Confluence to IT Glue migration requires transforming wiki content into a relational asset model. Images break on HTML export, macros have no equivalent, and API access may require the Enterprise plan.
There is no native import path from Confluence to IT Glue. Confluence is an unstructured wiki where Spaces contain Pages in a tree hierarchy, with content stored as XHTML and custom macros. IT Glue is a relational IT documentation platform built for MSPs, where Organizations contain typed assets like Configurations, Flexible Assets, Documents, and Passwords linked through explicit relationships. The fundamental gap is structural: Confluence pages are freeform and hierarchical, while IT Glue assets are typed, flat within their category, and relationally linked. A single Confluence space documenting a client may contain network diagrams, server configs, password tables, and SOPs — all as wiki pages. In IT Glue, those same items must split across Configurations, Flexible Assets, Documents, and Passwords within a single Organization. Every migration requires custom API work, attachment re-hosting, macro stripping, and careful data mapping to transform unstructured wiki content into IT Glue's rigid per-organization schema.
Read this first
Pair-specific gotchas that catch teams out. Each one has cost somebody a weekend.
Confluence exports only include published content
Every native export format — XML, HTML, PDF — captures only the published version of each page. Unpublished draft changes are silently excluded. Blog posts are excluded from HTML exports. Comments are excluded from HTML format. Audit your spaces before starting. (support.atlassian.com)
The Broken Image Problem
Confluence HTML exports store attachments in folders named by page ID (e.g., /download/attachments/123456/image.png). When this HTML is imported into IT Glue, those paths resolve to nothing. Every inline image shows a broken icon. You must download each attachment and re-upload it to IT Glue, or script the re-hosting before import.
Budget check before you start
If IT Glue API access does require the Enterprise plan, upgrading from Basic ($29/user) or Select ($38/user) adds significant cost. For a 10-person MSP on Basic, that's an extra $150/month — $1,800/year — just to unlock the migration endpoint. Verify your plan's API access with IT Glue sales before committing to an API-based approach.
Archive before you migrate
Identify and archive outdated pages in Confluence first. Do not pay to move garbage data. Confluence APIs make extracting historical page versions complex — most teams migrate only the latest published version.
IT Glue account exports are not full environment backups
The export feature omits related items, revision histories, settings, users, and flexible asset templates. Do not confuse account export with full environment rollback. (help.itglue.kaseya.com)
The runbook
Work top to bottom. Tick steps as you go — your progress is saved in this browser.
01 Discovery Decide what content deserves to move before you plan how to move it.
Objective A content inventory with a keep/rewrite/retire decision on every article and an agreed URL strategy.
Keep these open
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Inventory all content in Confluence
Count articles, categories, attachments, images and embedded media, and pull page views and last-updated dates for each article. Usage data is what makes the next decision defensible rather than political.
Data Profiler Get real record counts instead of estimating from memory -
Make a keep, rewrite or retire call on every article
Most knowledge bases are half stale. Migrating everything imports the staleness and doubles the work; use views and last-updated to triage, and get the owning team to confirm. This usually removes 30-50% of scope.
Migrating stale content is the most common knowledge-base migration mistake — it costs effort and actively degrades the new site.
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Agree the URL and redirect strategy
Decide the IT Glue URL structure and whether you can serve 301 redirects from the old paths. Public help centres carry real search traffic and inbound links; losing it is a measurable commercial impact.
Without 301 redirects from old article URLs you lose accumulated search ranking and every external link and bookmark breaks.
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Map the information architecture
Document the current category tree and design the target one, checking whether IT Glue supports your nesting depth. Deeply nested hierarchies frequently have to be flattened, which changes navigation for everyone.
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Confirm permissions, audiences and localisation scope
Establish which content is public, internal or restricted, and how IT Glue models that. Then confirm how many locales you have and whether translation relationships between articles survive the move.
