Zammad to Zendesk migration requires API-to-API extraction using Zammad's REST API and Zendesk's Ticket Import API. No native migration path exists between the two platforms.
There is no native import path, built-in connector, or vendor-provided migration tool for moving data from Zammad to Zendesk. The fundamental data-model gap centers on Zammad's articles (typed, sender-attributed messages per ticket) versus Zendesk's simpler comments model, which means channel metadata and sender semantics must be translated and partially flattened during migration. A successful migration requires custom API-to-API extraction via Zammad's REST API (or direct PostgreSQL access for self-hosted instances) and loading through Zendesk's Ticket Import API, with a purpose-built transformation layer to handle field mapping, attachment re-upload, timestamp preservation, and rate-limit management.
Read this first
Pair-specific gotchas that catch teams out. Each one has cost somebody a weekend.
There is no official reverse of Zammad's inbound Zendesk migrator
Zammad documents Zendesk → Zammad migration, but for Zammad → Zendesk you must use API-based import workflows. (docs.zammad.org)
Zendesk strictly enforces the closed status
Once a ticket is set to closed via the API, it can never be updated again. Ensure all comments, tags, and attachments are correct in the payload before setting this status.
Zendesk supports custom objects, but they're plan-gated with limits
3, 5, 30, or 50 custom objects depending on plan, up to 100 fields per object, and up to 5 or 10 lookup relationship fields per object. (support.zendesk.com)
Pagination limit
Zammad enforces a hard maximum of 100 objects per page. You cannot raise this limit. Use page and per_page parameters and iterate until the response returns fewer items than per_page. Adding expand=true includes related object names inline, reducing follow-up lookups.
Zendesk Ticket Import API constraints
Triggers don't fire on imported tickets. SLA metrics (first reply time, resolution time) are not calculated for imported tickets. No side conversation support on imported tickets. Requesters must be active — suspended users will cause the import to fail with a 422 Unprocessable Entity. (support.zendesk.com)
If you're building a new migration utility in mid-2026 or later, prefer Zendesk OAuth for
If you're building a new migration utility in mid-2026 or later, prefer Zendesk OAuth for authentication. Zendesk has announced that API tokens will be permanently deactivated on April 30, 2027. (developer.zendesk.com)
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 Zammad
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 Zendesk can hold your support model
Walk your current workflow through Zendesk: 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 Zammad → Zendesk 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.
Zammad → Zendesk specifics
- Ecosystem breadth
- Zendesk's marketplace has 1,500+ integrations. Zammad's integration ecosystem is narrower, relying heavily on its REST API for custom connections. Teams that need native connectors to Salesforce, Shopify, or Jira hit limits with Zammad first.
- Managed SaaS operations
- Zammad can be self-hosted, which means your team owns infrastructure, upgrades, and database maintenance. Moving to Zendesk shifts that operational burden to the vendor.
- AI and automation
- Zendesk's investment in AI — Intelligent Triage, AI Agents, Answer Bot — is tightly coupled with its ticketing data model. Zammad's AI features are newer and less mature.
- Reporting and compliance
- Zendesk Explore provides built-in analytics dashboards, CSAT surveys, SLA enforcement, and agent capacity metrics out of the box. Zammad's reporting is more limited and often requires custom queries or external BI tools.
- Team scaling
- Organizations growing past 20–30 agents often find Zendesk's role-based permissions, multi-brand support, and enterprise security features (SSO, audit logs, data locality) more aligned with their needs.
