Overview  

The Confluence Wiki has more features than the GitLab Wiki. If you use advanced features or have a large Confluence space, GitLab may not be a good alternative.

GitLab is a good alternative for:

• Smaller Confluence spaces
• Groups that want to store documentation in the same tool they use for code and project management (GitLab - Project Management and Service Desk)

Each GitLab project includes a Wiki space (DoIT Shared Tools - GitLab - GitLab Wiki Feature and Snippets).

Markdown

Content in the GitLab Wiki is edited in GitLab Flavored Markdown.  Markdown allows you to use plain text syntax to create rich text documents.  It's a simple syntax, but it still takes some learning for users unfamiliar with it, which is a consideration in migrating to the GitLab Wiki.      

Migrating from Confluence to GitLab Wiki

Manual copy to GitLab Wiki

For relatively small Wiki sites (less than 50 pages), manually copying the content isn't prohibitively time-consuming. 

1. In a GitLab project, create a home page for your Wiki.
2. For the Confluence Wiki Page you want to copy, select the View Storage Format option and copy the content.
3. Create a new Wiki page and paste the copied content into the editor.  
4. Choose your preferred editor.  GitLab provides a rich text and plain text editor.  If you're trying to paste in content that includes highly formatted content like tables, you might choose the rich text editor.  You can switch between editors at any time.   
5. Edit the page as needed and save.

Once the migration is complete, you can maintain your documentation using all the features of the GitLab Wiki.   

GitLab Pages

If you want to keep the current contents of your Confluence Wiki but don't intend to update it frequently, you can:

1. Export your Wiki space as HTML (DoIT Jira and Confluence Service Change - How-to Create a Static Copy of a Confluence/Wiki Space)
2. Create a GitLab project.
3. Push your HTML files to the project's repository. 
4. Set up GitLab Pages to serve the HTML files as a website. 

Because of the custom HTML markup in the Confluence export, you will likely still need to do some editing of files for them to display well.  But once the migration is completed, you'll have a hosted web site with your content, which automatically updates when you update or add to the source HTML.

Convert to Markdown

If you have a large Confluence Wiki space that you would like to migrate to GitLab Wiki, another option is to export the space as XML (DoIT Jira and Confluence Service Change - How-to Create a Static Copy of a Confluence/Wiki Space) and use a tool such as Pandoc to convert the XML to Markdown. 

There may still be manual editing you need to do before the resulting Markdown displays as expected in the GitLab Wiki.  

For assistance importing a large set of markdown files to a GitLab Project wiki, contact the Shared Tools team (DoIT Shared Tools - Contact Us).

Confluence migration alternatives

• KB User's Guide - Migrating from Confluence Wiki to the KB
• WiscWeb - Migrating from Confluence Wiki to WiscWeb