The 9 Best Internal Wiki Tools For Remote Teams in 2021

Looking for a wiki tool for documentation? Check out the following wiki tools for remote teams! Read on…

A wiki or an internal wiki is a must-have have software for businesses, especially those who have a distributed workforce.

A wiki helps remote teams share information quickly, solve problems, onboard and train new hires, and acts as a knowledge base for customer queries.

But before we dive into awesome wiki tools your remote team can use for documentation, let us first understand what exactly is a wiki tool.

This article was originally published on Remoteverse.com

What is a Wiki Tool?

A wiki tool is software that allows employees to collaboratively create, edit and share information inside or outside an organization.

The word wiki comes from the Hawaiian word for “quick”. A wiki is indeed, a quick and easy way to manage and share information.

According to Wikipedia, “a wiki is a hypertext publication collaboratively edited and managed by its own audience directly using a web browser.”

Wikis act as a single source of truth for all knowledge within an organization. This knowledge is accessible to anyone within the organization.

Think of it as a central repository to store all company data and important info.

Documents like meeting notes, process documentation, shared logins, checklists, onboarding and training material, company policies, HR documents, etc are all stored in an internal wiki for easy access.

While mostly used by organizations, the use of a wiki is beyond the boundaries of a business.

Different Use-Cases of a Wiki

Wikis can be used by teachers, librarians, and even individuals- simply anyone who needs to store and share information.

Wikis can be public-facing, private, or personal. You can use the wiki as:

• An internal wiki software for collaboration amongst team members
• A corporate or private wiki software for storing and sharing your company’s info
• A classroom wiki for teachers to share resources with each other as well as with students.
• A personal wiki for taking and storing notes.

Internal Wiki Statistics 2021

Before we jump into the benefits of an internal wiki, check out these amazing internal wiki stats:

• Fortune 500 companies lose roughly $31.5 billion a year by failing to share knowledge.
• Data suggests that when companies use an internal knowledge base to store their data, employee productivity can be boosted by as much as 35%!
• 91 percent of customers would use an online knowledge base if it were available and tailored to their needs (Social Media Today)
• 51 percent of customers prefer technical support through a knowledge base (Econsultancy)
• 40 percent of customers prefer self-service over human contact (Forbes)

The Many Benefits of Wiki Tools for Remote Teams

Employees spend a ton of time looking for info on their computers, on their USB sticks, email attachments, cloud storage apps, and more.

All of this searching leads to a ton of wastage of time and effort.

In fact, according to McKinsey & Company, employees spend 19% of an average workweek trying to gather the information needed for completing a task.

Would you rather want your team to be working on the task they were hired to do or spend their precious time scavenging for information?

Finding the right data at the right time is important.

It becomes notably significant when you need to find something urgently, like a customer service rep looking into the company’s knowledge base, trying to solve a customer query.

Apart from having a central repository for all company knowledge and info, an internal wiki tool has a ton of benefits:

#1. Better Collaboration

A wiki tool facilitates communication and collaboration amongst remote team members.

It helps employees to create, edit, and share info with each other and collaborate under a single, virtual roof.

This, in turn, improves communication and leads to transparency.

Read More: What is a Business One Pager & How to Write One! (Templates Included)

Using an internal wiki tool, managers can update project status, developers can share code, marketers can share brand assets, HRs can share policies, and more. The use cases are limitless!

#2. Better Onboarding

Over 40% of employees with poor training leave their jobs within the first year.

Appropriate training is essential for the smooth onboarding of new hires and prevents churn.

An internal wiki can be a great tool to do just that.

New employees can then be given access to your company wiki that contains important company documents like:

• How-to guides
• Standard operating procedures
• Best practices
• Checklists
• Training material
• Customer support material
• Business policies

Essentially, all key knowledge your team has acquired during your stay at the organization.

While in-person training can help, it’s impossible to convey everything from your memory to a new employee.

Managers, thus, direct new employees to the ‘brain of the organization‘, i.e. their knowledge base which is created using a wiki tool.

Just like people turn to Wikipedia to seek answers to their questions, it’s essential that your new employees have access to your wiki to get answers.

Research suggests that companies that invest in employee training enjoy a 24% higher profit margin versus companies that don’t.

Internal wiki software can be one of the best business investments you have ever made!

#3. Conserve Knowledge

The biggest asset an organization has is its employees.

But what if a key member of your team with years of experience and expertise decides to leave the company, gets promoted to another branch in a different city, or goes on a long vacation?

They simply take their years of experience and knowledge with them and replacing them becomes an uphill battle for your team.

This is why internal wiki software is a crucial investment for every organization.

An internal wiki software allows companies to seize vital knowledge of their employees and keep it in a safe place.

Employees can document all their know-how and expertise inside the wiki tool as they work on a project.

