Docsie Review – The Good and Bad for 2023

Where does all your company knowledge live? Process, procedures, policies, product information—all this stuff needs to exist somewhere, but juggling it all in your Windows files application can get overwhelming.

This is exactly what Docsie was designed to fix. Docsie lets you create your documentation in one place, building a company knowledge hub for employees, customers, users, and more. It’s almost like Google Drive on steroids.

You save time and streamline knowledge management. Everyone’s happy.

So let’s take a look at the nitty-gritty of Docsie to see if it’s worth your time.

Docsie: The Good and the Bad

Overall, Docsie is a very well-rounded documentation and knowledge management platform with plans available for a wide array of business types.

There’s a lot of good stuff—but still, no software fits everybody. The pros are abundant, but we’ll have to cover a few cons as well.

Let’s take a look at the benefits and the drawbacks of Docsie so you can have the full picture.

What Docsie is Good At

Intuitive setup and organization: It’s pretty easy to get up and running with Docsie right away. Each document gets classified as a “book,” and you can group books into “shelves” to organize them in any way that best fits your organization.

Adding and modifying shelves only takes a few button clicks.

Similarly, documents let you click and insert blocks like section headers, text boxes, and graphics to build nice, neat, professional compositions quickly.

Even better: all paid Docsie plans are preloaded with templates for shelves, books, and articles.

Quite fittingly, the aptly named “Docsie” gives you documentation in your login area showing you how to use the software, too.

If you run into issues or have questions, Docsie has lots of help/support pages and a solid customer support team. You can reach Docsie via email at [email protected] or submit a public support ticket.

Speaking of, you can also view other public tickets. Someone may have had the same problem, and thus, you might find an answer without even needing to contact a real human—which can be either a good thing or a bad thing, depending on how you look at it.

Internal and external knowledge bases: Docsie lets you create separate knowledge bases for internal and external use in one platform.

The internal knowledge base would include your company policies, procedures, product info, and other things your employees and similar stakeholders need. Strong security features back the internal knowledge base in all but the Standard plan, including JWT token authentication, IAM RBAC, and password protection.

Meanwhile, the external knowledge base lets you build product documentation, which is what most people use the platform for, as well as self-service documentation, like FAQs. This takes the burden off your support team and lets you cut customer support-related costs while potentially improving customer satisfaction.

In our opinion, having these two knowledge bases separated is a huge win.

Video tutorial and guided tour creation: Paper documentation is nice, but many people understand things better when they can see it. Fortunately, Docsie lets you create visual representations of your documentation in a few ways.

One of the coolest features here is the ability to generate video tutorials from documentation automatically. The tutorial will include sections, transitions, animations, and narrations—everything you’d expect from hiring video professionals.

Then there are the guided tours. Using CSS, Docsie lets you build interactive and intuitive guided tours through your workflows. Much more effective to show people how to do things than to just tell them.

Features like this can be especially helpful when creating product documentation like user manual instructions.

Documentation import: Have documentation from another software? No need to rebuild everything from scratch—Docsie lets you import existing documents.

Importing only takes a few seconds, and once you’re done, you’ll just need to check over Docsie’s version and make any necessary edits before publishing.

Analytics and reporting: Docsie has lots of analytics and reporting options for your documentation.

Here’s only some of the data you can look at:

• Visits: Total number of users visiting your knowledge portal.
• Average rating: Average of all your user feedback scores.
• Net Promoter Score (NPS): A reputable statistic measuring customer loyalty broadly, which includes matters like CX.
• Display: Easily filter through different documents, shelves, or workspaces and categorize documents.
• Data for period: This lets you change the timeframe for measuring data. You can choose weeks, months, quarters, years, or even fortnights if you’re feeling medieval.
• Total visits: Visitor rates over time can be shown with a graph.
• Sessions by country: Number of sessions based on location.

For views per page, the following two metrics are available:

• Views per page: Page views and percentage breakdowns for your top viewed knowledge portal pages.
• Feedback collected: Total number of feedback submissions collected.

For feedback details, the following two metrics are available:

• NPS over time: A six-month line chart of your NPS.
• Search for feedback: You can search for visitor feedback in your knowledge portal.

Advanced multilingual support: Is your company international? Do you serve customers across borders? Docsie lets you create pages in multiple languages with the same URL. Its AI program then auto-translates for users in different countries.

Thus, Docsie can serve the user the correct content and language based on location with only one URL. This saves you time translating pages and preserves SEO by avoiding multiple similar URLs.

Docsie currently supports auto-translation into 12 languages, excluding English—but that’s what you’ll be starting with, so it doesn’t matter.

Excellent free plan: Docsie has a “free forever” plan that, by our albeit high standards, is easily good enough for small businesses.

That said, even bigger businesses can use the free plan to get a feel for the software at their own pace before upgrading. No worries about accidentally getting billed or committing to anything.

You can also get a 15-25-minute product demo if you book a call with Docsie to see the full features in action.