Confluence → IT Glue specifics
- PSA/RMM integration requirements
- IT Glue integrates natively with ConnectWise, Autotask, Datto RMM, and the broader Kaseya stack. Confluence doesn't. MSPs maintaining client documentation in Confluence hit a wall when they need credential rotation, configuration syncing, or ticket-linked documentation. (itglue.com)
- Password management consolidation
- Teams storing passwords in Confluence pages — even with page-level restrictions — lack encrypted vaulting, audit trails, and OTP support. IT Glue's password engine is purpose-built for this.
- Per-client segmentation
- Confluence's permission model can isolate spaces, but it doesn't enforce per-client Organization boundaries the way IT Glue does. For MSPs managing 50+ clients, IT Glue's Organization model is materially safer.
- Compliance pressure
- IT Glue is SOC 2 compliant with immutable audit trails. Confluence Cloud has audit logs, but they aren't designed for the credential-access compliance workflows MSPs face.
Don't move on until
- Full content inventory with page views and last-updated dates
- Keep / rewrite / retire decision recorded per article
- URL and redirect strategy agreed with whoever owns SEO
02 Data Audit Audit the markup, the links and the assets — that is where KB migrations break.
Objective A content export with markup, internal links and every embedded asset accounted for.
Keep these open
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Export content and assess markup fidelity
Export articles in the richest format available and inspect what survived: tables, code blocks, callouts, nested lists, anchors and embedded video. Rich formatting is where fidelity is lost, and it is lost quietly.
HTML-to-Markdown conversion routinely mangles nested lists, tables and code blocks. Inspect the output rather than trusting the converter.
Data Profiler Profile the Confluence export for nulls, outliers and type drift -
Inventory every internal link and cross-reference
Extract all internal links, anchor links and article cross-references. These break by default: the target URL structure differs, so every internal link needs rewriting as part of the load, not afterwards.
Internal links left pointing at old URLs turn the new knowledge base into a maze of 404s on day one.
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Inventory images, attachments and embedded media
List every asset with its URL, size and type, and confirm each still resolves. Assets hosted on the old platform's CDN will 404 the moment you decommission it, so they must be rehosted, not referenced.
Images referenced from the source platform's CDN break when the old account closes. Download and rehost every asset.
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Find and fix broken links and orphans
Crawl for existing broken internal and external links, and find articles no category links to. Fix them before migrating — a migration is a bad time to discover pre-existing rot.
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Check for PII and internal information in public content
Scan for customer names, internal hostnames, credentials in code samples and screenshots containing real data. Republishing these on a public help centre is a disclosure, and screenshots are the usual culprit.
PII & Compliance Scanner Find regulated fields before they land in a new system -
Normalise metadata
Standardise authors, tags, timestamps to UTC, and locale codes. Author mapping needs a decision for people who have left — attribution to a deleted user usually fails the import.
Don't move on until
- Content exported with markup fidelity assessed
- Every internal link and asset reference inventoried
- Broken links and missing assets fixed or logged
03 Field Mapping Map structure, metadata, permissions and — above all — URLs.
Objective A mapping covering article fields, taxonomy, permissions and a complete old-to-new URL map.
Keep these open
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Map the article schema
Map title, body, excerpt, author, dates, status, tags, SEO metadata and any custom properties. Confirm which fields IT Glue lets you set on import versus which it computes — computed dates are a common surprise.
Schema Mapper Opens pre-loaded with the Confluence → IT Glue field pair -
Map the taxonomy and hierarchy
Map categories, sections and tags to the target structure, resolving any nesting-depth limit explicitly. If you must flatten, decide how the lost level is preserved — usually as a tag or a title prefix.
JSON to CSV Converter Flatten nested API responses into a reviewable sheet -
Map permissions and audience segmentation
Map public, logged-in, and role-restricted visibility to IT Glue's model. Verify the mapping deliberately: internal content accidentally published publicly is the highest-severity failure in this whole category.
Permission mapping errors publish internal documentation to the open web. Verify visibility on every restricted article after load.
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Build the complete old-to-new URL map
Produce a row per article mapping the old URL to the new one, then confirm exactly where the 301s will be served — IT Glue, a CDN, or your own web layer. Without this artifact the redirect step cannot be executed at all.
