Confluence alternative
Replacing Confluence when your company already runs on Microsoft 365
The obvious answer is SharePoint, which you are already paying for. Here is what it covers, what changes in the move, and the one thing neither Confluence nor SharePoint does: write the pages. For that there is SecondBrain 365, an AI agent inside your Microsoft 365.
The short answer
If your company already has Microsoft 365, the Confluence alternative you already own is SharePoint: a site for each space, pages for pages, and access that comes from your Microsoft 365 groups and Teams. For lighter work there is Loop, for drafting together, and OneNote for notebooks. Nothing new to buy or to sign in to.
What you give up is mostly Atlassian's own ground: the page tree, restrictions on single pages as an everyday habit, macros, and the link with Jira. What you gain is one place fewer — one set of permissions, one search, and pages that sit next to the email and chats where the work is discussed. What neither tool gives you is someone to write the pages. That part does not move with the content.
Why many teams are deciding now. Atlassian ended support for Server on 15 February 2024. Data Center reaches end of life on 28 March 2029, when instances become read-only; new customers could no longer buy it after 30 March 2026. If you run Confluence on your own servers, the choice is Atlassian Cloud or somewhere else.
What each part of Confluence becomes in Microsoft 365
The concepts carry over. The way they are organised does not, and that is where a move is won or lost.
- Spaces
- In Microsoft 365: A SharePoint team site — usually the one behind a Teams team.
- What changes: Who is in comes from the Microsoft 365 group or the team, the people who already work together, instead of a separate list kept in Confluence.
- Pages and the page tree
- In Microsoft 365: Pages in the site's Site Pages library, tied together with site navigation and hub sites.
- What changes: Structure comes from the navigation you set up, not from where a page sits in a tree. Decide it before the move, not after.
- Space permissions and page restrictions
- In Microsoft 365: Access set per site, through the group or the team.
- What changes: Confluence makes restricting a single page routine. Microsoft's guidance is to manage access per site, so content with a different audience usually gets a site of its own.
- Live docs and quick notes
- In Microsoft 365: Loop workspaces and pages; OneNote for notebooks.
- What changes: Good for drafting together. For pages people are meant to find and rely on, SharePoint is the published home.
- Macros and the Jira link
- In Microsoft 365: SharePoint web parts. The Jira link stays with Atlassian.
- What changes: If your engineers work in Jira every day, this is the real cost of the move — and a fair reason to keep Confluence for engineering alone.
- Search
- In Microsoft 365: Microsoft Search and Microsoft 365 Copilot, over everything else in your tenant.
- What changes: Pages sit next to the email, files and chats people already search, and Copilot only shows each person what they are allowed to see.
Sources: Atlassian, Confluence permissions structure; Microsoft, Sharing and permissions in SharePoint, modern pages, Microsoft Loop and Copilot privacy.
How the content gets across. Confluence space admins can export a space to PDF, CSV, HTML or XML. Microsoft's own migration page lists Box, Dropbox, Google Workspace, file shares and SharePoint Server as sources — Confluence is not among them — so turning an export into SharePoint pages is work for a third-party tool or a partner. The methods and the tools are covered, together with SharePoint vs Confluence, feature by feature, on intranet.ai.
One piece of advice from any migration: move what is still true, not everything. A page that was out of date in Confluence arrives out of date in SharePoint, now with a newer timestamp on it.
The tool changes. Who writes the pages does not.
Confluence, SharePoint on its own, and SharePoint with an agent writing into it — compared on what happens after the move.
- Confluence
SharePoint- SecondBrain 365
- Where the pages live
- Confluence: In Confluence spaces — Atlassian Cloud, or Data Center until 2029
- In SharePoint sites, in your Microsoft 365 tenant
- In a SharePoint site, in your Microsoft 365 tenant
- Who can change them
- Confluence: Space permissions, plus restrictions on single pages
- The site's group or team
- The site's group or team — and only the people you add can send the agent anything
- Who writes a page
- Confluence: Your team, with AI help to draft and summarise
- Your team — or Copilot in SharePoint when you ask it to, with a Copilot licence
- The agent, from the email, meetings, chats and documents it is brought into, following rules you write in plain language
- When the facts change
- Confluence: Not something Atlassian describes
- Copilot in SharePoint points out stale pages, broken links and gaps (preview)
- It updates what it is shown, and asks the team when something new contradicts a page
Sources: Atlassian, Confluence, permissions and Data Center end of life; Microsoft, Copilot in SharePoint (preview).
Copilot in SharePoint also comes up for companies that used Viva Topics — how it compares with the retired Viva Topics.
Where SecondBrain 365 fits
The pages nobody has time to write
Confluence move — kickoff
Agent invited to the meeting · 6 Oct
Marta: HR and IT go first, they have the fewest restricted pages.
Luca: every space owner lists the pages still worth keeping by 24 October.
Marta: engineering is the hard one, because of Jira.
Agreed: engineering stays on Confluence until the Jira review in January.
Pick a record to see where it came from.
The agent does not move a single page. It records what the team decides about moving them — with the date, and a link back to who said it.
SecondBrain 365 is an agent with its own identity and company email inside your Microsoft 365. You copy it on an email, invite it to a Teams meeting, add it to a Teams group or share a document with it. From what it is shown, it writes pages on a SharePoint site — following rules you write in plain language — links related pages, and highlights the people, clients and acronyms they mention.
When something new contradicts a page, it tells the team on Teams and asks which version holds. You can require approval before anything is written, and every page stays editable.
It is not a migration tool. It does not convert Confluence pages. The ones you have already moved to SharePoint can be shared with it, and it reads them like any other document.
More on what the agent does with an email, a meeting or a chat, on who writes the pages once you are on SharePoint, and on keeping a project's decisions and deadlines on record.
FAQ
Questions about moving off Confluence
SharePoint. A Confluence space maps to a SharePoint team site, usually connected to a Microsoft 365 group or a Teams team, and Confluence pages become SharePoint pages. Microsoft Loop covers collaborative drafting, closer to Confluence's live docs, and OneNote covers shared notebooks.
Not today. Microsoft's Migrate to Microsoft 365 page lists Box, Dropbox, Google Workspace, file shares and SharePoint Server as sources, not Confluence. Space admins can export a Confluence space to PDF, CSV, HTML or XML, and a third-party tool or a Microsoft partner turns that into SharePoint pages. Atlassian notes that comments are not included in PDF or HTML exports.
For part of it. Loop workspaces and pages are good for drafting and planning together, much like Confluence live docs. For a knowledge base that people are expected to find, trust and link to, SharePoint pages are the better home, with the permissions and search the rest of your tenant already uses.
Atlassian has set end of life for Data Center on 28 March 2029, when subscriptions expire and instances become read-only. New customers could no longer buy Data Center after 30 March 2026, and existing customers can buy and expand until 30 March 2028. Server support already ended on 15 February 2024.
Yes, and for engineering teams that work in Jira every day it can be the right call. The cost is the one you are trying to remove: two places to look, and two sets of permissions to keep in step. If you split, decide which kinds of page live where, so nobody has to guess.
No. It is not a migration tool. Once your pages are in SharePoint, you can share the ones worth keeping with the agent and it reads them like any other document. What it adds is the writing from then on: pages built from the email, Teams meetings, chats and documents it is brought into.