Confluence is a wiki, and a wiki is a solved problem. The hard part is moving a decade of spaces, permissions and page history somewhere you control. This page is about what a replacement has to do, what it does not have to do, and how the migration actually goes.
Strip out the parts nobody opens and four jobs remain: a home for documentation that is not a file share, page trees that stay navigable past a few hundred pages, comments and suggestions on a page while it is being written, and search that finds the page rather than the folder.
A replacement is credible when it does those four well, and honest when it does not do the rest. The rest — macros, Marketplace apps, deep Jira linkage — is where a migration gets expensive, and it is worth auditing which of it is load-bearing before you scope anything.
There are four shapes of answer, and they fail in different ways. The comparison that matters is not a feature count. It is where the content lives, and who can be made to produce it.
| Option | Where it runs | Strongest at | The trade-off |
|---|---|---|---|
| Confluence Cloud | Atlassian cloud | Ecosystem, macros, Jira linkage | Content sits on Atlassian infrastructure, under their AI settings |
| Confluence Data Center | Your servers | Familiarity, existing investment | Hard end of life 28 March 2029, with no security fixes after |
| Self-hosted wiki (Docmost, Outline) | Your servers | Documentation, fast to run | Weak on structured files; it is a wiki only |
| ShimoDocs | Your Kubernetes cluster | Docs, sheets, slides, forms, tables and AI inside one boundary | You own the operations |
Confluence is a document tool. Teams that live in it eventually keep something else open beside it, because a wiki is a poor place for a budget model, a release checklist or an intake form.
ShimoDocs covers that adjacent surface in the same deployment: spreadsheets with a formula language for the model, app sheets and tables for the checklist and its owners, and forms for the intake. The point is not feature count. It is that the document, the data behind it and the AI that reads both sit inside one network boundary rather than three vendor tenancies.
Confluence exports to HTML, and the export is faithful enough that the content moves cleanly. The three things that decide whether the migration sticks are the ones that do not appear in an import log.
A read-only Confluence left reachable after cutover is the most reliable way to double the length of a migration. Retire it on a date, and tell people the date.
Atlassian began using customer data under its data contribution settings on 17 August 2026, and metadata contribution cannot be disabled below the Enterprise tier. That does not make Confluence a bad wiki. It does mean that for some organisations the hosting question moved from a preference to a requirement.
If that is where you are, the relevant question is not which self-hosted wiki looks nicest. It is whether the platform can point its AI at a model you chose, inside a boundary you control, and whether every AI action lands in an audit log you can produce. Those are deployment properties, and they are the ones to test in a pilot.
Yes, in three shapes: a self-hosted wiki such as Docmost or Outline, an on-premises office suite, or Confluence Data Center itself until it reaches end of life. A wiki is the closest match if you only need documentation. An office suite covers documentation plus the spreadsheets, forms and tables that teams otherwise keep open beside a wiki.
The products go read-only and stop receiving security fixes on 28 March 2029. New customers could not buy new Data Center subscriptions from 30 March 2026, and existing customers lose the ability to buy new subscriptions, apps or user expansions from 30 March 2028, which closes the window to grow a deployment before the deadline.
Macros and Marketplace apps are the most common casualty, and they are worth auditing before you scope the move. Page content exports to HTML faithfully. The things that usually break quietly are attachments — which survive while the internal links pointing at them do not — and the comment threads, which carry the reasoning behind a page rather than the page itself.
Not one-to-one. Confluence permissions are per-space with page-level overrides that accumulate over years, while most self-hosted platforms use workspace-level roles for groups. It is a translation exercise with a mapping table rather than a copy operation, and it is the deliverable the rest of the migration waits on.
A wiki cannot. ShimoDocs covers documents, sheets, slides, forms and tables in one deployment, so the budget model, the release checklist and the intake form stop living in three different tools. That is the practical difference between replacing Confluence and replacing the set of things teams used alongside it.