Help Scout to HubSpot Service Hub migration requires API-based extraction — the native CSV export strips all thread content. Plan for HubSpot's engagement association model and 2–4 weeks.
There is no native migration path from Help Scout to HubSpot Service Hub. Help Scout's built-in CSV export strips all conversation thread contents, message bodies, and internal notes, making API-based extraction via the Mailbox API v2 mandatory. The fundamental data model mismatch — Help Scout's flat Conversation/Thread hierarchy versus HubSpot's relational Ticket-to-Engagement architecture — means a single conversation with multiple threads must be decomposed into one Ticket plus multiple individual Engagement objects with explicit associations. Workflows, saved replies, Beacon configurations, and knowledge base articles require manual rebuilding, and custom field mappings must account for mailbox-scoped IDs, dropdown enum translations, and HubSpot's internal ID requirements for pipelines and stages.
Read this first
Pair-specific gotchas that catch teams out. Each one has cost somebody a weekend.
The Search API bottleneck
HubSpot's CRM Search API is limited to 4–5 requests per second — separate from the general burst limit. If your migration script uses search for dedup checks before each insert, this becomes the binding constraint. Newly created records may also take up to 30 seconds to appear in search results due to indexing lag. Build unique legacy_*_id properties, use batch upsert or batch read by ID, and keep search for exception handling only.
Retry strategy
Implement exponential backoff with jitter on 429 responses. Cap at 5 retries per request. Log every failed record to a dead-letter queue for manual review. If a batch partially fails (HubSpot returns per-record status in batch responses), replay only the source IDs that didn't acknowledge. Never silently drop a record.
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 HubSpot Service Hub can hold your support model
Walk your current workflow through HubSpot Service Hub: 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 → HubSpot Service Hub 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 → HubSpot Service Hub specifics
- Timeline ordering
- Verify threads appear in chronological order on the HubSpot ticket record. Check both the legacy Tickets view and the Help Desk workspace.
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
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 → HubSpot Service Hub 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 → HubSpot Service Hub 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 HubSpot Service Hub 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 HubSpot Service Hub sandbox that reconciles cleanly and has been reviewed by real agents.
Keep these open
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Stand up a HubSpot Service Hub 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 HubSpot Service Hub'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.
Help Scout → HubSpot Service Hub specifics
- Thread count sampling
- Randomly select 50–100 tickets. Verify thread count matches the source. Verify threads appear in correct chronological order (sorted by hs_timestamp).
- Field-level checks
- Confirm custom fields, tags, statuses, and assignees transferred correctly. Spot-check 20 tickets for dropdown field value accuracy.
- Association integrity
- Confirm every ticket has an associated contact. Orphaned tickets are effectively lost data. Confirm contacts have company associations where applicable. Run: GET /crm/v3/objects/tickets/{id}/associations/contacts on a sample set.
- Help Desk workspace check
- Verify that migrated tickets appear in the Help Desk workspace, not just the legacy Tickets view.
- Live inbound test
- Send a new test message after cutover to confirm routing works end-to-end.
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 HubSpot Service Hub, 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 HubSpot Service Hub'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.
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 HubSpot Service Hub 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 HubSpot Service Hub, 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.
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Record count reconciliation
Total tickets in HubSpot should equal total conversations in Help Scout — broken down by mailbox, status, and date range.
Help Scout → HubSpot Service Hub specifics
- Attachment verification
- Open 20 attachments to confirm they download and render properly. Verify file access is private, not public.
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.
