To migrate from Notion to Confluence Cloud, export your workspace as an HTML ZIP and import via Confluence's built-in importer. This native method flattens relational databases, drops inline comments, loses formula logic, and breaks embedded content and synced blocks. For workspaces with complex relational structures, organizations must choose between native HTML import, open-source scripts (ecosystem is thin), or a managed API pipeline. Pre-export cleanup — archiving unused pages, resolving comments, flattening deep nesting — significantly reduces QA effort.
There is no clean 1:1 export from Notion to Confluence — the native Atlassian HTML importer flattens relational databases into static tables, drops inline comments, and times out on exports exceeding ~1 GB. Notion stores content as a block-based relational object model where each row is a page and databases link via relations and rollups. Confluence uses a macro-driven page-tree hierarchy with spaces, parent-child pages, and structured macros. Bridging this gap requires converting blocks to macros, rebuilding relational databases manually, remapping user IDs, and remediating every internal link — all before the Confluence legacy editor is fully deprecated.
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 Notion
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 Confluence 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 Confluence 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 Confluence models that. Then confirm how many locales you have and whether translation relationships between articles survive the move.
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 Notion 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.
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Archive unused databases and pages
If nobody has touched it in six months, it probably doesn't need to migrate. Reducing volume directly reduces export time, import failures, and QA effort.
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Resolve or export inline comments
The native importer drops inline comments entirely. Any comment thread that contains decisions or context should be resolved and its content merged into the page body before export.
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Flatten excessive nesting
Notion allows infinite page nesting. Confluence works best with wider, shallower trees. If you have pages nested 5+ levels deep, restructure before export — it's far easier to reorganize in Notion's drag-and-drop interface than in Confluence after import.
Notion → Confluence specifics
- Hierarchy Audit
- Ensure child pages nested properly under their parent spaces. Confluence operates best with wider, shallower trees compared to Notion's infinite nesting.
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 Confluence lets you set on import versus which it computes — computed dates are a common surprise.
Schema Mapper Opens pre-loaded with the Notion → Confluence 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 Confluence'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 — Confluence, 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 Confluence's importer expects -
Plan localisation and freeze the spec
Confirm how translated articles link to their source language in Confluence, 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 Confluence 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 Confluence 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 Confluence, 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 Notion, 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.
Notion → Confluence specifics
- Rollback Readiness
- Before starting the migration, take a full backup of your Confluence target space (if it contains existing content). If the import produces unexpected results, you can delete the imported space and re-import. For Notion, your source data is untouched by the export process — but verify this by spot-checking a few pages in Notion after export to confirm nothing was modified.
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 Notion and Confluence 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 Notion available read-only until traffic has recovered, take a final export, and only then close the account.
Notion → Confluence specifics
- Link Remediation
- Internal links may still point to notion.so URLs. Execute a global find-and-replace to update internal routing to the new Confluence environment.
- Permission Validation
- Notion's permission model (workspace-level, page-level, team spaces) does not map directly to Confluence's space-and-page permission scheme. Verify that private pages (e.g., HR, Executive) did not inherit global workspace permissions during the transfer. Specifically: Notion pages shared with individual users need their equivalent Confluence page restrictions manually configured, and Notion "Team Spaces" should map to dedicated Confluence spaces with appropriate group permissions.
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
Risk matrix
Per-object risk for this pair. Plan extra validation around anything marked high.
| Object | Risk | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Relational Databases | high | Degrade into static HTML tables with all relations severed |
| Inline Comments | high | Dropped entirely during native import with no automatic recovery |
| Kanban / Board Views | high | Converted to flat text tables — must manually recreate using Jira or Trello |
| Synced Blocks | medium | Text duplicated onto the page but live sync permanently broken |
| Internal Links | medium | Still point to notion.so URLs — require global find-and-replace |
| Page Permissions | medium | Private pages may inherit global workspace permissions during transfer |
| User Mapping | medium | Authorship defaults to Anonymous if target users not provisioned before import |
| Simple Text & Headers | low | 1:1 conversion to Confluence — no fix required |
| Toggle Lists | low | Convert to Confluence Expand macros with minor formatting review |
The hard parts
What makes this specific migration difficult, beyond the mechanics.
Database Flattening
Relational databases degrade into static HTML tables with all relations severed. Interactive views are lost entirely.
Legacy Editor Deprecation
Pushing raw HTML via the v1 API lands pages in the deprecated legacy editor. Auto-conversion is lossy for complex content.
Import Size Limits
Confluence Cloud UI importer times out on ZIP files exceeding ~1 GB. Large workspaces require chunked exports or API extraction.
Inline Comments Lost
Notion inline comments are dropped entirely during native HTML import. Critical context must be resolved before export.
Link Remediation
Internal links still point to notion.so URLs after import and require a global find-and-replace pass.
Tools used in this playbook
All free, all run entirely in your browser — nothing is uploaded.
FAQ
Does Confluence import Notion databases with their relations intact?
No. The native Atlassian importer flattens Notion databases into static HTML tables and converts individual database entries into subpages. Retaining interactive relations requires either manual recreation using Confluence macros or a custom API migration pipeline.
Why does the Confluence importer time out when uploading Notion data?
Timeouts generally occur when the exported Notion ZIP file exceeds Confluence Cloud's default attachment processing limits (often around 1GB). This requires users to export and import their Notion workspace in smaller, segmented chunks.
Should Notion pages be exported as PDF for a Confluence migration?
No. PDF exports create flat, uneditable documents that destroy the wiki structure and page tree hierarchy. HTML (with subpages included) is the required format for a structured Confluence migration.
How do I maintain authorship and page permissions during a Notion to Confluence migration?
During the native HTML import process, Confluence will prompt you to map Notion user IDs to Confluence user IDs. You must ensure all target users are fully provisioned in your Atlassian environment prior to executing the import; otherwise, page authorship will default to an "Anonymous" user.
Can I use Markdown instead of HTML for the export?
While Notion allows Markdown exports, HTML is strictly recommended for Confluence migrations. Markdown exports often struggle with deep directory paths for image attachments and fail to translate Notion's toggle and column blocks as cleanly as the HTML parser.
Is it better to continuously sync Notion and Confluence instead of fully migrating?
Syncing (via tools like Truto) is viable for temporary coexistence or siloed teams, but it incurs double-licensing costs and risks data fragmentation. For permanent, company-wide transitions, a hard migration eliminates the security overhead of maintaining two separate knowledge bases.
What happens to Notion's inline comments when moved to Confluence?
The native Atlassian HTML importer drops Notion inline comments entirely. If these comments contain critical historical context, you must manually resolve them or copy them into the main page body prior to executing the export.