Guru Review: A Collaboration and Knowledge Management Software
Access to quality information is critical to outperforming the competition and achieving outstanding business growth. The common challenge is that employees spend so much time looking for accurate information from various sources. Guru is a tool that makes that simplifies that process.
Guru is a software for knowledge and collaboration management designed to illuminate the path to more innovative and efficient work. This article reviews Guru through a product overview, notable features, integrations, customer support, pricing, and more. You can decide if this software is the secret sauce that makes your team and business unstoppable.
Guru Overview
Founded in 2013, Guru’s mission is to cut through noise and provide teams with reliable information to perform their best. Guru believes employees are a company’s best asset and aims to simplify their jobs by helping them get easier and faster access to accurate insights.
With Guru, employees get access to information directly in their workflow. The company’s cutting-edge automated workflows and AI capabilities make managing knowledge effortless and more accessible. No matter how complex an organization is, Guru promises to help users verify information, find answers to queries, and improve understanding.
Under the leadership of the co-founders Rick Nucci and Mitch Stewart, the company strives to achieve its goals. Guru also boasts of several technology and service partners, including TaskUs, Dispatch, Slack, and Microsoft. The company has seven investors, the most recent being Accel and Emergence.
According to Privco, as of April 2020, Guru has a post-money valuation of $ 100M to $500M. Over 2500 companies use Guru. The list includes Spotify, Shopify, and Generac. The company has raised over $70 million in funding.
- Established: 2013
- Founders: Rick Nucci and Mitch Stewart
- Headquarters: Philadelphia, USA
5 core features of Guru
Expert Opinion
Rating: 4.7/5
Using Guru’s features makes performing tasks and finding information so much easier, almost like having a personal virtual assistant. With features like the AI Assist and Expert recommendation, It promotes cohesiveness and collaboration between colleagues. This enhances productivity in the workplace and makes achieving organizational goals more manageable.
While Guru is easy to use and navigate, the company can improve the analytics feature. Some pages are hard to find. We also experienced difficulties with the interface when we tried opening several queries simultaneously. It would also be nice if the company could cater to larger teams and incorporate better tag management.
The integration with Slack is plausible, and the extensions work so well that there’s hardly any reason to reinstall for updates or to fix bugs. We also appreciate the integrations with many other tools and the ability to customize our team’s interface.
Altogether, when we measured the software’s performance against the challenges it aimed to solve, Guru performed excellently.
Notable features of Guru
Guru provides several features that make it stand out from the competition. Below, we highlighted a few and provided detailed insights into how they work.
1. Guru AI Answer
Guru’s Answer is an intuitive AI-powered enterprise search engine that can help employees navigate a company’s information landscape. It’s a way of delivering precise and trusted information when needed. The feature directly cuts out the stress of browsing through multiple content to get answers to queries.
The AI Answer streamlines search efforts by scanning through existing knowledge in seconds to get you the answers you seek. The results come with a list of sources with permission settings mirrored in Guru. This helps elevate your search experience and increase your productivity.
You can click the “Ask a question” button to use this feature. Guru provides an additional advantage because it does not require you to type in keywords. You can simply ask direct questions, such as, “Do I get paid vacation after five years at the company?”
The AI sources the answer from messaging tools, documents, knowledge base, or other programs or apps connected to Guru.
According to the company’s website, Answer Guru saves you 8 minutes with every question answered. This is because it eliminates the traditional steps to get an accurate answer to a question.
2. AI Assist
Guru designed Assist to enhance, summarize, and streamline content creation to ensure impactful knowledge sharing. With this feature, you can instantly summarize important documents, remove jargon from content, and fix writing errors. This tool helps authors adjust, edit, and clarify the knowledge created.
Assist can also help adjust the tone and voice of a write-up and translate text. This tool takes insight from previous content from subject matter experts and creates reliable content.
Guru’s integration with Slack allows you to leverage the AI Assist tool to summarize or create an FAQ thread. Readers can also use this feature to determine action items and generate card summaries. It also translates texts into over a hundred languages.
3. Guru Analytics
Analytics typically plays a crucial role in a company’s administration and leadership. Getting relevant insights can help you connect and measure your intended outcome and can foster better decision-making.
Guru Analytics helps you get the insights and context you need to make informed decisions. The analytics tool goes beyond providing basic statistics and gives you relevant benchmarks you can use to measure your business performance.
Guru structures analytics into three sections: Knowledge health, Guru impact, and Performance. Knowledge Health gives insight into the quality of information stored on the software and how well your teams use it. With Guru Impact, you can see who’s using what feature and data, while performance displays the overall performance of Guru.
Team managers can leverage all these resources and tools to see how team members use Guru. You can also get additional insights into specific datasets by filtering your search to get more specific details about your departments and teams.
