Empolis Industrial Knowledge
Empolis Industrial Knowledge is an AI-driven knowledge platform for industrial companies. It merges technical content from scattered systems, indexes it semantically and delivers it to service, field and shopfloor teams through portals, mobile apps and open APIs.
What is Empolis Industrial Knowledge?
Empolis Industrial Knowledge is a software-as-a-service standard product for AI-driven knowledge management in industry, published by Empolis Information Management GmbH of Kaiserslautern, Germany, a company of the Proalpha Group since 2022. The vendor positions it as out-of-the-box standard software rather than a bespoke project: it centrally merges content from various sources, semantically indexes it using artificial intelligence techniques, and makes it available to authorised user groups in a targeted way through portals, mobile applications and APIs.
The platform is built around a central Knowledge Base and three claimed axes: Collect & Organize, Transfer & Governance, Access & Integrate. Its named building blocks are Knowledge Portal, Knowledge Forge (AI generation of structured articles from chats, e-mails and tickets), Expert Knowledge and Expert Dialog (guided diagnostic trees and interactive checklists), Community & Team Knowledge, Knowledge Graph, Knowledge Home, Access Management and the Frontline Workplace field app. Empolis Buddy, the natural-language AI assistant, runs either on a language model licensed by the customer or on one licensed by Empolis. The claimed technologies are intelligent search, decision trees, knowledge graphs and generative AI marketed as “Trustworthy AI”. System add-ons extend the core: Topic Navigation (an iiRDS-standard interface), Session Support, an Outlook add-in, Knowledge Home Premium, Auto Translate and OCR instances.
Commercially, the service description documents three tiers, essential, advanced and professional, whose functional scope is identical; they differ only in included quotas and extension terms. The German pricing page adds a fourth, Enterprise. Consumption is metered through Power Users, Day Tickets, Guest Users measured in Basic Calls, plus data and index storage.
Operationally the software runs on AWS in the Frankfurt am Main region with continuous replication to a second EU data centre, under a contractual availability of 99.50% per month, with 90% of searches through the Basic API answered in under one second. Empolis as a whole claims more than 300 industrial customers, around 500 installations, roughly 700,000 professional users and some 40 million end customers across 120 countries. Named references on the site include KUKA, Vaillant, Carl Zeiss Microscopy, BOMAG, Komatsu, Phoenix Contact, HOMAG and SAF-Holland.
What it does
- Centralise documents, knowledge articles and work instructions in a single Knowledge Portal searchable in one place.
- Ask questions in plain language and get answers from Empolis Buddy, the conversational AI assistant.
- Generate structured knowledge articles automatically from unstructured material such as tickets, e-mails and chat logs with Knowledge Forge.
- Guide a technician step by step through diagnostic trees and interactive checklists with Expert Dialog.
- Consult the knowledge base offline on a smartphone or tablet through the Frontline Workplace app.
- Connect existing sources such as SharePoint, SAP, Zendesk, Jira and ServiceNow through standard connectors.
- Expose the knowledge base to other systems through the product's open APIs, including a dedicated RAG API.
When to use Empolis Industrial Knowledge / When not to
A quick filter to help you decide if Empolis Industrial Knowledge is the right fit.
When to use Empolis Industrial Knowledge
- Manufacturers with a large installed base of machines and sprawling technical documentation who need one searchable knowledge base instead of a dozen file shares.
- Customer service, hotline and field service teams that need contextual answers while a machine is down, on the desk or on a phone in the plant.
- Organisations losing know-how to retirement and the skilled-labour shortage, who want senior expertise captured in structured articles and guided diagnostics before it walks out of the door.
- Teams building customer self-service portals or embedding a knowledge base inside an existing ticketing or CRM system such as Zendesk, ServiceNow or Salesforce Service Cloud.
- Buyers who require EU hosting on AWS Frankfurt together with ISO 27001, ISO 27017, ISO 27018 and TISAX evidence, and who can commit to a 12-month contract from €500 per month.
When not to use Empolis Industrial Knowledge
- Consumers and private individuals: the product terms (art. 1(2)) restrict the contract to entrepreneurs within the meaning of §14 BGB, public-law legal entities and public-law special funds.
