A 30-Person Firm: Which Knowledge Tool Should You Pick?
Notion, Confluence, Outline, Coda, Google Sites — or even just Markdown plus Git. The menu of options is long enough that many founders give up and let WhatsApp and Excel continue to absorb everything.
But it's not a small decision. The wrong knowledge base will quietly burn three years of your team's attention, while the things that should be captured stay locked inside conversations. After walking the decision path with a dozen Hong Kong SMEs, we've narrowed it down to three axes that actually matter.
Axis 1: Knowledge Sovereignty
Who holds your core know-how, five years from now?
This question decides whether you should pick SaaS (Notion, Confluence Cloud) or self-hosted (Outline self-hosted, BookStack, wiki.js).
- SaaS platforms — easy to start, zero ops burden, painless mobility across devices. But pricing is set by the vendor, export formats can be lock-in, and platform sunset risk is real.
- Self-hosted — all data stays under your control, structure is free to evolve, long-run cost is low. But day-one learning cost is high, and you need at least half a dedicated person to keep ops smooth.
There's no universally right answer. The question isn't "which one is best" — it's "where do you want your know-how to live in five years."
Axis 2: Editorial Cost
This axis is the one most often underestimated. How painful it is to write one piece of content directly determines how much content gets written.
- WYSIWYG (Notion, Coda) — fast to type, visually rich, suitable for non-engineering staff to contribute frequently.
- Markdown + Git (Outline, BookStack, file-based) — clean version control, auditable diffs, well suited to engineering or regulated docs. But non-engineering staff hit friction.
Practical rule: pick the tool that 80% of your team would actually open twice a week. A wiki that's theoretically perfect but practically empty is worth zero.
Axis 3: Fit With Business Systems
A knowledge base that doesn't talk to CRM, ERP, or your ticketing system turns into a second memory palace — while the primary memory still lives inside the business systems.
Things to evaluate:
- API / webhook support — can business systems push content in automatically? (e.g. a new customer in CRM auto-generates an onboarding checklist page.)
- Embed support — can business dashboards be embedded into documents?
- Cross-domain search — does a search for "2023 Customer A" return results from CRM, knowledge base, and email all at once?
Our Real-World Recommendation
For most 20-50 person Hong Kong SMEs, the most common sweet spot looks like this:
- Core knowledge (process, SOPs, decision records) — Outline self-hosted. Sovereignty plus Git-like version control.
- Collaborative docs (meeting notes, proposals, drafts) — Google Docs. Zero learning cost.
- Project management and task state — Plane or Linear. Don't mix it into the knowledge base.
The biggest mistake is trying to use one tool for everything. Three pieces of tooling, each doing one job well and linking to each other, tends to outlast any "all-in-one" platform.