GitBook pricing 2025: Let’s figure out what it really costs

So, you’ve landed on GitBook. You’ve seen how slick it looks and heard it’s a great way to build beautiful product docs or a team knowledge base. The editor feels smooth, the final product looks polished, and you’re ready to get started.

Then you click on the pricing page.

And… it gets a little weird, right? You see a price for a "Site," but then there’s another price for "Users." Suddenly you’re doing mental gymnastics trying to figure out if you add them together, multiply, or just close the tab and try again tomorrow. If you’ve felt that wave of confusion, you’re definitely not the only one. Many teams jump in thinking they know the cost, only to get a surprise on their first invoice.

This guide is here to clear all that up. We’re going to walk through the entire GitBook pricing model for 2025, step by step. No jargon, no confusing charts. Just a straight-up explanation of the plans, what you get, and how to calculate the real price you’ll pay.

Understanding GitBook before analyzing GitBook pricing

Before we dive into the numbers, let’s get on the same page. GitBook is a modern platform built specifically for documentation. Think of it as a dedicated space for your team to create, manage, and share things like technical guides, API references, internal playbooks, and help centers.

Its biggest selling point is a super clean, block-based editor that feels a lot like Notion or Medium. This makes it really easy for non-technical folks to contribute without having to learn any weird code. At the same time, it has a powerful Git sync feature that developers tend to love, letting them tie documentation updates directly to code changes.

Essentially, it’s a self-contained world for your docs. You write in GitBook, you organize in GitBook, and you publish from GitBook. This works great for getting a site up and running, but as we’ll see later, keeping all your knowledge in one basket can create some headaches down the road.

A complete guide to GitBook pricing

Alright, let’s tackle the main event. The number one thing that trips people up is that GitBook’s pricing isn’t just one plan. It’s a combination of two different plans that you have to bundle together.

The two-part GitBook pricing puzzle: Site plans vs user plans

Here’s the core concept you need to grasp:

1. A Site Plan lets you publish a documentation website. It controls the features of the public-facing site, like whether you can use a custom domain.

2. A User Plan lets your team members actually create, edit, or manage the content on that site.

The Site Plan, by default, only comes with one user seat (for you, the owner). If you want anyone else on your team to help write, edit, or even leave a comment, you have to buy them a seat through a separate User Plan.

It’s kind of like buying a concert ticket (your Site Plan), which gets the venue open. But then you have to buy a separate ticket for every band member who wants to get on stage and play (your User Plan). You need both to put on a show.

GitBook pricing: GitBook site plans explained

Your Site Plan is the foundation. It determines what your published documentation can do. Do you need a professional help.yourcompany.com domain? Or is a yourcompany.gitbook.io URL okay? Do you want to let visitors ask questions and get AI-powered answers? That’s all controlled here.

Here’s a look at how the site plans stack up:

Feature	Free Plan	Premium Plan ($65/mo)	Ultimate Plan ($249/mo)
Best For	Personal projects & tinkering	Branded, public-facing docs	Secure, multi-part docs
Custom Domain	No (gitbook.io subdomain)	Yes	Yes
AI Answers	No	Yes	Yes
Site Sections	No	No	Yes (for multiple products)
Authenticated Access	No	No	Yes (via SSO with Azure, Okta)
Included Users	Just 1 (the owner)	Just 1 (the owner)	Just 1 (the owner)

As you can see, even the paid plans only include a single user. This is where the second part of the puzzle comes in.

GitBook pricing: GitBook user plans explained

Once you’ve picked your site’s foundation, you need to give your team the keys. The User Plan determines how many people can collaborate on your content and what tools they have at their disposal. If you’re anything but a solo creator, you’ll need to add a paid user plan on top of your site plan.

This table breaks down what each user plan offers:

Feature	Free Plan	Plus Plan ($8/user/mo)	Pro Plan ($12/user/mo)
Best For	Solo writers	Small teams needing basic collaboration	Teams wanting advanced tools & AI
User Seats	1	Unlimited (you pay per person)	Unlimited (you pay per person)
Change Requests	No	Yes	Yes
AI Writing Tools	No	No	Yes
Advanced Permissions	No	Basic	Yes (control who can edit what)

How to calculate your actual cost with GitBook pricing (with an example)

Let’s walk through a common scenario to see how this all adds up in the real world.

Imagine a startup has a team of 5 technical writers building a public help center. They need it to be on their own domain, they want the AI-powered search for their users, and the writing team needs access to AI writing tools to work more efficiently.

Here’s how they’d calculate their bill:

1. Site Plan Cost: For a custom domain and the "AI Answers" feature, they have to go with the Premium Plan. That’s $65 per month.

2. User Plan Cost: They need 5 seats, and they want the AI writing tools, which are only available on the Pro Plan. The cost is 5 users × $12/user/month. That’s $60 per month.

