Uncategorized - HeroThemes https://herothemes.com Happier Customers, Fewer Support Tickets. Sun, 19 Jul 2026 20:52:26 +0000 en-US hourly 1 12 Best Customer Service Companies in New York (Including BPOs and Call Centers) https://herothemes.com/blog/customer-service-new-york/ https://herothemes.com/blog/customer-service-new-york/#respond Mon, 06 Jul 2026 19:51:07 +0000 https://herothemes.com/?p=1746641 Hiring customer support staff in New York isn't cheap. Maintaining a fully staffed team that is available around the clock is even more difficult. That's why many businesses...

The post 12 Best Customer Service Companies in New York (Including BPOs and Call Centers) first appeared on HeroThemes.

]]>
Hiring customer support staff in New York isn't cheap. Maintaining a fully staffed team that is available around the clock is even more difficult.

That's why many businesses turn to customer service outsourcing. The right partner can extend your team with:

  • Trained agents
  • Longer support hours
  • Multilingual coverage
  • Industry expertise

Without the cost of building everything in-house.

In this guide, we've reviewed the best customer service companies in New York, from enterprise BPOs to boutique support specialists and answering services.

Let's see which outsourcing partner fits your needs perfectly in New York!

Why Outsource Customer Service in New York

New York is a huge market. Customers here expect quick responses, and industries such as finance, media, fashion, and technology have high stakes when it comes to compliance and branding, so they don't tolerate poor support.

Outsourcing your customer service to a company that knows this terrain buys you speed, coverage, and expertise that would be difficult to develop on your own.

Here's what you actually gain by working with a New York focused customer service company:

  • A huge multilingual talent pool. New Yorkers speak more than 800 languages, and about 30% of them speak something other than English at home, per the New York State Office of Language Access.
  • Industry fluency. Finance, fintech, media, luxury retail, and real estate all have their own vocabulary and rules, which is not something easily implemented.
  • Regulatory awareness. Financial accounts often need SOC 2, PCI DSS, and licensed agents.
  • 24/7 Coverage. In a place that genuinely never sleeps, 24/7 answering, overflow handling, and after-hours support prevent you from losing customers overnight.
  • Cost flexibility. You can hire a Manhattan-based premium team for Wall Street work or tap a nearshore partner for tier-one volume, or pay only for what you use.

Outsourcing works best when your provider knows what they are doing. Before you sign anything, document your top 10 customer scenarios and load them into a shared inbox where your agents and you can both see. And try to find answers to these questions:

By doing so you will get a good idea about your situation and will be able to choose a proper outsourcing partner for your business.

Use a tool like Heroic Inbox to help you manage every message, assignment, and reply in one place. And Heroic Knowledge Base and HelpJet to create a capable self-service portal.

HeroThemes products for customer service and support

How I Sized Up These Companies (Our Review Process)

We weighed each of these customer service providers on the things that actually predict a good partnership rather than the things that photograph well.

Our criteria:

  • Real New York presence, whether that's a headquarters, a Manhattan office, upstate operations, or a clear track record serving NYC clients.
  • Service depth: Voice, chat, email, social, and back-office coverage plus 24/7 and multilingual options.
  • Verified sentiment from G2, Clutch, Trustpilot, Glassdoor, and community reviews rather than marketing copy.
  • Pricing transparency, or at least an honest read on the pricing tier.
  • Ideal fit, so you know whether a company suits small business, the mid-market, or an enterprise.

The Best Customer Service Companies in New York

Trust icon

We rigorously test and research every product that we recommend through HeroThemes. Our review process. We may also earn a commission if you make a purchase through our links.

1. Ubiquity

Ubiquity New York Based customer service partner

Ubiquity is the closest thing this list has to a hometown hero. Founded in 2012 and headquartered in New York City, it built its reputation serving disruptors and innovators in financial services, healthcare, and eCommerce.

What started as a single contact center now spans five continents, but strategy still runs out of the NYC office.

Ubiquity offers a relationship-based outsourcing pitch, which in practice means account managers who act like partners rather than order-takers.

If you are in fintech, payments, or healthcare and you want a New York-headquartered partner that treats compliance as table stakes, Ubiquity should be definitely on your list.

Key Services and Strong Points:

  • Customer care, technical support, sales, collections, and retention
  • Identity verification, fraud detection, and chargeback management
  • Multilingual, omnichannel coverage across voice, chat, and email
  • Deep compliance chops for regulated financial and healthcare work

Pricing

Ubiquity uses a “productive hour” model so you pay for agent time spent on your work rather than clocked hours. With custom quotes based on scope.

It sits in the mid-market to enterprise range and rewards buyers who prize transparency over the lowest price.

2. EXL

EXL for customer service problems

EXL evolved from a pure business process outsourcer into a data and AI powerhouse serving insurance, banking, healthcare, and media.

