How to export a Confluence space to Markdown

Published 2026-10-17 · Facts checked 2026-10-17 · By ArtUp Labs, the maker of ArtUp Export

1. What Confluence Cloud exports on its own

Markdown is not among the formats in Atlassian's export article. The HTML export is the closest starting point: Atlassian suggests it for turning a space into a static website. Know its gaps — attachments go into folders named by the ID of their page, blog posts are not included and page comments are not exported. Source: Atlassian, Export content to Word, PDF, HTML and XML, checked 2026-10-17.

The HTML route

1. As a space admin, export the space (or selected pages) to HTML and download the zip.
2. Convert each HTML file with a converter such as pandoc (pandoc page.html -t gfm -o page.md).
3. Fix what the converter cannot know: the page tree as folders, links between pages, image paths and Confluence macros (panels, expand sections, status lozenges and so on).

This is free and fine for a one-off copy. It gets expensive when you want to repeat it: every run starts over, and you redo the clean-up.

Command-line exporters

Open-source scripts call the Confluence REST API with an API token and write Markdown. They suit a CI job well. You run and maintain them yourself, keep a token with read access in your pipeline, and check how each one handles macros, attachments and page order.

2. Export a space to Markdown with ArtUp Export

ArtUp Export is our Confluence Cloud app. It turns a page, a branch or a whole space into a zip of Markdown files, built in your browser.

1. In a space, open ArtUp Export in the space sidebar — or on any page, ••• → Export to Markdown.
2. Pick Whole space, Page and children or One page.
3. Pick a format: Generic Markdown, Hugo, Docusaurus or MkDocs.
4. Click Export and keep the tab open until the zip downloads. The result screen lists every warning with its page.

What is in the zip:

export-manifest.json             # ids, versions, paths — no page content
product-documentation/
  index.md                       # a page with children: folder + index file
  index.assets/diagram.png       # that page's attachments
  getting-started.md             # a page without children: one file
  getting-started.assets/screen.png

• The full tree as folders, siblings in the Confluence sidebar order (in front-matter or as numeric prefixes).
• Stable file names: ASCII slugs of the titles; a page keeps its file name on later exports.
• YAML front-matter on every page: title, Confluence id, space, parent, version, last editor, update time, labels and page URL.
• Relative links between pages and to attachments.
• Panels become the generator's own admonitions (GitHub alerts, Docusaurus :::note, MkDocs !!! note). Macros with no Markdown equivalent get a placeholder and appear in the warnings list — nothing is dropped silently.

Measured On 29 September 2026, on a test space of 1,001 pages (tree depth 6) with 200 attachments, a full export took 258 and 245 seconds in two runs and produced a 201 MB zip. Exporting again with no changes in Confluence gave a byte-identical zip. Your time depends on your site, network and attachment sizes.

Docusaurus and MkDocs built a site from our test export; Hugo needs the settings listed in the presets section of the documentation. Next time, an update export contains only what changed.