BookStack vs. Zendesk Guide

BookStack is fantastic for having business users and not-so-technically-savvy IT users. It enables them to create a documentation they like in a visual way while still forcing them to adhere to logical structure of a document. It works fine even for more technical matters such as integration guidelines, especially when these concern some of the more obscure technologies. The exported docs are presentable but lack any interactivity. Where it lacks is generating heavily technical documentations. Heavier REST or GraphQL integrations should for example be documented through other means. As for developer documentations, there are definitely more suitable alternatives, also.

Incentivized

[Zendesk Guide] is well suited for any telecommunications company, especially in a work from home scenario. Zendesk Guide is basically an incentive for employees to not slack off and continue to provide excellent skills and services they were trained to do. The application is not necessarily appropriate for business's that don't utilize over the phone or web chat interactions.

Incentivized

• Documentation
• Guides
• Knowledge-base
• Version control

Incentivized

• Easy to organize articles
• Easy to preview and publish
• Easy to edit
• Ability to add other users at different permission levels

Incentivized

• Continuity in backward compatibility
• Dark mode
• Absent tree view

Incentivized

• Some improvement needed to reviewing articles, as we can't do the reviews in the same place where we write and publish the article.
• Central KBs need to support version history, which some time lacks to give track of multiple review.

Incentivized

The support is good but can sometime be frustrating to get a quick answer. We end up being sent articles that don't answer the question and then we have to go back and try again

Incentivized

Confluence, having only a slight advantage in terms of features compared to BookStack, really only makes sense to procure as a part of the Jira bundle. It requires much more maintenance from my experience and does not really deliver any extra value aside from the very strict certifications like HIPAA. DokuWiki and MediaWiki both provided way too much in terms of customizability, not really focusing on the business need. Of course, MediaWiki was conceived for a whole different purpose but is very often seen being used for both internal and public documentation delivery. DokuWiki did not provide the authors with the user-friendly environment that BookStack has and integrated most poorly with LDAP. As for OneNote, which was used for support docs prior to BookStack, it provided the authors with too much of a user-friendly environment, rendering the product of their work very inconsistent. Also, the sharing model was either peer-to-peer or within Teams, neither of which made it easy to audit and supervise.

Incentivized

Freshservice also provides similar features to Zendesk Guide, however, I believe that it is not as good as Zendesk Guide. For example, in Freshservice, manageable and visibility permission can only be set at the folder level and not at the article level. Also security permission in Freshservice cannot be created from tags. This mean that without API calls or integration, admin has to assign employees to the specific manageable and visiblity permission group which is inconvenience and extremely manual. In our company, when there are more than 10 movements in a day as well as many employees hired and left in a month, doing this manually is not preferable

Incentivized

• Spillover within Business IT staff up, nearly double substitutability. This is through the ability of a support technician servicing a different product to find a guide describing how to solve the more frequent issues the way a product lead would do it.
• Time to draft and publish a documentation down some 20% compared to previous solution.
• OpenSource that integrates fine with enterprise-grade software and somehow even passes security audit. 20 times cheaper to implement compared to Confluence, almost free to maintain.

Incentivized

• After the community came to us and we redesigned and made it more SEO-friendly and performance-efficient, its engagement increased by 30-40% in 1 Year based on different factors.
• It has returned the Invested money in best way possible and given the product a global name by distributing the queries and solutions to lakhs of community users.
• Increase in Page views by 32% in 1 year
• Increase in Community visits by 29% in 1 year
• Increase in Average Member online time by 54% in 1 year

Incentivized