Migrating Help Scout to Front requires the API, not Front's native importer, which drops internal notes. Budget 5 to 12 business days and plan for Front's 50 to 200 RPM rate limits.
Migrating from Help Scout to Front requires translating Help Scout's thread-based conversation model into Front's separate message-and-comment structure, making this a data transformation project rather than a simple lift-and-shift. Front's built-in Help Scout importer exists but is not actively maintained and silently drops all internal notes and comments, resulting in permanent data loss for teams relying on historical internal context. Help Scout's UI exports only produce reporting CSVs without message bodies, so any full-fidelity migration must be driven through the Help Scout Mailbox API v2 and Front's Core API. Additional custom work is needed to handle note timestamp preservation (Front's comment endpoint lacks a created_at parameter), status model differences, and entities like satisfaction ratings and line-item threads that have no clean equivalent in Front.
Read this first
Pair-specific gotchas that catch teams out. Each one has cost somebody a weekend.
TL;DR: Help Scout to Front Migration
Migrating from Help Scout to Front is a moderate-to-high complexity project because Help Scout's thread-based conversation model must be translated into Front's message-and-comment structure. Front's built-in Help Scout importer is not actively maintained and does not import internal Notes or Comments — that data is permanently lost. Help Scout's UI export only produces reporting CSVs with no message bodies, so every full-fidelity migration path requires the Help Scout Mailbox API v2. A realistic timeline is 5 to 12 business days for 10,000 to 100,000 conversations, including mapping, testing, and cutover. Teams with fewer than 5,000 conversations and no need for internal notes can try the native importer. Everyone else should plan an API-led migration or use a managed service. Written July 2025. Targets Help Scout Mailbox API v2 and Front Core API. Before starting, verify whether Front has added a created_at parameter to the Add comment endpoint or updated its native Help Scout importer — either change would materially simplify the process described here.
The Hidden Data Loss: Internal Notes
Front's native Help Scout importer does not import Notes or Comments. Front's own documentation confirms this tool is not actively maintained. If your team has years of internal context, escalation notes, or compliance-relevant annotations stored as Help Scout notes, the native importer will silently drop all of it. This is not a bug — it is a known limitation of an unmaintained tool.
Order of Operations
Import messages in chronological order (oldest first). The first imported message creates the conversation object in Front. All subsequent messages thread into that conversation using the conversation_id returned by the first import call. If you import out of order, threading breaks.
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 Help Scout
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 Front can hold your support model
Walk your current workflow through Front: 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 Help Scout → Front 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.
Help Scout → Front specifics
- Omnichannel shared inbox architecture
- Front unifies email, SMS, WhatsApp, social media, and live chat into a single inbox with native per-teammate conversation status. Help Scout's strength is email-first support with a Beacon widget, but teams handling high volumes across multiple channels find Front's unified routing model better suited to their workflow. Teams comparing Front against Zendesk, Intercom, or Freshdesk as a Help Scout replacement typically choose Front when cross-functional collaboration (not just support ticketing) is the primary workflow requirement.
- Cross-functional collaboration
- Front treats every conversation as a collaborative workspace where sales, ops, and support work side by side using Comments (called "discussions" in the product). Teams outgrowing Help Scout's support-only model move to Front for cross-functional visibility.
- Advanced rules and SLA workflows
- Front's rules engine supports conditional branching, time-based escalation, and custom ticket statuses organized into categories (open, waiting, resolved) that go beyond Help Scout's workflow triggers.
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 Help Scout 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 Help Scout 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 Help Scout 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 -
Disable any Front Rules that might trigger on imported data
auto-replies, assignment rules, and SLA timers will fire on imported conversations if left enabled
Help Scout → Front specifics
- Help Scout Satisfaction Ratings
- Front does not have a native CSAT survey attached to conversations in the same way. Ratings can be stored as tags or custom field values for historical reference.
- Help Scout Beacon configuration
- Front's Chat Widget is a separate product. Beacon settings, proactive messages, and Beacon-specific workflows must be rebuilt from scratch. Chat conversations from Beacon can be imported as Front messages, but they lose their real-time chat formatting and appear as standard message threads. If your Beacon chat volume is significant, plan for agent retraining on Front's Chat Widget behavior (e.g., Front Chat conversations are assigned to individual teammates rather than queued in a Beacon-style round-robin).