Docsie’s Potential Drawbacks

While Docsie has a ton of positive features, no software tool is perfect. Here’s a few potential drawbacks to consider when deciding if Docsie is the right knowledge base platform for your business.

Some helpful features are not available in all plans: As you can see, Docsie has plenty of helpful features. The problem is, certain features that seem like they should be in all plans are not.

For example, support tickets, product tours, analytics, custom pages, and Docsie API access are all available only in the Premium plan or higher. Both Free and Standard, which is the lowest-level paid plan, do not have these.

Similarly, Docsie may support several languages, but you can only use up to a few per plan. For example, the highest-level plan supports up to five active languages. Standard only supports one.

AI chatbots are add-on only: Docsie offers role-specific chatbots. That means you can customize chatbots to retrieve certain types of information based on who needs that information.

This can save employees a lot of time, but these chatbots don’t inherently come with any plans. You must purchase them on the side.

Docsie Plans and Pricing

Docsie has five plans at different price points and levels of features, which means that there’s a version of the software for you, no matter your business’s size or industry.

Each paid plan includes everything in previous plans, plus more features. So if your company grows and your knowledge base needs a change, you can step up to a new plan.

Let’s break down what’s in each plan.

Free: free forever

The Free plan is great for anyone who wants to try a few of the software’s core features at their own pace. And like we mentioned earlier, it may be all you need if you’re running a business that’s on the smaller side.

Free users get:

• A public knowledge base
• One shelf
• Two team accounts
• Up to 400 articles
• 2 GB of storage

Standard: $99 per month billed annually, $189 per month billed monthly

Standard is the entry-level paid plan. It unlocks one workspace, which is the main area where you can neatly organize all your files. It also ups the number of team accounts to five and lifts limits on content and storage.

Remember, it has everything the Free plan has, including:

• One custom domain with SSL
• One landing page
• Custom branding and CSS customization
• Custom JavaScript
• File manager for media
• AI search
• Shelf, book, and article templates
• SEO features
• Server-side rendering
• Production and staging versions
• Video uploads
• Password protection for knowledge bases

This plan only supports one language.

In short, this has all the knowledge base basics for a business that’s ready to move beyond the Free plan and get into a more comprehensive feature set.

Premium: $179 per month billed annually, $349 per month billed monthly

Step up to Premium, and you get everything in Standard, plus a bunch of new stuff. These additional features include:

• Custom pages
• Detailed analytics
• In-app help widgets
• Product tours
• Glossary
• AI code analyzer
• Broken link reporting
• Snippets and fragments
• Help center feedback and embeds
• Notifications
• Support tickets
• Docsie API access

This plan supports auto-translation of pages for up to two languages, making it the first plan to expand beyond one language. This plan also comes with five team accounts, the same number as Standard.

Furthermore, Premium users can connect their Zapier and Github to streamline their workflows if they use these tools.

This plan seems suited to slightly larger businesses that need international language capabilities and some additional advanced features.

Business: $249 per month billed annually, $449 per month billed monthly

Business includes everything in Premium but adds another whole workspace and doubles the number of team accounts to 10. Plus, it supports up to three languages rather than just two.

You’ll also get:

• Up to five custom-branded domain deployments
• Three custom domains with SSL
• Five secure manual deployments with unlimited viewers
• Project management and workflows
• Three active versions
• Reports and automations
• Content audits

Business also adds support for Microsoft Teams and Sharepoint integrations, as well as access to phone support to reach Docsie’s customer service team in case anything goes awry.

Oh, and you’ll get standard invoicing templates from Docsie to help out your accounting team.

Given the additional domains, languages, and, well, the plan’s name, the Business plan is designed for large, growing businesses that serve customers and have employees in many locations.

Organization: $699 per month billed annually, $900 per month billed monthly

The Organization plan sits on the royal throne of the pricing tier list. It has everything in all previous plans, bumps the team account limit to 25, ups the number of workspaces to three, and supports a total of five active languages.

There are only a few new “features,” per se. Instead, you get more of the most important things:

• Up to 10 customer-branded domains
• Up to 10 secure knowledge base deployments
• SAML/SSO
• Granular permissions
• Five active versions

It’s worth nothing that at this level, you’ll get a custom support agreement rather than just standard email and phone support. Docsie prioritizes its enterprise customers.

Large enterprises should consider this plan, given the very reasonable price tag.

Final Thoughts

Right off the bat, Docsie is a very appealing knowledge management solution for building documentation. You can create internal and external knowledge bases, monitor important analytics, and use the platform to serve employees and customers in multiple different countries. The AI-powered video tutorial creation and guided tours are a nice above-and-beyond feature, a way to bring your documentation to life in a visceral way.

Our most important cautions with Docsie are to be aware that not all plans contain all features, and some cool things—like AI chatbots—are add-on only.

That said, there are five separate plans—so Docsie offers something for everyone.

And if you aren’t sure, you can mess around with the Free plan to your heart’s content or request a free trial of the other plans.