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Three of these publish a pricing model and three publish nothing at all, and the distance you can travel before somebody wants a call runs from forever to not at all. What none of the six offers is a knowledge base your business owns outright, with the spaces and approval rules built around how your team actually writes, and one company answerable for it afterwards.
Where to start
Most businesses shopping for a wiki already know what is not working. The runbook lives in a chat thread somebody pinned, or there are three versions of the onboarding document and nobody can say which one is current. Those are structure problems rather than licence problems, and if the answer is a knowledge base you own and somebody else runs, what managed Frappe Wiki actually covers is set out in full.
1
Notion will let you run a workspace free forever and upgrade with a card. Helpjuice prints all three of its monthly figures on the page and gives you fourteen days without a card. Confluence gives you ten users free, then prices on volume bands that render only inside their own calculator. Document360 publishes no figure at all but hands you fourteen days with every feature switched on. Bloomfire publishes nothing and bills every plan across several years. Guru publishes no figure, offers no free plan and runs no trial, so the only way in is a booked working session. That spread tells you more about how each one expects to be bought than any feature grid will.
2
A subscription hands you an empty workspace and a login. Somebody still has to decide the space structure, the permissions, the approval and review rules, the page templates and what becomes of a document nobody has opened in two years, and on every platform here that somebody is you or a contractor you hire separately. It is the work that decides whether anybody trusts what they find, and it is the work nobody quotes for. The same gap runs through every comparison on this site.
3
Standing a wiki up is the easy half, and every platform here manages it. What changes afterwards is the billing. Notion holds a paid seat for the rest of the billing period once it has been assigned. Confluence bills monthly plans on the highest seat count reached at any point in the cycle, prorates the additions and credits nothing back when somebody leaves. Ask what a year of ordinary hiring does to the figure before you sign.
Six platforms and six different answers to one simple question: how much can you see before you have to talk to somebody. One of them will not let you see anything.
VS
Free Plan, No Time Limit
Ten Dollars Per Member
Sign On Is A Business Feature
Notion is the one platform here you can run indefinitely without speaking to anybody, and the free plan is a real plan rather than a countdown. Paid tiers are ten dollars per member on Plus and twenty on Business, charged per member rather than per login, and a seat you assign is held for the rest of the billing period. The free plan caps external guests at ten, limits blocks once a second member joins and keeps seven days of page history. SAML sign on arrives at Business, and SCIM, audit logs and a named success contact only at Enterprise.
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VS
Free For Ten Users
Billed On Your Peak Seat Count
Data Center Ends In 2029
Confluence has the deepest ecosystem here and the most awkward billing. The free plan covers ten users with community support only, and above that the rate sits on progressive volume bands that render only inside Atlassian's own calculator, so no figure is quotable from the page. Monthly plans bill on the highest seat count assigned at any point in the cycle, additions are prorated, removals are credited back at nothing, and the same rule applies to Marketplace apps. Premium adds a backed uptime commitment and support around the clock. Data Center subscriptions expire in March 2029 and those deployments become read only.
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VS
Fourteen Days, Every Feature
Six Variables Set The Quote
Success Manager On Every Plan
Document360 publishes no price of any kind, and unusually it explains why: a flat tier would overcharge a small team and undercharge an enterprise. Six things set the quote and they name all six, which is team accounts, workspaces, languages, security and sign on needs, whether the knowledge base is public or private or both, and how much of the AI suite you use. The trial runs fourteen days with every feature switched on, so you can answer most of those yourself before the call. Every plan carries a dedicated success manager, onboarding and standard migration, and the reader side analytics are the strongest here.
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VS
No Free Plan, No Trial
Explicitly Not Per Seat
Strategy Team Included
Guru is the only platform here you cannot try at all. There is no free plan, no self serve trial and no rate card, and the single way in is a booked working session where they scope you on size, knowledge complexity and how far along you are with AI. What you buy is one package in three layers: the platform, an embedded knowledge management strategy team, and enterprise governance covering SOC 2 Type II, HIPAA, single sign on, SCIM and permission aware answers with citations. They refuse per seat pricing on principle. If you wanted an evaluation you could run yourself on a Thursday afternoon, this is not it.