This way, when an employee leaves, their experience doesn’t leave with them.

Future employees can readily access this knowledge and continue doing their work without any hiccups.

As you can see, there are numerous benefits of using wiki tools for remote teams.

Now that we know the importance of wiki tools, let us explore some of the best wiki tools for remote teams out there!

The 9 Best Wiki Tools For Remote Teams in 2021

To make the process of creating and sharing knowledge easier for you, we have curated a list of some of the best internal wiki tools for remote teams on the market right now.

Are you ready? Let’s dive in…

#1. Confluence Wiki

Kicking off our list of awesome wiki tools for remote teams is Confluence. Connecting people, content, and ideas, Confluence is a knowledge management tool built by the software giant Atlassian.

With real-time editing, Confluence wiki allows team members to remotely collaborate on the same page, add in-line comments, @mention someone, and more.

Apart from creating docs from scratch, Confluence Wiki also allows you to drag and drop your Office docs, PDFs, images, etc.

Files on Confluence are automatically versioned, removing all confusion and chaos. Users can also track every single change made to a document easily.

Flexible permissions allow teams to secure their content from unauthorized access and have complete control over their files.

With amazing mobile apps, teams can stay informed no matter where they are in the world.

Some key features of Confluence:

• Customizable templates to kickstart work
• Integration with JIRA and Hipchat for enhanced collaboration
• Version tracking and real-time editing

Pricing:

• Free plan with limited features
• Paid plans start at: Standard ($5 per user/month), Pro ($10 per user /month), Enterprise (contact sales).

#2. DokuWiki

A highly versatile tool, Dokuwiki is open-source wiki software. The tool doesn’t require a database and is very clean and simple to use.

The wiki has very low system requirements and is a breeze to install. Even though the platform allows anyone to create, edit, and share files, it also has access control features to keep stuff private.

A great part of Dokuwiki is its vibrant community that constantly supports and builds new plugins to improve the tool.

Moreover, the software also has a ton of templates to quickly start creating documents without worrying about formatting.

Users can even create their own templates and submit them to Dokuwiki for others to use.

If you are looking for an open-source wiki software that easy to use and install, Dokuwiki might be the one you need!

Some key features of Dokuwiki:

• Access controls and authentication connectors
• Numerous plugins and extensions
• Open source wiki tool

Pricing:

• Free to use

#3. Nuclino

Following the trend of lightweight wikis, Nuclino is next up on our list.

The ‘collective brain of your team’, Nuclino empowers employees to ‘dump’ all their knowledge and organize it in Nuclino.

Using Nuclino, teams can create an internal and external knowledge base, company wikis, or simply use it to store important company files in a central location.

For faster writing, Nuclino supports Markdown and other formatting features.

Nuclino also allows teams to add one item inside another using the ‘@’ command, helping them to organize content in a meaningful way.

Teams can view their items in different views- the ‘recent‘ view (to show all the recently updated items), the ‘board’ view (to track items in a workflow), and the ‘graph’ view (to create a mind map).

Some key features of Nuclino:

• Available in the browser or as a desktop and mobile app
• Export your data quickly in formats like PDF, Word, Markdown, etc
• Access settings to control who can view or edit content.

Pricing:

• Free plan for 50 items
• Paid plan starts from: Standard ($5 per user/month)

Read More: The 10 Best Digital Whiteboard Software for Remote Teams!

#4. You Need A Wiki

Do you use Google Docs for a lot of your documentation? You are going to love this tool!

You need a wiki that converts your Google Docs files and folders into a fully functional wiki in less than 30 seconds! Yes, you read that right!

Simply import your existing Google Drive folders and files and let this amazing wiki software do the rest.

Search has never been Google Docs’ strong suit. This is why You need a wiki that has a nested tree menu that lets you quickly find the files you are looking for.

Moreover, you can set up a table of contents or link to other documents easily, making organization easier.

The best part is that you can still use all the good features of Google Docs- real-time collaboration, advanced formatting, commenting, and more.

If you are a heavy Google Docs user, You need a wiki is a great wiki tool for your remote team!

Some key features of You need a wiki:

• Quickly create a wiki with your existing Google Docs
• Save file automatically to Google Drive
• Unlimited wikis and read-only users

Pricing:

• Free plan with limited features
• Paid plans start at: Up to 10 users ($10 per month), up to 25 users ($49 per month), up to 75 users ($99 per month).

#5. Slab

Trusted by over 7000+ companies including Asana and Vox Media, Slab is another great wiki tool for documentation.

Slab provides a great editor to create beautiful-looking content. You can even embed docs and files from other tools into your Slab documents.

All your documents appear on the left side of your homepage. Content in Slab is organized by topics and not in messy folders or tags, making it easier to find.

