Guru is a knowledge platform designed to serve as what the vendor describes as an AI source of truth for enterprises. It connects information from tools like Slack, Teams, Google Workspace, Salesforce, and other systems into one governed, permission-aware knowledge layer. Guru delivers cited AI answers, chat, and research directly within existing workflows, to enable employees and AI assistants to access verified knowledge securely and efficiently. The platform combines…
$300
per month 10 seats (minimum)
HCL Connections
Score 9.0 out of 10
N/A
Connections from HCL Technologies (formerly from IBM, acquired by HCL in 2018) is a collaboration tool and employee digital workspace with key features like social analytics, blogs, document management, and a social network.
N/A
Pricing
Guru
HCL Connections
Editions & Modules
Self Serve
$30
per month per user
Enterprise
Custom
No answers on this topic
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
Guru
HCL Connections
Free Trial
Yes
No
Free/Freemium Version
No
No
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
Yes
No
Entry-level Setup Fee
Optional
No setup fee
Additional Details
Discount available for annual pricing. 10 seat minimum.
Guru supports the collaboration async across teams, and my experience so far was amazing both with the tool and the teams that I've been working with. I can easily rely on one single platform for all our internal knowledge management. Guru has been incredibly valuable for our knowledge management. I integrated it with multiple sources, from Gong to Asana, Google Drive, and more, and now we can easily rely on one single platform for all our knowledge needs.I especially love that you can verify content and schedule review timelines, which helps ensure everything stays up to date and that our information remains accurate and reliable.Honestly, I wouldn’t switch to any other platform. Guru covers all of our internal business needs perfectly.
IBM Connections is well suited for larger organizations that need an internal social networking tool and are willing to deal with IBM and the complexity of the software. It is less appropriate for smaller organizations and those who don't want to deal with the complexity, or IBM's awful customer service and prices.
Easy to learn. Anyone can make cards and use the AI to make them professional.
Answer questions about my business, essentially a wiki for everything we do.
The research mode is amazing. Full reports on various types of information including some rather complex topics. Complete with citations of where the information came from.
Admins can manage a hierarchy to keep information secure and available to the correct people.
The plugin for MS Office/Explorer has made saving and sharing working documents extremely convenient for me and my close colleagues
The newsfeed feature conveniently aggregates updates from the communities/people you follow. It's nice not to have to jump from community to community to see what's going on in the organization
The various apps can be used for several purposes. A little creativity goes a long way when establishing what type of information the apps can be useful for communicating
The "My Library" session could be simplified. Whenever we access it, instead of going to "Following" Gurus, it can directly open the folders I created and save my favorite Gurus.
When keywords are not organized, it can be a little tricky to find a card if there are many similar articles.
When there are many updates on the same card, they are stacked at the top of the page, making it difficult to view the card.
The lack of a note-taking tool became a bigger and bigger issue as time went on. Our pilot users felt Connections was a natural place to take and share meeting notes – including photos, drawings, recorded audio, etc. – and were always frustrated that there was no easy, organized way to do that. We tried using a Blog, Wiki, etc. but nothing really resonated as a good solution for this.
The Wiki tool is weak, providing rigid structure but with few options. A Community can only have a single Wiki, for instance. Wikis are weak in the mobile app as well; they’re not even easy to navigate. Users ended up ignoring Wikis completely despite our efforts to get them to convert documents like guidelines, policies, procedures, handbooks, etc. into Wiki form.
The Windows Explorer plug-in was useful but required a lot of manual intervention to setup. For instance, once a user joins a Community in Connections, the Community also has to be manually added to the Explorer plug-in so the user can find, open and edit files with it. We felt this process should be much more automated.
Tagging is only relevant in the web UI and, to a lesser extent, in the mobile app. However, in the Windows Explorer plug-in, Tags are not usable at all making it difficult to find things that were easy to find in the web UI.