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VS
No Price, Any Tier
Billed Across Several Years
Implementation Quoted Apart
Bloomfire is enterprise knowledge management rather than a wiki, and it publishes no figure against any of its three tiers. Those tiers scope on reach rather than seats: a team, a department, or the whole company. It says plainly that it will not invoice you more as user numbers grow, which is the customer friendly choice and rarer in this category than it should be. The cost sits in the term. Every plan is billed on a multi-year basis, and data migration and implementation services are quoted as a separate fee on top. A self guided tour and a booked demo will show you the software. Neither will show you a number.
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VS
All Three Figures Published
Banded At Thirty Users
Fourteen Days, No Card
Helpjuice prints every figure on the page: two hundred and forty nine, four hundred and forty nine and seven hundred and ninety nine a month, with no annual toggle and no call to book first. It is the easiest of these to budget from. What the bands buy is where the planning goes. Thirty people who can log in on the first plan, a hundred on the second, unlimited on the third, with single sign on and the whole AI suite held above the entry tier, and storage capped at twelve, twenty four and thirty eight gigabytes. The trial is fourteen days of everything and it asks for no card.
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About the service
Managed Frappe Wiki is not a subscription with our name on the invoice. Your business owns the instance, the pages and the source code, the spaces, permissions and approval rules are built around how your team already writes things down, and one company is answerable for the configuration, the Frappe Cloud hosting and the support afterwards. If you want something switched on this week and nothing custom about it, our managed Zoho Learn service is usually the better place to start.
The six split three and three on published pricing, and the reason behind each silence matters more than the silence itself. Notion and Confluence publish a per member model, so you can model your own bill and the answer moves every time you hire. Helpjuice publishes three flat monthly figures instead, banded on how many people can log in. Document360 declines to publish because it prices a configuration rather than a headcount, and it names the six variables that set the quote. Guru declines because it sells a bundled engagement rather than software, and refuses per seat pricing outright. Bloomfire declines too, and bills every plan across several years with the implementation quoted beside it. Those are several different products wearing one category label.
The honest limit on our side is the AI layer. Guru builds its whole product around governed AI answers carrying citations and lineage, Document360 ships Eddy and sells a premium AI suite on top, Helpjuice bundles an AI writer, AI search and a chatbot from its second tier upward, and Notion sells agent credits by the thousand. Frappe Wiki ships none of that. If what you want is an assistant your staff can question in plain language across every system you run, buy it from somebody who has already built one. That is a real gap and it is stated here rather than buried.
Underneath all of it is a question about who owns the structure. On a subscription platform the vendor decides what a page and a permission can be, and the answer changes when they ship. On an open source system you decide, which is more work and more control. Whether that trade is worth making depends on how ordinary your documentation actually is, and most of it is more ordinary than people expect.
A wiki switched on changes nothing on its own. Space structure, who may publish and who may only suggest, the approval and review rules, page templates and what becomes of a document nobody has opened in two years decide whether anybody trusts what they find, and every one of those is a decision rather than a setting. We read what your team already writes before any of it gets configured.
Two of these six charge per member, one bands you by how many people can log in, and the other three size the quote on how big you already are, so growth and the bill are the same event whichever you pick. Five hundred a month covers configuration, content migration, space and permission structure, admin training, Frappe Cloud hosting and the support queue, and adding another two hundred people does not touch it. At twelve people that is more than a small subscription here. At five hundred people it is not.
A page that has quietly stopped matching how the work is actually done does not announce itself. It still opens, it still looks authoritative, and the gap turns up when a new starter follows it and does the wrong thing. Watching the review dates and the ownership is part of the fee rather than something bought separately afterwards.
What is the best knowledge base software for a small business?
There is no answer that survives contact with your own headcount. What separates these six is how far they let you get on your own. Notion will sell to one person for nothing and stay free indefinitely. Helpjuice prints three flat monthly figures and gives you fourteen days on a card you never enter. Confluence gives ten users free, then keeps the rate inside a calculator. Document360 shows no price but opens every feature for fourteen days. Bloomfire shows no price and bills across several years. Guru shows nothing and runs no trial at all. Frappe Wiki is open source, so the software costs nothing and what you pay for is the work.
How does a knowledge base decision go wrong?
Rarely on the software. It goes wrong on the content and the structure, which nobody quotes for. The platform gets bought, a login arrives, and three months later there are nine pages in it and everybody is still asking in chat. The subscription bills the whole time. Ask who is doing that work before you ask what the plan costs.
Who owns the platform if you implement it for us?
