As your organization grows and your knowledge management needs evolve, finding the right tool to host and manage content becomes that much more important.
While Zendesk Guide is a popular solution for managing customer-facing knowledge bases, it may not always meet the specific requirements of your specific situation.
Is it time to maximize the tools that you have or look for new ones that may be a better fit for your business needs?
In this article, we'll explore Zendesk Guide's capabilities and limitations, explain how you can take them further with Swifteq, and review five Zendesk Guide alternatives for 2025.
Why Would You Need a Zendesk Guide Alternative?
Zendesk Guide offers robust functionality and convenience because it is built into your existing Zendesk environment. That being said, it does come with its limitations without using other tools.
Some common challenges are:
Find and replace: Already in 2021, the community flagged that Zendesk did not have a bulk ‘find and replace’ functionality, making it tedious to do large updates across Help Center articles. Even small but broad updates can become a large task.
Duplicate content: If you’re looking to migrate, move, or update articles, Zendesk Guide currently does not allow for article duplication. You’ve got to copy/paste the whole article, which can get messy when it comes to formatting.
Broken links: Your Help Center will often (and should) interlink between articles and your product to get people to the right places. When links get updated, you need to remember where to update them. Zendesk Guide does not have a way to notify you or track broken links natively. That means it’s up to you to remember, or worse, your customers to tell you.
Multiple languages: Handling multilingual content can be cumbersome without additional tools. Especially if you’re not translating all articles into additional languages, the formatting can break in many scenarios; customers would need to visit hardcoded URLs, and multiple languages would not show fully within the search.
These limitations can hinder efficiency and scalability, especially for organizations managing complex or large-scale knowledge bases.
Expand the Capabilities of Zendesk Guide
Before considering alternatives, you can explore how to streamline the management of your help center and take the Zendesk Guide much further.
From my experience, I have seen many organizations lock themselves into a choice and need to make the most of it before being able to switch to anything else.
The good news is that with a large host of integrations in the Zendesk Marketplace, there can be many ways to bring Zendesk Guide to the level you need.
With many integrations to consider, it can be difficult to find the right match, but with a well-rounded and lightweight implementation, Swifteq’s tools are a clear choice.
To expand your capabilities with Zendesk Guide, consider these options:
Swifteq's app is a comprehensive tool designed to improve Zendesk Help Centers management. It offers a suite of features aimed at streamlining content management, ensuring consistency, and enhancing productivity and overall efficiency.
Help Center Manager's features you'll find useful:
Bulk Operations
Efficiently manage multiple articles simultaneously. With just a few clicks, you can move, update, or delete them. Plus, reset article votes in bulk to obtain fresh insights into customer feedback.
Effortless Content Export
Seamlessly export help articles and their content in various formats, such as CSV, HTML, Word, or PDF, facilitating audits and collaborations.
Find and Replace Across Your Entire Knowledge Base
Swiftly update outdated terminology or links across multiple articles using the find and replace feature, applicable to both text and HTML code.
Identify and Repair Broken Links
Automatically detect and fix broken links throughout your Help Center, ensuring all references are valid and current.
Task Management
Assign tasks related to Help Center content to team members, monitor progress, and ensure timely updates and maintenance.
Repair Broken Images
Automatically detect and replace images within your articles, ensuring a seamless user experience for your customers.
Media File Management
Gain a centralized view and management of all media files, including images and videos, used in the Help Center. Leverage AI to generate alt text for images and update the articles instantly.
Comprehensive Search and Filter
Easily locate articles, links, and media within your Help Center using advanced search and filtering options, including match case and exact phrase searches.
Automatic Article Translation
Automatically translate your articles into multiple languages, expanding your reach to a global audience without the need for manual translation efforts.
Help Center Analytics
Gain insights into your Help Center's performance with analytics tools that help you understand user engagement and identify areas for improvement.
Swifteq's Help Center Translate is an AI-driven application crafted to swiftly and accurately transform your Help Center into a multilingual platform. With this tool, you can offer a global customer support experience, ensuring every client feels welcomed.
Help Center Translate's main features are:
Accurate and Automated Translations
Enhance your customer support by providing translations of articles to and from any modern language, ensuring your customers receive assistance in their native tongue.
Support for Over 50 Languages
Expand your global reach by translating content into more than 50 languages, catering to a diverse international audience.
