How do you decide when to use a Content Item vs a Knowledge Article?

[Bhaskarla Neeha]

I’ve been working with Service Catalog and Knowledge Management, and I often notice that Content Items and Knowledge Articles serve similar purposes both provide static information to the user and are visible on the Service Portal.

I understand the basic distinction:

Knowledge Articles live in Knowledge Bases, are searchable, and used across the platform.

Content Items live in the Service Catalog and are meant for showing static info alongside catalog items.

But in practice, especially when designing a user-friendly portal, they can feel interchangeable.

So my question is:
How do you decide when something should be a Knowledge Article vs a Content Item? Are there best practices, performance considerations, or team workflows that influence your choice?

Would love to hear how other teams make this decision in real-world implementations.

[GlideFather]

And last one :))

Content item can be in the same Catalog, standing by side from Catalog item,s Knowledge articles cannot be next to catalog items and record producers.

So if you have information to share and you want to be next to "Create an incident" for example, the content item is better than knowledge article in this sense...

[Bhaskarla Neeha]

Okay now this is clear as day @GlideFather .I also understood that Content Items are more like one-click redirectors to external links and if any updates are made to them, they get captured in update sets unlike KB Articles. Correct me if I am missing anything, but this really helped clear the fog!

[GlideFather]

Best approach is to go to PDI (request one unless you already have it) and try to create one Content item, add it to Catalog/Portal, play with it and it will give you the best idea what it is