Moving from Notion to Confluence often happens when engineering teams standardise on the Atlassian stack (Jira + Confluence). Confluence is significantly cheaper at scale — but Notion's flexible blocks don't translate cleanly to Confluence's page hierarchy.
Notion Plus is $16/user/month. Confluence Standard is ~$4.89/user/month (cloud). For a 20-person engineering team, that's $320/month vs $98/month — saving $2,664/year. When combined with an existing Jira subscription, Confluence's native Jira integration (live ticket status, sprint trackers, release notes auto-populated from Jira) provides workflow benefits that justify the migration for engineering-heavy organisations.
The challenge: Notion's block-based pages (databases, kanban boards, inline images, linked mentions) don't map to Confluence's structured page tree. Databases don't exist in Confluence. Page templates differ fundamentally. Expect significant manual work to recreate Notion pages as readable, well-structured Confluence pages.
For a 20-person engineering team on Notion Plus moving to Confluence Cloud. Adjust for your page volume and complexity.
| Input | Suggested Value | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Current monthly cost (Notion) | $320 | Plus plan, 20 users |
| New monthly cost (Confluence) | $98 | Standard cloud, 20 users |
| Contract months remaining | 5 | Notion annual mid-point |
| Migration hours | 45 | Architecture + migration + QA + templates |
| Staff hourly rate | $65 | Tech writer or engineering lead |
| Retraining hours / person | 5 | Confluence editor + space navigation |
| Staff needing training | 20 | All team members |
| Downtime hours (total) | 25 | Documentation friction during cutover |
| Downtime cost / hour | $60 | Eng team time cost per hour |
| Risk buffer | 12% | Database migration is genuinely hard |
Pre-filled with the values above. Adjust for your team size and page complexity.
Open Calculator with These ValuesAll values are editable. Results are estimates only.
Notion exports to Markdown or HTML. Confluence's built-in importer handles Word documents and HTML. Third-party tools like Notion2Confluence or Confluence's migration assistant can automate bulk page imports. However, Notion's block-based content (databases, toggles, callouts) will lose formatting and require manual cleanup. Expect 30–50% of pages to need significant reformatting.
Notion is a flexible block editor — great for personal wikis, databases, and mixed content types. Confluence is a structured team wiki with strong enterprise governance (page approval, templates, permissions by space). Confluence integrates deeply with Jira. Notion's database feature has no equivalent in Confluence. Confluence scales better for large organisations with compliance requirements.
Consider keeping Notion for content that heavily uses databases (roadmap planning, content calendars) and moving structured documentation (engineering specs, runbooks, meeting notes) to Confluence. A hybrid approach is sometimes the most practical short-term solution, though it adds cognitive overhead. If you're standardising for Jira integration, full migration is cleaner in the long run.