Socialtext (discontinued) vs. Stack Overflow for Teams vs. Zoho Wiki

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

You can keep all of your organization information in one place without having to pay for it. You can make it your permanent knowledge base for training of your customers, without having to build another one on your website. However if you have multiple projects, then you need to either use the paid version or some other tool, as for the free version you are only provided with one free wiki.

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

• Centralized Content
• Categorization
• Collaboration
• Notifications & Updates
• Integrations

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

• Even for business plan, they provide 1GB storage/ User which is very less in case if you need to attach files, this must be upgraded without increasing cost.
• It is no-where mentioned that where their data centers are located, in some countries like India it is legal compliance that data should reside in country.
• They don't have adequate templates to start with.

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

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

Confluence features were limited with the free version and our organization wasn't in a position to invest in a knowledge sharing platform, hence Zoho Wiki came in handy as it saved us on the extra cost which we could not initially afford. Also as we were already using other Zoho products which Atlassian was not offering, therefore Zoho Wiki was considered the best alternative.

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

• Quicker Ramp Times of Employees.
• Time Savings
• Improved Efficiencies

Incentivized