It is headquartered in New York City, and runs with roughly 65,000 professionals across more than 50 offices on six continents.

EXL is the choice when your customer service problem is really a data and operations problem in a support costume:

  • Insurance claims
  • Payment integrity
  • Regulated workflows

If you are a small business, look at other options.

EXL is built for large, regulated enterprises that need domain expertise, and its custom pricing shows it.

Key Services and Strong Points:

  • End-to-end business process management for regulated industries
  • Insurance, healthcare, banking, and financial services specialization
  • Advanced analytics, data engineering, and generative AI integration
  • Claims processing, compliance workflows, and customer service at scale

Pricing

EXL uses fully custom, enterprise-grade pricing tied to scope, analytics depth, and delivery locations.

3. Sutherland Global Services

Sutherland Global Services

Sutherland, established in 1986 and headquartered in Rochester, New York, it's one of the world's largest independent BPOs. It has over 40,000 employees, serving clients in over 140 countries.

Sutherland's calling card is “integrated BPO,” which combines front-office customer care with back-office processes and a heavy dose of AI and automation.

It covers the full customer lifecycle, from acquisition to retention.

Key Services and Strong Points:

  • Integrated front-office and back-office BPO
  • AI, automation, and analytics-driven customer engagement
  • Full customer lifecycle coverage across 140-plus countries
  • Deep experience in insurance, healthcare, telecom, and banking

Pricing

Sutherland works on custom enterprise pricing shaped by volume, complexity, and delivery mix.

It's built for long, large-scale partnerships rather than short pilots.

4. Horatio

Horatio NY based outsourcing partner

Horatio is headquartered in New York City and has nearshore delivery centers in the Dominican Republic and Colombia. Its very name nods to Horatio Street in the West Village.

The company built its business around high-growth, customer-obsessed brands. Its client list includes Zola, The Skimm, and Loop Earplugs.

It mixes personal service with AI tools and CRM know-how, and staffs dedicated teams so your agents aren't shared across 12 accounts.

Horatio feels more like an extension of your team than a vendor. The nearshore model provides real-time zone overlap with the U.S., which is better than a 12-hour time difference when a customer crisis occurs.

Key Services and Strong Points:

  • Omnichannel customer support across phone, chat, email, and social
  • Back-office operations, technical support, and fraud prevention
  • Dedicated teams with full support org, not shared agents
  • Strong fit for eCommerce, fintech, SaaS, and health tech

Pricing

Horatio uses a per-dedicated-agent model and doesn't publish rates, though reviews point to typical engagements in the tens of thousands of dollars annually.

5. Peak Support

Peak Support for boutiques

Peak Support is the boutique that punches well above its size. Founded in 2015 and now operating as part of Ubiquity, it delivers customer service to high-growth companies with a people-first culture.

It serves plenty of NYC eCommerce, SaaS, and gaming brands.

The company provides customer support, technical support, back-office work, and trust and safety, delivered from the Philippines, the U.S., Colombia, Eastern Europe, and India.

Peak Support hires carefully, accepting only a tiny fraction of applicants, and can launch a new team in about a week. That combination of good hiring and speed makes it a favorite for founders who care about brand voice.

Key Services and Strong Points:

  • Customer and technical support with a people-first culture
  • Back-office operations and trust and safety
  • Fast team launches, often within a week
  • Rigorous hiring and industry-leading employee ratings

Pricing

Peak Support offers competitive mid-market pricing. Costs scale by team size, with no long-term contract lock-in.

6. SupportYourApp

SupportYourApp

SupportYourApp is the tech-support specialist that we keep recommending from our other guides. Founded in 2010, it's an “intelligent support-as-a-service” company serving more than 250 clients in over 30 countries.

Its clients include Calm, MacPaw, and Mastercard. It works well for SaaS, fintech, eCommerce, and gaming brands, including plenty of New York City tech companies.

The company offers omnichannel, scalable support in dozens of languages, backed by its own SupportCRM ticketing system and strong security credentials (including PCI DSS and ISO 27001).

Key Services and Strong Points:

  • 24/7 omnichannel technical and customer support
  • Multilingual coverage in dozens of languages
  • Proprietary SupportCRM plus strong security certifications
  • Selective onboarding to protect quality
  • Strong fit for SaaS, fintech, and tech startups

Pricing

SupportYourApp pricing is quote based, but engagements typically run from about $2,300 to $50,000 monthly depending on team size and scope.

7. Boldr

Boldr largest global B Corp certified BPO

Boldr, it's the first and largest global B Corp certified BPO. It runs offices in the Philippines, Mexico, Canada, South Africa, and the U.S., serving more than 100 client partners.

It works with values-aligned NYC brands like UrbanStems and supports eCommerce, SaaS, and other high-growth companies.

