How to Set Up a Knowledge Base in Front (2026): A Step-by-Step Guide

Before you start: plans, permissions, and how it's organised

Front's knowledge base lives inside the help center, and per Front's getting-started guide it's available on all current plans. Two roles matter: a help center admin can edit both content and settings (full access), while a knowledge base content editor can only edit content. You need full admin access to enable the feature in the first place.

One structural rule shapes everything below: one knowledge base per help center. If you need more than one — say a public customer KB and a separate internal wiki — you create additional help centers. Inside a knowledge base, content nests in three layers: categories (folders that appear as cards on the homepage), optional sections (sub-groupings inside a category), and articles (the actual documents).

Step 1 — Enable the knowledge base

The feature is off until you switch it on.

1. Go to Settings → Help center and select the help center you want to use.
2. Under Features, enable the Knowledge base toggle.
3. Click Save.

A Knowledge base section now appears in the left navigation. If you're on a legacy plan without access, Front's guide notes you can upgrade in Billing or contact your account manager.

Step 2 — Build your category structure

Structure first, articles second — deciding your top-level categories before you write saves a painful reorganisation later. Per Front's guide to organizing with categories and sections, categories are the folders that show up as cards, and sections group articles within them.

To create a category:

1. Open Help center → Knowledge base → Content tab.
2. Click the Add arrow and choose Add category.
3. Fill in the New category form:

• Icon — the symbol shown on the category card.
• File category under — where the category sits (parent placement, e.g. under the Homepage or nested inside another category).
• Make private (optional) — a private category is hidden from the public and reachable only via direct link.
• Name — the label on the card (e.g. Billing & Payments).
• Description (optional) — supporting text shown on the card and category page.

Two things worth knowing before you commit to names. The category URL is generated automatically from the name and can't be edited afterward, so pick names you'll want in the URL. And Front lets you convert a category into a section, but not a section back into a category — so when in doubt, start something as a category. To add a section instead, use Add → Add section, which just asks where to file it and what to name it.

A workable structure for a mixed support-and-sales team might look like this:

Step 3 — Write and publish articles

Articles are the payload. To add one, go to the Content tab and click Add article, then write in Front's editor. Per Front's guide to adding and editing articles, every article carries one of three statuses: Draft (visible only to admins), Published (live), or Published with pending changes (the live version stays up while your edits sit in a separate draft — Front auto-creates that draft the moment you edit a published article, so you never overwrite what customers are reading).

To make an article live:

1. Open the article and finish your content.
2. Assign it to a category or section so it has a home.
3. Add up to five keywords — these boost the article in your knowledge base's internal search.
4. Click Publish. A green success message appears at the bottom left.

One detail that surprises people: article URLs use the article ID, not a readable slug. It doesn't affect internal search, but it's worth knowing before you plan an SEO strategy around clean URLs. Front also offers AI Compose to help draft, edit, or translate article content — handy for turning a rough answer into a clean, publishable one.

Step 4 — Publish the help center itself

Here's the two-step gotcha that traps many teams: publishing an article is not the same as publishing the site. Front requires both. Individually published articles stay invisible to the public until the help center portal itself is published. So after your articles are live-status, publish the help center from its settings — only then does the site become reachable by non-admins.

Step 5 — Add a custom domain

By default your help center lives on a Front-hosted URL. To serve it from help.yourcompany.com instead, you'll need a custom domain — and per Front's custom domain guide, this is a Professional-plan-or-above feature, and requires company admin or help center admin permissions. Note it cannot be an apex domain: kb.acme.org works, acme.org does not.

Do the DNS part a day or two ahead of launch:

1. In help center Settings → Domains, click Add custom domain and enter your domain.
2. Copy the Host and Required values Front gives you.
3. In your DNS provider, create a CNAME record — Name = the Host value, Value = the Required value, TTL 60.
4. Click Verify in Front. Provisioning can take up to 30 minutes.
5. When the status reads Redirect, add the second CNAME record Front provides, then Refresh status.
6. Once the status shows Primary, click Go live.

Front automatically requests an SSL/TLS certificate; if you already run CAA records on the domain, add certainly.com so the certificate can be issued. A help center supports up to two custom domains — one primary and one redirect.

Step 6 — Go multilingual (optional)

If you support customers across regions, Front lets you add multiple languages to a knowledge base so content is served in a visitor's preferred language. You maintain the article set per language, and AI Compose can translate existing articles to bootstrap a new language rather than rewriting from scratch. It's the right lever when a single English KB is quietly failing a chunk of your audience.

The honest limits — and where an AI layer picks up

Front's knowledge base is a genuinely solid, no-extra-cost self-service tool, and for a public help center or an internal wiki it does the job cleanly. But a knowledge base is fundamentally passive: it only helps the customer who chooses to search it. Plenty don't — they open a conversation and ask anyway, and now a human has to find the article the customer didn't. Self-service deflection has a ceiling, and that ceiling is human behaviour.

It's also worth naming the plan seams honestly: the custom domain is Professional-and-above, article URLs are ID-based rather than slug-friendly, and search relies on the five keywords you remember to tag. Front's pricing tiers spell out what unlocks where, and our Front knowledge base explained piece goes deeper on the feature itself.

This is exactly the seam where an AI agent layer earns its place — not by replacing your knowledge base, but by putting it to work on the conversations customers actually send. The broader category of AI agents for customer service exists for precisely this: turning static content into live answers. Macha is one such layer, running on top of the Front you already use through the live Macha–Front connector — it does not replace Front, your help center, or your shared inboxes. You point Macha at the same knowledge base you just built, and its agent grounds its replies in those articles, reading a customer's message inside your Front inbox and drafting or sending an answer sourced from your own published content. When a question needs a real-time fact — an order status, an account balance — a custom tool lets the agent call your REST API for it, so the answer is both grounded and current. Every published article you write does double duty: self-service for searchers, and grounding for the agent answering everyone else. Macha's credits are consumed per AI action, never per resolution — reading and answering a conversation is metered work, and it's honest to price it that way. If you want the mechanics, connecting Front to Macha to route conversations to AI walks through the setup, and the wider Front shared inbox model shows where it all lands.

FAQ

Is Front's knowledge base free, or does it cost extra? The knowledge base is available on all current Front plans. The feature itself isn't an add-on, though a custom domain for your help center requires the Professional plan or above.

How do I publish an article in Front? Open the article, assign it to a category or section, add up to five search keywords, and click Publish — a green success message confirms it. Remember the second step: the help center portal itself must also be published, or non-admins still won't see your live articles.

Can I have more than one knowledge base? You get one knowledge base per help center. To run separate ones — for example a public customer KB and a private internal wiki — create additional help centers, each with its own knowledge base.

Can I use my own domain for the Front help center? Yes, on Professional or above. You add a custom domain (like kb.yourcompany.com, not an apex like yourcompany.com) under Settings → Domains, create the CNAME records Front supplies, verify, and go live once the status reads Primary. Front auto-issues the SSL certificate.

Can Macha use my Front knowledge base to answer customers? Yes. Macha connects to Front as a live connector and can ground its AI agent in your published knowledge base — so instead of only helping customers who search the KB, it uses that same content to draft or send grounded replies to customers who write into your Front inbox.

Ready to turn a static help center into live, grounded answers? Start a free trial of Macha and connect it to your Front in minutes.