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Where should you exactly put your processes?
Most advice on this is written by whoever is selling the software. We don't sell any,
so here's the version with the limits left in.
The tool is almost never why it failed.
Owners ask this question expecting the answer to be a product name. It usually isn't. Every platform on this page works. Companies run well on all of them, and companies have abandoned all of them.
What separates the two is whether anything ever got written and put inside.
The shelf is not the problem. The empty shelf is.
So before the comparison, the two questions that actually decide it.
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Where do your people already look when they don't know something?
Put it there. A brilliant system nobody opens loses to a mediocre one they already have open.
Do you need to know who read it?
If the answer matters, and for anything involving safety, money, or a regulator it does, a shared drive is not enough and you're buying software.
What each one is actually good at
A shared drive
Google Drive, SharePoint, Dropbox
Good at:Â You already have it, everyone can open it, nothing new to learn, and it costs nothing extra.
Bad at:Â Finding anything. Version control. Knowing whether a guide is current or three years stale. Nobody can tell
you who has read what.
Costs:Â Nothing you aren't already paying.
Wrong for:Â More than about ten guides, more than one team, or anything where you need proof somebody read it.
For a company with six guides and eleven people, this is genuinely the right answer, and every vendor on this page will tell you otherwise.
A doc or wiki tool
Notion, Confluence
Good at:Â Search that works. Flexible structure. Links between related work. If your team already lives in it, adoption is free.
Bad at:Â Structure drifts, because anyone can build anything. Six months in you have four formats and no standard.
Costs:Â Often already paid for.
Wrong for:Â A team that isn't already in it daily, and anyone who needs read-tracking.
Dedicated process and training software
Trainual, Whale, SweetProcess, Process Street
Good at:Â Built for exactly this. Assign a guide to a person, see who completed it, quiz them if you need to. Onboarding sequences. Real accountability.
Bad at:Â It arrives completely empty, and filling it is the same problem you had before you bought it.
Costs:Â Roughly $1,500 to $18,000 a year, clustering around $3,000 to $6,000.
Wrong for:Â Anyone hoping the purchase itself will produce the documents. It won't, and this is the single most common way money gets wasted in this category.
Jim is a trained Trainual partner. See the disclosure below.
Your operating system
Ninety
Good at:Â The process sits next to the person accountable for it, which is where the argument usually is. If your leadership team already meets in it weekly, the documentation stops being a separate initiative.
Bad at:Â It's built around running the company, so the documentation side is lighter than a dedicated tool.
Costs:Â Per seat, usually already being paid by the leadership team.
Wrong for:Â A company that isn't already running that way. Don't buy an operating system to store documents.
Jim is an authorised Ninety reseller through his EOS implementation practice. See the disclosure below.
An assistant over your document library
Ninety
Good at:Â Asking a question in your own words and getting an answer, instead of hunting through folders. For an owner who wants to know how a warranty claim gets processed, this is genuinely faster than reading.
Bad at:Â Being the place the documents live. It has no version control, no approval, and no way to tell you which answer it trusted.
Costs:Â Usually bundled with something you already pay for.
Wrong for:Â Anything you need to be able to prove. And it fails badly on a library that disagrees with itself.
An assistant is the front door, not the filing cabinet. It's a way to ask your processes questions. The guides still have to live somewhere with version control, and when two of them disagree you'll get a confident answer that matches neither.
Paper, laminated, at the workstation
Ninety
Good at:Â It is read. Nobody stops mid-task to unlock a phone with a glove on.
Bad at:Â Updating it. Every change means a reprint, and old copies survive on walls for years.
Costs:Â A laminator.
Wrong for:Â Anything that changes often, and anything you need a record of.
Everyone leaves this off the list. For a shop floor, a warehouse aisle, or a truck it is frequently the correct answer, usually alongside a digital source of truth rather than instead of one.
Almost every company we talk to already owns at least one of these, and it's empty or half-filled. The tool was never the missing piece.
Whatever you choose, write them the same way
The one thing that survives a change of platform is the shape of the document. A guide written to a consistent standard imports cleanly into any of these, and a new hire handed twelve of them is learning one format twelve times rather than twelve documents.
It matters more than it used to. Twelve guides written to one standard get answered accurately when somebody asks a question of them. Twelve guides in four formats get blended, because nothing tells a reader — human or otherwise — where one procedure ends and the next begins.
That's why we published ours, free, with no email required.
What we sell, and what we don't
We don't sell software, and we don't take commission for recommending any platform on this page.
Two relationships you should know about. Jim is a trained Trainual partner, and an authorised reseller of Ninety through his EOS implementation practice, which is a separate business from Process Champion. Neither company pays us for anything on this page, and both are described here with their real limitations.
What we sell is the writing. If you'd rather not do it yourself, that's the whole business.
How that works, and what it costs→
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