As of 1 Nov 2026, the panel rates Confluence 3/5 and Notion Wikis 3/5 in Knowledge Base & Wiki. Weighted by what each judge cares about, 2 of the 6 judges pick Confluence and 4 pick Notion Wikis. Confluence scores higher on 4 of 7 criteria (Editor, structure & search, European sovereignty, Help-center publishing & integrations, plus 1 more). Notion Wikis scores higher on 3 of 7 criteria (Verification, ownership & freshness, Permissions, SSO & administration and Pricing transparency). Provenance — Confluence: Rest of world; Notion Wikis: Rest of world, United States. Ratings are the AI panel’s opinion, formed from public evidence: how scores are made.
Confluence and Notion Wikis split this panel. Confluence's means run higher on authoring and search (7.2 vs 6.7; three judges lean Confluence, none Notion Wikis), publishing and integrations (6.8 vs 6.5), portability and hosting (6.2 vs 6.0) and sovereignty (5.2 vs 4.8, leaning Confluence 3-2). Notion Wikis' means run higher on knowledge governance (6.0 vs 4.7; four judges lean Notion Wikis, none Confluence), access control (7.7 vs 7.2) and pricing transparency (6.0 vs 5.7). The governance gap traces to a genuine split on Confluence: four judges scored 4, declining to count the approval workflow they found in developer documentation last updated in 2018; two scored 6. Weighted totals divide 4-2 — Notion Wikis ahead for the operations lead, IT administrator, engineering lead and skeptic; Confluence for the support knowledge manager and quality manager. Notion Wikis' legal entity jurisdiction is listed as US; Confluence's sovereignty attributes are listed as unknown.
Choose Confluence if
You need live co-editing and full-text search that reaches attached files, Google Drive and SharePoint — authoring and search leans Confluence three judges to none (means 7.2 vs 6.7).
Your wiki content has to flow out to other tools — publishing and integrations leans Confluence two judges to none, with four ties (6.8 vs 6.5).
You want a self-managed edition on the table — portability and hosting leans Confluence one judge to none with five ties, and the verdict records the self-managed Data Center edition, whose life ends March 28, 2029.
A US contracting entity is a blocker for you — Notion Wikis' legal entity jurisdiction is listed as US, and the sovereignty criterion leans Confluence three judges to two (5.2 vs 4.8).
Your buyer group looks like the support knowledge manager or the quality manager — their weighted totals favor Confluence, 6.2 vs 6.1 and 6.5 vs 6.1.
Choose Notion Wikis if
You need knowledge governance you can show auditors — knowledge governance leans Notion Wikis four judges to none (6.0 vs 4.7), while four Confluence judges declined to count its approval-workflow evidence, found in developer documentation last updated in 2018.
Your team must enforce single sign-on exclusively and provision accounts automatically — Notion Wikis documents SAML 2.0 with any identity provider, Only SAML SSO login enforcement and SCIM provisioning; access control leans its way three judges to none (7.7 vs 7.2).
Your compliance stack needs the wiki audit log piped onward — Notion Wikis documents an audit log that can feed a SIEM or DLP, part of the access-control criterion it leads three judges to none.
Comparing published prices is your gating step — pricing transparency leans Notion Wikis two judges to none, with four ties (6.0 vs 5.7).
Your buyer group mirrors the IT administrator or engineering lead — weighted totals put Notion Wikis ahead for both, 6.6 vs 5.9 and 6.6 vs 6.2.
Read this comparison as one judge. Each weighs the same scores by what they care about.
The IT Administrator
Runs IT for a public utility with 900 staff whose Confluence Server held twelve years of pages until Atlassian ended its support. Was offered the cloud, read the subprocessor list and went looking instead. Needs a migration that keeps page trees, permissions and attachments, single sign-on against Entra ID with groups synced, an audit log the auditor accepts, and an edition they can run in the utility's own data centre if the works council or the regulator asks.
Confluence
Notion Wikis
This judge's pick
Criterion by criterion
Editor, structure & search
Confluence
The captured pages show a rich editor with real-time co-editing, presence indicators, inline comments and mentions, a nested content tree in spaces, templates, page versioning with compare and revert, and full-text search that covers files and reaches third-party tools like Google Drive and SharePoint through Rovo, with whiteboards for diagramming and a related-pages feature listed. Wiki markup is described as supported in the legacy editor only, and we found no public information on Markdown support in the current editor or on AI answers citing their source pages, which is what keeps this below the top level.