- Anyone looking for a free plan or a self-serve trial: none is published, and the entry tier starts at €500 per month.
- Buyers who want to sign up online and be productive the same afternoon: all four pricing cards route to a sales contact, and the real entry point is a demo request.
- Short-term or one-off project needs: the standard term is 12 months with three months' notice and annual invoicing in advance.
- Users tied to browsers other than Chrome or Firefox, since product terms art. 2(6) restrict software access to the latest or second-latest version of those two.
How to use Empolis Industrial Knowledge
A typical end-to-end flow, from setup to results.
- Start with a demo request on the vendor's form: there is no self-service sign-up, and a commercial offer follows the demo.
- Agree the tier and the included quotas with sales, then sign the standard 12-month contract.
- Receive the first user's login and password from Empolis; that account becomes the administrator and creates all further users.
- Run the onboarding with an Empolis Customer Success Manager, which is included in the service.
- Set up communities, roles and permissions: Power Users for full use, Day Tickets drawn from a monthly contingent and counted on days of actual use, Guest Users on a dedicated subdomain for anonymous self-service.
- Connect one or more identity providers for single sign-on; each provider needs an initial mapping of properties.
- Activate the standard connectors for your existing sources and use the integration API for cases the connectors do not cover.
- Load and structure the content, let the AI index it, then refine the knowledge model and the search languages you activate.
- Brand the portal with your own colours and logos; a custom portal or custom search is available as a separate service package.
- Roll out daily use: browser access through Chrome or Firefox, the Frontline Workplace app from the App Store, Google Play or Microsoft Store for offline field work, and support Monday to Friday from 9:00 to 17:00 by hotline, e-mail or ticket.
Pros & Cons
Pros
- An entry price is actually published (from €500 per month), where many industrial B2B vendors publish nothing at all.
- Hosting on AWS Frankfurt with continuous EU replication, backed by downloadable ISO 27001, 27017, 27018, 9001 and 14001 certificates and TISAX.
- A complete Data Processing Agreement is published as an open PDF, including a named table of the seven subprocessors and where they are based.
- The three documented tiers share the same functional scope: only the quotas change, so a smaller budget does not mean a cut-down product.
- API-first design with four named APIs and ready-made connectors for the usual ERP, CRM and ITSM systems.
- Genuine offline use on the field app, with automatic synchronisation when connectivity returns.
- Quantified commitments (99.50% availability per month, stated response times) with Customer Success Manager onboarding, hotline and online learning content included in every package.
Cons
- Product terms art. 3(2) reserve Empolis the right to train the software on the data the customer stores in it, and no opt-out mechanism is documented anywhere.
- Only one amount is public: €500 per month for Essential. Advanced, Professional and Enterprise are all “Preise auf Anfrage”, price on request.
- The quotas that actually drive the bill (power users, day tickets, communities, storage) are not published, so the tiers cannot be compared without a quote.
- Use of the integrated AI features is limited within the base price (“Die Nutzung der integrierten AI-Features ist im Basispreis limitiert”), extensions are on request, and Empolis reserves the right to cap LLM tokens.
- No free plan and no free trial are published, and the standard commitment is 12 months with three months' notice.
- The pricing page exists in German only, is not linked from the English site and does not appear in the English sitemap; the product documentation and the product's own privacy policy sit on hosts whose robots.txt forbids automated collection, so they could not be checked.
- Signs of editorial neglect: the pricing FAQ is unwritten and its five answers read literally “Antwort Nummer 1”, the ROI calculator link points to a www.domain.com placeholder, the homepage links to a mistyped www.empoils.com, and the terms still mention “iOS from version 11” while the App Store listing requires iOS 16.