Object HubSpot Object
| Help Scout field | HubSpot Service Hub field | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Conversation | Ticket | Core support record. Map status (active/pending/closed) → pipeline stage. Store Help Scout conversation ID in a custom legacy_conversation_id property. |
| Thread: customer/agent reply | Email Engagement | Body → hs_email_text. Set hs_email_direction (INCOMING_EMAIL for customer, FORWARDED_EMAIL for agent). Timestamps must be ISO 8601. Associate to both ticket and contact. HubSpot sorts timeline by hs_timestamp — incorrect timestamps silently reorder conversations. |
| Thread: note | Note Engagement | Body → hs_note_body. Associate to ticket. Internal notes stay internal. |
| Thread: phone | Call Engagement | Preserve call body and timestamp. No clean equivalent for chat threads — flatten to notes. |
| Thread: lineitem | Note (flattened) | No clean 1:1 object in HubSpot. Flatten assignment changes, merge events, forward markers, and workflow actions into readable audit text. |
| Customer | Contact | Email is the dedup key. Help Scout allows multiple emails per customer; map secondary emails to HubSpot's secondary email property. Carry a legacy_customer_id. |
| Organization / Company | Company | Map to domain or name. Associate contacts afterward. Disable HubSpot's automatic company creation before loading or you will create duplicates from contact email domains. |
| Mailbox | Ticket Pipeline or Custom Property | Use pipeline only if the mailbox represents a different lifecycle, not just a queue. |
| Tags | Multi-select Custom Property | HubSpot tickets don't have a native tags object. Create a multi-select dropdown and pre-populate all option values before loading. Normalize spelling and case first. |
| Custom Fields | Custom Ticket Properties | Must create properties in HubSpot first. Match field types (dropdown, text, number, date). Map dropdown options through internal IDs, not display text. Help Scout custom fields are mailbox-scoped — if a conversation moved between mailboxes, custom field data may be missing. |
| Attachments | File Manager + hs_attachment_ids | Upload to HubSpot File Manager, then reference file IDs on the engagement. Set access to PRIVATE at upload time — uploads default to PUBLIC_INDEXABLE if not specified. |
| User | Owner | Map deactivated Help Scout users to a generic "Legacy Agent" owner in HubSpot so historical tickets aren't orphaned. |
| Saved Replies | Snippets | No API migration path. Rebuild manually. |
| Workflows | HubSpot Workflows | No migration path. Inventory and rebuild from scratch. |
| Docs (KB articles) | Knowledge Base Articles | Separate workstream. See the Knowledge Base Migration section below. |
| Satisfaction Ratings | Custom Property | Score can be stored as a custom ticket property. Free-text comments are excluded from Help Scout's native export but available via the API's thread data. |
Risk matrix
Per-object risk for this pair. Plan extra validation around anything marked high.
| Object | Risk | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Tickets | medium | Core conversation-to-ticket mapping requires status-to-pipeline-stage transformation using internal IDs, and tickets must be properly threaded to appear in HubSpot's Help Desk workspace. |
| Conversation Threads | high | Each thread type (customer reply, agent reply, note, phone, lineitem) must be mapped to a different HubSpot engagement type with correct direction flags and timestamps, and incorrect hs_timestamp values silently reorder the conversation timeline. |
| Contacts | medium | Help Scout allows multiple emails per customer which must be mapped to HubSpot's secondary email property, and deduplication relies on email as the key across both platforms. |
| Companies | medium | HubSpot's automatic company creation from contact email domains must be disabled before loading to prevent duplicate company records from being generated. |
| Custom Fields | high | Help Scout custom fields are mailbox-scoped with internal option IDs requiring a translation lookup table, and conversations that moved between mailboxes may have missing custom field data. |
| Tags | medium | HubSpot tickets lack a native tags object, so tags must be mapped to a pre-populated multi-select custom dropdown property with normalized spelling and case. |
| Attachments | high | Attachments require individual API downloads from Help Scout, upload to HubSpot File Manager with explicit PRIVATE access setting, and reference via hs_attachment_ids on the engagement. |
| Saved Replies and Workflows | high | There is no API migration path for saved replies or workflows; both must be inventoried and manually rebuilt from scratch in HubSpot. |
| Knowledge Base Articles | medium | Docs migration is a separate workstream with no direct import path, requiring content extraction and reformatting for HubSpot's Knowledge Base structure. |
| Satisfaction Ratings | low | Numeric scores can be stored as custom ticket properties, though free-text comments are excluded from Help Scout's native export and must be extracted via the API's thread data. |
The hard parts
What makes this specific migration difficult, beyond the mechanics.
Conversation Thread Content Loss
Help Scout's native CSV/XLSX export excludes all conversation thread contents, message bodies, and satisfaction rating comments, requiring full API-based extraction via the Mailbox API v2 to preserve any actual support history.
Data Model Architecture Mismatch
Help Scout's Conversation-with-nested-Threads model must be decomposed into HubSpot's flat Ticket plus individually created Engagement objects (emails, notes, calls) with explicit CRM associations to both tickets and contacts.
API Rate Limit Throughput
Help Scout requires a minimum of two API calls per conversation (list + threads), and at 200 req/min on Standard plans, extracting 50,000 conversations takes approximately 8–9 hours before accounting for attachments or validation.
