A Gorgias to Freshdesk migration takes 2–4 weeks. The biggest risks are Freshdesk's per-endpoint API sub-limits dropping records and losing embedded Shopify order context during transformation.
Step-by-step technical guide to migrating from Gorgias to Freshdesk. Covers API rate limits, data mapping, Shopify data handling, and zero-downtime cutover.
Read this first
Pair-specific gotchas that catch teams out. Each one has cost somebody a weekend.
Authorship on imported conversations
When you create a Freshdesk ticket via POST /api/v2/tickets, the description is attributed to the requester (contact). But when you add subsequent replies via POST /api/v2/tickets/{id}/reply, they are attributed to the agent whose API key is used — not the original sender. To preserve accurate authorship, prepend original sender, timestamp, and channel inside the message body. If available on your plan, use Freshdesk's Ticket Import API (POST /api/v2/imports/tickets), which supports historical timestamps and suppresses email notifications. The Ticket Import API is available on Pro and Enterprise plans — teams on Growth must use the standard create endpoint and accept the timestamp and notification limitations.
The runbook
Work top to bottom. Tick steps as you go — your progress is saved in this browser.
01 Discovery Establish why you are moving, what "done" means, and who signs off.
Objective A written scope with agreed success criteria, a named owner per workstream, and a budget approved by finance.
Keep these open
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Pull the real numbers out of Gorgias
Export counts for tickets (open and closed separately), contacts, organisations, attachments, macros, triggers, automations, views and SLA policies. Note the oldest ticket date — history depth drives the whole timeline. Estimating from memory is the single most common cause of a blown migration window.
Data Profiler Get real record counts instead of estimating from memory -
Decide what history actually moves
Agree a cut-off with the support lead: all history, last 24 months, or open tickets plus a read-only archive. Every extra year of closed tickets adds API time and cost without adding much agent value. Get this in writing — it is the decision people relitigate mid-cutover.
A "move everything" default is what turns a two-week migration into a two-month one.
COI & ROI Calculator Build the 36-month business case you will need for sign-off -
Confirm Freshdesk can hold your support model
Walk your current workflow through Freshdesk: multi-brand, business hours, SLA targets, CSAT, side conversations, public vs internal notes, and any channel you depend on (voice, chat, WhatsApp, social). List anything with no native equivalent — those are project risks, not configuration details.
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Build the business case
Model licence delta, migration effort, agent retraining, and the cost of staying put (Cost of Inaction). Executives approve a number, not a plan, and you will be asked for it again at the go/no-go.
Helpdesk Migration Planner Turn ticket volume into a dated Gorgias → Freshdesk timeline -
Name owners and set the go/no-go date
One named owner each for data, configuration, integrations, and agent enablement, plus a decision-maker who can call a rollback. Put the go/no-go meeting in calendars now, 48 hours before the freeze.
Don't move on until
- Record counts confirmed for tickets, contacts, organisations and macros
- Success criteria signed off by the support lead
- Freeze window provisionally booked with the business
02 Data Audit Find out what is actually in the data before you try to move it.
Objective A profiled, cleaned export with every quality defect either fixed at source or explicitly accepted.
Keep these open
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Take a full Gorgias export and profile it
Export to CSV or JSON and profile every file: row counts, null rates per column, distinct values, and type consistency. Compare row counts against the API totals from Discovery — a gap here means your export is silently truncated, usually by pagination.
Data Profiler Profile the Gorgias export for nulls, outliers and type drift -
Validate file structure before anyone writes a transform
Check delimiters, quoting, encoding (expect UTF-8, watch for BOMs and Latin-1), duplicate headers, and embedded newlines in ticket bodies. Ticket descriptions with raw newlines and commas break naive CSV parsers and silently shift columns.
A single unescaped quote in one ticket body can shift every subsequent column without any error.
CSV Validator Catch broken headers and ragged rows in the raw export -
Inventory PII and set retention
Scan for emails, phone numbers, payment card fragments, national IDs and anything else regulated in ticket bodies and custom fields — support tickets are where customers paste things they should not. Decide what gets migrated, masked, or dropped, and record the legal basis.
Ticket bodies and attachments routinely contain card and ID data that never appears in a structured field.
PII & Compliance Scanner Find regulated fields before they land in a new system -
Quantify duplicates, orphans and dead references
Count duplicate contacts (same email, different casing), tickets whose requester no longer exists, organisations with no members, and attachments whose parent ticket is gone. Fix these in Gorgias where you can — migrating them just moves the mess.