IBM Docs was not included in the on-premises deployment; it was an additional license so we did not test it. Documents, mainly Microsoft Office files, are still the single most common way our user community creates, shares, edits and presents information. That proved to be a major gap for our users, and slowed user adoption considerably. We considered testing it, but IBM Docs would only work for about half of our users so we found ourselves wondering if we really wanted to support two document editing platforms. IBM Docs also offers no way to work offline as far as we could tell. This also meant we would need to keep licensing Microsoft Office which is not cheap.
Consulting costs are high because the back-end environment is complex. Installing, administrating and even patching Connections is a fairly complex process. We needed to hire consultants to install our test environment and any major upgrades would’ve required additional consulting fees. Any 3rd party add-ons we looked at were highly technical in nature meaning…you guessed it, more consulting costs.
Administrating IBM Connections requires editing XML files in a specific, secure way that is typically done in a console. I love consoles as much as the next admin, but when you only use a console once every 2 months it means looking up all the documentation and re-educating yourself. A single change could take me 2 hours to implement. 3rd party admin dashboards do exist, at an additional cost, but IBM really should provide a much easier way to manage the environment.
The lack of in-person or online training courses, materials, videos, etc. really discouraged a lot of users. The only decent training we could find (marketing videos aside) was a single video series on Lynda.com which, of course, was an additional cost. In the end that video didn’t really help our users much beyond introductory concepts.
IBM includes reporting, but it’s a massive Cognos system requiring some serious hardware and Cognos expertise. We had neither, and would have ultimately opted for a 3rd party add-on for reporting and statistics.
An often overlooked concern is eDiscovery. Our contracted eDiscovery service extensively works with various ECMs, but had no idea how they would handle Connections data. The cloud version of Connections offers an add-on for eDiscovery, but as far as we could tell IBM offered nothing for on-premises deployments.
I rated Guru a 9 out of 10 for renewal likelihood because it has significantly enhanced our processes and customer satisfaction in the automotive rental company. Guru’s user-friendly interface and organized knowledge base make it easy to access and update essential information, which is crucial for maintaining high operational standards. The tool’s integration with other platforms, like the Guru Chrome extension, streamlines our workflow, increasing efficiency and productivity. One of the standout features is the ability to favorite cards, allowing quick access to frequently used information, which saves time and ensures accuracy in customer interactions. Additionally, Guru’s analytics feature helps us identify which resources need updating, ensuring our knowledge base remains relevant and effective. The only reason it’s not a perfect 10 is occasional slow performance and occasional inaccuracies in search results. However, these minor issues do not overshadow the overall benefits Guru provides. Its consistent updates and reminders further enhance our ability to deliver excellent customer support, making it an indispensable tool for our team.
Connections has continued to more than meet our needs from a collaboration point of view and we are currently working on integration with our IBM Websphere portal platform to provide an integrated collaboration solution. This scenario will provide our users the best both products have to offer in a single interface.
The functionality of Guru for me and the org as a whole cannot be understated. It does the things it needs to do like knowledge Management and Resource Sharing at a very high level with extra features like comments and groups to improve quality of life for the near future.
Connections combines all the most useful abilities from various social networks. This makes it useful of course, but it also reduces user adoption time initially by allowing users to get comfortable with basic features. Once they are comfortable, it's easy for users to start exploring. They find new people in the organization to contact, new sources of information, etc. Before you know it, about half of the users are contributing back in some form -- and all with little or no training needed by IT.
Highly reliable day‑to‑dayGuru is consistently available when I need it. The platform loads quickly, search works reliably, and I rarely experience downtime or slow performance. It’s dependable enough that teams can trust it as a daily source of truth. Minimal unplanned outages or errors. In my experience, unplanned outages or errors are extremely rare. Even during high‑usage periods or heavy workflows, Guru remains stable and responsive.
Once Connections was installed, patched, etc. it was ALWAYS up. We only had to bring it down for OS updates to the servers. That seems to be typical of anything that runs on WebSphere; it's bulletproof and could probably run for months and years if the underlying OS didn't require constant patching.
Pages load quickly and consistently. Guru’s interface is lightweight, so cards, boards, and search results load fast with very little lag. Even when navigating between collections or opening larger cards, performance stays smooth and reliable. Integrations perform well without slowing systems down. Using Guru through the browser extension or Slack integration doesn’t noticeably impact performance. Cards surface quickly, and interacting with the integrations feels just as smooth as using Guru directly.