You do, and on Frappe Wiki that is a property of the software rather than a clause we agreed to. The instance is yours, the pages and their revision history are yours, the source code is open, and every space and permission rule we configure stays with you. Stop paying us and the wiki keeps running. On a subscription the content is exportable, but the software itself stops.
Is it cheaper to just subscribe to one of these instead?
For a small team, almost certainly yes, and we would rather say so here than argue around it. Notion is free indefinitely, and fifteen people on Plus is a hundred and fifty a month against our five hundred. If you have fifteen staff, one handbook and nobody arguing about who may edit it, use Notion and spend the difference elsewhere. What none of those figures covers is somebody deciding the structure and keeping it right, which on their side is either your operations lead giving up evenings or a contractor billed separately.
Which of these platforms will actually show you a price?
Two of them properly, and one halfway. Notion publishes its per member rates outright and Helpjuice prints two hundred and forty nine, four hundred and forty nine and seven hundred and ninety nine a month, so those are the two you can budget from the page. Confluence publishes a free tier and a set of volume bands whose rates render only inside its own calculator, so no figure is quotable. Document360 publishes nothing and says why, naming the six variables that set the quote. Bloomfire publishes nothing either and bills across several years. Guru publishes nothing, runs no trial, and asks for a call. We publish five hundred and one thousand, which is not a virtue so much as a different sales model.
What happens when something breaks after the first month?
On a subscription the software is supported and the configuration is not, and almost everything that goes wrong is configuration. A permission that shows a contractor the salary page is not a bug their support desk can fix. Here it is one company and one number, fixes sit inside the fee rather than being quoted for, and when an upstream Frappe Wiki release changes something that affects you, that is our problem before it is yours.
Do we have to move every document at once?
No, and most people should not. Onboarding and the runbooks usually go first, because somebody needs them every week and the improvement shows up inside a month. Policies, product notes and anything customer facing follow once somebody has decided what each page is actually for. Running new starters through the new wiki while an old shared drive sits where it is for a quarter is normal rather than a compromise.
Can you take over a Frappe Wiki instance somebody else set up?
Often, and it is real work rather than a tidy up. We read the space structure, the permission model, the approval rules, the page templates and every customization somebody added, then say plainly what is worth keeping. Occasionally the honest answer is a clean instance with the pages and their history migrated across.
How long before people are actually using it?
Two to five weeks for most teams, and longer where an existing library has to be restructured rather than imported. Configuration starts the week we begin, not after a discovery phase that bills separately. What people notice first is rarely the software. It is that the answer sits in one place and nobody is asking in chat any more.
We have someone technical in house. What is left for you to do?
Standing the software up is a morning of work and Frappe Cloud will host it for a modest monthly fee, so if that were the job you would not need us. The time goes into space structure, permission design, and the approval and review rules, and into the awkward cases nobody thinks about first. A contractor who needs three pages and nothing else. A policy that has to be re-approved every year. A page two teams both believe they own.
When should you not hire us for this at all?
Two cases, and both are common. If you have six people and one handbook, a shared folder and a decent habit are genuinely fine and we will say so. If what you actually need is an assistant that answers across every system you run, with citations and inherited permissions, Guru has built exactly that and Frappe Wiki has not, so buy theirs.
What if the software is not the real problem?
We will say so before taking your money, and the fit review costs nothing. A wiki built around documentation nobody wanted only files the neglect more tidily. A fair number of these conversations end with forty pages being deleted, four being rewritten, and no new software at all.
What does this actually cost if we go through you?
Two flat monthly tiers, both listed on the managed Frappe Wiki page. Standard at five hundred a month covers configuration, content migration, space and permission structure, admin training, Frappe Cloud hosting and ongoing support. Priority at one thousand adds two concurrent requests, faster turnaround and a quarterly review of permissions, space structure and stale pages. Neither tier counts members.
What happens if we want to leave later?
Thirty days notice ends it and nothing is stranded. The instance, the pages and the revision history were always yours, so there is no migration and nothing to hand back. What stops is us. That is a harder offer for a subscription platform to make, because there the software is the thing that stops.
What do you need from us before we start?
Whatever the current documentation lives in, a list of who is allowed to see what, and an hour with the person everybody asks when they cannot find something. The walk through takes a few days and costs nothing, and it ends with a plain answer about whether Frappe Wiki suits the business.