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 Zammad 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 Zammad 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 Zammad 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 -
Audit trails and time accounting
Zendesk doesn't import these; archive separately
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Export your Zammad object definitions
via GET /api/v1/object_manager_attributes to list all custom fields with their data types and options (docs.zammad.org)
Zammad → Zendesk specifics
- Ticket Articles
- GET /api/v1/ticket_articles/by_ticket/{ticket_id} — all articles for a ticket
- Organizations
- GET /api/v1/organizations?page={n}&per_page={n}
- Attachments
- GET /api/v1/ticket_attachment/{ticket_id}/{article_id}/{attachment_id}
- Knowledge Base
- GET /api/v1/knowledge_bases (categories and answers accessible via sub-endpoints)
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 Zammad → Zendesk 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 Zammad → Zendesk 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 Zendesk 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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Create matching fields in Zendesk
ticket fields, user fields, or organization fields. Note that Zendesk field types may not map 1:1 (e.g., Zammad's richtext has no direct equivalent in Zendesk custom fields; convert to textarea or text)
Data Format Converter Reshape the export into the format Zendesk's importer expects -
Map picklist values
if Zammad uses a select or tree_select field, ensure every option value exists in the Zendesk dropdown. Zammad's tree_select (hierarchical) must be flattened to a single-level dropdown in Zendesk or encoded with a delimiter (e.g., Parent::Child)
JSON to CSV Converter Flatten nested API responses into a reviewable sheet
Zammad → Zendesk specifics
- Small team, < 5K tickets, no custom fields
- CSV for users + a third-party tool for tickets (if one supports Zammad). Otherwise, API-to-API.
- Unused custom fields
- delete or ignore before mapping to Zendesk
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 Zendesk sandbox that reconciles cleanly and has been reviewed by real agents.
Keep these open
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Stand up a Zendesk 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 Zendesk'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.
Zammad → Zendesk specifics
- Spam and test tickets
- filter by tag or status before extraction
- Small sample test
- Migrate 50–100 tickets to a Zendesk sandbox to validate field mapping, status translation, and attachment handling
- Full volume test
- Migrate all data to a Zendesk sandbox to validate timing, rate limit handling, and edge cases
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 Zendesk, 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 Zammad 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 Zendesk'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 Zammad 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 Zammad read-only rather than cancelled — cancelling the old contract on day one removes your only fallback.
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Use Zendesk's bulk delete APIs
to remove imported tickets if needed (note: Zendesk permanently deletes tickets after 30 days in the deleted tickets view)
Zammad → Zendesk specifics
- Tag all imported data
- with a migration identifier (e.g., migration_zammad_2026)
- Don't cancel your Zammad subscription or decommission infrastructure
- until post-migration QA is fully signed off
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 Zammad and Zendesk 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 Zendesk, 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 Zammad 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 counts
Compare ticket, user, and organization counts between source and target
Zammad → Zendesk specifics
- Ongoing sync needed post-migration
- API-to-API for historical data, then middleware or Zammad webhooks for forward sync.
- Field spot-checks
- Sample 50–100 tickets and compare field values side by side
- Attachment verification
- Confirm attachments are accessible and correctly linked
- Relationship integrity
- Verify that tickets point to the correct requester, assignee, and organization
- Timestamp accuracy
- Confirm created_at timestamps match original Zammad values
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 Object
| Zammad field | Zendesk field | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Ticket | Ticket | 1:1 mapping. Use Ticket Import API (/api/v2/imports/tickets) or batch endpoint (/api/v2/imports/tickets/create_many) |
| Ticket Article | Ticket Comment | Map internal flag → public: false. Map article type and sender to determine comment author |
| User (customer) | User (end-user) | Create via Users API before importing tickets |
| User (agent) | User (agent) | Must exist in Zendesk before ticket import — tickets reference assignee_id and author_id |
| Organization | Organization | Create via Organizations API. Map organization_id on users |
| Group | Group | Create manually or via API. Map group_id on tickets |
| Tag | Tag | Applied to tickets during import |
| Knowledge Base Category | Help Center Section | Requires Zendesk Guide. Map category hierarchy |
| Knowledge Base Answer | Help Center Article | HTML content migration. Handle embedded images |
| Custom Object Attribute | Custom Ticket/User/Org Field | Must create fields in Zendesk first with matching data types |
State Status
| Zammad field | Zendesk field | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| new | new | Direct map |
| open | open | Direct map |
| pending reminder | pending | Map pending_time to Zendesk's due date if applicable |
| pending close | pending | Collapsed with pending reminder |
| closed | closed | See immutability warning below |
| merged | closed | Add internal note or tag referencing original ticket number |
Zammad Zendesk
| Zammad field | Zendesk field | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| number | external_id | Preserves original ticket number for agent cross-reference |
| title | subject | Direct map |
| state.name | status | See state mapping table above |
| priority.name | priority | Map: 1 low → low, 2 normal → normal, 3 high → high |
| group.name | group_id | Lookup group ID in Zendesk by name via crosswalk |
| owner_id | assignee_id | Map Zammad user ID → Zendesk user ID via crosswalk table |
| customer_id | requester_id | Map Zammad user ID → Zendesk user ID via crosswalk table |
| created_at | created_at | Direct map (ISO 8601). Must use Import API to set |
| updated_at | updated_at | Direct map |
| close_at | solved_at | Only for closed tickets |
| tags | tags | Array → comma-separated or array |
Articles Comments
Zammad's rich article metadata (type, sender, internal flag, channel) must be flattened into Zendesk's simpler comment structure, risking loss of channel-specific context such as phone vs. SMS vs. social origin.