The company builds customized, scalable teams and emphasizes ethical outsourcing, reinvesting in employee careers and local communities.

Key Services and Strong Points:

  • Customized, scalable customer support teams
  • Back-office, EOR, and recruiting services
  • B Corp certification and genuine ethical-sourcing model
  • Strong client retention and partnership sentiment
  • Multilingual delivery across five countries

Pricing

Boldr works on project-based pricing, with engagements reported from under $10,000 up into six figures.

8. Influx

Influx

Influx is the “on-demand” solution for companies that hate long-term contracts. Since its founding in 2013, Influx has brought a pay-as-you-go model to customer support. It has a follow-the-sun network of over 1,100 people across 15 countries.

It's often described as the “AWS for customer service,” and it serves startups and scaleups, including NYC brands that need to absorb volume spikes without fixed commitments.

Key Services and Strong Points:

  • On-demand, month-to-month support with no lock-in
  • Fast team launches, typically within a week
  • Follow-the-sun 24/7 coverage across 15 countries
  • Dedicated teams, back-office, and sales support
  • Brand-aligned service tuned to your tone and values

Pricing

Influx offers a simple pay-per-agent or pay-per-response model, with fully managed part-time agents starting around $800 per month. It's one of the more budget-accessible options for startups.

9. Working Solutions

Working Solutions

Working Solutions runs an on-demand network of more than 150,000 registered home-based agents across the U.S. and Canada.

It's a woman-owned business and a repeat honoree on FlexJobs' remote-work rankings, and it serves NY clients across retail, travel, healthcare, and financial services.

The company bills for time actually worked, tracked in 15-minute increments. That means clients pay for productivity rather than clocked hours. That elasticity makes it strong for seasonal spikes, weather events, and long-range projects with unpredictable volume.

It also blends AI and intelligent agents for customer care, sales, and tech support, and it's known for educating agents deeply in each client's business.

Key Services and Strong Points:

  • On-demand virtual agents for care, sales, and tech support
  • Pay-for-time-worked billing in 15-minute increments
  • Strong seasonal and surge scalability
  • AI plus intelligent-agent blend
  • Nearly three decades of virtual contact center experience

Pricing

Working Solutions bills for productive interaction time rather than full shifts, which can cut waste versus brick-and-mortar centers. Pricing is custom and scales with your program.

10. Go Answer

Go Answer

Go Answer handles inbound calls, live chat, and legal intake, and it's built a reputation for treating small businesses like they matter.

It is headquartered in Garden City, New York, it's a bilingual, 24/7 contact center and answering service founded by a family of entrepreneurs.

Go Answer serves law firms, medical practices, contractors, financial advisors, and small businesses that can't afford to miss a call.

For a solo practitioner or a growing local business, Go Answer offers the human, always-on presence that turns missed calls into booked clients.

Key Services and Strong Points:

  • 24/7 bilingual live answering and virtual reception
  • Specialized legal intake and lead qualification
  • Live chat and outbound calling
  • CRM and calendar integrations
  • Genuine Long Island, New York headquarters

Pricing

Go Answer's live answering plans start around $175 per month on a pay-as-you-go basis and scale up with minute volume, with dedicated legal intake plans priced higher. It's very accessible for small businesses.

11. Answering Service Care

Answering Service Care

Answering Service Care is a third-generation family business that's been answering phones since 1974. It's headquartered in Margate, Florida, but serves New York businesses widely. It has earned a strong reputation across law firms, medical offices, insurance agencies, and financial advisors nationwide.

It has handled calls for thousands of businesses and carries a solid TrustScore on Trustpilot.

The company provides 24/7 live answering with HIPAA-compliant secure messaging, lead intake, appointment scheduling, and message relay. Its multi-decade track record and industry-specific training mean agents know how to handle a nervous patient or a prospective legal client with the right tone. Reviewers consistently praise its responsiveness and the accuracy of its message-taking.

For regulated small businesses, especially in healthcare and law, that combination of compliance and human warmth is the draw.

Key Services and Strong Points:

  • 24/7 live answering with trained professionals
  • HIPAA-compliant secure messaging
  • Lead intake, appointment scheduling, and call transfers
  • Deep experience in medical, legal, and insurance
  • 50-plus years in business with strong review sentiment

Pricing

Answering Service Care prices by minutes of service and offers a money-back guarantee, positioning itself as competitive with major national providers. It's a small-business-friendly outsourcing company.

Answering Service Care Starter Plan costs $40/per month (comes with 0 Minutes) with an additional charge of $1.75 per minute.

12. Smith.ai

Smith ai outsourcing partner

Smith.ai has become the default virtual receptionist for solo professionals and small firms. It combines AI-powered call handling with trained, North America-based human receptionists, and it has handled well over 10 million calls for thousands of businesses.

