An honest review of the HubSpot knowledge base software

If your business runs on HubSpot, you already know it’s a powerhouse. It’s a fantastic CRM, and when it’s time to manage customer support, jumping over to its Service Hub feels like the next logical step. So, naturally, when you think about building a help center, using the built-in HubSpot knowledge base software seems like a no-brainer. It’s right there, after all.

But let’s be real for a second. While having everything in one place is convenient, does a built-in tool actually solve the problems modern support teams are facing? Your company’s knowledge isn’t just a collection of perfectly polished articles. It’s messy. It’s scattered across old support tickets, buried in Slack threads, and tucked away in random Google Docs. And your customers? They want accurate answers, and they want them now, not a link to a generic FAQ page.

This guide is going to give you a straight-up, honest look at the HubSpot knowledge base software. We’ll talk about what it does well, where it falls short, and how newer AI tools can fill in the gaps to build a support system that actually keeps up.

What is the HubSpot knowledge base software?

The HubSpot knowledge base software is a tool you’ll find within their Service Hub, but only if you’re on the Professional or Enterprise plans. At its heart, it’s designed to help you build a library of help articles. The idea is to empower customers to find their own answers, which should (in theory) reduce the number of repetitive questions your support team has to field all day.

You can think of it as your company’s digital encyclopedia. You can write articles for common questions, create step-by-step tutorials for your product, and sort everything into categories so it’s easy for people to find what they’re looking for. It’s really built for businesses that are already all-in on the HubSpot ecosystem. If your sales, marketing, and CRM are already handled by HubSpot, using their knowledge base keeps everything tidy and under one roof.

The components are what you’d expect from a knowledge base tool: an editor for writing your articles, a system for organizing them, a search bar, and a dashboard to see how everything is performing.

The good stuff: What the HubSpot knowledge base software gets right

Before we dig into the limitations, let’s give credit where it’s due. HubSpot has created a solid tool that’s well-integrated into its platform. For a lot of teams, it’s a perfectly decent place to start.

It connects with the rest of HubSpot

This is HubSpot’s biggest advantage. Your knowledge base isn’t some separate tool floating on its own; it’s wired directly into your contact records and support tickets. When a customer gets in touch, your support agents can actually see which help articles they’ve already read. This is a small but mighty feature, as it prevents agents from sending a link to an article the customer just told them was unhelpful. It gives you a much clearer picture of the customer’s journey.

The HubSpot knowledge base software is built for Google searches

HubSpot gets that a customer’s hunt for an answer usually starts on Google, not your website. Their knowledge base is designed with SEO in mind, which helps your articles show up in search results. This means a customer might solve their problem without ever having to log a ticket or talk to your team. It’s a proactive way to offer support that can really boost the visibility of your help content.

You get built-in analytics with the HubSpot knowledge base software

You can’t fix what you can’t see, and HubSpot gives you a reporting dashboard to keep an eye on how your knowledge base is performing. You can track things like article views to see which topics are popular and which are collecting dust. It also gathers feedback with a simple "Was this article helpful?" prompt at the bottom of each page. These insights are meant to help you spot gaps in your content and figure out which articles could use an update.

You can make the HubSpot knowledge base software look like your brand

Your help center should feel like an extension of your brand, not some generic third-party website. HubSpot lets you customize the design with your logo, colors, and fonts to keep things consistent. The article editor is clean and pretty easy to use, so anyone on your team can create content without needing a degree in web design.

The not-so-good stuff: Where the HubSpot knowledge base software falls short

So, the HubSpot knowledge base is integrated, SEO-friendly, and easy to use. What’s the problem? The issue isn’t really with what HubSpot does, but with what it doesn’t. The world of customer support has changed, and traditional knowledge bases are having a hard time keeping up.

The HubSpot knowledge base software silo problem: Your real knowledge is everywhere else

This is the big one. Your company’s most useful, practical knowledge doesn’t live in a perfectly curated help center. It’s scattered all over the place. It’s in the thousands of past support tickets where your best agents figured out tough problems. It’s in internal Google Docs, detailed Confluence pages, and quick answers shared in Slack.

HubSpot’s knowledge base is a silo. It can only search its own articles, which means it’s completely blind to all that other valuable information. This forces your agents to manually dig through different systems to find answers, which is slow and frustrating. What if your knowledge base could tap into all those sources instantly? Modern AI tools like eesel AI act as an intelligent layer that connects to all your existing knowledge, no matter where it is, without making you move everything into one central location.

