For a founder or small growing team replacing Notion or Confluence, the practical shortlist is: Slite for lightweight internal docs with AI answers and document-health controls, Guru for governed internal answers across existing apps, Glean when cross-app enterprise search is already a painful problem, and Document360 when the main need is a public, private, or mixed documentation portal rather than broad workplace search. The key tradeoff is scope: authoring-first tools are easier to roll out, while enterprise search layers need more setup and permission testing.
This guide focuses on four buyer questions that matter more than a generic AI feature list: Can answers cite sources? Do answers respect access permissions? How quickly do changed documents refresh? Is the product designed for internal knowledge search or for public help-center content? Internal search tools and public help centers solve related but different problems, so this guide does not treat them as interchangeable.
- Choose Slite if the team wants a simpler internal knowledge base, AI Q&A, document ownership, verification reminders, and some connected-tool search on higher plans.
- Choose Guru if the team wants a governed AI knowledge layer across existing internal apps, with citations, lineage, audit logs, and a credit model that needs usage modeling.
- Choose Glean if the company already has knowledge spread across many apps and needs permission-enforced enterprise search, not just a better wiki.
- Choose Document360 if the team needs structured product documentation, customer help, standard operating procedures, API docs, or a mixed public/private knowledge base.
Slite internal knowledge base and AI answer tool
Slite
Best fit: Slite fits startups and growing teams that want an internal knowledge base with AI search and answer features, rather than a full public help-center platform. Slite pricing lists internal features such as “AI search & answers” and also public sharing options, including AI answers on public docs and custom branding for public docs (Slite: pricing).
Capabilities: Slite Ask returns direct answers with source documents, and Slite says Pro and Enterprise can search connected tools in addition to Slite docs (Slite: official documentation). For internal Slite content, Slite says Ask searches documents the user can access, filtered by permissions (Slite: official documentation). Slite document permissions inherit from parent channels or parent docs by default, with overrides available lower down the tree (Slite: official documentation).
Capabilities: Slite has unusually concrete document-freshness mechanics for a lightweight wiki. Slite documents verification, owners, outdated states, and search ranking effects: verified docs rank higher, while outdated docs are deprioritized (Slite: official documentation). Slite also says its own docs and attachments are indexed automatically, with Slite doc permissions checked in real time for the Agent (Slite: official documentation). For Confluence as a connected source, Slite documents an automatic refresh every 6 hours and per-user Atlassian authentication (Slite: official documentation).
Limitations: Slite is easier to pilot than a broad enterprise-search deployment, but the team should not generalize Slite’s own real-time permission checks to every connected source. Slite also documents a specific Slack visibility risk: if a user asks @Slite in a public Slack channel, the answer can be visible to everyone in that channel even when the answer is based on sources only the asker can access (Slite: official documentation). That does not mean Slite ignores source permissions, but it does mean the output location matters.
Pricing: Slite publicly lists Basic at USD $10 per member/month, billed yearly, with 30 Ask questions per seat/month inside Slite docs; higher tiers add Agent use across connected tools (Slite: pricing). Slite AI Agent features use monthly pooled credits, and Slite says the Agent pauses when credits are exhausted until credits reset or are topped up (Slite: official documentation).
Guru AI knowledge layer for governed internal answers
Guru
Capabilities: Guru’s documented strengths are governance, citations, and answer traceability. Guru lists permission-aware answers with citations and lineage, plus centralized audit logs across consumers (Guru: pricing). Guru also says it connects to common internal systems such as Slack, Microsoft Teams, Salesforce, Zendesk, Confluence, and SharePoint (Guru: pricing). For a growing team with knowledge spread across sales, support, and internal documents, this makes Guru closer to an internal answer layer than a public docs product.
Capabilities: Guru documents source-permission choices for connected sources, which is useful but also increases setup responsibility. Guru says administrators choose a permission model after connecting a source, including an option where access is controlled entirely within Guru and independently of the source app permissions (Guru: official documentation). A team should treat that setting as a pilot item, not as a detail to skip during setup.
