The 7 Best CMS for Documentation, Knowledge Base or Self-Service Portal

The CMS (Content Management System) can greatly improve your content creation process, reduce costs and eliminate unnecessary headaches.

You have tons of other things to look at, and why invent the wheel again?

CMS works great for any small to large scale websites. In fact, 61.9%¹ of all websites on the internet are built using some form of CMS.

We tried our best to recommend different types of documentation CMS available on the market.

Don’t get confused (TL; DR):

1. If you don’t have development skills or are looking for something simple 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.

7 Best CMS for Documentation in 2025

Whether it is for creating technical documentation, API documentation, internal documentation, or to host support guides. Each tool listed here will provide you with the necessary features.

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

1. WordPress + Heroic Knowledge Base

Heroic Knowledge Base is a very simple and straightforward plugin for WordPress (WordPress is a content management system that powers over 43%² 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.

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 $149.50/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. MkDocs

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

3. MediaWiki

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.

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.

4. 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.

5. HubSpot Knowledge Base

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

6. Webflow

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.

7. Notion + Engine.so

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. Usage statistics and market shares of content management systems by w3techs ↩︎
2. About WordPress and it’s usage statistics ↩︎