Data Cleaner Strip empty rows, stray whitespace and dead columns -
Clean and normalise the export
Trim whitespace, drop empty rows and columns, normalise casing on emails and tags, and standardise every timestamp to UTC ISO 8601. Timezone drift is invisible at load time and shows up weeks later as SLA reports nobody can reconcile.
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Produce a masked copy for sandbox work
Generate a realistic but fake version of the export for testing and for any vendor who needs sample data. Loading real customer PII into a sandbox is a breach in most jurisdictions, and sandboxes are rarely covered by your DPA.
PII Masker Generate a safe copy for sandbox and vendor testing -
Extract Shopify data
If ticket messages contain Shopify order references, parse them and store as structured custom fields (cf_shopify_order_id, cf_order_status, cf_order_total) or append as a formatted private note.
Don't move on until
- Export parses cleanly with no ragged rows or encoding errors
- PII inventory complete and retention decisions recorded
- Duplicate and orphan records quantified and triaged
03 Field Mapping Turn two schemas into one signed-off mapping spec.
Objective A reviewed field-level mapping covering every object, with an explicit decision for every field that has no target.
Keep these open
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Generate the first-pass Gorgias → Freshdesk field map
Start from an automated match on both schemas, then review every row by hand. Automated matching gets the obvious 70% right and is confidently wrong on the rest — especially anything named "type", "status" or "custom_field_1".
Schema Mapper Opens pre-loaded with the Gorgias → Freshdesk field pair -
Map status, priority and channel values, not just field names
Enumerate every value in each picklist on both sides and map them explicitly. Value-level mismatches are the defect class that survives all the way to production because the field itself mapped fine — a ticket that should be "Pending" arriving as "Open" reopens SLA clocks.
Statuses with no target equivalent (on-hold, pending-customer) need a policy decision, not a best guess.
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Decide how custom fields land
Create the target custom fields first, matching type exactly (a dropdown mapped to free text can never be mapped back). Where Freshdesk has no equivalent, decide between a new custom field, a tag, or a note appended to the ticket body — and record which.
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Resolve identity and threading
Decide how source IDs are preserved — most platforms will not let you set the primary key, so keep the original ID in a custom field. Without it, reconciliation becomes fuzzy matching and every future support question about an old ticket is unanswerable.
Losing the original ticket ID makes reconciliation and rollback effectively impossible.
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Plan attachments, inline images and threading order
Confirm size limits, allowed MIME types, and whether inline images survive as attachments or need rehosting. Decide the comment ordering and author attribution rules: comments loaded out of order, or all attributed to the API user, destroy the conversation history agents rely on.
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Freeze and sign off the mapping spec
Version the spec, walk the support lead through it row by row, and get explicit sign-off. Any change after this point goes through change control — mid-flight mapping edits are how partial loads happen.
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Map statuses
Gorgias open → Freshdesk 2 (Open). Gorgias closed → Freshdesk 4 (Resolved) or 5 (Closed). Decide based on whether you want closed tickets to be reopenable by customer reply.
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Map priorities
Gorgias has no native priority field. If you have used tags or custom fields for priority, map them to Freshdesk's 1 (Low), 2 (Medium), 3 (High), 4 (Urgent).
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Deduplicate customers
Gorgias allows customers with multiple channels. Freshdesk deduplicates contacts by email — creating a duplicate returns HTTP 409. Implement upsert logic: check existence first via GET /api/v2/contacts?email={email}, then create or update.
Gorgias → Freshdesk specifics
- Transform custom fields
- Rename to cf_ prefix format. Convert enum values to match pre-created Freshdesk dropdown options. Verify you will not exceed plan-level custom field limits (Growth: ~20, Pro: ~50, Enterprise: ~150).
- Custom field validation
- Verify that Shopify-derived fields (cf_shopify_order_id, cf_order_status) contain the expected values for 10 sampled tickets.
Don't move on until
- Every source field is mapped, deliberately dropped, or parked in a custom field
- Status, priority and channel value maps agreed with the support lead
- Mapping spec version-controlled and signed off
04 Test Migration Prove the pipeline on a small, representative slice.
Objective A pilot load into a Freshdesk sandbox that reconciles cleanly and has been reviewed by real agents.
