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Slab — Modern knowledge base & wiki for teams
Slab is a knowledge hub for the modern workplace. We help teams unlock their full potential through shared learning and documentation. Slab features a beautiful editor, blazing fast search, and tons of integrations like Slack & Github.
Update: Slab 2.0 + Free
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Hi Product Hunt 👋,
I'm Jason, the CEO of Slab, and along with my team @chengyinliu and @jesse_chase, we are thrilled to share Slab with you. Thanks @chrismessina for hunting us!
At Slab, we're building your team's long-term memory.
When a team is starting out, knowledge sharing is mostly ad hoc through Google Docs or ephemeral through email or chat. Once they grow to a certain size (remote teams experience this much sooner), finding answers in these tools becomes a struggle and a more deliberate and durable way to share knowledge is needed.
Our team has all experienced this problem firsthand, at some of the most innovative software companies. We learned that knowledge sharing at scale is still an open problem, even for the most efficient teams.
We've spent the past year iterating with our private beta companies to build Slab. It ties together an intuitive, simple interface with powerful search and organization—and integrates with numerous tools to connect your team's knowledge together.
We are excited to share this with you today and would love to get your feedback! We'll be around all day answering questions, so feel free to comment here or email me directly at jason@slab.com.
@anvishapai @chengyinliu @chrismessina @slab @jhchen What are you guys most excited about building next for Slab users?
@dtran320 The most common request I hear is Desktop and Mobile apps, and I can't wait for the day I don't have to say "we are working on it"! 😝
Personally however I am most pumped about Search. Fast, relevant search can make such a big impact on your day-to-day productivity.
We wanted our search to break past silos so we search across your content from GDrive, GitHub, Slack etc. We have an interesting challenge here where some of these providers' search endpoints ranking algorithms aren't great and don't always contain all the information we want (like Previews). We also have to rank these results against each other (eg: how do you compare a pull request to a Slack message?) while keeping it all blazing fast.
@anvishapai @chengyinliu @chrismessina @slab @jhchen product looks beautiful. love how it connects to everything. it seems like a pretty busy space how did you guys find your early users for the product and continued to grow since that point?
@anvishapai @chengyinliu @chrismessina @slab @thepriyadarshy There are a lot of writing tools for individuals and small teams, in particular in the note-taking space where sharing and the reader's experience is an afterthought. This is fine for a ten person team but will break down at scale, especially across functions.
There are very few tools that scale beyond 25-50 people and even fewer that are both powerful enough for engineering teams and approachable enough for marketing teams. The only name that consistently comes up here as even acceptable is Confluence. Slab hopes to become an alternative that people will name with more enthusiasm.
To answer your early growth question specifically I don't think Slab did anything special. We hustled our friends and network, listened to their feedback and iterate, and over time as our product became more worthy, our users referred us.
@dtran320 @anvishapai I guess this has changed. I just spoke to Slab support on chat and was told "we currently don't have plans for apps yet".
We were super early users of Slab and love that it imported our repo's Github wiki, which hadn't been getting any love.
Pros:Actually makes you want to write and maintain a wiki!
Cons:I can't stop staring at their animated logo
Awesome product 😍 Been using it for the past few months, love being able to quickly create docs, and share exports that look fresh with clients and my team 🙌🏽🔥
Proud to be a supporter of @slab. Know they have had a really strong beta release and looking forward to companies giving it a try.
It's great. I've used a few wiki's and just wanted to store something as we started our business.
Pros:Very lovely, simple to use interface. Onboarding is good too.
Cons:maybe a 'very tiny' walk through? I've used a few of these wiki's and it would be good to know what makes it special on the first run.
Slab is a simple, but very well designed wiki with a clear sense of purpose: it wants to tie together all the places your team currently stores information to become a single source of knowledge for the entire organization. The result is a wiki that lacks some of the visual niceties and tat of some other solutions, but which makes up for it in sheer usability.
They're threading a needle here. It feels simple and doesn't impose itself at all on your writing process, but it also subtly ensures that you're keeping everything well organized and referenceable by the whole org. That's a stark contrast to systems like Confluence, which are potentially very powerful if used correctly but using where using them "correctly" imposes such an additional upkeep burden they hardly get used at all.