Total Monthly Cost: $65 (for the site) + $60 (for the users) = $125 per month.

So, while you might see "$65/month" on the pricing page, the actual cost for a small team is nearly double that. It’s a capable platform, but you have to go in with your eyes open and budget for the total, combined cost.

Key GitBook features: what does GitBook pricing get you?

Now that the price is clearer, let’s talk about what you get for your money. GitBook has some genuinely great features that make it a popular choice.

A great experience for writing and collaborating

This is where GitBook truly shines. The core writing experience is fantastic. The editor is minimalist and block-based, so anyone can start creating clean, well-structured content right away without a steep learning curve.

For developer-heavy teams, the Git Sync is often the main attraction. It lets you connect a documentation space to a GitHub repository. This means your docs can live alongside your code. When a developer updates a feature, they can update the corresponding documentation in the same branch and merge it all at once. Combined with version history and commenting features, it creates a really tight workflow for keeping technical docs accurate and up-to-date.

GitBook’s AI and search capabilities

On its paid plans, GitBook includes "AI-powered instant answers." This adds a search bar to your published site where readers can ask questions in plain English, and the AI will find and summarize answers based only on the content within that GitBook space. It’s a definite step up from basic keyword search and improves the self-service experience for your users.

The catch, however, is that its knowledge is trapped within its own four walls. In any real business, crucial information isn’t just in one place. It’s scattered across past support tickets, project plans in Google Docs, internal discussions in Slack, and official guides on Confluence.

While GitBook’s AI is a good start, a tool like eesel AI works by connecting to all of those sources at once. Instead of being limited to one documentation site, your team can get answers that pull from your GitBook docs, previous Zendesk tickets, and internal wikis simultaneously. With a product like eesel AI’s Internal Chat, your team can ask questions right from Slack and get a complete answer drawn from everywhere, not just from the docs site.

Common GitBook limitations and what to watch out for with GitBook pricing

No tool is perfect for everyone. Based on user feedback and our own analysis, here are a few things to keep in mind before you commit to GitBook.

How GitBook pricing can be confusing and scale in unexpected ways

We’ve spent a lot of time on this, but it’s the number one complaint for a reason. The two-part pricing model makes it hard to forecast your budget, especially if your team is growing or if you have seasonal collaborators. As some users have noted in Capterra reviews, pricing model changes can also sometimes move features you rely on to a more expensive tier. You need to be prepared for your bill to grow as your team does.

Your knowledge gets locked into the GitBook platform

This is probably the biggest strategic hurdle to consider. GitBook does its one job, hosting docs, very well. But in doing so, it creates another information silo. All that valuable, carefully written documentation is stuck inside the GitBook ecosystem.

This means your support team can’t easily access that knowledge while they’re working on a ticket in their help desk. Your sales team can’t pull up the latest product specs without leaving their CRM. Your employees have to remember to go to a specific URL to find information, instead of getting answers delivered in the tools they use every day, like Slack or Microsoft Teams.

The AI features are limited to Q&A

GitBook’s AI is designed to do one thing: find and summarize information from its own content. Think of it as a smart search tool, not an action-oriented assistant. It can’t automate workflows, triage incoming support tickets, or help your agents draft replies based on what it finds.

This is the main difference between a documentation tool with AI features and a dedicated AI automation platform. A solution like eesel AI doesn’t just answer questions, it takes action. It can integrate directly with your help desk to automatically resolve tickets using info from GitBook. It offers an AI Copilot that helps your agents write better replies faster and uses AI Triage to automatically tag and route issues. It turns your static documentation into an active employee that works for you 24/7.

Is GitBook pricing worth it for you?

After all that, what’s the final call? GitBook is a genuinely great tool for creating and hosting documentation. It’s modern, user-friendly, and has powerful features for teams that live and breathe Git.

But its pricing model requires careful calculation, and more importantly, it keeps your knowledge isolated from the other tools your business runs on. This can limit how useful that knowledge actually is in day-to-day operations.

Here’s a simple way to think about it:

Unlock your documentation’s true potential with eesel AI

Don’t let your valuable documentation just sit there on a digital shelf. By connecting your GitBook site to eesel AI, you can turn it from a static library into an active part of your team. You can power an AI agent that answers employee questions in Slack, instantly resolves customer tickets, and gives your support team 24/7 assistance with accurate info pulled directly from your docs.

The best part? eesel AI works with the tools you already have. You don’t have to leave GitBook. You just make it, and all your other knowledge sources, smarter and more connected. It gives you the best of both worlds: beautifully crafted documentation and intelligent, automated workflows across your entire company.

Ready to see how you can put your knowledge to work? Start a free trial or book a demo with our team to explore how eesel AI can transform your documentation into an intelligent, automated support system.