Efficient Bulk Translation
Streamline your localization efforts by translating multiple articles simultaneously into one or more languages.
Preservation of Original Formatting
Our translations maintain the original HTML formatting of your articles, including links, images, and headings, ensuring consistency across all languages.
Selective Translation for Updates
Efficiently translate only the newly modified sections of your articles, avoiding the need to re-translate entire content for minor updates.
Integration of Custom Glossaries
Upload your own glossary to consistently incorporate specialized terminology throughout your help center, ensuring translations align with your brand's language.
Automatic Synchronization
Automatically sync new content and updates, ensuring your translated Help Center is always current.
Seamless Integration
Connect Swifteq to your Zendesk Help Center effortlessly with a single click. No coding or technical setup is required.
Consider tools like these that plug right into your team’s flow of work and don’t disrupt the current processes.
Alongside these options, there are other tools, such as Help Center Analytics and Help Center Export, that help you measure the success of your documentation and make it easy to take it elsewhere if needed.
Best Zendesk Guide Alternatives for 2025
While Swifteq’s tools enhance the Zendesk Guide, you may still want to explore additional platforms tailored to your specific needs.
Here are five alternatives to Zendesk Guide, each with unique strengths and features to consider:
1. Confluence
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Confluence is a comprehensive team collaboration and documentation platform that integrates with other Atlassian products like Jira, Bitbucket, and Trello.
This integration enables teams to link issues, create automated documentation, and maintain project visibility across different tools.
It also offers robust search functionality, including full-text search, filters, and the ability to search across all spaces and pages, making information retrieval quick and efficient.
The platform offers highly customizable workspaces known as "spaces," which can be tailored for different departments, projects, or teams.
Each space can have its own structure, permissions, and templates, allowing organizations to create the perfect team hub that matches their workflow.
Features like page trees, hierarchical organization, and nested pages help maintain clear information architecture.
While Confluence is great for internal documentation and team collaboration, it may be less suited for customer-facing knowledge bases.
The customization options for public-facing pages are somewhat limited compared to dedicated knowledge base solutions, particularly in terms of design flexibility and visitor analytics.
2. Guru
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Guru is a modern knowledge management platform specifically designed for real-time knowledge sharing.
Its innovative AI-powered suggestion system actively learns from user behavior and content interactions to surface relevant information exactly when team members need it, reducing the time spent searching for answers.
The platform's intelligent verification system helps ensure knowledge stays current by prompting subject matter experts to review and update content periodically.
While the premium features and advanced capabilities come with a higher price point than some competitors, Guru's extensive integration capabilities often justify the investment.
It integrates into existing workflows through a large library of integrations with popular tools like Slack, Microsoft Teams, Chrome, and various project management platforms.
This means teams can access and share knowledge without leaving their primary work applications, significantly reducing context switching and improving productivity.
3. ProProfs Knowledge Base
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Looking for something simple? ProProfs is a straightforward and accessible knowledge base solution.
Its standout feature is its extensive library of pre-built templates, which significantly reduces the initial setup time and provides structured starting points for various types of knowledge bases, from customer support documentation to internal process guides.
While ProProfs offers a user-friendly experience and a quick setup process, its integration capabilities are notably limited compared to more robust solutions like Zendesk Guide. It provides basic integrations with common help desk tools and analytics platforms.
4. Notion
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Notion has earned significant recognition for its highly customizable workspaces that adapt to virtually any team's needs, offering a unique blend of documentation, project management, and collaboration tools.
Its block-based architecture lets users build sophisticated pages by combining text, tables, databases, kanban boards, calendars, and other elements in endlessly flexible ways.
This versatility enables teams to create everything from simple documentation to complex project trackers and team wikis within the same environment.
While it is highly customizable, Notion lacks specialized features commonly found in dedicated help desk solutions, such as sophisticated search analytics, customer feedback tracking, and advanced SEO optimization tools.
The analytics capabilities are relatively basic, focusing more on page views and engagement rather than providing detailed insights into customer behavior and content effectiveness.
5. Helpjuice
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Helpjuice is a knowledge base platform that strongly emphasizes SEO optimization and analytical capabilities, as well as its great support.
It implements SEO best practices, like customizable meta descriptions, automatic sitemap generation, and structured data markup.