Ultimately, a wiki is only as useful as the amount of infomation it contains. Slab is one of the few I've seen that my team actually seems to like to use. That's a winner today in my book, and I'm very eager to see what else they add as it develops.
Pros:Lightweight in all the ways you want it to be, easiest to use wiki I've encountered. Search is powerful w/ integration into linked documents
Cons:Still a bit feature light, works best for content without a lot of visuals. Would benefit from more customization options
I've been looking for a way to build out SOP's for my business. Considering this... but also I don't know if i like the SOP's living in a proprietary paid monthly solution indefinitely. If there was an export to PDF feature that that could live forever I would be more likely to use this tool.
@sam_gastro Hi Sam! You can certainly export your posts out from Slab. We support both single post exporting and batch exporting. Please don't hesitate to shoot us a message at support@slab.com if you have more questions!
Congrats on the launch. We've been using slab at our startup for close to a year and love it. Its been super helpful for:
--> new employee on-boarding and up to date docs on company policies, etc.
--> organizing product and engineering docs for collaboration on new features
--> keep the team aligned by organizing meeting notes, OKRs, etc.
I love the design and ease of use. And the integration with google docs is amazing. Sometimes we do our writing directly in slab, and other times we just paste in a link to a doc and it gets converted into a large beautifully formatted card in slab which is great. And everything is organized in a shared repository that actually makes sense in a team context (unlike google drive which is a mess for team management).
We have a few remote team members and slab has been a foundational tool in helping us make that work -- by making it easy for everyone to document, organize and collaborate around product work. People actually use it. And spending more time writing stuff down has been invaluable.
The team is great too -- responsive, quick to make refinements, and always shipping new features. We've had a great experience.
@zanes Thank you for the kind words all your feedback throughout 🙌🏽Our product is where it is today because of users like you!
Been beta testing for a while - love the product and the team is super responsive and builds fantastic product!!
Hi @jhchen, this seems similar to Tettra (https://tettra.co). Can you highlight some of your differentiators? Thanks.
@tlazay One main difference is Tettra seems to be content with a single player editing experience. Our perspective on Slab is collaboration is crucial to producing high quality content. Our users love using our inline commenting to solicit and give feedback on content and real-time collaboration gives everyone the peace of mind they are always looking at the latest and no one will overwrite anyone else’s work.
My team of 10 ran out of Slab as one of its early users. Loved how easy it was to create posts and link them together. I'm excited to see where this product goes! :)
I love how Slab brings together a lot of the best features you need in a company wiki/note taking tool with relevant integrations like Slack and GitHub!
Seems interesting, would love to try it for personal use first. How about a program for up to 5 users that is free or 5$ a month?
@shefyg we have a 30 day free trial with uncapped # of users and docs. Please sign up at https://slab.com!
@anvishapai Sorry for the late response:). In my opinion 30 days trial is terrible. Why would I spend time, learning to use an app, use it for 30 days, just to delete it at the end of the month? If under my first impression, it doesn't worth the money (for me of course) 30 days experience would change it. Your kind of product can only be useful for long-term, so either you enable users to use it long term or not. Now as someone that want to organize his thoughts, by myself or with a few friends, I wouldn't spend 25$ a month on a tool that doesn't gives me back at least 5 time that amount.
Slab has become so ubiquitous at Elucd that we use it as a verb. “To Slab” something means to preserve it into the long term memory of our org by documenting it. We were fortunate enough to be invited into the private beta in the early days of our company, and we use it for everything — technical documentation, our employee handbook, product launch documentation, notes and synopses of user research, and on and on. It’s one of the few saas products that everyone on our team universally loves. Lightweight enough to not be a drag, but powerful enough to scale with us as our needs grow. I recommend it constantly to people looking for a knowledge management solution, and am thrilled and proud to see Slab on PH today!
How does Slab compare to something like Notion (which works well for now for our tiny team)?
