How the Development Team Exports Confluence to Markdown for GitHub Without Breaking Tables, Code, or Images

The fastest way to export Confluence to Markdown without broken tables, code blocks, or image links is Markdown Exporter for Confluence by Narva Software: open any page, select More actions (…) → Export to Markdown, and download clean GitHub Flavored Markdown with every image and attachment included.

This use case follows a real development team that writes internal documentation in Confluence and ships code-related docs through GitHub. Below, you will see the workflow they run, the problem they solved, the exact export steps, and how the approach compares with manual copy-paste and Confluence’s built-in exports.

Key takeaways

• The workflow: The company uses Confluence for team knowledge, GitHub and Markdown editors for anything tied to code.

• The problem: Manual copy-paste between Confluence and GitHub continuously broke tables, code blocks, and image links, and engineers spent hours fixing them.

• The fix: Markdown Exporter for Confluence app that converts single pages, page trees, or whole spaces to Markdown in one action. 

• The result: Clean files on the first export, a tool that non-technical teammates use on their own, and far less cleanup work for engineers.

The workflow: Confluence for knowledge, GitHub for code

As many other development teams that use both Confluence and GitHub, this team also runs a split documentation stack. Confluence holds internal documentation that engineers, product managers, and other non-technical colleagues all read and edit. GitHub and Markdown editors hold the documentation that lives next to code: READMEs, runbooks, architecture notes, and developer guides.

This split reflects how developers work across the industry. In the Stack Overflow 2025 Developer Survey, which gathered responses from more than 49,000 developers in 177 countries, Markdown files ranked as the most admired documentation tool for the third year running, at 75.8% admired versus 40.2% for Confluence. The same survey named GitHub the most desired collaboration tool, at 59.3%.

The team’s documentation workflow, before and after:

The problem: a manual bridge that broke content

Before the team adopted an exporter, every move from Confluence to GitHub was a hand-built conversion.

“Our team heavily relies on both Confluence for internal documentation and GitHub/Markdown editors for development work. Moving content between the two used to be a tedious, manual process that broke tables, code blocks, and image links.”

Marek V.

The old process was tedious and manual, and content broke on almost every transfer.

What broke during copy-paste

• Tables. Rows and columns collapsed into loose text, so engineers rebuilt each table in Markdown pipe syntax.

• Code blocks. Code lost its fences and language tags, which removed syntax highlighting on GitHub.

• Image links. Images still pointed at Confluence attachments, so readers on GitHub saw broken links.

Cleanup cost and time adds up

Small fixes on every page turn into lost engineering days. Atlassian’s State of Developer Experience 2025 report, based on a survey of 3,500 developers and managers, found that 50% of developers lose more than 10 hours a week to organizational inefficiencies, and 90% lose at least 6 hours. Developers ranked finding information, adapting to new technology, and context switching between tools as their top time-wasters. The same research puts actual coding at about 16% of a developer’s working week.

Switching tools also breaks focus. Research by Gloria Mark, professor of informatics at the University of California, Irvine, found that people take an average of 23 minutes and 15 seconds to return to a task after an interruption, as she explained in an interview with the Gallup Management Journal. Every manual Confluence-to-GitHub transfer is one of those interruptions.

Confluence’s built-in export does not close the gap

Atlassian’s export documentation lists Word, PDF, HTML, and XML as Confluence’s export formats. Markdown is not on that list. An HTML export still needs a second conversion step and manual cleanup before it is ready for a GitHub repository.

The Solution: How the team uses Markdown Exporter for Confluence

The development team started using the Markdown Exporter for Confluence from Narva Software to turn the content into markdown, exporting entire confluence space to Markdown or running Bulk export.

The app handles: 

• Task lists (checklists) and emojis

• GitHub Flavored Markdown (GFM), with Confluence panels mapped to GFM alerts

• draw.io and Gliffy diagrams

• Images and attachments, exported alongside the Markdown files

• Relative links between exported pages

• Single pages, blog posts, folders, full page hierarchies, and entire spaces

Security built for enterprise documentation

The exporter runs client-side in the browser, so Confluence data is not transferred or stored outside the Atlassian environment. The app is Cloud Fortified, part of the Atlassian Marketplace Bug Bounty program, and GDPR compliant. Narva Software holds SOC 2 Type 2 certification, with reports available through the Narva Trust Center.

“The Markdown Exporter for Confluence has been an absolute game-changer for our workflow. It exports complex pages into perfectly clean Markdown files instantly, completely preserving the original structure, code syntax highlighting, and nested lists. The user interface is incredibly intuitive, making it seamless for both technical and non-technical team members to use.  It has dramatically improved our documentation pipeline and saved our engineers countless hours of cleanup. On top of that, the app feels incredibly stable and lightweight. If you need a reliable, hassle-free way to bridge the gap between Confluence and Markdown, this app is worth every penny. Highly recommended!”

Marek V.