It skews heavily toward law firms but serves home services, healthcare, and real estate too.

Key Services and Strong Points:

  • Hybrid AI-plus-human 24/7 call answering
  • Lead qualification, appointment booking, and spam filtering
  • Per-call billing rather than per-minute
  • Thousands of CRM and calendar integrations
  • Deep legal-intake specialization

Pricing

Smith.ai offers 25 free calls per month. After that, each call costs $3.

Final Thoughts

There are plenty of outsourcing partners for customer service and support in New York.

A few practical benchmarks to guide your final call:

  • If you have fewer than a dozen support contacts a day, a virtual receptionist or answering service beats a full BPO. You might even be able to handle it in-house with a good shared inbox.
  • If your volume is spiky or seasonal, prioritize on-demand models like Influx or Working Solutions that let you scale without long contracts.
  • If compliance is central, insist on SOC 2, PCI DSS, and HIPAA where relevant.
  • If brand voice is everything, a boutique like Horatio, or Boldr will protect it better than a mega-BPO.

Whichever partner you choose, outsourcing amplifies your systems rather than replacing them.

Feed your provider a clear knowledge base so agents answer consistently, and route their work into a shared inbox so nothing falls through the cracks.

Tools like Heroic Knowledge Base and Heroic Inbox give your outsourced team the same source of truth your in-house staff uses. This is the difference between support that feels seamless and support that feels bolted on.

The post 12 Best Customer Service Companies in New York (Including BPOs and Call Centers) first appeared on HeroThemes.

]]>
https://herothemes.com/blog/customer-service-new-york/feed/ 0
8 Best CMS for Documentation, Knowledge Base (Expert Picks) https://herothemes.com/blog/best-cms-for-documentation/ https://herothemes.com/blog/best-cms-for-documentation/#respond Thu, 11 Jun 2026 16:21:50 +0000 https://herothemes.com/?p=1549326 CMS for documentation? An absolutely fantastic choice! People already avoid creating or spending time managing documentation, so why choose complicated options that makes it even worse? (I'm looking...

The post 8 Best CMS for Documentation, Knowledge Base (Expert Picks) first appeared on HeroThemes.

]]>
CMS for documentation? An absolutely fantastic choice!

People already avoid creating or spending time managing documentation1, so why choose complicated options that makes it even worse? (I'm looking at you — custom developed systems 👀)

Meme about lack of documentation

Compared to home-grown document systems or SaaS platforms, CMS (Content Management System) is easy to use, produces the same results in less time, and is very affordable.

And in 2026, you have many CMS options to choose from for documentation, knowledge base, self-service portal (or whatever you call it).

In this guide, I have listed the top 8 CMS for online documentation that will give you the jump start you are looking for.

Let's start!

Don’t get confused (TL; DR):

  1. If you don't have any programming knowledge or development skills and are looking for something easy to use (no code solution), choose WordPress and Heroic Knowledge Base.
  2. If you are familiar with GitHub and want to host a few guides, use GitHub’s built-in Wiki feature.
  3. If you have a good development budget and want complete freedom with code, MkDocs can be your solution.

What Is a Content Management System (CMS)?

A content management system (CMS) is a software application that allows users to create, edit, and manage digital content, usually focused on creating websites — without requiring any programming or development skills.

Key Features of a CMS - visual infographic by HeroThemes
Key Features of a CMS – visual infographic by HeroThemes

CMS works great for any small to large scale websites. In fact, 61.9%2 of all websites on the internet are built using some form of CMS.

usage statistics and market shares of CMS

What Makes the Best CMS for Documentation?

Trust icon

We rigorously test and research every product that we recommend through HeroThemes. Our review process. We may also earn a commission if you make a purchase through our links.

CMS software or platforms simplify the creation and management of web content with a code-free environment that anyone can use.

Although, a software that I like doesn't have to be what you want.

For example, developers often prefer a Markdown editor to a WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) editor or a fancy drag-and-drop editor. Business owners may also not like the look of a documentation system created with a basic theme.

So with that in mind, I've been testing a lot of CMS software over the last week, and here are the common features I've been looking for:

  1. Ease of content creation and editing: If the one thing that is the best about CMSs that you would ask me — is its ability to effortlessly create and edit content. There are thousands of possibilities such as:
    • Includes popular editors such as WYSIWYG, Markdown, or drag-and-drop page builders.
    • Almost every CMS editor makes it easy to add common web elements like headings, paragraphs, images, videos, quotes, code, lists, tables, hyperlinks, etc. Which, technical documentation uses a lot to properly style the content and make it easier for readers to consume.
    • Ability to easily access web pages.
  2. Powerful search, organized structure and navigation: Documentation used by every team (development, support, marketing, or HR), and you can imagine how horrible the system would be without any structure or navigation options. Here are a few things that make the documentation easier to explore:
    • Instant search with autocomplete suggestions
    • Hierarchical organization (categories, subcategories, nested menus)
    • Breadcrumbs, search filters, and dynamic table of contents.
  3. Customization and branding: One of the main reasons why CMS is avoided is due to its lack of customizability, but we are in 2026, and most documentation CMSs are powerful enough to allow you to customize every nook and cranny of your documentation.
  4. User roles and access: Looking at the documentation management system, many users are involved in creating content, managing and improving the system, and end readers. You need a role and access based system that can help you keep your organization secrets safe and run it smoothly. CMS like WordPress comes with a pre-built roles such as editor, author, subscriber, or administrator, which you can further enhance based on your needs.
  5. Code Snippet: In a software API documentation, developers often need to include code snippets as examples to better explain technical concepts. Having a pre-designed block for code wouldn't cost much.
  6. Versioning and archiving: Often needed in a software documentation to provide support for the old versions of the software, mostly due to considerable number of users might unable to meet the system requirements.
  7. Integration capabilities: Documentation is often paired with ticketing systems, live chat, analytic platforms, or GitHub. You need easier access to integrate with such platforms.
  8. Analytics, reports and feedback: Most brands struggle to keep documentation up to date due to lack of data and feedback. A documentation system built on WordPress and Heroic Knowledge Base gives you a built-in way to track important metrics and collect user feedback. This gives you regular insight into the quality and helpfulness of your content.
  9. Scalability and affordability: CMS are easy to scale and very affordable, often you only need to pay for the extra hosting usage.

7 Best CMS for Documentation of 2026

Whether you are looking for a CMS for technical documentation, API documentation, internal documentation, or to host support guides. Each of the listed software here will provide you with the necessary features.

Some are easy to use, others are a little bit complicated, but try 2-3 of the tools listed here to choose the best option for your needs.

1. WordPress + Heroic Knowledge Base

Heroic KB and WordPress CMS for the documentation

Heroic Knowledge Base is a very simple and straightforward plugin for WordPress (WordPress is a content management system that powers over 43%3 of all websites).

Heroic KB is a very reliable and proven solution (with over 30,000 customers) for creating and managing any type of documentation.

Heroic KB is a no code solution. Meaning, you don’t need to know about any kind of coding language. Simply choose from the available options or select checkboxes to make changes to your documentation.

Heroic KB general settings

But that doesn’t mean you can’t enhance it with additional coded features. WordPress gives you the freedom to code and use whatever you want.

With WordPress and Heroic KB many things are possible. Including:

  • Use it as a Headless CMS
  • Create internal documentation with user restrictions and role management feature
  • Collect data or feedback from your documentation
  • Convert your website into a mobile app or online store with additional plugins
  • Multi-language support
  • Advanced Search Functionality
  • Templates and custom blocks

The possibilities are endless.

WordPress is free and open-source CMS software, while Heroic KB is a premium plugin. The essential plan starts at $67.50/year, which includes all the necessary features.

We have multiple tutorials on creating documentation with Heroic KB. Check them out:

  1. How to create and write technical documentation
  2. Beginner’s guide to the internal documentation

2. Sanity

Sanity AI Content Operating System for documentation teams

Sanity is The Content Operating System for the AI era—and for documentation teams, the distinction from a traditional CMS becomes concrete when content needs to reach more than one destination.

Product docs on a public site, contextual help in an app, an AI support agent answering customer questions, localized versions for different markets: in most CMS setups, each of those is a separate problem.

Sanity's Content Lake stores documentation as structured, schema-defined content—queryable via GROQ and delivered through an API to any surface that needs it.

Sanity Studio gives writers and developers a customizable editing environment without the editorial team touching code. One set of docs, delivered everywhere your users actually are.

For technical documentation especially, where content often outlives the frontend it was written for, building on a structured foundation from the start avoids the painful migration that comes later when requirements grow beyond a single-site CMS.

3. MkDocs

MkDocs CMS for documentation

MkDocs can be a great free CMS system for your documentation.

Especially developer-related documentation (technical documentation, API documentation, and software documentation) where you have to involve software developers to create documentation.

MkDocs is a free to use static website generator that requires little technical knowledge to get started.

Things get easier once you set up MkDocs. After setup, all you need to know about is a markdown language to create and edit pages (which can be learned in 10-15 minutes).

You can completely host your MkDocs website or use GitHub pages to host and manage your content and code.

With GitHub pages managing documentation gets a little bit easier, as your customer support team members can also create new pages or edit existing ones with little bit guidance.

Their own site (MkDocs.org) is a great example of how this works. Their domain works as a frontend for users and GitHub works as a backend for developers to manage content.

