Socialtext (discontinued) vs. Stack Overflow for Teams vs. Zendesk Guide

We use Social Text as a platform to air our issues with different departments. We voice our concerns and suggestions so we can help find a solution to the problems we incur on a daily basis. We need to have social text as an app so we can communicate in real time not only during work hours.

In my opinion, Stack Overflow for Teams is well suited for an organization that is on a hiring spree for the engineering teams. The reason for it is because instead of catering to doubts of new joinees individually, they can be asked to refer to the Stack Overflow and hence will save a lot of time for both new joiners as well as the existing employees.

Incentivized

In our company, we host our benefit articles based on country on our Zendesk Guide. However, these articles should not be seen by employees that are outside their respective article country. For example, an employee that is based in Thailand shouldn't be seeing Malaysia benefits article as employees might compared benefits. With Zendesk Guide, the system allow us to set the configuration of the article so it is only visible Thailand-based employees, and for Malaysia article, only Malaysia-based employees

Incentivized

• Version history - Always keeps the edited versions and one can revert back any time
• Creating and Editing an article is very easy and intutive
• Sharing the articles with peers

• Sharing technical solutions to problems we encounter in our internal development environment.
• Sharing best practices we find in external resources.
• Discussions on design patterns and conventions we can use in our projects.

Incentivized

• They give us ability to control the whole frontend of the Communities by giving us access to manipulate HTML (in HBS file), CSS and JS
• They give handlebars templating engine in backend which helps us to show various listing rendered through server side without having need to implement client side rendering of the listing and features.
• They provide us dynamic content fields, which can be useful for mapping categories or storing category and topic IDs so we don't need to hard code IDs in Sandbox and Production separately.

Incentivized

• Search needs a ton of improvements. It was very slow a year ago
• Search result quality was also not that good
• I know they have improved their UI recently but when i used it last year it did not really have any design elements which could be used to make the articles look more presentable. It was important for us as we used it for external communication as well.

• I would recommend an increased engineering focus on the Microsoft Teams integration.
• It would be nice to make more medals.
• Easier ways to earn points.

Incentivized

• Formatting according to our brand guidelines can be tricky
• Reporting metrics are lacking
• The user interface can be confusing
• Their support team takes a long time to respond
• They have comments open on their KB articles, but almost noone responds, which is frustrating.

Incentivized

We have a lot of info in Socialtext already. It would be hard to get all that info out and port it to a different system

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

I frankly like Confluence better than socialtext because of the speed and the quality of search. They also have better design elements which can help make the articles pleasant to the eyes.

It's easier to use Stack Overflow for Teams Q&A to maintain our knowledge base over time, over the Confluence wikis that we also maintain. You don't need to bother about folders, filenames, templates - just ask a question and answer it or get it answered. It feels less formal, so developers feel more free to add content.

Incentivized

It is an attribute of Zendesk that allows for easy over the phone communication between agents and customers. It is more personal and allows for better productivity. Phone support from anywhere with reliable internet connection which is essential to call center communication whether in the office or in the home of the agent.

Incentivized

• We get solutions to concerns much faster
• We promote interactions with the other depts
• We listen and have discussions

• It makes the search for answers more efficient, so devs can focus in more important things.
• Knowledge is not lost, even if people leave the company.

Incentivized

• We used it for multiple customer so we can say ROI of Zendesk Guide is very competitive.
• Zendesk meet[s] most of the business objective[s], which suits [a]s best product among its competitor.
• I highly recommend to use Zendesk for knowledge base and tickets and agents.

Incentivized