IBM Connections web UI, mobile app (data sync to / from the device), and file transfer speeds were almost always very fast. It was rare for a slow-down of any kind, even when doing searches.
The only reason I do not give it a a ten is because I think there is still some room for improvement in meeting the different time zone needs of their customers, but overall their support is top notch. Friendly, capable, and quick.
IBM Support has ALWAYS been quick to respond, regardless of the product. Even first level techs seldom provide "canned" responses and they really try to help. If they can't help, they don't wallow around but engage the right person immediately. It's very rare that the first level tech needs to escalate, and even more rare when they do escalate and the next person engaged cannot solve it. We have been more than satisfied with IBM support's quick and professional responses to our issues.
I would rate the in-person training for Guru a solid 9 out of 10. The session was incredibly valuable as it provided comprehensive insights into using Guru effectively. I learned a lot about the tool's functionalities, which significantly enhanced my proficiency and confidence in utilizing Guru for my daily tasks. The training was engaging, informative, and tailored well to ensure I could apply what I learned immediately. Overall, it was a highly productive and beneficial learning experience.
The online, on-demand training available was very good. I do wish we had done live online training as an org so that everyone had the same opportunity to learn the value and best practices. I completed the online, on-demand trainings personally, then turned around and taught the org, but I wish I had let the Guru experts do the heavy lifting for me!
You will need a very strong team of guru champions in order to get EVERYONE and EVERYTHING on Guru, it takes some craziness and over talking about guru everywhere to get people to be exicted, contribute and use. If you are starting any kind of buisness and you need KB, just go for guru as fast as you can because when you will grow you will thank yourself.
Try to understand you will never find a product which suites all your end user for 100%. IBM Connections is the best of all breeds but if you go look on each functionality on its own there are better example out there. But as IBM COnnections delivers it all in just one platform makes it the best example about integration of different functionality into one platform.
The platform is unique, comprehensive, and uses AI. These are standout features. I also like the verification process and the ability to search from anywhere or on any browser. Guru enhances productivity and knowledge transfer when someone leaves an organization. Guru's interface is very user-friendly and can be trained quickly with new hires.
From the few times that I have used MS SharePoint, I can say that it doesn't seem to hold a candle to the robust features of IBM Connections. The out-of-the-box capabilities of IBM Connections are amazing and are more easy to access and use than what I've seen with MS SharePoint.
Guru is somewhat expensive compared to what our org is typically willing to spend on software solutions. Additionally, there is a price difference per seat when paid monthly versus annually, which was a big downside for us as my company didn't want to commit to an annual cost.
Easily deployable across multiple teams and departmentsGuru is designed to scale horizontally across an organization. As teams grow, it’s simple to create new Collections, Boards, and permission sets without disrupting existing structures. This allows each department to manage its own knowledge while still contributing to a unified source of truth
Scaling UP is never an issue with IBM's core technologies like WebSphere, DB2, etc. as long as you have or can find the technical resources to implement it. Where IBM seems to fail is scaling DOWN for smaller organizations. Connections 5.0 on-premises would have required us to create 7 servers -- yes, they would be virtualized, but still that's 7 OS licenses, 40 virtual CPU cores, 80GB RAM, and a few TB of hard disk space. All to replace Quick which runs on 1 server with 1 OS license, 4 cores, 8GB RAM and 600GB of disk. Granted, there are major differences in capabilities between the two, but how do you get a CFO understand why features like a mobile app, file sync, and social sharing require 10x the back-end resources?
Guru allows our team to quickly reference available learning/knowledge materials with our clients on a daily basis and provide better support at every outreach
With that said, spreading those same resources across two major global teams in the USA and Germany can lead to some inconsistencies. The i-frame process is not very intuitive for this scenario and our team treats policy/procedural differences as separate card or article entities.
Guru allowed our organization to pioneer and establish a dedicated knowledge team component, of subject matter experts who work in tangent with existing resources, create new ones, and vet collective knowledge.