Notion Wikis
The wikis page shows pages with drag-and-drop organisation, @ mentions to link pages, synced blocks and a template gallery of 30,000+, comments are documented, and the AI pages describe enterprise search across Slack, Google Drive and GitHub plus semantic AI search, with page history tiered at 7, 30, 90 or custom days. We found no public information on backlinks or a link graph, on attachment search, or on AI answers citing the specific source pages they draw on, so I stop short of the higher marks.
Verification, ownership & freshness
Confluence
Page versioning with comparison and revert, analytics on Premium plans, and a site audit log exportable as CSV are documented. An approval workflow with separate author and approver groups that cannot self-approve appears in developer documentation as a Workflow plugin prototype on a page last updated in 2018, and we found no public information on a named owner or verifier per page, review intervals with reminders, read confirmations, or stale-content and failed-search analytics.
Notion Wikis
Page verification is documented properly: a page can be marked verified for a fixed period or indefinitely, the owner is notified in the inbox and by email when it lapses, and verified pages rank higher in search and AI responses; page analytics show total and unique views and who created, edited or viewed a page when. The Enterprise plan adds an audit log exportable to SIEM. We found no public information on approval workflows with named reviewers, read confirmations for mandatory pages, or automatic flagging of duplicate or stale content.
Permissions, SSO & administration
Confluence
Granular permissions per space and page are documented (not on the Free plan), guests are limited to a single space with up to five guests per paid user, and SAML single sign-on, enforced two-step verification, automated user provisioning and IP allowlisting come through Atlassian Guard — a separate subscription on Standard and Premium, included at Enterprise. The audit log exports as CSV with up to 10,000 activities from the past 180 days and is reachable via REST API and webhooks. We found no public information on directory group sync from an identity provider or on permissions being honoured by search and AI answers.
Notion Wikis
SAML 2.0 single sign-on with any identity provider is documented in detail — that covers our Entra ID — with Just-in-Time provisioning and an enforceable Only SAML SSO login method, and SCIM on Enterprise manages users and groups, which is the group sync I need. Permission levels run from full access down to can view, subpages inherit, teamspaces carry their own permissions, and organisation-wide policies cover guests, public sharing and exports with an Enterprise audit log feeding SIEM. MFA is offered but I found no public information on organisation-wide enforcement or IP restrictions, so I hold at this level.
Help-center publishing & integrations
Confluence
Public links and anonymous access publish entire spaces to the internet, knowledge base articles can be offered in multiple languages, and Jira Service Management provides a customer-facing self-service knowledge base. A documented REST API v2 with downloadable OpenAPI spec and Postman collection, webhooks, and an MCP server endpoint for Rovo are published. We found no public information on a help center with custom domain and SEO controls or an in-app widget, which is what keeps this below the top level.
Notion Wikis
Any page can be published as a site on a notion.site or custom domain (an add-on at $10 per month, $8 per month with annual billing, per domain up to 25 domains), with SEO title and description editing, Google Analytics and embeds of published pages into other websites; the public API, webhooks and an MCP server for AI assistants are all documented alongside Slack, Jira and Figma integrations and a marketplace. The help center states password protection is not available at the moment and that publishing exposes contributor names, photos and email addresses in page metadata, and we found no public information on multilingual publishing, ticket deflection or an in-product widget.
Import, export & self-hosting
Confluence
The free Confluence Cloud Migration Assistant installs on a Data Center instance (Server 5.10.0 or later) and migrates chosen space data, users, attachments and Marketplace apps with pre- and post-migration reports, the REST API covers pages, versions and attachments, and deletion of customer data on termination is stated in the data processing terms. The self-hosted path is time-limited: Data Center support and subscriptions end on March 28, 2029. We found no public information on a full export with page history in an open format, or that the migration preserves page permissions.