Limitations: Guru’s reviewed official documentation did not provide one universal refresh interval across all connected systems. A team that cares about document freshness should validate refresh behavior source by source during a pilot. Guru’s credit model also needs planning because regular AI-powered search consumes credits, and a question can consume more than one credit depending on search and answer generation steps (Guru: official documentation).
Pricing: Guru does not present simple public per-seat pricing on the reviewed pricing page. Guru says investment is tailored to organization scale, knowledge complexity, and AI maturity, with scoping handled during the first conversation (Guru: pricing). Guru credits are shared at the organizational level, are not token charges, and regular Guru search consumes 1 credit; Guru gives an example where a question that performs one search and generates one answer consumes 2 credits (Guru: official documentation).
Glean enterprise search and AI assistant for cross-app knowledge
Glean
Best fit: Glean fits organizations whose knowledge already lives across many workplace systems and whose core problem is permission-enforced internal search. Glean describes AI-powered workplace search with 275+ app connectors for personalized and permissions-enforced enterprise search (Glean: official documentation). Glean is not positioned as a public customer help-center builder.
Capabilities: Glean AI Answers draw from organizational documents and include citations when appropriate, so users can inspect sources (Glean: official documentation). Glean says answers use only content the user already has permission to see and do not surface information from documents the user cannot access (Glean: official documentation). Glean connectors also fetch source permission maps, so search results are intended to follow access controls set in source applications (Glean: official documentation).
Capabilities: Glean supports indexed, live, and hybrid connector patterns, which matters for teams that care about freshness, latency, and cost tradeoffs (Glean: official documentation). For the Guru connector specifically, Glean documents a full crawl every 24 hours and content and permission updates every hour, while also saying near-real-time updates are not currently available for that connector (Glean: official documentation).
Limitations: Glean is aimed at broader cross-app enterprise search, so a small team that only needs a cleaner wiki should validate whether that scope is necessary. Glean itself says exact connector behavior varies by connector and source, and changes are captured as quickly as the source and connector allow (Glean: official documentation). Glean citations are also not guaranteed on every Assistant response; Glean says citations appear when Assistant retrieves content, but “No sources” mode or no retrieval can produce answers without citations (Glean: official documentation).
Pricing: Glean did not expose a standard public price table or per-seat price in the reviewed official pages. Treat Glean pricing as sales-led or custom until Glean provides a quote (Glean: official documentation).
Document360 documentation platform for public, private, and mixed knowledge bases
Document360
Best fit: Document360 fits teams building structured documentation: help centers, product or user docs, internal knowledge bases, standard operating procedures, API and developer docs, and AI knowledge hubs (Document360: pricing). Document360 is different from Glean or Guru because Document360 is primarily a documentation and knowledge-base platform, not a general internal search layer across all workplace apps by default.
Capabilities: Ask Eddy AI provides direct answers from the knowledge base and includes numbered citations linking back to source articles (Document360: official documentation). Document360 says Eddy answers based on user access controls and permissions, and restricted articles are not included for users without access (Document360: official documentation). Document360 also supports public, private, and mixed site access, allowing teams to separate public help content from restricted internal or customer-only material (Document360: official documentation).
Limitations: Eddy indexes published content only. Document360 says draft, unpublished, and archived articles are not indexed by Eddy AI, and supported PDFs must be 40 MB or smaller (Document360: official documentation). Ask Eddy AI is available only on the Knowledge Base site and not on API documentation pages (Document360: official documentation). Teams that need AI answers over Slack, Google Drive, Salesforce, and multiple internal systems should not assume Document360 replaces an enterprise search layer.
Pricing: Document360 uses customized pricing. Document360 says team accounts, workspaces, languages, single sign-on and security needs, knowledge-base privacy model, and AI Premium Suite usage affect the quote (Document360: pricing). Document360 lists Eddy AI capabilities as included with the plan and AI Premium Suite as an optional add-on, but exact usage charges are quote-dependent (Document360: pricing).