| Zammad field | Zendesk field | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| body | html_body | Zammad stores HTML. Requires inline image URL rewriting |
| internal | public | Invert: internal: true → public: false |
| created_by_id | author_id | Map via user crosswalk |
| created_at | created_at | Direct map |
| attachments | uploads | Download from Zammad, upload to Zendesk, attach via token |
KB Object Guide Object
| Zammad field | Zendesk field | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Knowledge Base | Help Center | 1:1; Zendesk Guide must be enabled |
| Category (top-level) | Category | POST /api/v2/help_center/categories |
| Category (nested) | Section | POST /api/v2/help_center/categories/{id}/sections |
| Answer | Article | POST /api/v2/help_center/sections/{id}/articles |
| Translation | Article Translation | Separate article per locale, or use POST /api/v2/help_center/articles/{id}/translations |
Zammad Zendesk
| Zammad field | Zendesk field | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| ticket.number | ticket.external_id | Cross-reference key |
| ticket.title | ticket.subject | Direct map |
| ticket.state.name | ticket.status | Translate values (see state mapping above) |
| ticket.priority.name | ticket.priority | Map 1–4 scale |
| ticket.group.name | ticket.group_id | Lookup by name |
| ticket.customer_id | ticket.requester_id | Via user crosswalk |
| ticket.owner_id | ticket.assignee_id | Via user crosswalk |
| ticket.created_at | ticket.created_at | ISO 8601 |
| ticket.close_at | ticket.solved_at | Only for closed tickets |
| article.body | comment.html_body | Sanitize inline image URLs |
| article.internal | comment.public | Invert value |
| article.created_by_id | comment.author_id | Via user crosswalk |
| article.created_at | comment.created_at | ISO 8601 |
| article.type | (no equivalent) | Preserve as tag or body prefix |
| article.sender | (no equivalent) | Use to determine author_id context |
| user.firstname + lastname | user.name | Concatenate |
| user.email | user.email | Direct map |
| user.organization_id | user.organization_id | Via org crosswalk |
| organization.name | organization.name | Direct map |
| organization.domain | organization.domain_names | Wrap in array |
Risk matrix
Per-object risk for this pair. Plan extra validation around anything marked high.
