Import from Confluence

If you or one of your teams has already been using Confluence as a knowledge base solution, you may have a lot of content there you'd like to move over to KnowledgeOwl. You can import that content from a Confluence space directly into your KnowledgeOwl knowledge base with a few clicks.

Before you begin

Before you can import content into KnowledgeOwl, generate an HTML export of your Confluence space.

Refer to Confluence's instructions for your setup:

• Confluence Cloud: Follow the instructions to Export a space. Be sure you export as HTML.
• Confluence Server: Follow the instructions to Export multiple pages to HTML or PDF section. Be sure you export as HTML.

Download the zipped archive file and have it ready.

Import your content from Confluence

Follow these steps to import from Confluence:

1. In KnowledgeOwl, go to Tools > Imports. The Import content page opens.
   
2. Under Third-party imports, select Confluence. The Import Confluence content page opens:
   The Import Confluence content page
3. To Select your Confluence export, drag your Confluence zip file into the box or select the browse link, browse to the file, and select it.
4. Once you add the file, the page updates to display the file name and the Next button activates. Select Next to continue. The page updates to display your Configure import settings. 
5. The importer defaults to creating all imported content beginning at the top-level of your content hierarchy. If you'd like to import all content into a category for review, change Select import destination from Top level to Existing category. Once you select Existing category, start entering the name of a category. The field will autosuggest. Select the category you want to import all content into.
6. The importer defaults to creating all articles with a Published status. Use the Select article status dropdown to select a different status of your choice.
7. If you'd like to add a tag to identify all the articles created from this import, enter that tag name in Tag all imported articles with this tag name (optional).
   1. We strongly recommend this approach if you're importing content alongside manually-created content, so you can easily filter to these articles in Manage. Tags that include the word confluence and/or the date can be helpful, like: imported-from-confluence or confluence-20260416.
8. Once you've set your import settings, select Import content.

The page refreshes to display a progress bar. You don't have to leave this page open while the import runs. Once the import is complete, the progress bar updates and displays a confirmation message.

If you're testing the import in a new knowledge base and want to make changes and try to re-import, delete this knowledge base and create a new knowledge base to re-test the import. Refer to Testing imports for more details.

How the Confluence import works

Confluence and KnowledgeOwl are formatted and architected differently, so the importer does some converting as it goes.

Architecturally, Confluence doesn't have the concept of categories versus articles, it just uses pages, which can be parent or child pages. When we import them, we convert parent pages to custom content categories. Child pages without any children are converted to articles.

We also perform these style/formatting cleaning steps, designed to get your content behaving like native KnowledgeOwl content as quickly as possible:

• Remove all element class names.
• Remove all inline styles (setting fonts, font sizes, colors, etc.).
• Remove <style> blocks from within articles to ensure articles get your knowledge base's default styles.
• Other than the article title, we migrate all h1s to h2s, h2s to h3s, and h3s to h4s, since we display the article title as the lone h1 on the page.
• For all image elements, we add our img-responsive class, which helps guarantee the image will resize based on different screen sizes.
• For all tables:
  • Add our "table-bordered" class, which we add to new tables by default.
  • Add style="width: 100%;" to the table to match our default.
  • Move <tbody><tr><th> rows into <tbody><thead> rows, so they get our table header styles.

Import failures

If your file fails to import, we'll warn you that there was an issue with text like this:

We ran into an issue importing your content. Please contact support.

Please contact us and share the HTML zip file that caused the failure so we can troubleshoot what went wrong.

You will also receive an error if your Confluence zip file is larger than 500MB:

File size exceeds 500MB limit

If this happens, you'll need to split your zip file into several smaller zip files. Contact us if you'd like our support team to help with this.