My client is migrating off of Zendesk, but we’re finding that HubSpot’s Knowledge Base features are severely lacking, especially in the migration/import tools that are available.
They have over 4,000 articles in 8 different languages, with a lot of tables, accordions, and other unsupported content within the article body.
Has anyone ever tried to set up a knowledge base but using a HubSpot blog instead?
This would give us access to a much better Smart Copy import experience, and also more features such as AI language translations and actual API endpoints for custom integrations where needed.
Using a blog as a knowledge base is something that I personally haven’t seen or experimented with. That said, this may be best answered by those who might have more migration experience. In the meantime, this thread could potentially spark some ideas:
Smart Copy and CSS Selectors
Hey @lnorden, @elizheleva, @JasmineOejbro – curious if you’ve come across this before/ if you have any thoughts on if this could be sustainable?
@katherineladue The core functionality of the KB is different from what you get with a blog.
What you lose by using blog posts instead:
Categories & Sub-categories
Capture data on feedback on article helpfulness (to improve the content)
Easily manage private/public and noindex of articles
Capture search to spot new articles you may want to add
Easily search and serve articles through chatbots (I also believe it can be connected to Help Desk Agent?)
With that said, I have seen clients use blogs similarly to a knowledge base when they haven’t got Service Hub, so it is entirely possible if the ease of import is worth the loss of functionality. You’d likely want/need to set up a different blog template to differentiate from the standard blog to surface tags and categories or sub-categories (will likely need to be hard-coded which is which) to visually be more reminiscent of Knowledge bases.
To date, I have not experienced a large scale blog import work smoothly that doesn’t require any cleanup afterwards anyway (including smart, API and XML file import). I’d personally test a small import of the trickier content types you’re experiencing doesn’t work well on the knowledge hub articles to see if these would actually render as expected for a blog import (or you just shift the same cleanup issue to a new format) to determine if the blog route is actually easier.
I cannot answer for the other things mentioned (AI language translation and custom integrations) as I have no direct experience with these more than point out that they’d need to be tested on the blog as well to make sure the functionality you are seeking is actually supported there.
