Moving from notion to back to confluence

[Thorsten Millhoff]

About a year ago we moved from confluence to notion ( lets ignore the reason), anyway, with the ability to now have database tables in confluence I wold like to see if we can't move back. Has anyone tried to move notion database back to confluence ? I tried but was not very successful, so if anyone has does this , please share some insight.

[Max Foerster - K15t · Accepted solution]

Hey @Thorsten Millhoff welcome to the community!

I am a former member of the Orderly Databases team at K15t, which you now know as Databases in Confluence. Kristian has already correctly stated that Databases primarily supports the CSV and HTML formats for data import. Incidentally, copy & paste also works very well in many cases.

But yes, the result can, unfortunately, be mixed. Not only does the data have to be imported correctly, but the different data types or columns must also be brought together somehow. And yes, it's not nice. The simpler the database Notion is, the better the result will be in Databases. In general, Notion is not known for making it easy to leave but only for making it easy to import from various sources. I'm sorry we can't offer a workaround or magic tricks here. :/

Best, Max

[Thorsten Millhoff]

Hi Max, 

thanks for that answer, I'll mark it as acceptable ,however, is there a place to suggest feature requests ? And does it even make sense to raise it ? I think even it notion does make it difficult, as it has an API and confluence does too, even a manual script based approach would be good, maybe open source on github ?

All best

 Thorsten

[Max Foerster - K15t]

Hey Thorsten, 

As Databases are still in beta and not generally available, you will have the best chance to contact the Atlassian teams working on the product in the community group for Databases. Does it make sense to raise it? I don't know. Just because there is an API does not necessarily mean that it is useful. 😄 From what I remember, and that's old information from a year ago, the Notion API to extract information was not really helpful/powerful. And then again, as it is with any other migration between tools, you will have a hard time automating it and end up having to inspect, review, and fix all the content anyway. So I doubt that this is something that can or will be fixed on the Database side of things. And Notion will have little to no interest in enabling users to extract their content from their platform.

[Kristian Klima]

Hi @Thorsten Millhoff 

Databases support importing CSV and HTML so if you can export a CSV from Notion, just give it a try in a Confluence's free version.

[Thorsten Millhoff]

I have tried that, the result is less than great, problems with header row, column title and column type make it unusable.

One challenge is that the databases in notion are - so far - superior of confluence, but that will hopefully change over time.