4 posts tagged with "migration"

Every team has Markdown lying around that Confluence needs: the README that became the service doc, the design doc drafted as a pull-request description, the runbook that lives in the repo. And every attempt to move it hits the same wall — Confluence's default editor does not parse Markdown. Paste a .md document and you get a wall of pipes, backticks, and asterisks that looks exactly like what it is: text nobody formatted.

The macro route dissolves the wall. Paste the document into a Markdown macro that actually parses it, watch it render in the preview pane, publish. This page is the workflow, end to end.

Every Confluence page has two faces: the one you see in the editor, and the one the database sees. The database face is the storage format — an XHTML document with macros as tags — and before it, Confluence stored pages as wiki markup: h1. headings, *bold text*, {code} blocks. People still search for wiki markup because half the internet's Confluence advice, every migration script, and a lot of content written before ~2017 speaks that language. And in 2026 the topic got urgent: Atlassian is retiring the legacy editor (full deprecation April 2026), and the new cloud editor dropped the Markup macro entirely. Here's how to view, edit, and convert what's actually stored — with or without admin rights.

Migrating Confluence content is something most teams eventually face. Whether you are moving from Confluence Server to Cloud, reorganizing spaces after a company merger, or splitting a monolithic workspace into focused team spaces, the process can feel overwhelming. Pages link to each other, attachments sit deep in page trees, permissions are inherited from parent spaces, and macros pull data from external sources.

This guide walks through the entire Confluence content migration process from start to finish. You will learn how to plan your migration, choose the right tools for your scenario, export and import content without losing data, and validate the result. We cover both Atlassian's built-in export features and the Modern Importer Exporter for Confluence app for format-based migrations.

Teams move content in and out of Confluence every day — migrating between instances, backing up documentation, importing from other tools, exporting for offline review. Confluence has basic PDF and HTML export built in, but it's limited. No bulk operations, no multi-format support, no structured import workflow.

Over a dozen marketplace apps try to fill this gap, but most solve one narrow problem: PDF export, Word import, or Markdown conversion. We built Modern Importer & Exporter for Confluence to handle both directions — import and export — across multiple formats. In this post we compare it against every alternative on the Atlassian Marketplace.