What is knowledge source?

A knowledge source is one item in a knowledge base: a crawled website, a sitemap import, an uploaded PDF, a connected Notion workspace or Google Drive folder. It is the unit you add, refresh and delete, and often the unit a plan limits. Intercom and Zendesk call them knowledge sources; Tidio says data sources.

It matters because vendors count sources differently, and the count decides what a free or starter plan can hold. One vendor may count every crawled page as a source, another the whole crawl as one, a third counts characters or megabytes instead. A limit of "5 sources" can therefore mean five pages or five entire websites. Read the counting rule before comparing plans, and check what happens at the cap: refused imports, a prompt to upgrade, or silent truncation.

Where definitions split further: snippets and question-and-answer pairs sit inside the knowledge base but are often not counted as sources, because they are typed in the dashboard rather than imported. Published help center articles are usually mirrored in automatically and not counted either. The text they contain still counts toward any size cap, so a workspace can be under its source limit and over its text limit at the same time, and the second limit is the one that bites on a large site.