Keep these open
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Stand up a Freshdesk sandbox that matches production config
Create the custom fields, groups, brands, business hours and SLA policies first. A pilot into a default sandbox tests nothing, because the failures you care about are all configuration mismatches.
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Pick a deliberately nasty pilot sample
Take 500-1000 records chosen for difficulty, not convenience: the longest ticket threads, tickets with the most attachments, non-Latin character sets, merged and split tickets, deleted requesters, and every status value. A clean random sample proves only that easy records are easy.
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Run the load with masked data and instrument everything
Log every API request and response with its source record ID. When 40 records fail out of 10,000 you need to know exactly which ones and why, without re-running the whole batch.
PII Masker Never load real customer PII into a sandbox -
Measure real throughput against the rate limit
Record achieved records-per-hour under Freshdesk's actual rate limits, including retries and backoff. Extrapolate to the full volume: if the maths says the full load exceeds your freeze window, you fix that now, not on cutover night.
Published rate limits are ceilings, not throughput. Assume real-world rates are meaningfully lower once retries and backoff are counted.
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Reconcile the pilot and triage every failure
Diff source against target on record counts and field-level values. Every discrepancy gets a root cause and a fix — "probably fine" at pilot scale becomes thousands of broken records at full scale.
Migration Validation Tool Diff the pilot batch against source before scaling up -
Put real agents in front of the pilot data
Have two or three agents work sample tickets end to end in the sandbox. They find the things reconciliation cannot see: unreadable threading, missing context, macros that no longer make sense. Fix the mapping, then re-run.
Gorgias → Freshdesk specifics
- Negative test
- Confirm that no email notifications were sent to customers during import. Check Freshdesk's email send logs (Admin > Email Notifications > Logs) for the migration window.
Don't move on until
- Pilot batch reconciles to 100% on record counts
- Agents have reviewed sample tickets and confirmed they are workable
- Measured throughput extrapolates to a viable full-load window
05 Cutover Execute the switch inside a controlled, reversible window.
Objective All in-scope data live in Freshdesk, agents working in the new system, and a rollback path that stayed available throughout.
Keep these open
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Pre-load history before the freeze
Load closed tickets and contacts days or weeks ahead while Gorgias stays live. Only open tickets and the final delta need to move inside the freeze — this is the single biggest lever on window length.
Helpdesk Migration Planner Size the freeze window from Freshdesk's real API limits -
Publish the runbook with times, owners and abort criteria
A timed sequence: freeze start, final export, delta load, channel switch, smoke test, go/no-go, agent switch. Name who does each step and the explicit condition that triggers a rollback. Decide the abort criteria before the night, when nobody wants to be the one to call it.
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Freeze Gorgias and take the final delta
Stop new ticket creation, let agents finish in-flight replies, then export everything changed since the pre-load. Announce the freeze to the whole business, not just support — someone always tries to raise a ticket during it.
Tickets created during an unenforced freeze land in the old system and are the most common source of permanently lost data.
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Load the delta and open tickets
Run the delta load, then reconcile counts before touching any channel. Do not repoint email until the delta has verified — an inbound ticket arriving mid-load is far harder to untangle than a few extra minutes of freeze.
Migration Validation Tool Confirm the final delta landed before you reopen -
Repoint channels and verify with live traffic
Switch email forwarding and MX or connector settings, update chat widgets and web forms, and re-authorise integrations. Then send real test tickets through every channel and confirm each lands, routes and triggers the right automation.
Email forwarding changes can take up to a full DNS TTL to propagate — check the TTL days in advance and lower it if needed.
Cron Expression Builder Schedule the delta syncs that run through the freeze -
Run the go/no-go and switch the agents
Walk the exit criteria with the decision-maker, call it explicitly, then move agents over with a named person on hand for the first few hours. Keep Gorgias read-only rather than cancelled — cancelling the old contract on day one removes your only fallback.
Don't move on until
- Full historical load complete and counts matched
- Inbound channels repointed and verified with live test tickets
- Rollback decision point passed explicitly, not by default
06 Validation Prove the migration is complete, then close it out.
Objective Documented evidence that data, workflow and reporting all survived, and a signed acceptance.
Keep these open
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Run the full reconciliation
Compare source and target on every object: total counts, counts by status, counts by group, attachment counts, and field-level spot checks on a random sample. Produce one report you can hand to an auditor.
Migration Validation Tool Reconcile Gorgias and Freshdesk record-for-record -
Verify field completeness, not just record counts
Re-profile the loaded data and compare null rates per field against the source profile. Matching record counts with a field that silently arrived empty is the failure mode counts alone will never catch.