By default MkDocs come with important features that can be further enhanced with plugins:

  • Markdown support
  • Built-in themes or custom third-party themes
  • Table of contents
  • Ajax live search functionality
  • Version control
  • Redirect control
  • RSS generator

4. MediaWiki

MediaWiki to create a Wikipedia like documentation website

Are you a fan of Wikipedia? Want to create a similar documentation website?

Look no further!

MediaWiki is the solution for you. It powers Wikipedia, and its free and open-source wiki software.

Over the years it has become a very reliable and easy to use CMS for creating documentation, knowledge bases or self-help portals.

Similar to WordPress installation, MediaWiki can be installed in minutes with any cPanel based hosting.

From any cPanel based hosting > Softaculous Apps Installer > Install MediaWiki.

Installing MediaWiki with cPanel

Features? Expect everything needed to create proper wiki or documentation:

  • Collaborative editing
  • WYSIWYG and custom Wiki Markup support to create and design pages
  • Search functionality
  • Enhanced interlinking system for easy cross referencing
  • Additional extension and skins
  • API and bot support
  • Multi-language Support
  • Dedicated discussion section for each page

It’s a really good documentation CMS, especially for non-profit organizations where everyone can easily contribute.

5. GitHub Wikis

GitHub Wikis

Don’t have much to document about? Already using GitHub to host your project?

Then GitHub provides a built-in feature (called GitHub Wikis) to create some documentation. This is good enough to share guides such as app install/setup process, requirements, and other important stuff.

Similar to MkDocs, GitHub Wikis lets you use the Markdown language to style your wiki content.

Other noteworthy features include:

  • Version control, including history & revision tracking
  • Sidebar navigation to provide easy access to important pages
  • User restriction features to make public or private repositories
  • Basic search functionality
  • Auto generated table of contents

GitHub’s wiki feature is good! You don’t even have to pay for hosting and domain name.

It works great for small personal projects, but for any product documentation (or where you create documentation to provide customer support) you need a better solution. Like Heroic KB or MkDocs.

With other CMS solutions listed here you will have much better control over customization, advanced search, reporting, user access, and feature upgrades.

6. HubSpot Knowledge Base

HubSpot Knowledge Base CMS capabilities

HubSpot is a popular software provider for creating websites, managing customers, marketing, or to offer support.

They are known for their top of the line CRM (Content Relationship Management) software and in recent years they have steadily improved their website builder capabilities (CMS capabilities).

You can build a knowledge base or documentation with their Service Hub plan. And manage and analyze content with easy to use CMS, and further enhance it with their premium software suite.

Key features:

  • Easy to use drag and drop visual builder to build any kind of layout or design
  • Create rich looking guides with WYSIWYG editor
  • Built in analytics and reporting system
  • Built in SEO tools
  • Multilingual support
  • Templates
  • AI powered recommendations
  • Access control to create public or private documentations

HubSpot’s pricing plans are a little bit messy, but their support team is sure to help you choose the right plan.

To access their Knowledge Base (documentation) CMS feature, you will need to choose Service Hub Professional plan. Which will cost you $90/mo/seat.

With this plan you will also get a lot of other additional tools to offer better customer support.

Including tools such as:

  • Meeting scheduling
  • Live chat
  • Ticket automation
  • HubSpot payments
  • Conversation routing
  • Help Desk
  • Customer portal

7. Webflow

Webflow documentation templates

Webflow as a CMS has become quite popular in recent years due to its huge library of templates, good performance, ease of use and other capabilities.

With recent updates, you get built-in analytics, A/B testing capabilities, and building blocks to create landing pages faster.

Key features including:

  • Free and premium documentation website templates
  • Visual website builder with code editing capabilities
  • Convert your Figma design to Webflow site
  • Free and paid hosting plans
  • eCommerce capabilities
  • Multilingual capabilities to serve all types of customers
  • Collaborate with your team using built-in features such as role-based access, editor mode, and workspaces.

If you really want to experience Webflow and have decent traffic, you will at least need a CMS plan, which starts at $23/mo.

Which can be quite expensive compared to self-hosting your documentation with a CMS like WordPress.

Otherwise.

Webflow is a good CMS to host documentation, very flexible to be used by developers, designers, agencies, freelancers and bloggers.

8. Notion + Engine.so

notion and engine.so as a cms solution

If you’re already using Notion then Engine.so could be the solution for your documentation.

With Engine.so you can publish Notion content on your own domain. Using Notion as a CMS for your documentation.

Key features of Notion + Engine.so:

  • Good looking layout out of the box
  • Easy to set up compared to some other tools like MkDocs, MediaWiki
  • Good styling options with Markdown support (full control over editing pages with Notion blocks)
  • SEO optimizations
  • Use Notion’s features to collaborate with the team for editing and creating documents
  • Sidebar navigation and advanced search feature
  • Analytics and Insights
  • Other integrations to create a ticketing system, a chatbox or to create multilingual documentation.