Slab also provides analytics to understand whether your knowledge base is being read and understood by your team so you can make changes accordingly.

With robust integrations with Google Docs, Dropbox, Slack, Github, Asana, and more, users can search for content across their different tools and not just inside Slab.

Some key features of Slab:

• Intuitive interface
• Integrates with other knowledge base tools and searches across each of them.
• Organizes content by topic and not folders.

Pricing:

• Free plan with limited features
• Paid plans start at: Startup ($6.67 per user/month), Business ($12.50 per user/month), Enterprise (contact sales).

#6. Notion

Used by teams at Spotify, IBM, Pixar, and more, Notion is a great tool for documentation and creating internal wikis.

Teams can create private or personal workspaces and safeguard their content.

The feature that sets Notion apart from most wiki tools for remote teams out there is its highly customizable interface.

The platform also allows you to create nested pages, keeping everything well organized.

Documents created using Notion are interactive. Users can add Youtube videos, Figma designs, Google Spreadsheets, PDfs, presentations, and more and create media-rich docs.

From marketing and sales to finance and HR, every department can make use of Notion to create extensive knowledge bases and share info with each other.

Some key features of Notion:

• Desktop and mobile apps, as well as a web clipper.
• Thousands of templates to choose from and customize
• Embed 500+ apps inside your Notion pages and make them interactive.

Pricing:

• Free for personal use.
• Paid plan starts from: Personal pro ($4/month), Team ($8 per user/month), Enterprise (contact sales for pricing).

#7. Tettra

Tettra is another great wiki software, especially if your remote team uses Slack a lot.

Users can connect any Tettra category to the relevant Slack channel. In this way, anytime you publish new content to Tettra, your team will get a notification in Slack.

Searching in Tettra is easy, as you can search files by titles, headers, and page content.

You can also directly search for any document in your Tettra knowledge base right from Slack.

If you are looking for something that isn’t in the knowledge base, you can suggest new pages to be created using the suggestions feature. You can even create a suggestion directly from Slack.

Teams have full control over their documents in Tettra as they can set access permissions (admin, editor, contributor, etc), and can also provide guest and read-only access.

Tettra is an excellent wiki tool for documentation, especially if your team heavily relies on Slack for communication and collaboration.

Some key features of Tettra:

• Granular control over content as users can set private as well as ‘team-only’ access permissions.
• Automatically route questions to the right expert
• Robust integration with Slack and Microsoft Teams

Pricing:

• Free with limited features
• Paid plan starts from: Scaling ($99/month for first 10 users), Enterprise (contact sales for pricing).

Read More: 10 Free Document Collaboration Software for Remote Teams in 2021!

#8. PmWiki

PmWiki is an open-source wiki intended for websites.

A collaborative content management system, PmWiki allows users to create and edit content without any knowledge of HTML or CSS.

The cookbook section of the website offers various add-ons that let you customize PmWiki in different ways and according to your needs.

You can either create public wikis using this platform or restrict access to only members of your organization.

With password protection, you can safeguard an entire site, groups of pages, or individual pages. This way you can control who can read pages, edit, and upload attachments.

Users can change the appearance and functions of a PmWiki site by using various skins and HTML templates.

Some key features of PmWiki:

• Password protect entire site or pages
• Customize the look of your wiki using different skins
• Various plugins to enhance functionality

Pricing:

• Free to use

#9. Slite

The last tool on our list of awesome wiki tools for remote teams is Slite.

Slite wants to bring clarity to your work by allowing users to store all important files and documents under one central repository.

With Slite, you can create private notes or public workspaces with your teams.

Team handbooks, employee onboarding docs, meeting notes, SOPs- teams can create and store all their important docs neatly in folders known as “channels”.

Teams can either start from scratch or import their documents from Google Docs, Dropbox, Confluence, Evernote, and more.

Built with remote teams in mind, Slite also offers a ton of tips and specially made templates to make remote collaboration as easy as possible.

Some key features of Slite:

• Create interactive wikis by embedding YouTube videos, Spreadsheets, Code blocks, and more
• Co-edit docs, @mention peers, or invite external clients to docs temporarily
• Import existing documents from Google Drive, Confluence, Quip, etc.

Pricing:

• Free plan for 100 documents
• Paid plan starts from: Standard ($6.67 per user/month), Enterprise (contact sales).

Over to you!

So there you have it, folks! This was our list of awesome wiki tools for remote teams.

From flashy enterprise wikis to simple open-source tools, we have covered them all in this list.

You really cannot go wrong with any of the above-mentioned wiki tools, it all boils down to your team requirements and personal preference.

Since all of the wiki tools above have a free plan, we would advise you to try them out and see which one suits your team’s needs the best.

If we missed out on your favorite wiki software, do let us know by leaving a comment down below! Cheers!

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