Pricing & Plans
Pricing is published on a single German-language page. Only one amount is public: the Essential tier is offered from €500 per month (“Ab 500€ / Monat”). Advanced, Professional and Enterprise are quoted on request (“Preise auf Anfrage”). The service description states that, unless otherwise indicated, all prices are recurring monthly prices and that current pricing information is available on request. Product terms art. 12(1) provide for invoicing in advance on an annual basis, and art. 12(2) charge storage and traffic overruns according to the price list in force; the standard term is 12 months with three months' notice. Every package includes the Knowledge Portal, Knowledge Forge, Expert Knowledge, Community & Team Knowledge, Expert Dialog, the mobile apps, the Digital Information Twin, open APIs, hotline and support, online learning content and onboarding by a Customer Success Manager. Cost is metered through Power Users, Day Tickets (a monthly contingent counted on days of actual use), Guest Users measured in Basic Calls, and data and index storage; a footnote adds that use of the integrated AI features is limited within the base price, with higher quotas and functional extensions on request. No free plan and no free trial are published.
- from €500 per month
- price on request
- price on request
- price on request
Data, GDPR & hosting
A consolidated view of how Empolis Industrial Knowledge handles your data.
GDPR overview
GDPR positioning is documented rather than merely asserted. Empolis Information Management GmbH is established in Germany, so no Art. 27 EU representative applies; a data protection officer is appointed (Yvonne Varl, intersoft consulting services) and requests go to datenschutz@empolis.com. Product terms art. 19 confirm Empolis is prepared to conclude an Art. 28 processing agreement, and that agreement is published as an open 11-page PDF in the Trust Center. It names the customer as controller, details technical and organisational measures in section 3 (biometric physical access control, pseudonymisation, TLS encryption, input and availability controls) and commits Empolis to assist with data subject requests and Art. 33 to 36 duties. New subprocessors require prior written notice with a four-week objection right. Compliance evidence rests on self-audits, internal policies, ISO 27001 and Art. 40/42 instruments; customer audits are capped at one day per calendar year.
Who owns the data?
The source here is the product terms and the published Data Processing Agreement, not the website privacy policy. Under the DPA the customer is the controller within the meaning of Art. 4(7) GDPR and remains solely responsible for the lawfulness of the data it provides; Empolis acts as processor. Product terms art. 7(1) grant only a simple, non-sublicensable, non-transferable right of use limited to the contract term, and art. 4(2) keep the rights in individual adaptations with Empolis. On termination the instance is deactivated, customer data is archived for 30 days and can be downloaded, then deleted; DPA 2.4(9) adds return or erasure of data and media once the order has been performed.
Reuse rights
The customer keeps its own content, but the product terms give Empolis a broad secondary use of it. Art. 3(2) states that Empolis is entitled to use the data stored by the customer in the software for quality assurance of new versions before they are released (test runs, for example) and to train the software with that data in order to provide new functionalities, such as training automatic recognition of new data categories. Section 3.2.2.5 of the Data Processing Agreement repeats the same reservation under “Quality Assurance and Training Involving Standard Software”. No opt-out, exclusion or zero-retention mechanism is documented, either on the site or in the DPA. The DPA describes the processed data as account, access and customer data, processed for the purpose of operating a knowledge management system, with system users as the data subjects. Two third-party language model providers appear in the subprocessor table for the AI features: AWS (Nova model) and Microsoft Ireland (GPT model). Empolis Buddy can run either on a large language model licensed by the customer or on one licensed by Empolis.
Data retention & training
Hosting summary
Empolis runs the software on Amazon Web Services in the Frankfurt am Main region (DPA §1.1); the infrastructure subprocessor is Amazon Web Services EMEA SARL, based in Luxembourg. Product terms art. 2(3) confirm that the servers used to provide and operate the software are located within the European Union, and art. 5(2) add continuous automatic replication to a second data centre in the EU. The AWS data centres are stated to be certified to ISO 27001, ISO 27017 and ISO 27018 and to the German BSI C5 catalogue. Access is exclusively through a browser over HTTPS on port 443 with SSL/TLS encryption (DPA §1.2). The service is multi-tenant: art. 2(4) states there is no entitlement to a dedicated server, several instances run on one server, and customer data is kept separated. These facts come from the Data Processing Agreement and the product terms; the product's own privacy policy is hosted on a domain that blocks automated collection and could not be checked.