- Lineitem threads
- These log assignment changes, status transitions, and system events in Help Scout. Front does not have a visible audit log per conversation in the UI. Encode these as timestamped comments if they carry operational value, or drop them.
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 Help Scout → Front 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 Help Scout → Front 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 Front 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.
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 Front sandbox that reconciles cleanly and has been reviewed by real agents.
Keep these open
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Stand up a Front 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 Front'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.
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 Front, 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 Help Scout 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 Front'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 Help Scout 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 Help Scout read-only rather than cancelled — cancelling the old contract on day one removes your only fallback.
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Archive imported conversations in Front
by applying a bulk tag (e.g., migration-rollback) and archiving by tag. This preserves the imported data without deleting it, in case you need to retry.
Help Scout → Front specifics
- Revert email forwarding
- from Front channels back to Help Scout Mailboxes. This is the single most time-sensitive step — do it first to stop new conversations from entering Front.
- Reactivate Help Scout
- as the primary support tool. If you kept the account active (recommended for 30 days post-cutover), agents can resume work immediately.
- Investigate the failure
- Common causes: missing notes, broken threading from out-of-order imports, incorrect assignee mappings, or attachment corruption.
- Re-run migration
- after fixing the root cause. Because you used external_id on every imported message, you can identify which conversations were already imported and skip them or overwrite them.
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 Help Scout and Front 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 Front, 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 Help Scout 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.
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.
Help Scout Front Object Mapping
| Help Scout field | Front field | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Mailbox | Inbox | 1:1 mapping. Create target Inboxes before migration. |
| Conversation | Conversation | Parent container. The conversation is created indirectly when the first historical message is imported. Map subject, status, assignee, createdAt. |
| Thread (type: customer, message, reply) | Message | External communications. Use the POST /inboxes/{inbox_id}/imported_messages endpoint. |
| Thread (type: note) | Comment | Internal-only. Use the POST /conversations/{id}/comments endpoint. |
| Thread (type: lineitem) | Tag or Comment | Assignment/status change logs. No direct Front equivalent. Encode as a timestamped comment or skip. |
| Thread (type: chat) | Message | Beacon chat threads. Import as messages. Always fetch full threads from the dedicated endpoint — embed=threads truncates chat history. |
| Thread (type: forward) | No clean 1:1 | Preserve important context in a comment if needed, or translate only the final state. |
| Customer | Contact | Map email, firstName, lastName, phone, company. Pre-seed contacts to avoid duplicate auto-created records. Front enforces strict uniqueness on email addresses. |
| Organization | Account | Help Scout organizations map to Front accounts. Front domains are unique to one account, so shared-domain cases need manual resolution. |
| User | Teammate | Map by email address. Pre-provision teammates in Front before import. |
| Tag | Tag | 1:1 mapping. Create tags in Front first or let the API auto-create. Front tags are shared across the entire workspace. |
| Conversation Custom Field | Conversation Custom Field | Front supports specific data types. Picklist values must be pre-created and match exactly. Front rejects payloads if a value does not match the defined enum. |
| Customer/Org Properties | Contact/Account Custom Fields | Help Scout properties support number, text, url, date, and dropdown. Front allows up to 50 custom fields per category. |
| Saved Reply | Message Template | No API import. Must be rebuilt manually in Front. |
| Workflow | Rule | No API import. Must be rebuilt manually in Front. |
| Docs (Knowledge Base) | Knowledge Base | Separate migration. Front supports Help Scout KB import by URL for public docs sites and by CSV with a 3,000-row cap per file. |
Risk matrix
Per-object risk for this pair. Plan extra validation around anything marked high.