Cost and tradeoff notes for a small growing team
Do not compare these tools by sticker price alone. Slite is the most transparent among the reviewed products because it publishes a Basic price and question limits, but connected-tool AI use and pooled credits still matter (Slite: pricing, Slite: official documentation). Guru and Document360 use custom scoping, and Glean pricing was not public in the reviewed official pages.
The bigger cost is often operational. Slite is a fit for a pilot centered on cleaning and searching internal docs. Guru and Glean need careful connector setup, source mapping, and permission review. Document360 needs content architecture work if the team is replacing scattered internal notes with a public or mixed knowledge base.
For a founder, the simplest decision rule is: if employees need better answers from internal docs, start with Slite. If support, sales, and operations already live across many apps and the same question gets asked in Slack every week, evaluate Guru. If the company is large enough that permissions and connectors are the main challenge, evaluate Glean. If customers or partners need a polished knowledge base, evaluate Document360.
Concrete pilot plan: permission-leak and stale-document tests
Run a two-week pilot before signing an annual contract. The goal is not to invent a benchmark accuracy rate. The goal is to catch permission leaks, stale answers, missing citations, and cost surprises using the team’s own documents.
Step 1: Build a 30-question answer set
Create 30 real employee questions across onboarding, pricing policy, product roadmap, support escalation, security process, and customer-facing documentation. For each question, write the expected source document, the expected answer boundary, and whether the answer should be allowed for a normal employee, a contractor, and an administrator.
Step 2: Run a permission-leak pilot
Step 3: Run a stale-document pilot
Step 4: Score acceptance criteria
Use simple acceptance metrics as editorial suggestions, not vendor benchmarks: percentage of answers with usable citations, number of restricted-source exposures, number of stale answers after the documented refresh window, number of “no answer” responses where a correct source exists, and estimated monthly AI credits or usage under normal team behavior. A product can pass even if it sometimes says it does not know; for sensitive knowledge, a safe refusal is better than an unsupported answer.
Migration checklist from Notion or Confluence
- Map content types: separate internal policies, product specs, customer help, sales enablement, support macros, and API documentation.
- Remove duplicates: AI answer tools perform better operationally when the team has one canonical policy or process, not five outdated copies.
- Assign owners: choose a document owner and review interval for every high-risk document. Slite has explicit owner and verification features (Slite: official documentation).
- Preserve permissions: do not bulk import sensitive content into a flat space. Recreate department, customer, contractor, and executive restrictions before turning on AI answers.
- Test citations: require citations for policy, pricing, and process answers. Glean notes citation behavior can vary depending on retrieval and source mode (Glean: official documentation).
- Separate public from internal: use Document360-style public/private/mixed access when building a help center, but do not assume help-center permissions behave like enterprise search permissions across every internal app (Document360: official documentation).
- Model AI usage: check pooled credits, question limits, and quote-based AI add-ons before rollout.
How we selected these tools using documentation-based research
We selected only products with official documentation or pricing pages that addressed at least some of the buyer’s core requirements: answer citations, permission behavior, document freshness, and whether the product is meant for internal knowledge search or public documentation. Research checked on 2026-10-01.
This is documentation-based research, not a hands-on benchmark. We did not run controlled accuracy tests, measure retrieval quality, inspect private admin consoles, or validate vendor claims against customer deployments. Where official documentation did not verify a detail, this guide either omits the detail or says we could not verify it. The pilot plan above is a proposed buyer acceptance test, not a claim about vendor performance.
Key sources checked
- Slite pricing: Slite: pricing
- Slite Ask documentation: Slite: official documentation
- Slite document health: Slite: official documentation
- Guru pricing: Guru: pricing
- Guru credits: Guru: official documentation
- Guru source connections: Guru: official documentation
- Glean enterprise search: Glean: official documentation
- Glean connectors: Glean: official documentation
- Glean AI Answers: Glean: official documentation
- Document360 pricing: Document360: pricing
- Document360 AI assistive search: Document360: official documentation
- Document360 permission precedence: Document360: official documentation
