NGOstack vs Confluence
Wiki spaces and databases for NGOs, compared with Confluence
NGOstack is a platform NGOs run their operations on — workspaces, projects, milestones, evidence and funder records — with Notion-style wiki spaces and databases built into the same system. It is not a documentation tool bolted onto a suite of engineering tools; the wiki and the work sit on the same records.
So the decision here is not "which wiki has the nicer editor". It is whether your written knowledge should live next to your issue tracker, or next to your projects and reporting. If your quarterly report, your grant tracker and your evidence list are currently three separate copies of the same facts, that is the question this page is about.
What Confluence is genuinely good at
Confluence is a mature, deeply capable documentation platform, and for a lot of organisations it is the right home for written knowledge. It has years of refinement behind its space administration and permission model, a large library of templates and macros, and a marketplace of apps for almost any documentation habit you can name. Its strongest argument is proximity: if your technical team already tracks work in Jira, keeping the specifications, runbooks and meeting notes in the same suite means one login, one permission model, and pages that sit beside the issues they describe. That is a real advantage, and nothing below is an argument that Confluence is a weak wiki. It is not.
Where the SOPs live, and who can read them
A new programme coordinator starts on Monday and needs three things before their first field visit: the safeguarding policy, the per-diem rules, and the field-visit checklist. In NGOstack those sit in an organisation wiki space as nested pages, found by full-text search rather than by asking a colleague which folder it ended up in. Backlinks show which project pages reference the safeguarding policy, so when it changes you can see what depends on it. Version history shows what was amended after the last board review, and trash recovers the page someone deleted in a tidy-up. Workspace spaces keep per-project material with the project it belongs to; personal spaces hold drafts that are not ready to be policy yet. When a partner or an auditor asks for the policy itself, you generate a revocable read-only public share link rather than creating an account for them, and revoke it when the engagement ends. The same editor runs in the browser and in the desktop app for macOS, Windows and Linux — the desktop app is online and reads and writes the same live data, so there is no local copy to reconcile.
The grant tracker stops being a page full of tables
A funder asks for evidence against indicator 2.3 for Q3, with dates and a named owner for each item. The usual version of this is a spreadsheet, a folder of files, and someone retyping totals into the report page the night before. In NGOstack that tracker is a wiki database inside the space: fifteen column types including status, date, person, select and formula, and relation columns that point not only at other databases but at your live platform records — projects, milestones, evidence, funders and members. So indicator 2.3 relates to the actual evidence records, and a rollup counts how many are filled, finds the earliest and latest date, and sums the numeric column, computed server-side rather than in a formula someone has to maintain. The same data renders as six views, each with its own filters, sorts and grouping: a board by status for the Monday check-in, a calendar by reporting deadline, a table for the funder. Embed that database as a block inside the quarterly report page and the report and the tracker are the same data, not a copy of it that drifts. For IATI reporting, IATI-shaped databases export as IATI 2.03 XML — it is IATI-aligned, a subset, so validate before you submit.
What moving actually involves, and what it does not cover
Be clear-eyed about the migration. Structured data comes across by CSV or Excel with header mapping — lossy, so check the typed columns afterwards. If part of your knowledge already sits in Notion, there is a faithful migration: you paste your own Notion internal-integration token, migrate a whole space or pick individual databases, and typed columns, select colours and relations carry over; supported Notion formulas become live formula columns. The token is sent per request and never stored. Notion views, rollup and lookup cell values, embeds and very long row bodies do not come across. There is no dedicated Confluence importer today, so page content moves by hand — which in practice means an honest audit of which SOPs you still use and a decision to leave the rest behind. Three other things to weigh before you commit: the mobile app's wiki module is not yet at parity with web and desktop, so treat mobile editing as in progress; the desktop app is online rather than offline-capable; and NGOstack has no team chat, channels or direct messaging, so keep the chat tool your team already uses. Pricing is country-tiered rather than one global figure — see the pricing page for what applies to your organisation.
Which to choose
Stay with Confluence if your documentation estate is already deep and well organised, your team works alongside Jira and benefits from having docs in the same place as issues, and your reporting figures live comfortably in a finance system or spreadsheets you trust. A wiki your staff already know beats a better one you have to move into, and the hand-migration of pages described above is a genuine cost — do not pay it for a marginal gain. Move to NGOstack if you recognise the retyping problem: the grant tracker, the evidence list and the quarterly report holding the same numbers in three places, reconciled by hand each quarter. That is what the relation columns are for. When the indicator row points at the actual evidence record and the rollup counts it for you, the wiki stops being a description of the work and becomes a view onto it — and the funder question that used to take an afternoon becomes a filter on a table.
What's included
The spaces capabilities this page refers to — all part of the one org plan, not a separate purchase.
Org & workspace wiki spaces
Notion-style wiki spaces for SOPs, knowledge and institutional memory — personal, org and workspace. Nested pages, mentions and backlinks, full-text search, version history and trash, plus revocable read-only public share links — the same editor in the browser and in the desktop app.
Wiki on mobile
Wiki spaces and databases run in the browser and in the desktop app today — the mobile app is catching up.
Wiki databases
Notion-style databases inside your wiki spaces — six views (table, board, calendar, gallery, list, timeline) and fifteen column types, with relations that point at your real projects, milestones, evidence and funders. Bring existing data across by CSV, Excel or a faithful Notion migration, and export IATI-shaped databases as IATI 2.03 XML.
The full picture: Wiki and knowledge base software for NGO teams
Capabilities