Wikipedia aside, wikis just don’t get any respect. PBwiki, a startup that specializes in helping businesses, non-profits, and educational institutions collaborate via wikis, finally realized that and has officially changed its name to PBworks. Founder and Chief Product Officer David Weekly says the name change reflects the company’s expansion into offerings and functionality that extend beyond just a wiki. That is his story and he is sticking to it.
PBworks, which had an overhaul of its user interface and features last year, offers businesses a customized wiki workspace, with mobile support, document management, access controls and more. The company is also introducing a new project management application in the next few months. The company also rolled out a “Legal Edition” which merges a wiki with case management features, offers a legal knowledge base, and an electronic deal room to manage files that require review, input, and approval by legal professionals.
Currently, PBworks manages 50,000 wiki groups, with 10 million pages and 3 million users per month, according to the company. ComScore shows healthy growth and 2.1 million unique visitors worldwide (see chart below).
PBworks has accumulated a loyal client base. The company serves teams at over a third of the Fortune 500, and was home to three presidential campaigns, the United Nations, The Financial Times and Harvard University. Like Salesforce, PBworks is a paid subscription service, with no advertising. The company has raised nearly $2.5 million in funding, with its most recent funding round of $2.1 million announced in 2007. Competitors include Microsoft Sharepoint, Atlassian Confluence, and Socialtext.
Heard about the upcoming name change via email from them a week or so ago.
The change seems appropriate given they want to expand into other service offerings. They’ve been great for educational implementation thus far through my experience.
really?
Thanks Leena! One minor correction: 50,000 refers to the number of businesses using PBworks. The service hosts over 800,000 different workspaces all told.
Also, a fun fact that might interest folks on the legal side: 24 out of the top 25 law firms in America are either PBworks customers, or have staff who use PBworks.
Quick question Chris since my company is looking for a tool for building an internal “marketing glossary” – does PBWiki support markup formats that are more intuitive than Wikipedia’s? and does it have an intuitive UI for people who are somewhat technophobic?
@MarketingNinja:
Yes, PBworks is now WYSIWYG-only. No markup knowledge necessary. And it’s very well known for usability–that’s why so many elementary schools use it.
looks like a yummy, peanut buttery update to me. my experience, thus far – http://web-poet.../04/28/pbworks/
socialtext.com may be a $5 billion dollar company. They are one of the key players in the smartist, web 2.0 revolution with huge growth. People need to stop complaining about recession http://iamned.com/blog/
Not sure why I feel the need to comment this, but we use them at Twitturly, and we all like it so far.
They are a bit pricey though. Would be nice if the pricing didn’t include the first 3 people that use it. e.g. 1-3 people are free, 4 instantly becomes $32. Would make it more enticing if the 4th user and beyond was $8, $16, etc.
We’re looking at other options specifically because of this reason. $32 for 4 people is quite steep for what it is.
David Weekly should also change his name to David Daily, as that sounds more fitting in our fast paced, gotta have it now, ADD world.
It’s a great product – however
I am a bit disappointed with their pricing model, which is ADVERTISED as a MONTHLY charge per user, but in fact CHARGED on a YEARLY basis per user. A bit misleading if you ask me since you don’t find this out until you want to upgrade.
You would think they would have the facility to charge monthly like basecamp do.
Ian,
We decided to shift to the yearly pricing based on a study of other Software-as-a-Service companies in the enterprise space.
You can probably thank/blame Mark Benioff and Salesforce.com; they pretty much established the monthly fee charged 12 months in advance convention for the industry.
I didn’t even mention it in my post, but the annual payment requirement is the second reason we are looking around. As I said above, $32 per month is expensive for what we are getting. What is the real tipping point though is the yearly requirement. We go from $0 to $364 due the moment we add the fourth person to pbWorks.
Oh, and I’m trying to say this as nice as I can, but your study was wrong. Just because everyone else is billing a certain way doesn’t mean that you should too.
I agree with the need for a monthly payment option, not just a pricing option.
Also, it isn’t clear to me anywhere, apart from a support e-mail about the first 3 users still being free.
I’d love to see the guest users being free on all plans. For example, guests can only view and edit pages they are given permission to and can’t be more than a writer as far as permission levels go. Or something like that.
I concur that because salesforce do it, doesn’t mean it’s a good idea. If salesforce has the best product, people will pay whatever the pricing structure requires in the end. This isn’t necessarily an endorsement for the pricing structure though
Did anyone else get their old 1-3 free user plan downgraded to the free (basic) plan?
Pretty agree that anything that has “wiki” give the impression that it should be free. A change of name hopefully will make it “works”