A Guru alternative only helps if the wiki was the problem

The short version

• The usual Guru alternatives are Slite, Tettra, Notion, Confluence and Slab, and every one of them is a wiki.
• Switching wiki is worth it when the complaint is about Guru itself: cost per seat, the card format, or the verification queue.
• Migration moves existing content into a new schema. It does not make that content correct.
• Plenty of knowledge questions fail because the answer was never in any wiki: it sits in a ticket, a PDF or somebody's inbox.
• Before signing, check whether read-only users consume a seat, whether you can export everything, and whether an API can read the content later with permissions intact.

What are the main Guru alternatives?

The shortlist is short. Slite is the closest like-for-like swap, a focused team wiki with a question flow. Tettra covers similar ground for teams that live in Slack. Notion is a general workspace rather than a knowledge tool, which is both the attraction and the catch. Confluence makes sense if you are already in Jira and intend to stay. Slab is a wiki that leans on search across the tools you have connected.

All five are wikis. They differ in page model, pricing granularity and how hard they nudge somebody to review content, and those differences are real. None of them changes the thing that makes a knowledge base go quiet, which is that a page exists only because a person wrote it and stays correct only because a person maintains it.

Plans move often enough that any comparison table goes stale, including the ones vendors publish about each other. Price the two or three you actually shortlist on the day you decide, from the vendor's own pricing page, and count the seats you would really buy rather than the ones you have today.

Why do teams look for a Guru alternative?

Three reasons, and only one of them is really about Guru. The first is cost per seat as headcount grows, particularly for staff who will never write anything and only ever search. The second is the verification model: Guru asks a named person to own a card and re-confirm it on a cadence, which is a good idea that turns into a queue nobody clears. The third is coverage, and a different wiki cannot help with it.

A card exists because somebody sat down and wrote it. The questions that actually stall work tend to be about things nobody wrote down: why a refund was approved last March, which version of the contract template the client signed, what was decided in a thread three sprints ago. Those answers exist, in a ticket, a PDF, a CRM record or an inbox, and no wiki reaches them.

If you are leaving for the first or second reason, a different wiki is a reasonable purchase. If you are leaving for the third, you are shopping in the wrong aisle.

Does switching wiki make the answers current?

No. Content decay is a function of ownership, not storage format. The pages that are wrong in Guru will be wrong in the new tool within a week of the import, in a cleaner typeface.

It also moves the retrieval problem rather than solving it. Coveo's 2025 report on employee experience frames the issue as relevance rather than volume, and puts the share of information that fails employees at 42%. Read that as directional rather than as your number: the sample was 4,000 workers in the United States and the United Kingdom at companies with more than 5,000 staff, which is not a small business.

The useful question before a migration is not which tool is better. It is which pages you would keep. A team that answers 'we keep everything' is describing the problem it is about to pay to move.

Which Guru alternative fits which complaint?

Is staying on Guru and changing how you use it an option?

Often yes, and it is the cheapest option on the list. Most of the pain people attribute to the tool comes from scope: a few thousand pages, no owners, and a verification queue sized for a team twice as large.

The exercise is unglamorous. Pull the full page list, sort by last useful access, and archive aggressively. Assign owners to what survives, by name, with a review cadence somebody would actually honour. If a page has no owner willing to put their name on it, it should not survive the cut, whichever tool it sits in.

Do that first. It takes about a week and it is reversible. If the tool still annoys you afterwards, you now have a small, clean body of content to migrate, which is the only kind of migration that goes well.

What is the alternative to buying another wiki?

A retrieval layer over the systems you already have, sometimes called a company brain. Instead of asking people to copy knowledge into one place, it indexes the places the knowledge already is, resolves who is asking, searches only what that person is entitled to see, and answers with a citation back to the source.

The mechanism matters more than the label. Permissions have to be enforced before retrieval rather than applied to the results afterwards, because content that has reached the model has already crossed the boundary. Answers need citations, so the reader can check them in one click. And the system has to be able to say it does not know, because a confident wrong answer with a link attached is worse than silence.

This does not create knowledge nobody recorded. If the source document is out of date, retrieval will quote the out-of-date document accurately. It is a distribution fix, not a writing fix, which is why it works best next to a small wiki holding the handful of things that only exist as decisions.

What should you check before signing a new wiki contract?

Six things, and the headline price per seat is not the first one. All of them are checkable in an afternoon without a sales call. Notion publishes its plan prices, including Plus. Slite publishes its prices too, where the Basic plan is billed yearly, with no free tier and a 14-day trial. Tettra prints a qualifier line directly beneath its Scaling plan price, which is the kind of detail that decides the total.

The six checks

1. Whether a read-only user consumes a full seat. Most of your company will only ever search.
2. Free tier or trial only, and the billing cycle. A yearly commitment sets the size of the mistake.
3. Export: every page as markdown, attachments included, without opening a support ticket.
4. API read access with permissions attached, so a retrieval layer can read the content later without a scraper.
5. Whether search respects per-page permissions, or only the sidebar does.
6. The named owner of review, agreed before migration day rather than after it.

How do you tell which problem you actually have?

Collect the last twenty questions somebody asked in a channel instead of searching, and mark where each answer lived. If most of them had a page and the page was wrong or hard to find, you have a wiki problem, and a different wiki with fewer, owned pages will help.

If most of them had no page at all, and the answer was in a ticket, a signed PDF, a spreadsheet or one person's memory, you have a retrieval problem. Buying Slite or Tettra will not touch it, because there was nothing to find in Guru either.

Twenty questions is a small sample and it is yours, which makes it more useful than any benchmark. It takes an hour and it is the only input that distinguishes the two purchases.