DotMD vs Google Docs, Notion, and Confluence: what should your team write in?
Most teams never really chose a writing tool. They inherited one. Google Docs came with the email. Confluence came with Jira. Notion showed up as somebody's side project and everyone else joined.
That was a reasonable way to end up somewhere, back when documents were only read by people.
The difference that actually matters
Every tool here can produce Markdown. Google Docs has imported and exported it since July 2024, and since February 2026 you can pull a Markdown export just by editing the document URL. Notion exports Markdown. Confluence has plugins for it.
So the question is not whether a tool can emit Markdown. It is whether Markdown is what the tool *stores*.
In Google Docs, Notion, and Confluence, your document lives in that product's own format and Markdown is a conversion at the door. Every export is a translation, and translations drop things: the comment thread, the nested table, the callout with no equivalent on the other side.
In DotMD the .md file is the document. Nothing gets converted on the way out, because there is no second version to convert from.
That sounds like a detail. It stopped being one this year, for two reasons.
Your documents have a second audience now. On some documentation sites, AI agents now make roughly twice as many visits as humans. Those readers pay for every word they parse, and a proprietary page wrapped in menus and markup costs them far more than plain text. We wrote about that shift in more detail here.
Nobody can read a proprietary file in ten years without the product that made it. A .md file opens in anything, forever, including a plain text editor.
At a glance
| Feature | DotMD | Google Docs | Notion | Confluence |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| What the file actually is | A .md file | Google's own format | Blocks | Confluence storage format |
| Markdown | The source of truth | Import and export | Export | Via plugins |
| Formatting toolbar | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Real-time co-editing | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Slide deck from the same file | Yes, presented live | Separate product | No | No |
| Spreadsheet in the same file | Yes, 59 functions and cross-sheet references | Separate product | Database formula fields | No |
| AI in the document | Yes, bring your own API key | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Two-way Git sync | Yes | No | No | No |
| Publish to the web | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Track record | Launching now | Two decades | Years | Two decades |
That last row is not a throwaway. Three of these products have survived longer than most startups. Weigh it honestly.
When Google Docs is the right answer
Pick Google Docs when the document is going to be read, argued over, and then finished. Suggestion mode and comments are still the best review experience for people who do not write for a living, the sharing model is understood by everyone including your lawyer, and it costs you nothing extra because you already pay for it.
If the thing you are writing ends its life as a PDF and never touches a repository, Google Docs is not a compromise. It is the correct tool.
When Notion is the right answer
Pick Notion when your content is closer to records than to prose. Roadmaps, CRMs, hiring pipelines, anything you want to filter and sort and view as a board. A wiki that is also a database is a genuinely different product, and Markdown-native tools do not replace it.
When Confluence is the right answer
Pick Confluence when governance is the requirement. Enterprise permissioning, audit trails, and the fact that it is already wired into Jira and the approval process your compliance team signed off on. Nobody switches away from that for a nicer editor, and they should not.
Where DotMD is different
Formatting is a button, and the file stays Markdown. This is the part most Markdown tools get wrong. They hand you a split screen and ask you to memorise syntax. Your product manager will not do that. Neither will the support lead who actually knows why the refund policy has three exceptions. In DotMD you click bold, you insert a table from a menu, you see the result as you type, and the file underneath stays clean Markdown.
One file becomes a document, a deck, and a spreadsheet. The same .md file renders as prose, as slides you can present live with follow-the-presenter sync and a private notes window, or as a grid with 59 formula functions and cross-sheet references. Your sprint review, its deck, and its metrics table stop being three files in three products.
Review works the way code review works. Line-anchored comments and suggested edits the author accepts in one click, with AI reviewing alongside your team inside the document rather than in a chat tab. You bring your own API key, so your content is not training anyone's model.
Your docs can live in Git and in an editor at the same time. Two-way sync means editing in either place, with both staying true. Useful when your documentation sits beside the code it describes.
The bottom line
Choose Google Docs for documents that people read and then finish. Choose Notion when the content is structured records. Choose Confluence when governance is the point.
Choose DotMD when the file itself matters: when your docs need to be readable by machines and by humans, when the deck and the numbers should come from the same source as the prose, and when you want everyone on the team writing, not just the people who memorised the syntax.
DotMD is free for 5 documents, $5 a month for Premium, and $5 per seat for teams.
If you are weighing DotMD against a Markdown-native editor rather than these four, we wrote that comparison separately: DotMD vs other collaborative Markdown tools.