@anuraggoel There are several consequential differences that stem from one differing goal: Notion seeks to be an all-in-one tool and Slab seeks to be a best-of-breed tool.
Slab focuses just on content that has long term relevance to your team. As a result, we have small set of functionality that we need to fit into an interface. Notion has done a good job managing some of their complexity but they are playing the UX game on hard mode.
Notion can work well for small teams or individuals. But any time you need advanced task tracking features you'd have to look to GitHub/Asana/JIRA or if you need a more powerful table, Airtable/Excel/Sheets. Notion can't yet match up to the power of these tools for doing what they do best.
All teams need wikis, sheets, and tasks at some point. With Slab we've chosen to focus only on the wiki use case, and integrate with the best-of-breed sheets and tasks tools like Google Sheets/JIRA/GitHub etc. The integration link between two different products will never be as tight as the same product, but we think the strength of the individual products being integrated, more than makes up for this.
@anuraggoel @imromains Yup we're still iterating on copy and actually have dedicated pages for integrations planned but wanted to launch sooner. Thanks for the feedback!
@anuraggoel @jhchen I know this is a really old comment, but I'm calling shenanigans on the tracking features and table argument. Notion's tables are just as good as Airtable for 95% of use cases you'd see in Airtable (e.g. tasks, roadmaps, etc.). In many way's it's better because you get all the rich text editing features and UX Notion is incredible at built into every cell / row of a table.
Also, the "advanced task tracking features" of tools like JIRA often either go unused or get in the way. You see teams downloading data from JIRA and dumping it into Sheets just so they can get a handle on what's actually happening in JIRA.
@anuraggoel @mike_seekwell If Notion's tables meet 95% of your use cases that's great and can be the case for small teams and/or individuals. However there are millions of users that are very happy with Airtable and would not agree its features is awash with Notion's for tables/sheets. Slab is aiming to achieve the same for the wiki / knowledge base use case.
Congrats to this team on launching! As someone who has his team's knowledge spread apart in so many different areas (dropbox, my desktop, gdrive, box), I've first hand seen the problem of not being able to find the answers to the questions I often have. I was waiting for something like this to come around.
Hi @jhchen,
I'm currently looking at tools for my team to document our processes and knowledge. Slab looks quite interesting, well done!
I've been trying quite a few similar products in the last weeks and I have to say I'm struggling to get my head around what makes each tool unique / better for what use case etc.
For example, I'm currently trying Slite (https://slite.com/) which does look (and sound) quite similar.
Would you be able to help me understand what makes Slab different in your opinion?
@mnstefan jumping in for @jhchen here :)
Thanks for the kind words! You're right, there are definitely a lot of writing tools out there and the differences can be nuanced.
Perhaps the biggest difference between Slab and other tools like Slite, Notion and Quip is that we don't try to be the only tool in your stack.
Slab both searches across your other services and lets you embed content from them - we already have tight integrations with Google Drive, Slack, GitHub and are working through our list to add more like Trello, JIRA, Asana and more. For example, pasting a Google Sheet in a Slab post can lead to some serious magic, you should try it 🔮
Slite seems to have a good answer for personal and collaborative notetaking with their UX and apps on mobile, desktop. However, if you're looking for a tool that will work well with all the preferences of people on your team and help you keep things together when there's an inevitable proliferation of tooling, Slab might be a better bet.
We have used Slab since it was in private beta. It's been very helpful for us as we grow and scale the company. For us, as an enterprise startup focused on lengthly sales cycles and deep esoteric knowledge, we knew we needed a great product for us to document a lot of learnings.
Slab has been a product that everyone in the company has used, and uses without many questions or much on-boarding effort. It's been critical for us to scale knowledge and the ease at which we've managed to capture it has yielded so much as we continue to grow and add people.
Highly recommended.
Pros:Fast, Intuitive, Simple. Powerful integration with Slack and GDocs
Cons:Still new, compliance roadmap unknown
Slab has been absolutely huge helping our team document best practices and long term company knowledge. Great UX, super fast, really strong search. Hard to see any downsides!
Pros:Insanely helpful
Cons:Wish I'd had it earlier
Waffle