in everyday work with your knowledge base. | Either in Articles Module Only or Not Available Only delete operation available. |
| Useful Quick Filters With quick filters you can easily filter items by many parameters that is also useful in everyday work and will improve your work performance. Filters available in all modules across KnowledgeBase Manager Pro. | Not Available |
| Meta Data for Categories Categories are also pages and thus have meta data that you can fulfill to improve SEO. Meta data also used by search function in KnowledgeBase Manager Pro. | Not Available Title only, but you can’t type meta keywords or meta description to the category. |
| Article Rating Trends You can track how article rating changes in time. | Not Available |
| Multilingual Support in Glossary Alphabetical Navigation You can have alphabetical glossary navigation in front-end on any language as it is automatically generated from first letters of terms. | Not Available or English Only |
| Database Backups Module You can backup your entire knowledge base and restore it with one click if you will need to. | Not Available |
| Automated Database Backups You can set database backups to occur with certain period of time automatically. | Not Available |
| Harvested Emails Module When users write comments, questions etc. they leave email addresses and you can have all email addresses of your users in one place. Exporting option is also available. This is useful if you want to send emails to your users. | Not Available |
| Advanced Search Engine Friendly Links There are several options for SEO links that you can have with KnowledgeBase Manager Pro. Either article title only or full path with category titles as well. Ability to set extension for URLs, etc. | One Option or Not Available |
| Importing of Articles from CSV and XLS through the Wizard You can choose several options of article importing like delimiter and format. | You Should Meet Special Format In most cases you don’t know the format and it is not described. |
| Article Subscriptions Management Users of your knowledge base can subscribe to receive article updates and/or comments by email. There is a module to manage these subscriptions. | Not Available |
| Category Subscriptions Management Users of your knowledge base can subscribe to receive new articles that are added to the category by email. You can manage these subscriptions from the separate module. | Not Avaialbe |
| Updater Module Special updater module will inform you on release of new versions and you’ll be able to easily update KnowledgeBase Manager Pro through update wizard. | Either Check Only or Not Available You will be notified only but you’ll need to perform manual update. |
| Multiple Interface Languages You can have multiple interface languages in KnowledgeBase Manager Pro at a time and users can choose the language they want in their profile. Different interface languages can be also used for separate publications. | One Language Only You can have only one language enabled in a time. |
| Edit Languages through Web Interface In KnowledgeBase Manager Pro you can either translate in application itself or export language file and then import it back. | Text Files Only |
| Custom Ratings You can create your own scale and style. | One Hard Coded Type You can’t change rating type or style. For example you can’t get a custom scale from 1 to 10 or your own style. |
| Per User Preferences Staff members have preferences that allow them to tune KnowledgeBase Manager Pro according to their preferences. Availability of user preferences can be controlled by administrator as well. | No User Preferences |
| Side-by-Side Comparison in Version History You can compare article versions side-by-side and check differences easily. | Not Available You have to open both articles separately and find what have been changed. |
| AJAX Enabled Actions in Front-end Front-end operations in KnowledgeBase Manager Pro are AJAX’ed and thus dramatically improve end user experience. | Few Page Reloads for Any Operation |
| More Settings and Styling for Front-End Part There are a lot of settings and styling options for front-end part of your knowledge base. These options allow you to easily customize, enable or disable functions and change logo through web interface. Besides these easy to manage settings you also have ability to fully customize the look and feel through template management module. | Less Options Available Just basic features, customization and styling options available. |
| LDAP Integration Support in All Versions ANY version of KnowledgeBase Manager Pro can be integrated with your LDAP server. No additional charges! | LDAP Available in Enterprise Licenses Only LDAP integration is available in costly Enterprise versions that start from $2,000… |
| RTL Support KnowledgeBase Manager Pro supports right-to-left writing and includes RTL templates. One checkbox switches a theme into right-to-left mode. You can even create your own custom theme with RTL support! | Not Available It is hard to find a solution that supports right-to-left writing. |
| Indexation of Documents of All Popular Formats Knowledgebase Manager Pro can search in lots of different document formats including PDF, TXT, DOCX, DOC, XLS, XLSX, PPT, PPTX, HTML, JPG, TIF, VDX, DOT, RTF, and 25 other formats! | No Indexation or Several Basic Formats Only |
| Natural Language Search and Boolean Search Both full-text search methods find exactly what you need. Fast! | Keyword Search Usually only basic keyword search is available. It rarely shows good search results. You just need to know where the sought for item is located because you’ll never find it otherwise! |
| LDAP Mapping Supports Large Amount of Groups and Users Knowledgebase Manager Pro can easily import thousands of users from thousands of groups from any LDAP server. | Problematic Import Even of Several Hundreds of Users Sometimes, one thousand of users is the maximum number that can be imported. Usually the number is even less and limited to several hundreds. Also, it really hard to setup connection to a LDAP server. |
| Sitemap Knowledgebase Manager Pro generates a special XML sitemap which helps search engines like Google, Bing, Yahoo, Ask.com, and others to better index your knowledge base. Update of the plain and gzipped sitemap files can be performed on content change and on schedule. All major search engines get notified about the sitemap updates automatically. | Not Available |
| Advanced User Management Based on Two Different User Types: Staff and Clients There are staff user accounts for company’s employees that create and update content, and administer the knowledgebase, and there are also read-only client accounts for your clients that allow them to get access to some restricted content and use custom time and language settings. | Staff Users Only |
| Optional User Registration Process It is possible to enable user registration. There are options for assignment of new users to groups, approval, email notifications about new registrations, etc. | No Registration |
| API Interface with All Methods for Getting Data from the Knowledgebase API methods that get full information about any article, category, get lists of articles, categories, and glossary terms, search in articles, attachments, categories, and glossary, etc. | Limited Number of API Methods |
| SEO Optimization It blocks crawling of non-content pages, avoids duplicate content crawling, saves PageRank on article title changes. Customizable search engine friendly links are also supported. | Basic or No SEO Optimization |
| Drag’n'Drop Method for Images and Documents Upload Drag and drop documents and images for faster article creation. Extremely convenient when you need to upload multiple files at a time. No limitation on file size, no limitation on number of files, and upload progress is shown. | “Old-School” Upload Method Files can be uploaded one-by-one only, or you can select then one-by-one and then use “bulk upload” button. Maximum file size is limited by server settings and commonly causes problems when you want to increase it (especially on a shared hosting). |
| Microsoft SQL Support in All Versions Supports MySQL and MS SQL in all versions. | Not Supported, or Supported in Enterprise Licenses Only MS SQL is often not supported, or supported only in costly Enterprise versions that start from $2,000… |
| Single Sign-On (SSO) Full-functional Single Sign-On. Your users have one login and password for everything. They login once to access every resource, including KMP. | Single Sign-On (SSO) Not supported. Some vendors declare support of SSO, but when you try to use it, you understand that its presence is formal. |
| PDF Export Full support: UTF-8, images, multiple languages, custom header, footer, and custom styles, table of contents and outline are supported. PDF version of your article will have exactly the same look. | PDF Export Unicode characters are not supported, if your article is not in English – forget about PDF export. Little or no formatting can be exported – so usually you just get a plain text version of your article. Images are not supported either. |
| REASONABLE PRICE Single user version with full set of features is available for extremely low price of $196. Version with more than 100 user accounts with enterprise features is available for just $800. You can also get hosted knowledge base that runs on our servers for as low as $50 per month. | HIGH PRICE Average price for just a normal (at least working) solution starts at $500. Solution with enterprise features starts at $2,000… |
