Multi-tenant knowledge base: one platform, an isolated help center per customer

What multi-tenant means for a knowledge base

In software, multi-tenancy means one system serves many customers while keeping each customer's data apart. Applied to a knowledge base, it means you — a platform, a managed service provider or a reseller — run documentation for many of your own customers, and each of them must see only their own help center, under their own brand, at their own domain.

That is a different problem from one company publishing docs for its own brands. The requirements start with separation: a tenant must never see another tenant's articles, logo, search results or analytics, and adding tenant number 40 must be routine, not a new procurement.

If you are an agency managing client documentation, the agencies guide covers that workflow; if you are one company with several brands, see multi-brand documentation. This page is about the tenancy and isolation model itself.

Two tenancy models — and when to use each

There are two practical ways to serve many customers from one knowledge base. Multibase supports both, and many platforms combine them: a portal for each white-labeled tenant, and reader groups for customer-specific extras inside a shared portal.

How tenant isolation works in Multibase

Each portal is its own data scope, so a reader on tenant A's help center cannot search, browse or be recommended tenant B's content. Concretely:

• Data scope: articles and their versions, categories, images, reader groups, ratings, search logs and view analytics are stored per portal.
• Domain: each tenant gets its own custom domain via a CNAME record, with TLS certificates handled for you through Cloudflare for SaaS.
• Branding: logo, colors, fonts and custom CSS per portal, with no "Powered by Multibase" footer on paid plans — end users see only the tenant's brand.
• Access: reader groups restrict articles to logged-in readers, and authenticated readers are unlimited on every plan.
• SEO: every portal is server-rendered with its own search and its own sitemap, so tenants' help centers are indexed separately.
• AI access: each portal's MCP endpoint exposes only published, public articles — restricted reader-group content is never served.

Shared versus tenant-specific content

Most multi-tenant setups have a common core — how the platform works, billing, security — and a layer that differs per tenant: their configuration, integrations and terminology. Decide early where each article belongs, because it determines which tenancy model fits.

If the differences are small and per-tenant branding does not matter, use one portal and put the tenant-specific articles behind reader groups. If each tenant needs its own brand and domain, give them a portal and start it from a standard baseline: the same category structure and core articles, adapted with the tenant's names and settings.

Within a portal, the review workflow checks each change before it goes live, and version history lets you compare and restore recent versions. AI article generation and AI translation cut the cost of producing tenant variants, in up to 9 languages per portal.

Onboarding a new tenant

1. Create a new portal in your existing account — within your plan's portal limit there is no new contract or subscription.
2. Set the tenant's logo, colors, fonts and, if needed, custom CSS.
3. Ask the tenant to add a CNAME record for their help domain; TLS is issued and renewed for you.
4. Create the baseline categories and articles (AI article generation can draft them), then add tenant-specific content.
5. Create reader groups if part of the content must be limited to the tenant's logged-in users.
6. Share the portal's MCP endpoint, https://be.multibase.io/api/mcp/<portal-slug>, if the tenant wants AI assistants to read their public docs.

What multi-tenant pricing looks like

Many knowledge base vendors bill each additional knowledge base as another product: KnowledgeOwl adds $50/mo per extra knowledge base, and Document360 bills each brand as its own project, with white-label on its $399/mo Business tier. Multibase includes portals in the plan instead, so the cost per tenant falls as you grow.

Admins — your team members who edit content — are counted per account, not per tenant: 3 on Growth, 10 on Scale, unlimited on Enterprise. Prices assume annual billing; monthly billing is 20% more, and prices exclude VAT.

Limitations to know before you commit

Multibase gives each tenant a help center, not a support desk: there is no ticketing and no live chat. If tenants should edit their own docs, each tenant editor counts toward your plan's admin count, so plan for that on Growth and Scale.

The MCP endpoint serves public content only today; authenticated access to restricted articles over MCP is not available yet. And reader groups are a content-visibility feature, not a separate brand — if a tenant needs its own look or domain, give them a portal.