Notion Wikis
The Confluence import is documented in unusual detail — cloud and server instances, page hierarchy, attachments and simple tables come across, up to about 50,000 pages or 30GB — but the vendor's own import documentation states permissions are not imported: pages land private to the importing user and permissions must be reapplied, and history, private pages and most macros do not survive. A full workspace export to Markdown, HTML and CSV with uploaded files exists, though it can take up to 30 hours, excludes pages the exporter cannot see, and the help states you cannot recreate the workspace by reuploading the export. We found no public information on a self-hosted or on-premise edition, on open-source code, or on any export of page history.
European sovereignty
Confluence
The contracting entity is Atlassian Pty Ltd incorporated under Australian law, the default hosting footprint is global spanning the EEA, Switzerland, the UK, the USA and other regions, and data residency is an opt-in feature covering only certain in-scope data. The subprocessor list is public with locations, naming OpenAI in the USA, AWS Bedrock and Google Vertex AI spanning EEA and USA, and Cloudflare processing customer traffic globally, with standard contractual clauses governed by Irish law and an EU representative published. The privacy policy reserves use of information for machine-learning model training under legitimate interests, while the data processing addendum permits only de-identified, aggregated use of customer data.
Notion Wikis
The contracting entity is Notion Labs, Inc. of San Francisco and the privacy policy says data may be transferred, processed and stored anywhere in the world including the United States; EU residency in AWS Frankfurt or Ireland is an Enterprise-only opt-in that is free of charge, but the residency documentation itself lists exclusions — account information, usage data, Calendar, Mail, and customer data processed by subprocessors including LLM providers stay outside the selected region. Credit where due: the subprocessor list is published with locations (Anthropic, OpenAI and Google as Global; AWS in the USA and EU; support in Greece), the data processing agreement is published covering EU GDPR, training on customer data is stated not to occur, and SOC 2, ISO 27001, BSI C5 and ISMAP audits are listed. That is genuine disclosure, but a US entity with a higher-tier residency and a carve-out for the AI chain is not what my regulator means by sovereign.
Pricing transparency
Confluence
Cloud tiers are public with prices quoted exactly — Free $0 for 10 users with 2 GB storage, Standard at $5.78 per user / month, Premium at $11.16 per user / month — together with storage limits per plan, guests free at up to five per paid user, and Rovo credits and automation steps per tier. Enterprise pricing is available only by contacting sales, the Atlassian Guard subscriptions that carry single sign-on are unpriced on the captured pages, and we found no public information on the licence price of the Data Center edition, on data residency pricing, or on the FastShift migration service.
Notion Wikis
Free (€0 per member / month), Plus (€9.50 per member / month) and Business (€19.50 per member / month) are public with their inclusions, guests are free with per-plan limits, file uploads are 5MB on Free and up to 5GB on paid, and the add-ons are priced at $10 per month per custom domain and $10 per 1,000 monthly Notion credits. But everything my utility actually needs — SCIM, the audit log, EU data residency — sits in Enterprise, which is listed as Custom pricing, and we found no public information on minimum seats, VAT treatment or minimum term. For 900 staff I cannot compute the annual cost from public pages alone.
Sovereignty, side by side
Dimension
Confluence
Notion Wikis
Legal entity
Not determined
Incorporated in US
Hosting location
Not determined
Not determined
Hosting options
Not determined
Not determined
Open source
Not determined
Not determined
Data processing agreement
Not determined
Not determined
Transfer impact assessment
Not determined
Not determined
Facts, side by side
Only facts both products carry under the same definition — anything else would not be a fair row.
Cloudflare, Ltd. · Content delivery network provider; Hosting provider for the Remote Model Context Protocol (MCP) Server · Customer traffic is processed globally at the data center closest to the end user.7
As of 1 Nov 2026, the panel rates both 3/5. Weighted by what each judge cares about, 2 of the 6 judges pick Confluence and 4 pick Notion Wikis. Which one fits depends on the criteria that matter to you; the table on this page shows both side by side, and each judge’s reading has its own page. Both were scored by the same AI bench under the same rubric, from public evidence only, as the methodology describes.
Is Confluence or Notion Wikis European?
Confluence is not European by provenance (Rest of world). Notion Wikis is not European by provenance (Rest of world, United States). Provenance is read from each company’s own legal pages: who builds it and who owns it.
Do Confluence and Notion Wikis have a free plan?
As of 1 Nov 2026, both vendors’ own pages state a free plan. Each product page links the pricing page it was read from.