Browse the docs
How-to
Turn guides into a help center
Publish a searchable help center from your guides on Thoth Cloud: a home page, a page for each topic and guide, and optional click-through demos.
- Plan
- FreePro
- Reading time
- 6 min read
- Checked against Thoth for Windows on
- October 23, 2026
A help center is your guides as a small website at your own address under thothdocs.com: a home page with search, a page for each folder (a topic) and a page for each guide, with an “on this page” list and, if you want, a click-through demo.
- 1
Organize your guides into folders
Each folder becomes a topic. Guides outside folders are listed on the home page. Steps you skipped and the trash are left out.
- 2
Open the publish dialog
In the app, open Settings → Integrations → Thoth Cloud and choose Publish guides to a help center. From a single guide, choose Thoth help center under Publish to in its Export window.
- 3
Choose the help center and the guides
Pick one of your help centers, or create one and choose its address. Then choose the Whole library, one folder, or the guides you ticked.
- 4
Publish
Thoth sends each guide, and the website keeps it and draws the pages. Guides already on the help center are marked updates in the list and are updated in place, and the progress says Updating or Adding for each one. Only the pictures that changed are uploaded.
- 5
Make it yours
At my.usethoth.app open Help centers, choose the site and its Branding tab. Changes go live right away, with nothing to publish again.
The Free plan includes one help center of up to 5 guides, with a small “Made with Thoth” badge. Pro has five help centers with no guide limit and no badge, and Team has 25, with more in packs.
Branding is Pro and above
Your logo, favicon, banner picture, color, font and footer go on the help center, with a support link (an email address or a web page) and a phone number in the footer that visitors can click, and on Thoth’s own pages for it: its sign-in page when it is private, and the page it shows before anything is published. On Free the help center keeps its name and tagline, and Thoth’s default look.
Arrange it on the website#
A help center on Thoth Cloud has its name, tagline, colors, font, logo, favicon, banner picture and footer set on the website, not in the app, and a change goes live right away with nothing to publish again. A banner picture (a wide PNG, JPEG or WebP up to 1 MB) goes behind the name on the home page; without one the banner is your accent color, and the picture is darkened a little so the name stays easy to read. A new help center already has its home page, so you can open it and see how it looks before you add a guide. In the app, the dialog only chooses which guides go up; your folders become the help center’s topics. To take a guide off a help center, use Take out in the dialog or on the website. It stays in your library.
Your folders decide the topics at first. On the website, under Help centers, you can then rename a topic, move topics and guides up and down, give a guide a different topic, or hide a guide from the pages without removing it. Publishing a guide again keeps what you arranged.
Choose what goes on a site#
When you publish, you choose the Whole library, one folder (with its subfolders), or tick guides under Choose guides. The dialog says how many guides it updates and how many it adds, and lists exactly which will go up under See which guides.
- Each help center remembers what it was published from. Open the dialog with nothing chosen and it starts from what that site had last time. If you chose something else, Use that again brings the earlier choice back.
- Keep off websites is a switch on a guide (in its row menu or its guide settings) and on a folder (in its menu). A marked guide, and everything in a marked folder, is never put on a website, whatever you choose when publishing, and the dialog tells you which guides it left out. Use it for internal runbooks that live beside public ones.
- The mark applies to every help center you publish to. It doesn’t affect PDFs, Word files or other exports.
Make it private#
A help center on Thoth Cloud is public by default: anyone with the address can read it, but search engines are asked to leave it out of their results, so share the address with the people who need it. On Pro and Teams you can limit it to the people you allow, for a client runbook, an internal procedure or a partner’s onboarding.
- 1
Open the help center in your dashboard
Under Help centers, choose the site, then open its Access tab.
- 2
Choose “Only people I allow”
Visitors now see a sign-in page first, within a minute or two of saving. Nobody can read a page, search it or open its files without signing in, and search engines are told to ignore it.
- 3
Pick how people sign in
Turn on An emailed code, Sign in with Thoth, or both. A person only gets in if their address is on your list, whichever way they sign in.
- 4
Say who is let in
Tick your team, add individual addresses, and add domains such as
client.comto let in everyone with a verified address there. Save.
| Sign-in method | How it works | Good for |
|---|---|---|
| Emailed code | The visitor types their address, then the 6-digit code we email them (it works for 10 minutes). No account needed. They stay signed in on that browser for 7 days. | Clients and partners who just need to read. |
| Sign in with Thoth | The visitor signs in to their Thoth account, and the help center trusts that account’s verified email. They stay signed in for 1 day. | Your own team, and people who already use Thoth. |
- Your team: with team access on, everyone who is a member of your workspace is let in. Someone you remove, or whose access to the help center you take away, can’t sign in again, and the session they already have ends at once. Changing anything on the Access tab signs everyone out.
- Domains: free mail services such as gmail.com can’t be allowed as a domain, because anyone can get one. List those people’s addresses instead.
- Changing the rules signs everyone out. They sign in again under the new rules. Switching the help center back to public opens it to everyone.
- If your plan ends, a private help center shows “unavailable” until the plan returns. It is never made public.
What we keep
The addresses and domains you allow, to check people against. When someone asks for a code we keep a hash of it for 10 minutes, never the code itself. A signed-in visitor has one cookie on that help center’s address, used only to keep them signed in. Private pages are never stored in shared caches.