| Object | Risk | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Conversations (Messages) | medium | External message threads can be imported via Front's imported_messages endpoint, but conversations are created indirectly and require careful sequencing to preserve threading and subject mapping. |
| Internal Notes | high | Front's native importer drops all notes entirely, and even API-based imports cannot preserve original timestamps since the comment endpoint lacks a created_at parameter, forcing timestamp-in-body workarounds. |
| Contacts | medium | Front enforces strict email uniqueness, so duplicate or shared-email contacts from Help Scout can cause auto-created duplicates or import rejections if not pre-seeded and deduplicated before migration. |
| Tags | low | Tags map 1:1 between platforms and can be auto-created by the Front API, though teams should note that Front tags are shared across the entire workspace rather than scoped to individual mailboxes. |
| Custom Fields | high | Front rejects payloads if picklist values do not exactly match pre-defined enums, and data type mappings between Help Scout's property types and Front's supported field types require precise pre-configuration. |
| Attachments | medium | Attachments must be downloaded from Help Scout and re-uploaded to Front per-message, adding significant processing time and requiring robust error handling for large files or rate-limited API calls. |
| Organizations / Accounts | medium | Help Scout organizations map to Front accounts, but Front's unique domain constraint means organizations sharing domains across multiple Help Scout records require manual resolution. |
| Satisfaction Ratings | high | Front has no native CSAT survey equivalent attached to conversations, so Help Scout satisfaction ratings can only be preserved as tags or custom field values, losing their structured survey context. |
| Saved Replies / Workflows | medium | Neither saved replies nor workflows can be imported via API; both must be manually recreated in Front as message templates and rules respectively, which is labor-intensive for teams with large libraries. |
| Chat Conversations (Beacon) | medium | Beacon chat threads can be imported as Front messages but lose real-time chat formatting, and the embed=threads parameter truncates chat history, requiring dedicated endpoint fetches for full fidelity. |
The hard parts
What makes this specific migration difficult, beyond the mechanics.
Thread-to-Message/Comment Classification
Every Help Scout thread (customer reply, agent reply, note, chat, forward, lineitem) must be individually classified and routed to either a Front Message or Comment object, since Front separates external communications from internal discussions.
Internal Note Timestamp Loss
Front's public Add Comment endpoint does not accept a created_at parameter, making it impossible to preserve the original historical timestamps of Help Scout notes as first-class metadata.
Native Importer Drops Notes
Front's built-in Help Scout importer silently omits all internal notes and comments, permanently losing years of escalation reasoning, compliance annotations, and internal decision context.
Status Model Mismatch
Help Scout's four statuses (active, pending, closed, spam) must be mapped to Front's two conversation-level states (open, archived) plus optional custom ticket statuses organized into categories, requiring fallback strategies for pending-state workflows.
Contact and Account Deduplication
Front enforces strict uniqueness on email addresses for contacts and domain uniqueness per account, so shared-domain customers and duplicate contact records from Help Scout require manual resolution before or during import.
No Equivalent for Several Entities
Help Scout satisfaction ratings, Beacon configurations, lineitem audit threads, saved replies, and workflows have no direct Front API import path and must be either encoded as workarounds (tags, comments, custom fields) or manually rebuilt.
Tools used in this playbook
All free, all run entirely in your browser — nothing is uploaded.
FAQ
Can I migrate Help Scout to Front without losing data?
Yes, but not with Front's native importer alone. The native importer drops internal notes and is not actively maintained. An API-based migration using the Help Scout Mailbox API v2 and Front's Core API (imported_messages and comments endpoints) can preserve all conversation history, internal notes, tags, custom fields, and attachments. The one compromise is note timestamps — Front's comment endpoint has no created_at field, so exact historical timestamps must be embedded in the comment body.
How long does a Help Scout to Front migration take?
A typical migration of 10,000 to 100,000 conversations takes 5 to 12 business days including discovery, mapping, script development, test migration, full run, delta sync, and validation. The API write phase alone can take 24 to 72 or more hours of continuous processing due to Front's 50 to 200 RPM rate limits.
What data cannot be migrated from Help Scout to Front?
Help Scout Saved Replies, Workflows, Beacon configuration, and satisfaction rating survey responses cannot be migrated via the API and must be rebuilt manually in Front. Lineitem threads (system-generated audit logs) have no direct Front equivalent and are typically encoded as comments or dropped. Help Scout Docs require a separate migration — Front supports KB import by URL or CSV.
Does Front have a built-in Help Scout import tool?
Yes, Front has a native Help Scout importer under Settings then Imports. However, Front states this importer is not actively maintained and recommends using migration partners like Help Desk Migration or ClonePartner instead. The tool does not import internal Notes or Comments.
How much does a Help Scout to Front migration cost?
Front's native importer is free but drops internal notes. Third-party tools like Help Desk Migration charge based on record volume, typically $1,000 to $5,000 for mid-size migrations. Managed migration services range from $3,000 to $15,000 depending on volume and complexity. Building in-house costs 120 to 200 engineer-hours for a mid-size migration with notes, attachments, and custom fields.