Data Profiler Prove field completeness held up through the load -
Rebuild reporting and compare against baselines
Recreate your core dashboards — volume, first response time, resolution time, CSAT — and compare to pre-migration figures for the same period. Explain every variance; a changed SLA calculation is a real finding, not a rounding error.
SLA and first-response metrics are usually recalculated from the loaded timestamps, so they will differ if any timestamp mapping was approximate.
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Test the workflow layer end to end
Fire every trigger, automation, SLA escalation, macro and notification with a live ticket. Workflow does not migrate — it gets rebuilt — so it is untested until someone has actually watched it run.
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Confirm compliance and produce the audit trail
Re-scan the loaded data for regulated fields, confirm retention and deletion policies are configured in Freshdesk, and file the evidence with your PII decisions from the audit phase.
PII & Compliance Scanner Produce the compliance evidence your auditor will ask for -
Sign off, then decommission on a schedule
Get written acceptance against the Discovery success criteria. Keep Gorgias read-only for an agreed period (30-90 days is typical), take a final archive export, and only then cancel. Diarise the decommission date so it does not quietly renew.
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Record-count reconciliation
Compare total tickets, contacts, tags, and conversation entries between Gorgias and Freshdesk. Document expected counts from extraction and actual counts post-load.
Gorgias → Freshdesk specifics
- Field-level sampling
- Pull 50 random tickets from each status category (Open, Closed). Compare subject, description, status, tags, custom field values, and conversation count against the Gorgias source. Use cf_gorgias_ticket_id to cross-reference.
- Attachment verification
- Spot-check 20 tickets with attachments. Verify files are downloadable, not corrupted, and that inline images render correctly in the ticket body.
- Conversation threading
- Verify that messages appear in chronological order and that internal notes are correctly marked as private (not visible to customers in the portal).
- Agent attribution
- Confirm that tickets are assigned to the correct Freshdesk agents and that conversation entries show the correct author.
- Search validation
- Search for 10 known customer email addresses in Freshdesk. Verify their ticket history appears complete. Search by cf_gorgias_ticket_id to confirm cross-reference integrity.
Don't move on until
- Full reconciliation report attached to the project record
- Reporting baselines match pre-migration figures within agreed tolerance
- Formal acceptance signed and archive retention scheduled
Field mapping reference
The field-by-field mapping for each object. Use this as the starting point for your mapping spec.
How Gorgias objects map Freshdesk
| Gorgias field | Freshdesk field | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Customer | Contact | Deduplicate by email before import. Extra channel addresses go to other_emails or custom fields. |
| Customer → Company | Company | Gorgias has no native Company object. If you have grouped customers by company via custom fields or Shopify data, create Companies in Freshdesk first, then link contacts. |
| Ticket | Ticket | Map Gorgias status (open/closed) to Freshdesk integer IDs (2=Open, 3=Pending, 4=Resolved, 5=Closed). Preserve original channel as a tag or custom field. |
| Message (public) | Conversation (Reply) | Must set user_id to the correct agent or contact. Replay in chronological order. |
| Message (internal-note) | Conversation (Private Note) | Map via POST /api/v2/tickets/{id}/notes with private: true. |
| Tag | Tag | 1:1 mapping, but Freshdesk limits tags to 32 characters. Longer Gorgias tags will fail the API call silently. Create tags before importing tickets. |
| Custom Field (Ticket) | Custom Ticket Field | Field types must match. Freshdesk prefixes API names with cf_. Enum values must be pre-created. Note plan limits: Growth supports up to 20 custom ticket fields, Pro supports up to 50, Enterprise up to 150. |
| Custom Field (Customer) | Custom Contact Field | Freshdesk splits contact and company field schemas — choose the destination deliberately. |
| Team | Group | Create groups before assigning tickets. |
| User / Agent | Agent | Provision via POST /api/v2/agents or manually. Freshdesk roles and ticket_scope do not line up exactly with Gorgias roles. |
| Macro | Canned Response / Scenario | No API migration path. Text ports more easily than actions. Macros using Shopify variables will not work in Freshdesk. |
| Rule (Automation) | Automation Rule | No API migration path. Rebuild manually using Dispatch'r, Supervisor, Observer, and Scenario rules. See Help Desk Migration's Secret Saboteur: Automations. |
| Satisfaction Survey | CSAT Survey | Freshdesk has native CSAT. Historical scores can be stored as custom fields or private notes. |
| Order Data (Shopify) | Custom Fields / Private Note | No native Shopify order object in Freshdesk. Extract order IDs, amounts, and statuses into custom fields like cf_shopify_order_id or append as private notes. |
| Attachment | Attachment | Freshdesk enforces a 20 MB per conversation attachment limit. Files exceeding this must be hosted externally. |
What breaks
Known failure modes. Have a recovery plan for each before you cut over.
