The Best Knowledge Management (KM): The 2026 CRM Industry Leader Awards

The Market

Market Research Future valued the global market for knowledge management software at $14.6 billion in 2025, and it is projected to grow from $17.2 billion this year to $70 billion by 2035, registering a compound annual growth rate of 16.9 percent. The market, it said, is experiencing significant momentum as organizations increasingly recognize the value of capturing, organizing, sharing, and operationalizing institutional knowledge to improve productivity and decision making.

The category has expanded dramatically in the past few years and now includes centralized repositories, intelligent search capabilities, document management, collaboration features, workflow automation, content categorization, intelligent recommendations, chatbot-assisted knowledge retrieval, natural language processing, and more, making enterprise knowledge as accessible as possible to as many users as possible as quickly as possible. Another major growth factor is the increasing adoption of customer self-service portals and enterprise collaboration solutions. The technology landscape is also being enhanced by the integration of generative AI, predictive analytics, intelligent automation, cloud-native architectures, multilingual capabilities, and mobile applications, all of which are expected to create new revenue streams.

The Top Five

Knowledge management is central to eGain’s product portfolio, and it shows. The company has a “purpose-built AI Knowledge Hub for customer service,” says Derek Top, a vice president and research director at Opus Research, who notes that it also has “the longest track record of delivering trusted, compliant answers in regulated contact center environments.” Kate Leggett, a vice president and principal analyst at Forrester Research, agrees. “eGain’s multichannel knowledge-embedded approach is a significant advantage in the market. The solution has evolved to keep pace with many of the digital-native offerings, with a strong road map of embedding AI to improve the results of KM practices,” she says.

KMS Lighthouse has a reputation for working with its user base to develop features and product enhancements with a proactive and customer-centric approach. That, Leggett says, makes KMS Lighthouse among the most user-friendly in the industry. She singles out the product for its advanced search, natural language processing, relevance ranking, commenting, feedback routing, and key performance indicator capabilities. But its real strength is that it “allows businesses to adapt the platform to their specific workflows and priorities. KMS Lighthouse is a good fit for midsize to large enterprises seeking to improve decision-making processes with an intuitive platform and easy content creation.” What’s more, its system makes it easy to update, collaborate, and provide and share feedback in real time, and it integrates seamlessly with social media, product catalogs, operational systems, chatbots, virtual assistants, CRM, ticketing, and help desk systems.

Salesforce hasn’t been involved in the formal knowledge management market for long, but what it has done so far has had a solid impact for its customers. “As Salesforce continues to invest in its Knowledge Suite and Agentforce, it is leveraging natural language processing, automated translation, and other technologies to help customers build more modular, flexible, and self-maintaining knowledge bases,” says Rebecca Wettemann, founder and CEO of Valoir. Top adds that as “the grounding layer for Agentforce,” Salesforce Knowledge’s “CRM ubiquity means knowledge lives wherever service workflows execute.

Data governance is a critical component in modern knowledge management, and this is where Shelf shines. “Shelf has the strongest answer to the generative AI knowledge governance problem,” Top says. “Its Merlin AI engine runs continuous [quality assurance] across all knowledge content.”

Verint is unique in both the knowledge management and customer service markets. It is “one of the few contact center vendors to have native, differentiated knowledge management intellectual property” for live and virtual agents and customers, Wettemann says. That makes the company’s KM product portfolio “a great fit for large enterprises in call center operations,” according to Leggett, who hails Verint for its extensive APIs, making integration with CRM, self-service, back-office, and workforce solutions easy; its generative AI content creation capabilities; its advanced AI and natural language processing; and its intelligent search capabilities. Top calls it “enterprise-grade KM with strong content federation,” spidering knowledge scattered across a great number of unique sources, including SharePoint, Confluence, and file stores.

Ones to Watch

Atlassian, Glean, Guru, ServiceNow, Upland Software, Zendesk