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Define the markup conversion and link-rewrite rules
Specify how each markup construct converts and how internal links are rewritten using the URL map. Write it as a repeatable transform, not manual edits — you will run it more than once.
Data Format Converter Reshape the export into the format IT Glue's importer expects -
Plan localisation and freeze the spec
Confirm how translated articles link to their source language in IT Glue, then version and sign off the mapping spec.
Don't move on until
- Article schema and taxonomy mapped
- Permission and audience model mapped to target equivalents
- Complete URL map produced and redirect method confirmed
04 Test Migration Pilot the hardest articles, then read them.
Objective A pilot load whose formatting, links, assets and search all hold up under human review.
Keep these open
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Configure IT Glue with the agreed structure
Create the category tree, permission groups, locales and branding before loading. Articles loaded before their categories exist land uncategorised and have to be moved by hand.
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Pick the most difficult articles as the pilot
Choose 20-50 articles for difficulty: the longest, the most heavily formatted, ones with tables and code blocks, deep internal linking, many images, embedded video, restricted visibility, and non-Latin scripts. Easy articles prove nothing.
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Run the conversion and load with link rewriting
Apply the markup conversion, rewrite internal links from the URL map, upload and re-reference assets, then load. Log every conversion warning rather than suppressing it.
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Read every pilot article side by side
Open source and target together and compare rendering. This step is manual on purpose: no automated check catches a table that collapsed into a paragraph or a code block that lost its indentation.
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Click every link and load every asset
Verify each internal link resolves, each image loads from the new host, each attachment downloads and each embed plays. Assets still served from the old CDN are the defect that surfaces only after decommissioning.
Migration Validation Tool Diff the pilot batch against source before scaling up -
Test search and permissions
Search for known terms and confirm the right articles rank, then verify every restricted pilot article is invisible to an anonymous browser. Test permissions from a logged-out session, not an admin one.
Don't move on until
- Complex articles render correctly with formatting intact
- Every internal link and asset in the pilot resolves
- Search returns sensible results for the pilot content
05 Cutover Publish, redirect, and keep the search traffic.
Objective All in-scope content live in IT Glue with redirects serving and search engines informed.
Keep these open
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Load the full content set ahead of the switch
Run the full conversion and load into IT Glue, unpublished or on a staging domain. Content migration differs from data migration here: you can stage the whole thing before anyone sees it.
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Publish the runbook with the redirect step first-class
Sequence the freeze, final delta, publish, redirect activation, sitemap submission and link updates, with owners for each. Redirect activation is the step with lasting commercial consequences, so it gets explicit ownership.
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Freeze editing and migrate the delta
Stop editing in Confluence, then convert and load anything changed since the full load. Announce the freeze to every team that publishes — content teams are used to editing whenever they like.
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Publish and verify permissions live
Publish the content set, then immediately verify restricted articles are not publicly reachable using an anonymous session. Do this before announcing the new site, not after.
Verify restricted content from a logged-out browser. An admin session will show you everything and tell you nothing.
Migration Validation Tool Confirm the final delta landed before you reopen -
Activate 301 redirects and submit the sitemap
Turn on the redirects from the URL map, then spot-check a sample of high-traffic old URLs and confirm each returns 301 to the right article. Submit the new sitemap and keep the old one reachable until search engines have recrawled.
Redirect chains and redirect loops both leak ranking. Verify each redirect resolves in a single hop.
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Repoint in-product and support links
Update help links embedded in your product, in support macros, in email templates and in onboarding material. These are the links your existing customers actually use, and they are easy to forget.
Don't move on until
- All content loaded, categorised and correctly permissioned
- 301 redirects live and verified from a sample of old URLs
- Sitemap submitted and support links repointed
06 Validation Watch traffic, links and search rankings for weeks, not hours.
Objective Verified content completeness, healthy redirects, and search traffic recovered to baseline.
