The short answer
A wiki is written by many people and grows organically through links between pages. A knowledge base is a curated library of answers — usually for customers or a specific team — with a fixed structure and an editorial process.
Side by side
| Wiki | Knowledge base | |
|---|---|---|
| Who writes | Anyone on the team | Designated authors or support staff |
| Who reads | Mostly internal | Often customers, or one internal audience |
| Structure | Emerges from links | Planned categories and article templates |
| Typical content | Processes, decisions, project notes | How-to articles, FAQs, troubleshooting |
| Typical tools | Confluence, Notion, MediaWiki, GitHub wiki | Zendesk Guide, Intercom, Help Scout, GitBook |
Which do you need?
- Small internal team sharing how things work → start a wiki.
- Customers asking the same questions → build a knowledge base.
- Both, eventually — and the same draft can feed both: write it once as a wiki page, then polish it into a help article.
FastWikiGen drafts either kind from a topic or your notes: see the knowledge base generator and the AI wiki generator.
Frequently asked questions
Is Notion a wiki or a knowledge base?
It can be either. Used openly by the whole team it works as a wiki; with a fixed structure and a small group of editors it works as a knowledge base.