Its intelligent search functionality extends beyond basic keyword matching to understand user intent and provide relevant results, improving the overall user experience.
The pricing structure reflects the platform's enterprise-grade capabilities, positioning it at a higher price point compared to more basic solutions. This can make it less accessible for smaller businesses or startups with limited budgets.
Comparing Zendesk Guide Alternatives
Feature | Confluence | Guru | ProProfs | Notion | Helpjuice |
Internal Documentation | Yes | Yes | Limited | Yes | Limited |
Customer-Facing KB | Limited | Limited | Yes | Limited | Yes |
Multilingual Support | Add-ons Required | No | Yes | Add-ons Required | Yes |
Advanced Analytics | Basic | Basic | No | No | Yes |
Ease of Use | Moderate | Easy | Easy | Easy | Moderate |
Cost | Moderate | High | Affordable | Affordable | High |
Internal documentation comparison:
ProProfs and Helpjuice are ‘Limited’ as these tools may be better suited for customer-facing help centers.
They lack advanced features or workflows specifically designed for robust internal team collaboration or technical documentation if you’re looking for a blend of both.
Customer-facing help center:
Confluence, Guru, and Notion take the other side as ‘limited’ as these platforms may not be primarily optimized for hosting public help centers.
While they excel in internal documentation, they may lack customer-friendly layouts, public accessibility, or features tailored for SEO optimization.
What to Consider with Your Zendesk Guide Alternative
When considering an integration to expand Guide capabilities
When you’re trying to maximize the tools that you have, you will most likely start with expanding your current tools capabilities. (Which is a great starting point.)
When you do, consider the following with integrations:
Ease of implementation vs. received value
Some integrations are plug-and-play, and some require quite a bit of work to implement. There is also often a difference in their capabilities. Consider the balance you want to have to make the most of your choice.
Longevity
When your goal is to maximize your tooling, that usually comes with a timeline in mind. Six months? One year? Two years? How long will this tool take you into the future? It is important to consider this timeline because you may need a short-term solution as you make a change, or you may need to look for one that can last a much longer period of time as a permanent stay.
Integration type and flexibility
While there are many integrations in the marketplace, there are many that specialize in one specific thing, unlike Swifteq, which has a suite of tools. This means that when you choose one, you may end up layering in multiple integrations, which makes your tool stack and automation more complex than needed.
Consider integrations that are flexible, offering multiple options for you to be able to take Zendesk Guide further into the future. This way, you can continue to grow in a streamlined way, without increasing the complexity of your workflows.
When considering a new tool
If you are already using the Zendesk ecosystem and evaluating Zendesk Guide alternatives, you’ll need to consider how well the new solution integrates with the other Zendesk tools.
Here are some things to consider:
Is the integration native, or will you need to custom-build connections?
Keeping this in mind will also tell you how much work it may be to implement, and having native integrations may save you a considerable amount of time, while something custom may allow for a more tailored approach.
Will it significantly disrupt the team’s workflow?
Looking up information in the regular rhythm of your job can make things so much easier. Consider how well this new tool will blend into your team’s activities and/or if disruption would be worth it.
What kind of data would you get?
If you’re looking to measure the success of your knowledge management, being able to see if the usage is in line with the other areas of the Zendesk ecosystem may be an important consideration.
When looking for a new tool, consider the business needs, budget, team changes, and considerations first, and really see how this fits into the larger picture. Are there any non-negotiables that you have?
Considering these things, you’ll be able to refine your search and these potential alternatives to the Zendesk guide.
Choose the Best Option for You
While Zendesk Guide is a strong option for hosting your knowledge base, key limitations make managing all of your knowledge quite a time-intensive task.
Tools like Swifteq’s Help Center Manager and Translate can extend Zendesk’s capabilities, making it that much smoother and more powerful.
However, if you’re looking for a full-fledged Zendesk Guide alternative, platforms like Confluence, Guru, ProProfs, Notion, and Helpjuice can offer compelling features depending on your specific needs.
Before you switch, consider augmenting your Zendesk capabilities with Swifteq and start your 14-day free trial today. You might have the chance to spare loads of work with migration.
Written by Neal Travis
Neal is a curious learner and builder of customer experiences in scale-ups. He is the Head of Customer Experience at the Academy to Innovate HR (AIHR) and Host of Growth Support