Slab to Confluence has no native path. Export via API, translate Markdown to ADF, map topics to spaces, and rewrite internal links — all API-driven to bypass the 200 MB import limit.
There is no native migration path from Slab to Confluence — no connector, no plugin, no one-click wizard. Confluence's import options do not list Slab as a source. Slab exports content as Markdown files. Confluence requires content in Atlassian Document Format (ADF), a JSON-based document tree — or its legacy XHTML-based Storage Format, which Atlassian is fully deprecating in April 2026. Every migration requires ADF translation, topic-to-space mapping, multi-pass internal link rewriting, and image re-hosting — all API-driven to bypass the 200 MB XML import limit.
Read this first
Pair-specific gotchas that catch teams out. Each one has cost somebody a weekend.
Admin does not mean full access
Slab admins can bulk-download published posts and topics, but they cannot export secret topics they are not part of, or drafts. Slab's GraphQL API only returns content the Slab Bot user has access to. If you skip the access audit, your migration will be incomplete before it starts. (help.slab.com)
Current-state reality
Slab's current help docs describe bulk export as Markdown or Docx — not a full HTML or JSON workspace dump. Plan around the formats Slab documents now, not the formats you wish existed. (help.slab.com)
ADF is a superset of Markdown
Markdown-to-ADF conversion is inherently lossy in one direction: ADF supports panels, status badges, mentions, and media nodes that have no Markdown equivalent. Going the other direction — Slab Markdown to ADF — means you won't lose content from the Markdown itself, but you also won't gain Confluence-native features without custom mapping rules.
Canonical-home rule
Every Slab post gets one true Confluence page. Everything else — secondary topics, cross-cutting tags — becomes metadata or navigation. This single decision prevents most duplicate-page and broken-link cleanup later.
Don't forget anchor links
Slab supports linking to specific sections within a post. Confluence's cloud editor supports anchor macros, but the anchor ID scheme is different. Section-level links need their own mapping rules.
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 Slab
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.
Slab → Confluence specifics
- Jira-heavy engineering orgs
- Confluence's native Jira macros — embedding issue lists, linking to epics, auto-updating status badges — eliminate the tab-switching tax. Engineers can link PRs, epics, and incident reports directly inside documentation.
- Atlassian ecosystem consolidation
- One vendor, one SSO config, one admin console. Companies standardize on Atlassian for compliance or procurement simplicity.
- Permission model requirements
- Confluence's space-level and page-level permission system is more granular than Slab's topic-based access. Regulated industries often need this.
- Phase 1 (January 21, 2026)
- New pages can no longer be created in the legacy editor.
- Phase 2 (January–February 2026)
- Opening a legacy page auto-converts it to the cloud editor.
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 Slab 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.
Slab → Confluence specifics
- Post metadata
- creation dates, authors, edit history are stripped
- Embedded integration content
- Slab embeds from GitHub, Figma, Loom, etc. export as bare URLs or are dropped entirely
- Images as downloadable files
- inline images appear as embedded references, not downloaded assets
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 Slab → 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 Slab, 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 Slab 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 Slab available read-only until traffic has recovered, take a final export, and only then close the account.
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.
Library Language
| Slab field | Confluence field | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| marklassian | JavaScript/TypeScript | Lightweight (~12kb gzipped), covers common Markdown syntax, supports embedded raw ADF nodes |
| md-to-adf | JavaScript | GitHub-flavored Markdown focused, built for Jira/Confluence |
| marklas | Python | Bidirectional (MD↔ADF), supports roundtrip metadata preservation |
| @atlaskit/editor-markdown-transformer | JavaScript | Official Atlassian library — heavier dependency, requires manual tree shaking |
Risk matrix
Per-object risk for this pair. Plan extra validation around anything marked high.
| Object | Risk | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Internal Links | high | All Slab URLs break post-migration — require three-pass rewriting |
| Comments & Discussions | high | Absent from export and API — cannot map to Confluence inline comments |
| Embedded Integrations | high | GitHub, Figma, and Loom embeds degrade to bare URLs with no ADF equivalent |
| Secret Topics | high | Silently excluded from export if admin or Slab Bot lacks access |
| Authorship | medium | Confluence labels all imported pages as created by the importing user |
| Code Block Language Tags | medium | ADF language tag format differs — edge cases like tsx and hcl need verification |
| Post Ordering | medium | Must explicitly set page position during creation or ordering is lost |
| Callout Blocks | medium | Require explicit mapping rules to Confluence panel macros per callout type |
| Table Formatting | low | Simple Markdown tables translate cleanly — complex layouts may break |
| Headings & Text | low | Standard Markdown content converts to ADF without issues |
The hard parts
What makes this specific migration difficult, beyond the mechanics.
ADF Translation
Slab Markdown must be converted to Atlassian Document Format JSON with custom rules for callouts, embeds, and code blocks.
Topic-to-Space Mapping
Slab posts can belong to multiple topics. Confluence pages live in exactly one space with a strict parent-child tree.
Internal Link Rewriting
Every Slab URL must be replaced with Confluence page links via a three-pass migration strategy.
Image Re-hosting
Inline images reference Slab's CDN and must be downloaded and re-uploaded as Confluence attachments with updated ADF media nodes.
Secret Topic Access
Slab's API only returns content the Bot user can access. Secret topics are silently excluded without an access audit.
Tools used in this playbook
All free, all run entirely in your browser — nothing is uploaded.
FAQ
Can I import Slab content directly into Confluence?
No. Confluence has no native Slab importer. You can export Markdown from Slab and either use Confluence's space import (limited to 200 MB of uncompressed XML) or build an API-driven pipeline that translates Markdown to Atlassian Document Format (ADF) and creates pages via the Confluence REST API. Pushing raw HTML through the v1 API lands pages in the legacy editor, which Atlassian is fully deprecating in April 2026.
Does Slab have an API for migration?
Yes, Slab offers a GraphQL API, but it's only available on Business or Enterprise plans. The API returns content based on what the Slab Bot user has access to — secret topics and drafts are excluded unless Slab Bot is explicitly granted access.
How do I preserve internal links when migrating from Slab to Confluence?
Build a link-mapping table during migration. First, import all pages to generate new Confluence Page IDs. Then build a mapping table linking old Slab URLs to the new IDs. Finally, run a second pass through every page's ADF body, replacing Slab URLs with the corresponding Confluence page links.
What is the Confluence Cloud XML import size limit?
Confluence Cloud enforces a strict 200 MB limit on the uncompressed entities.xml file inside the import archive. Attachments don't count toward this limit, but page content, history, and metadata do. Spaces exceeding 200 MB must be migrated via the REST API instead.
Will Slab comments and embeds survive the migration?
Usually not cleanly. Slab's post comments are absent from the standard export and not reliably available via the API for mapping to Confluence's inline comment system. Embedded integrations (GitHub previews, Figma frames, Loom videos) migrate as plain URLs since Confluence does not support iframe content in ADF.