| Object | Risk | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Tickets | high | Tickets require full article-to-comment translation, timestamp preservation via the Import API, and careful handling of status/priority mapping between the two platforms' differing state models. |
| Ticket Articles / Comments | high | Zammad's rich article metadata (type, sender, internal flag, channel) must be flattened into Zendesk's simpler comment structure, risking loss of channel-specific context such as phone vs. SMS vs. social origin. |
| Attachments | high | Each attachment must be individually downloaded from Zammad and re-uploaded to Zendesk's Upload API, dramatically increasing API call volume and introducing failure points at scale. |
| Custom Fields | high | Zammad's object attributes and Zendesk's custom fields differ in type support, validation, and scoping, requiring manual schema creation on the Zendesk side and per-record value transformation. |
| Users / Contacts | medium | User records map relatively well between the two platforms, but role semantics differ (Zammad's role-based users vs. Zendesk's end-user/agent split), and deduplication must be handled during import. |
| Organizations | low | Organization records are structurally similar in both platforms and map with minimal transformation, though custom organization attributes need separate field mapping. |
| Groups | medium | Both platforms use groups for routing and assignment, but permission models and hierarchies differ, requiring manual group recreation and agent re-assignment in Zendesk. |
| Tags | low | Tags are simple string values in both systems and transfer cleanly, though Zammad tags are ticket-scoped while Zendesk supports tags on users and organizations as well. |
| Knowledge Base Articles | medium | Zammad's multilingual Knowledge Base with categories must be restructured into Zendesk Guide's section-and-article hierarchy, with potential loss of translation linkage and embedded media requiring re-upload. |
| SLA Metrics and Reporting Data | high | Zendesk's Ticket Import API does not carry over SLA metrics, meaning historical SLA compliance data, first-response times, and resolution metrics from Zammad cannot be reconstructed natively in Zendesk. |
The hard parts
What makes this specific migration difficult, beyond the mechanics.
Article-to-Comment Data Translation
Zammad stores each message as a typed article with sender, type, and internal flags, which must be translated into Zendesk's simpler public/internal comment model, losing some channel-level nuance in the process.
Attachment Re-upload Workflow
Attachments must be individually downloaded from Zammad's per-article attachment endpoints and re-uploaded to Zendesk's Upload API to obtain tokens before they can be referenced in imported ticket comments.
Dual-Platform Rate Limiting
Both Zammad and Zendesk enforce API rate limits, requiring the migration pipeline to implement throttling, retry logic, and error recovery on both the extraction and loading sides simultaneously.
Custom Field Schema Mapping
Zammad's object attributes across tickets, users, organizations, and groups must be mapped to Zendesk's custom fields and potentially custom objects, with differences in field types, validation rules, and dropdown option values requiring careful translation.
Timestamp and History Preservation
Preserving original created_at and updated_at timestamps requires using Zendesk's Ticket Import API rather than the standard Ticket API, and this import endpoint does not support SLA metrics or side conversations.
No Native Migration Path
While Zammad provides a built-in Zendesk-to-Zammad migrator, there is no official reverse path, meaning the entire Zammad-to-Zendesk pipeline must be custom-built and tested from scratch.
Tools used in this playbook
All free, all run entirely in your browser — nothing is uploaded.
FAQ
Can I migrate full ticket history from Zammad to Zendesk?
Yes, but only via API. Zendesk's Ticket Import API (/api/v2/imports/tickets) lets you create tickets with multiple comments, preserving timestamps and author information. CSV imports only work for users and organizations, not ticket conversation history.
Does Zendesk have a built-in Zammad importer?
No. There is no native migration path between Zammad and Zendesk. Zammad documents a Zendesk → Zammad migrator, but there is no official reverse. You must extract data via Zammad's REST API and load it using Zendesk's Ticket Import API, or use a managed migration service.
What are Zendesk's API rate limits for ticket imports?
Zendesk rate limits depend on your plan: 200 req/min (Team), 400 (Growth), 700 (Professional), 2,500 (Enterprise). The Ticket Import endpoint shares the account-level limit. Exceeding it returns a 429 error with a Retry-After header.
Will inline images transfer from Zammad to Zendesk?
Not automatically. Zammad stores inline images as CID (Content-ID) references. Your migration script must parse the HTML body, download the CID image attachments, upload them to Zendesk, and rewrite the HTML source links to point to the new Zendesk URLs.
Are SLA metrics preserved when importing tickets into Zendesk?
No. Zendesk does not calculate SLA metrics on imported tickets — first reply time, resolution time, and similar metrics will be blank. Zendesk recommends tagging imported tickets and excluding them from SLA reports.