Gorgias CSV export excludes internal notes
The standard ticket CSV export omits internal notes, ticket events, Facebook wall posts, and Instagram media messages. The analytics export with message content includes only public messages from the most recent 30 days and caps at 100K tickets. A full migration requires the API (docs.gorgias.com).
Gorgias does not export contacts as CSV
Customer records must be extracted via GET /api/customers.
Gorgias message bodies are capped at 1 MB
If the source already truncated a message, no migration can restore the missing text (developers.gorgias.com).
Inline images
Gorgias stores inline images as base64-encoded strings or temporary AWS S3 pre-signed URLs (which expire). If your script does not parse the HTML body, download the image, re-host it on permanent storage, and update the src attribute, you will migrate broken image icons.
Agent authorship
If a Gorgias agent has left the company and does not have a licensed seat in Freshdesk, you cannot assign historical replies to them. Map inactive agents to a generic "Legacy Agent" account in Freshdesk to preserve the history. Include the original agent name in the message body (e.g., " [Originally from: Jane Smith, 2023-01-15]").
Freshdesk pagination ceiling
The /api/v2/tickets list endpoint caps at page 500 (using per_page=100, that is 50,000 tickets). Beyond that, use the search endpoint or filter by date ranges. The filter endpoint is capped at 10 pages (300 results).
Multi-brand Gorgias accounts
If you operate multiple Shopify stores through one Gorgias account, you must decide whether to merge into one Freshdesk instance (using Products to separate brands) or split into separate Freshdesk portals. This decision affects custom field design, automation rules, and reporting. Make this architectural decision in Phase 0, not mid-migration.
Bot and AI Agent messages
Gorgias AI Agent messages are stored as regular messages with sender.type indicating a bot. They migrate to Freshdesk as standard conversation entries — the AI attribution is not preserved. Tag these with cf_ai_response: true during transformation if you want to track them.
Macros and automations
Gorgias rules cannot be exported via API. Every macro using Shopify variables must be manually rewritten into Freshdesk Scenario Automations, canned responses, and rule configurations. Budget 3–5 days for this rebuild. See Your Help Desk Data Migration's Secret Saboteur: Automations, Macros, and Workflows.
Tools used in this playbook
All free, all run entirely in your browser — nothing is uploaded.
FAQ
Can I migrate Gorgias to Freshdesk without losing data?
Yes, if you use the Gorgias REST API for extraction rather than CSV exports. CSV exports exclude internal notes, attachments, and customer records. An API-based migration preserves tickets, all message types, tags, custom fields, and attachments — subject to Freshdesk's 20 MB per conversation attachment limit.
Can Gorgias Shopify order history be preserved in Freshdesk?
Not natively. Gorgias pulls Shopify data live from the Shopify API — it is not stored as ticket fields. During migration, you can extract order references and store them as Freshdesk custom fields (e.g., cf_shopify_order_id) or private notes, but this does not replicate Gorgias's live Shopify sidebar functionality.
How long does a Gorgias to Freshdesk migration take?
A typical migration of 50K–100K tickets takes 2–4 weeks end-to-end, including discovery, test migration, full migration, delta sync, and validation. The data transfer itself takes 2–4 days of continuous API processing on a Freshdesk Pro plan. Automation and macro rebuilds run in parallel.
Will customers receive email notifications during the migration?
They will if you don't disable Freshdesk automations before importing. Freshdesk's Dispatch'r and Observer rules fire on API-created tickets and can trigger emails to customers on historical tickets. Always disable all automation rules before starting the import.
How much does a Gorgias to Freshdesk migration cost?
DIY costs are primarily engineering time: 80–160 hours for a mid-complexity migration (50K–200K tickets). Third-party tools like Help Desk Migration charge based on record count, typically $1,500–$5,000 for this range. Managed migration services range from $3,000–$15,000 depending on volume, complexity, and compliance requirements.