Notion’s free plan should be good enough to start with, and based on your needs you can upgrade it further.

Engine.so is a premium only solution, starting at $19/month per site. However, it will include Engine.so Branding (not a really good marketing strategy 🙂), if you don’t want that you will have to choose a business plan that will cost you $49/month per site.

All things aside, if you are already a fan of Notion, or using it for your business, this can be a good option for you!

Final Thoughts

We tried to provide a variety of CMS options to create documentation.

For example:

  1. Heroic Knowledge Base, GitHub Wikis and Notion + Engine.so will work with your existing setup (if you are already using base tools).
  2. MkDocs and MediaWiki are a little tricky to set up and require developer assistance.
  3. Webflow and HubSpot can be easy to set up, you don’t have to worry about hosting or coding, but it will cost you a lot in the long run.

We highly recommend trying out the Heroic KB and WordPress combo, as it offers a rich set of features, ease of use, further feature enhancements and cost effectiveness at the same time.

No matter which CMS solution you choose from this list, you will get all the necessary features to create an awesome documentation website.

Let us know which CMS you are using, or like the most by commenting below 👇.

Mentioned Resources in This Guide

  1. Reddit thread on lack of documentation ↩︎
  2. Usage statistics and market shares of content management systems by w3techs ↩︎
  3. About WordPress and it's usage statistics ↩︎

The post 8 Best CMS for Documentation, Knowledge Base (Expert Picks) first appeared on HeroThemes.

]]>
https://herothemes.com/blog/best-cms-for-documentation/feed/ 0
PressNomics 6 – A HeroThemes Retrospective https://herothemes.com/blog/pressnomics-6/ https://herothemes.com/blog/pressnomics-6/#comments Thu, 19 Sep 2019 16:52:44 +0000 https://herothemes.com/?p=51095 “Hey, you’re the guys from HeroThemes”, one of the other attendees said. “We use your KnowAll theme!” Even though HeroThemes has now served over 23,000 customers, it’s still...

The post PressNomics 6 – A HeroThemes Retrospective first appeared on HeroThemes.

]]>
“Hey, you’re the guys from HeroThemes”, one of the other attendees said. “We use your KnowAll theme!”

Even though HeroThemes has now served over 23,000 customers, it’s still an odd feeling to meet another WordPress business owner using our theme for their help site IRL, especially over 5,000 miles away from HeroThemes’ Staffordshire HQ at PressNomics 6 in sunny Tucson, Arizona.

Trust icon

We rigorously test and research every product that we recommend through HeroThemes. Our review process. We may also earn a commission if you make a purchase through our links.

What is PressNomics?

Grand Avenue

So why have Chris and I travelled to #PN6? Well, PressNomics is renowned as one of the few and best business-centric WordPress conferences in the world. It’s intended for business owners, developers, and (in their words) is a “gathering for those that power the WordPress economy”.

This year’s attendees list included teams from AwesomeMotive (WPBeginer, OptinMonster, WPForms et al), Gravity Forms, GoDaddy, Jilt, rtCamp, weDevs and LearnDash to name but a few. It’s hosted by Pagely, one of the first dedicated WordPress hosting providers. The cohort this year did not disappoint and meant there was some great conversations had during the week.

Hobnobbing aside, there were some excellent talks over two days, presented by insightful individuals both in and out of the industry.

The evening before the first day was a chance to meet for drinks by the pool. Sitting in the Tucson valley, the Hacienda del Sol Ranch would be the venue for the next few days. As the main event commenced the next day, there was a single track of talks and a breakout area. The resort setting provided opportunities for other discussions and asides, being a rare occasion the top minds of the WordPress product economy can meet.

The day after the event was the social day, either golf or a cultural tour. With duck hooks best suited for a carnival game, we opted for the latter and enjoyed a trip to Kartchner Caverns State Park followed by lunch at the home of the “chimichanga”. All excellent experiences to imbibe the local culture and cuisine amongst great company.

What We Learnt

Event highlights

Here are some of the highlights of the talks I was able to attend, to give a flavour of the speakers and content at this year’s event.

Growing a business can be painful. Mike Roberts of SpyFu told us as much. As he shared experiences of building a business in his basement, turning down investment from VCs and the dilemma of wealth vs control.

Hope as a catalyst for change was the message of Brooke Siem’s talk, as she talked about boozy cupcakes, life as a nomadic entrepreneur on the Remote Year programme and recovery from prescription anti-depressants. Brooke explained how making course corrections early can affect major life changes.

Seth Carstens, Director of Technology at Meredith, the company behind Time magazine and Sports Illustrated discussed Products & Engineering. Agile development and Scrum project management. Seth’s key message was iterative development is important for small and big teams alike.