Help Desk Workspace Visibility
API-created tickets appear in HubSpot's legacy Tickets view by default and require at least one properly associated conversation thread (email engagement) to surface in the newer Help Desk workspace.
Custom Field and Dropdown Mapping
Help Scout custom fields are mailbox-scoped with internal option IDs that must be translated to HubSpot enum values via a lookup table, and HubSpot pipeline stages require internal IDs rather than display labels.
Attachment Privacy Defaults
Attachments uploaded to HubSpot's File Manager default to PUBLIC_INDEXABLE access if not explicitly set to PRIVATE, risking unintended public exposure of customer support files.
What breaks
Known failure modes. Have a recovery plan for each before you cut over.
Inline images:
Help Scout threads often contain inline images hosted on Help Scout's servers (secure.helpscout.net URLs). If you migrate HTML bodies directly, those images break when Help Scout closes your account or your subscription lapses. Download inline images, upload them to HubSpot File Manager (POST /files/v3/files with access=PRIVATE), and rewrite the <img> src tags before loading the thread HTML into HubSpot.
Merged conversations:
Merged conversations in Help Scout return a 301 Moved Permanently for the old conversation ID. Migration scripts must follow redirects or pre-resolve merged IDs before replaying thread history. Track old→new ID mappings to avoid duplicate ticket creation.
Multiple email addresses:
Help Scout allows multiple emails per customer profile. HubSpot designates one primary email. Map secondary emails to HubSpot's hs_additional_emails property (semicolon-delimited), or deduplication logic will create duplicate contacts.
Mailbox-scoped custom fields:
If a conversation moved between Help Scout mailboxes, custom field data may be missing for the original mailbox's fields. Audit this before migration by comparing custom field population rates across mailboxes.
HubSpot Help Desk workspace visibility:
Tickets created via the API appear in the legacy Tickets view but may not appear in HubSpot's Help Desk workspace unless at least one email engagement is properly associated, creating a conversation thread. Verify this behavior in a sandbox first.
Note body length:
HubSpot note bodies have a character limit of 65,536 characters. Split long note bodies exceeding this limit into multiple sequential notes, preserving timestamp ordering.
Lineitem and system events:
Help Scout lineitem threads (assignment changes, merge events, workflow actions) have no 1:1 HubSpot equivalent. Flatten these into readable audit notes or omit them based on your requirements.
Thread timestamp ordering:
HubSpot sorts ticket timeline entries by hs_timestamp. If you map this field incorrectly — for example, using conversation creation time instead of individual thread creation time — the conversation will appear out of order. Always map hs_timestamp from the createdAt field on each individual Help Scout thread.
CC and BCC fields:
Help Scout stores CC recipients on threads. HubSpot's email engagement supports hs_email_cc and hs_email_bcc properties, but these must be explicitly mapped or CC context is lost.
Tools used in this playbook
All free, all run entirely in your browser — nothing is uploaded.
FAQ
Can I migrate Help Scout to HubSpot Service Hub without losing data?
Yes, but only if you use the Help Scout Inbox API for extraction. The native CSV export excludes all conversation thread contents, message bodies, and internal notes. An API-based migration preserves full thread history, attachments, and custom fields.
How long does a Help Scout to HubSpot Service Hub migration take?
A typical migration takes 2–4 weeks including planning, execution, and validation. The API extraction alone can take 8–48 hours depending on conversation volume and your Help Scout plan's rate limits (200–800 requests/minute). Large accounts with 200K+ conversations may extend to 6 weeks.
What data can't be migrated from Help Scout to HubSpot Service Hub?
Workflows, saved replies, Beacon widget configuration, and user permissions cannot be migrated via API and must be rebuilt manually in HubSpot. Inline images embedded in message bodies require download and re-upload. Knowledge base migration is a separate workstream with a 400-article-per-import cap.
How much does a Help Scout to HubSpot Service Hub migration cost?
Third-party SaaS tools charge based on record count, typically starting at a few hundred dollars for small accounts. Managed migration services range from $2,000–$15,000+ depending on conversation volume, custom fields, and compliance requirements. DIY costs are engineering time: 2–4 weeks of a dedicated engineer.
Is there a native Help Scout to HubSpot integration for migration?
No. The existing Help Scout–HubSpot integration syncs sidebar data (contact properties, deal info) for live use — it does not migrate historical conversations or tickets. There is no native one-click migration path between the two platforms.