Confluence → Outline
What it saves, what actually moves, what you rebuild — and the thing that catches people.
What it costs, and what it saves
Confluence Standard is about $6 per user per month. Outline self-hosted is BSL-licensed and free for internal use — a VPS.
Moves cleanly
Pages via Confluence's HTML or Markdown export, then Outline's import.
You rebuild
Macros, templates and any Confluence-specific formatting.
What Confluence costs you today
Free for up to 10 users with a 2 GB storage cap. Standard runs about $6.40 per user per month and Premium about $12.30, both billed on total users rather than active ones. Data Center for self-hosting starts around $30,000 a year. The number that surprises people is the floor: at 200 seats Standard is roughly $15,000 a year for a wiki. Prices checked 2026-08-03.
What actually holds you in
Higher than the export button suggests. Pages export to HTML, XML or PDF, so the words come out. What does not come out cleanly is everything that made them useful: Jira macros, page trees, inline comments, permissions inherited from spaces, and the templates people built their process around. Teams that write plain pages migrate in a weekend. Teams that built workflows out of macros are migrating a system, not documents.
What you are moving to
Outline is a fast, beautifully judged team knowledge base with excellent search, a slash-command editor and Slack integration that people actually use. It is also the entry on this page most often mislabelled. Outline ships under the **Business Source License 1.1**, not an OSI licence: you may self-host it for internal use, but you may not offer it as a competing hosted service, and the licence converts to open source only after a delay. For most companies documenting their own work that changes nothing. If you were planning to build a product on it, it changes everything — and you would not learn that from the directory that told you it was open source.
Self-hostable free within BUSL terms. Outline Cloud is paid per user.
Outline strengths
- Best design and editing experience of anything on this page
- Search is genuinely fast and good
- Slack and API integrations that people use daily
- Self-hostable for ordinary internal use
What you give up
- NOT open source — Business Source License, despite near-universal mislabelling
- Cannot be offered as a competing hosted service
- Licence terms can be tightened by the vendor on future versions
- Smaller plugin ecosystem than Confluence
The migration, step by step
- 1Export spaces from Confluence — HTML export preserves more structure than PDF
- 2Deploy Outline with Postgres, Redis and S3-compatible storage for attachments
- 3Configure SSO before importing, because retrofitting auth is worse
- 4Import per space and check that internal links resolved
- 5Set up search and verify it covers imported content
The gotcha
Confluence macros have no equivalent and they are everywhere in a mature wiki — status badges, includes, Jira issue tables. Every macro becomes either plain text or a hole, and a page full of holes reads as broken even when the content survived.
When to stay on Confluence
You are in the Atlassian ecosystem and Jira integration is genuinely used.
More Layer 5 migrations
Figures verified 2026-08-03 against vendor pricing pages. Prices change and migrations differ by estate — treat the cost delta as a starting model, not a quote. Rankings and recommendations here are merit-only; affiliate income never changes a verdict. See our methodology.