Carl Alexander is a Canadian software developer. His book Discover object-oriented programming using WordPress is a beautifully presented guide to object-oriented programming concepts in a WordPress context (I’ve bought a copy). Carl discussed following his passion and the path that lead him down.

Location in nature

Pagely, the event hosts, presented a series of lightning talks about the technology they are using to help customers such as Bring a Trailer cope with spikes in demand required for the online auction site. They also previewed Northstack, a “serverless” web stack, with elastic scalability. Use cases include leveraging the likes of Gatsby with a headless WordPress setup to create a decoupled CMS with the platform.

The final talk from Rahul Bansal of rtCamp focussed on scaling business. rtCamp started in 2008 as India’s first WordPress-only agency and is now a WordPress VIP partner. Good Work, Good People is the company’s motto and Rahul explained how this was instilled in the company culture, from the office mural to the domain name in their staging environment.

The Asides

We got a chance to interact with more than just the speakers. Here is a selection of some of the attendees we had the pleasure of chatting to during the week.

Jon Christopher from SearchWP, the search solution for WordPress talked about the upcoming 3.1 release. SearchWP fills the void in search WordPress presents, it is a powerful tool for finding content and includes functionality such as PDF search. We recommend it to clients who wish to go beyond the default search.

We met GoDaddy’s head of WordPress, Gabriel Mays and Rich Tabor, who’s awesome CoBlocks and ThemeBeans products were recently acquired by GoDaddy as they strengthen their offering in the WordPress space. Rich’s takeaways from the previous PN5 event helped inform our decision to attend this year’s conference.

Ben Ramsden, a fellow Brit lost in Australia and of GFChart, an extension that can create charts and reports with Gravity Forms. Ben also hosts a Business Transformations podcast and has already done his own retrospective of this year’s event.

Syed Balkhi, founder WPBeginner has recently launched the second year of the WPBeginner Growth Accelerator, a dedicated WordPress growth accelerator fund. Previous alumni of the programme include Formidable Forms. Chris spoke to Steph and Steve Wells about their experience of their experience of the accelerator. Applications for the 2019 round close September 30th.

Another Brit, Alex Denning, was there representing Ellipsis Marketing, who specialise in delivering content marketing strategies for WordPress businesses.

We had lots of great chat with Jay Hoppie, CEO of Alpha Particle with some terrifying stories of the injuries sustained in the electric scooter rental craze sweeping the US. Jay’s company provides digital consultancy services to business and they’ve recently leveraged Bedrock to deploy enterprise level WordPress solutions.

The team from Gravity Forms were there, including Jonathan Calderon who shared tales of customer support and spider attacks in Florida. Our KnowAll Pro theme package includes an integration with Gravity Forms that can gate contact and support forms with a knowledge base search field.

From Gravity Wiz, Scott Buchmann, who offered insights in providing documentation and support for the awesome suite of Gravity Forms “Perks” they offer.

It was great to talk to Mike Schinkel from NewClarity Consulting, his open source WPLib project provides developer tools for building and deploying WordPress applications.

One of the main sponsors of the event was Jilt and we spoke to Beka Rice and Tabitha Turton about how we use their cart abandonment system to help recover sales that would otherwise be lost. We’ll be looking to leverage more of Jilt’s lifecycle emails going forward to further improve our customer engagement.

Explore:

u003ca href=u0022https://herothemes.com/blog/customer-engagement-software/u0022 target=u0022_blanku0022u003eTop 7 Customer Engagement Softwareu003c/au003e

Sandhills Developments, another main sponsor and the company behind Easy Digital Downloads and AffiliateWP were there only in spirit, so we were unable to meet founder Pippin Williamson. Many of the product businesses at the event, including ourselves, use these plugins to power their digital product stores.

Location in deset

On the way back to catch our flight we met with Brian Jackson, marketing extraordinaire at Kinsta. We use Kinsta to host HeroThemes.com and it’s the host we recommend to customers. We talked marketing and coupon codes.

Closing Thoughts

PressNomics 6 delivered exactly what it promised – an engaging event focussed on the business of WordPress. While WordCamps serve the wider community well, product developers can struggle to find relevant insights amongst a swathe of agency and end-user driven attendance and content. Making the jump across the pond was a worthwhile endeavour for HeroThemes as we continue to grow our customer service products for WordPress.

I only hope that the focus of the conference continues undiluted, Josh and Sally Strebel’s passion shined through, their hospitality and commitment was unparalleled.

PressNomics is a prime example of an independent WordPress event done right and is an important one for the future of those building businesses around the platform.

The post PressNomics 6 – A HeroThemes Retrospective first appeared on HeroThemes.

]]>
https://herothemes.com/blog/pressnomics-6/feed/ 2