Keep these open
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Reconcile content counts and assets
Compare article counts by category and status, plus asset counts, against source. Confirm every article in the keep list is present and every retired one genuinely is not.
Migration Validation Tool Reconcile Confluence and IT Glue record-for-record -
Crawl the new site for broken links and assets
Run a full crawl for 404s, broken images and missing attachments, and fix everything it finds. Repeat the crawl after the fixes rather than assuming they worked.
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Verify the redirects at scale
Test every mapped old URL for a single-hop 301 to the right destination. Chains and loops both leak ranking and are invisible unless you check the whole map, not a sample.
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Monitor organic traffic and rankings for four to eight weeks
Track organic sessions, impressions and rankings for your top articles against baseline. A dip in the first two weeks is normal; one that has not recovered by week six is a redirect or indexing problem to investigate.
Do not decommission the old platform until search traffic has recovered — you may still need the old URLs to diagnose a ranking loss.
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Verify search, permissions and feedback loops
Confirm on-site search returns good results for real queries, re-verify restricted content from a logged-out session, and check article feedback and analytics are collecting.
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Sign off and decommission on a delay
Get acceptance against the Discovery criteria, keep Confluence available read-only until traffic has recovered, take a final export, and only then close the account.
Confluence → IT Glue specifics
- PSA/RMM sync configuration
- If Organizations are synced from a PSA (ConnectWise, Autotask), verify the migrated Organizations match before enabling sync. Conflicting records can cause data overwrites.
- Access permissions
- Confluence space permissions don't migrate. Rebuild per-Organization access controls, group assignments, and password visibility rules in IT Glue.
- User training
- IT Glue's navigation model (Organization → sidebar → asset type) is fundamentally different from Confluence's space/page tree. Budget time for team onboarding. Most adoption problems come from putting new structured data back into freeform Documents instead of Flexible Assets.
- Decommission Confluence
- Set Confluence to read-only for 30 days before shutting off billing to ensure no data was missed.
Don't move on until
- Article counts reconciled and no broken links remain
- Redirects returning 301 with no chains or loops
- Organic traffic recovered to within tolerance of baseline
Field mapping reference
The field-by-field mapping for each object. Use this as the starting point for your mapping spec.
Confluence IT Glue Object Mapping
Jira links, Gliffy diagrams, expand blocks, and Table Filter macros have no IT Glue equivalent — macro-heavy pages produce near-empty output.
| Confluence field | IT Glue field | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Space (per client) | Organization | One space per client maps to one Organization. If a single space has subpages per client, split the tree into per-Organization imports. |
| Page (SOP, runbook, how-to) | Document | Free-text procedural content. Closest 1:1 mapping. |
| Page (server inventory, network diagram) | Flexible Asset | Structured data needs a Flexible Asset Type defined first. Each field must be mapped explicitly. |
| Page (password table) | Password (General or Embedded) | Extract from Confluence tables or macros. Each row becomes a separate IT Glue Password record. |
| Page (contact list) | Contact | Extract structured fields (name, email, phone) from Confluence tables. |
| Child page hierarchy | Document folders or Related Items | IT Glue Documents can be organized in folders within an Organization. Deep page trees must be flattened or represented via Related Items links. |
| Attachments (files, images) | Attachments on Documents or Configurations | Must be downloaded from Confluence and re-uploaded. |
| Labels | No direct equivalent | Can be partially represented using Flexible Asset tags or document naming conventions. IT Glue Documents do not support tagging. |
| Page comments | No direct equivalent | IT Glue Documents do not support threaded comments. Append to the document body or discard. |
| Confluence macros | Stripped or converted | No IT Glue equivalent for Jira links, expand blocks, status macros, Gliffy diagrams, or Table Filter macros. |
| Page ID / source URL | Custom source_id field | Required for validation, reruns, and link rewriting. |
Risk matrix
Per-object risk for this pair. Plan extra validation around anything marked high.