The manual slog of writing content for the HubSpot knowledge base software

With a traditional knowledge base, creating content is a slow, reactive game. A support manager notices the same question popping up over and over, assigns someone to write an article, it goes through review, and maybe a week later, it’s published. By that time, a whole new problem is already trending.

HubSpot’s analytics might show you what customers are searching for, but it still depends on a person to connect the dots and write the content from scratch. An AI platform can do this work for you by analyzing your support tickets and automatically drafting articles based on successful solutions. eesel AI can spot knowledge gaps from your actual customer conversations and help you fill them with proven, relevant answers.

The HubSpot knowledge base software pricing wall: It’s locked behind expensive plans

Let’s talk money. The HubSpot knowledge base isn’t part of their free or starter plans. To get it, you have to shell out for the Service Hub Professional or Enterprise tiers, which can easily run into thousands of dollars a year.

This forces you into an all-or-nothing decision. What if you like your current helpdesk but just want to add a smart, AI-driven knowledge tool? HubSpot’s model requires you to switch your entire service setup. This is where dedicated AI platforms give you more freedom. With tools like eesel AI, you get straightforward pricing without weird per-resolution fees. You can add powerful AI to your existing tools, whether that’s Zendesk, Freshdesk, or Intercom, without having to rip out and replace everything.

Feature	Free Tools	Starter	Professional	Enterprise
Ticketing	✔	✔	✔	✔
Live Chat	✔	✔	✔	✔
Shared Inbox	✔	✔	✔	✔
Knowledge Base	–	–	✔	✔
Customer Portal	–	–	✔	✔
SLAs	–	–	✔	✔
Custom Reporting	–	–	✔	✔

A better way than the HubSpot knowledge base software: Unifying knowledge with AI

If a traditional knowledge base is like a library, a modern AI solution is like having an expert librarian who has read every single book and knows exactly where to find the answer you need. It’s about moving past static articles and creating a living system that gets smarter with every customer interaction.

Build a knowledge engine, not just a HubSpot knowledge base software

The difference here is bigger than it sounds. A knowledge base is a passive collection of articles. A knowledge engine is an active, intelligent system that learns from all of your company’s information to serve up instant, accurate answers.

This video shows how HubSpot is incorporating AI into its platform with features like Customer and Knowledge Base Agents to help scale support.

Here’s how a tool like eesel AI makes that happen:

• Connect all your sources in minutes: With one-click integrations, you can instantly pull in knowledge from Confluence, Google Docs, Notion, and wherever else your team keeps information.

• Train on real conversations: This is where things get really interesting. eesel AI actually analyzes your past support tickets to learn your brand’s voice, your most common customer issues, and your team’s best solutions. A standard knowledge base just can’t do that.

• Put AI where you actually work: Instead of making people go to a separate help center, you can bring the AI to them. You can use an AI Agent in your helpdesk to handle frontline support, give your agents an AI Copilot to draft replies in seconds, or set up an AI Internal Chat in Slack for your team’s internal questions.

Test it out with a simulation

With a traditional knowledge base, you kind of just have to "publish and pray." You write an article, put it out there, and hope it helps. There’s no real way to know if it will work until it’s live and customers are using it.

There’s a better way. Before you even switch the AI on for customers, eesel AI’s simulation mode lets you test it against thousands of your past tickets. You can see exactly how it would have answered, get a real forecast of its resolution rate, and find out where your knowledge gaps are. It’s a risk-free way to build confidence and prove the value from day one, no guesswork required.

Get started in minutes, not months

Building a good knowledge base from scratch can take months. You have to figure out what to write about, assign writers, edit everything, and get it all organized. It’s a huge undertaking.

Because eesel AI is self-serve, you can get going in minutes. You can sign up, connect your helpdesk and other knowledge sources, and have a working AI agent ready to test in less than an hour. No mandatory demos or long sales calls needed. You can build, test, and launch on your own schedule.

So, is the HubSpot knowledge base software right for you?

At the end of the day, it depends on your team’s needs. If you’re fully committed to the HubSpot ecosystem and just need a simple, integrated place to store basic help articles, it’s a perfectly fine choice. It’ll get the job done.

But if you want to bring all your scattered knowledge together, automate content creation, and launch a powerful AI assistant without a massive bill or a months-long project, then a dedicated solution is the way to go. The future of customer support isn’t about building bigger silos of information; it’s about making all your existing information useful and instantly available.

Ready to see what an AI-powered knowledge engine can do for your team? Connect your sources and start your free eesel AI trial today. You can be live in minutes.