4. AI Suggest Expert
Guru’s AI Suggest Expert leverages artificial technology to connect information with the right expert. This AI-powered tool recommends individuals based on the content they created in the past or information they verified.
In short, it learns from existing company information and automatically identifies go-to experts for every query and topic. With this swift routing of questions, you can create a more productive team since they can get more quality and faster responses to questions.
Guru Integration
Guru works smoothly with the tools you use. The design of the core integration is such that you can focus on your tasks. You can stay in the same conversation, tab, and email while searching for precisely what you need.
You can install the Guru’s Chrome extension to make getting information faster and easier. This extension works well on top of a cloud-based application. Guru also integrates well with Slack; you can share essential information with the app as it comes up in conversations.
As Guru integrates properly with Microsoft Teams, you can update employees anytime. Gmail and Outlook are not exempted from the integrations, as you can efficiently respond to messages right within them. You can connect your human resources information system (HRIS) with Guru to populate fields in organization charts and employee profiles.
Plans and Pricing
Guru currently has three distinct plans, each providing various degrees of access to its features and offerings. This section discusses each plan in detail and helps you determine which offer best suits your needs.
1. Starter Plan
The Starter Plan is the most basic package Guru offers to subscribers. With the starter plan, users can access AI-powered features like smart search and card recommendations. Guru also combs through the slack channels to find and recommend trending topics.
The plan allows integrations to communication platforms like Microsoft Teams, Slack, and Outlook. It also provides powerful management and organization features, including card manager and workspaces. It can be an excellent starter plan for small teams who want to store and share info in their workspace.
Features
- AI-driven search
- Browser extension
- Scheduled content verification
- Migration tools
- Public card
Pricing
The plan is free and allows up to three users on one account. If you must add additional users, you must pay $5/month for every additional person.
2. Builder Plan
This plan builds on the Starter Plan. Subscribers can get additional AI-powered features like duplicate content detection, tags and content suggestions, and knowledge categorization. The plan also offers additional security features, like permission management and user provisioning & deprovisioning (SCIM), to further ensure subscribers’ security.
The Builder Plan is appropriate for teams who want to customize and automate knowledge management and get relevant insights to aid growth.
Features
- AI Answer
- AI Assist
- Permission management
- HRIS sync
- Analytics
Pricing The Builder Plan allows unlimited users on one account. It costs $10 per month for each user.
3. Enterprise plan
This is a custom plan with pricing that scales directly with your company. It has added features such as AI-powered content suggestions and ticket linking. The Enterprise plan also makes users eligible for a designated customer success manager.
Features
- AI-powered content suggestion
- Ticket linking
- Designated customer success manager
- High percentage uptime
- Premier customer support
Plans and Pricing Comparision Table
| Starter Plan | Builder Plan | Enterprise Plan | |
| Number of users | Up to 3 | Unlimited | Unlimited |
| Price | Free | $10 per user per month | Custom pricing |
| Uptime | Standard | Standard | 99.99% uptime |
| Customer support | Standard | Standard | Premier |
| Customer success manager | – | – | Eligible |
| AI-driven search |  | | |
| Migration tools | | | |
| Browser extension | | | |
| AI Answer | – | | |
| AI Assist | – | | |
| Analytics | – | | |
| HRIS sync | – | | |
| Ticket linking | – | – | |
| Fast setup | | | |
Terms and Policies
To use Guru’s service, it’s a requirement to have your users register with their e-mail addresses. These users are colleagues and contractors you permit to use the Service on your behalf. Suppose there’s a need to authenticate the service using a third-party account, such as. Google Sign-In, you and your users are required to adhere to the authentication.
Guru doesn’t control and is not responsible for the practices or restrictions imposed by your organization or e-mail provider surrounding the use of the service. The company is not responsible or liable for the content you post or share via the service.
Ultimately, Guru holds the right to seize users’ access to the software when they suspect any case of infringement on the terms of use.
Customer Support
You can contact Guru Custom Support by requesting a demo or talking to an agent. To request a demo, you must fill in your name, work email address, and number of team members and choose the product you wish to review. You should get an email from the team after a while.
To talk to a company representative, they require you to fill out an online form. Information you need to input includes first and last name, email, company name, job title, and your custom message. After submitting this form, you can expect a company representative to contact you.
Conclusion
Guru is redefining how organizations capture, share, and leverage their collective knowledge. The company is streamlining knowledge workflow and enhancing productivity with countless integrations, AI-powered capacities, robust features, and an intuitive interface. So what do you think? Is Guru the solution for the knowledge-driven future?
Contributors: Roseline Sea-Nduka (Writer), John Ayanfe (Designer)