| Object | Risk | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Wiki Pages (SOPs/Runbooks) | low | Closest 1:1 mapping to IT Glue Documents — free-text procedural content transfers with minimal transformation. |
| Structured Pages (Server Inventories) | high | Must define Flexible Asset Types with fixed field schemas first, then parse HTML tables and map each field explicitly. |
| Inline Images and Attachments | high | HTML export paths break in IT Glue — every image must be downloaded from Confluence and re-hosted before import. |
| Password Tables | high | Credentials stored in Confluence HTML tables must be parsed row-by-row and converted to individual encrypted IT Glue Password records. |
| Confluence Macros | high | Jira links, Gliffy diagrams, expand blocks, and Table Filter macros have no IT Glue equivalent — macro-heavy pages produce near-empty output. |
| Page Comments | medium | IT Glue Documents do not support threaded comments — must be appended to document body or discarded entirely. |
| Labels and Tags | medium | Confluence labels have no direct IT Glue equivalent for Documents — partial representation possible only via Flexible Asset tags or naming conventions. |
| Internal Page Links | high | All Confluence page-ID and relative-path links break in IT Glue and must be rewritten using a source-to-target ID map. |
| Child Page Hierarchy | medium | IT Glue Documents support only shallow folders — deep Confluence page trees must be flattened with hierarchy preserved through naming or body links. |
| Contacts | low | Structured contact fields extracted from Confluence tables map cleanly to IT Glue Contact records. |
The hard parts
What makes this specific migration difficult, beyond the mechanics.
Inline Image Breakage
Confluence HTML exports store attachments in page-ID subfolders with relative paths that resolve to nothing in IT Glue, breaking every inline image.
Macro Conversion Loss
Confluence macros like Jira links, expand blocks, status badges, Gliffy diagrams, and Table Filter have no IT Glue equivalent and must be stripped or rebuilt manually.
Dual API Rate Limits
IT Glue enforces 3,000 requests per 5-minute window while Confluence uses a points-based model that resets hourly, requiring throttling and backoff on both sides.
Multi-Pass Relationship Mapping
IT Glue's Tag fields require creating objects in strict dependency order — Organizations first, then Configurations and Contacts, then Documents and Flexible Assets — making single-pass migration impossible.
API Access Paywall
IT Glue API access may require the Enterprise plan at $44/user/month with a 5-user minimum, potentially blocking API-based migration entirely.
Tools used in this playbook
All free, all run entirely in your browser — nothing is uploaded.
FAQ
Can I import Confluence pages directly into IT Glue?
Not with full fidelity. IT Glue has no native Confluence importer. You can export Confluence spaces to HTML and upload them into IT Glue Documents, but imported files land as a single Text block, inline images break because the HTML references local file paths IT Glue cannot resolve, and macros are lost. For anything beyond a handful of text-only pages, you need an API-based or managed migration.
Does IT Glue have an API for data migration?
Yes, but access may be restricted. IT Glue's KB articles list API access as an Enterprise-only feature ($44/user/month with a 5-user minimum), though the public pricing page has listed API access on lower tiers. Confirm with IT Glue sales before committing to an API-based approach. The API enforces a rate limit of 3,000 requests per 5-minute window, a 10MB payload limit, and paginates at up to 1,000 results per request.
What happens to Confluence macros during migration to IT Glue?
Confluence macros (Jira links, expand blocks, status badges, Gliffy diagrams, Table Filter) have no IT Glue equivalent. They must be stripped during transformation, converted to static content such as screenshots, or rebuilt manually. Macro-heavy pages often produce near-empty output after migration.
How do Confluence spaces map to IT Glue organizations?
If you use one Confluence space per client, each space maps to one IT Glue Organization. If you have a single space with subpages per client, you must split the page tree and route each section to the correct Organization. Wiki pages then map to Documents (for SOPs), Flexible Assets (for structured data), or Passwords (for credentials).
How long does a Confluence to IT Glue migration take?
For a manual HTML export approach with under 50 pages, expect 1–2 weeks of labor. For an API-based custom script covering 500+ pages across multiple spaces, budget 3–6 weeks of engineering time for script development, testing, and validation. A managed migration service can typically compress this to days.