Things to keep in mind
Risks and trade-offs to weigh before adopting Empolis Industrial Knowledge.
- Contractual training on your content: product terms art. 3(2) allow Empolis to train the software on customer-stored data and no opt-out is published, so treat anything you upload as material that may feed product improvement.
- Three subprocessors sit outside the EU: Amplitude Inc. (United States, usage statistics), Sendbird Inc. (United States, Community & Team Knowledge) and Breve Information Technology LLC-FZ (United Arab Emirates, Knowledge Home and the field app).
- Budget uncertainty: only one price is public, and the real bill depends on quotas that are not published (power users, day tickets, communities, storage, LLM tokens), with AI feature use limited in the base price and extensions charged on request.
- Commitment and exit window: 12-month term, three months' notice, annual invoicing in advance, and only 30 days to download your data once the contract ends.
- Scope of what could be verified: the product documentation and the product's own privacy policy are hosted on domains that forbid automated collection, so only the website privacy policy, the terms and the Trust Center PDFs could be read. Do not read a website guarantee as a product guarantee.
- Documentation inconsistencies worth raising before signing: the terms still refer to “iOS from version 11” while the App Store listing requires iOS 16, and Eric Brabänder is presented as CEO on the About page and as Senior Vice President Products & Marketing on the product page.
- Over-reliance on generated answers: the vendor advertises its assistant as delivering “100% correct answers”, a claim no AI system can support. Keep expert review in the loop for safety-critical diagnostics, and treat guided checklists as support for technician judgement rather than a replacement for it, or field skills will quietly erode.
Setup & Integrations
Technical difficulty
Moderate. The vendor presents the product as turnkey, out-of-the-box standard software: nothing to install, browser access only, mobile apps from the public stores. Onboarding by a Customer Success Manager is included and Empolis supplies the first administrator account. Real configuration work remains: communities, roles, connectors, an initial property mapping for each identity provider used for single sign-on, the knowledge model and the search languages to activate. Deeper customisation such as a custom portal, custom search or bespoke mobile apps is handled as separate service packages, so expect vendor involvement rather than a purely self-service rollout.
Deployment
Apps stores
Integrations
Supported languages
Behind Empolis Industrial Knowledge
Social
Resources
All the official URLs gathered for verification and reference.
Frequently asked questions
How much does Empolis Industrial Knowledge cost?
Is there a free plan or a free trial?
Where is the data hosted?
Does Empolis train on my data?
Is the list of subprocessors public?
Which certifications does the vendor hold?
Is there a mobile app?
Which systems does it integrate with?
What happens to my data when the contract ends?
What availability is guaranteed?
Should you pick Empolis Industrial Knowledge?
Empolis Industrial Knowledge is a substantial industrial knowledge platform from a Kaiserslautern publisher that has belonged to the Proalpha Group since 2022. What sets it apart from most knowledge tools in this market is how much it puts in writing: numerous dated ISO certificates, a Data Processing Agreement published in the open with its seven subprocessors named, EU hosting on AWS Frankfurt with replication to a second European data centre, and a quantified availability commitment of 99.50% per month. The functional scope is broad and coherent, from a central knowledge base, a conversational assistant and AI generation of articles out of tickets and e-mails, to guided diagnostics, a genuinely offline field app, open APIs and ready-made connectors, and the documented tiers all carry the same features, differing only in quotas.
The main reservation is contractual rather than technical. Product terms art. 3(2) reserve Empolis the right to train the software on the data customers store in it, and no opt-out is documented. Organisations with sensitive technical know-how should negotiate that clause explicitly before signing.
Price transparency is partial: one public amount, three of the four tiers on request, a pricing page published only in German and not linked from the English site, undisclosed quotas that decide the real bill, and AI feature use capped within the base price. A few signs of editorial neglect do not help: an unwritten pricing FAQ whose answers read “Antwort Nummer 1”, and template links pointing to a www.domain.com placeholder and a mistyped www.empoils.com.
The target audience is unambiguous: industrial B2B organisations, no self-service, a 12-month commitment, and a purchase that runs through a demo and a sales conversation.
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