A Zendesk to Gorgias migration takes 2–3 weeks. The native importer splits 250+ comment tickets and skips attachments. Gorgias API limits (40–80 req/20s) bottleneck large migrations.
There is no fully automated native migration path from Zendesk to Gorgias—the built-in Gorgias importer handles basic ticket and customer data but silently drops attachments, CSAT ratings, and all ticket fields when a Zendesk instance exceeds 500 fields. Fundamental data model differences complicate the move: Zendesk's 6 standard ticket statuses collapse to just 2 in Gorgias (Open and Closed), the Organization object has no Gorgias equivalent, and tickets cannot exist in Gorgias without at least one message. Custom work is required to rebuild all triggers, automations, SLA policies, and Views, as well as to handle attachment uploads, status-tag mapping, and field-type conversions via the Gorgias API.
Read this first
Pair-specific gotchas that catch teams out. Each one has cost somebody a weekend.
TL;DR — Zendesk to Gorgias Migration
A Zendesk to Gorgias migration is moderate complexity for data, high complexity for workflow reconstruction. Realistic timeline: 2–3 weeks end to end. The single biggest risk is silent data loss — the native Gorgias importer splits any ticket with more than 250 comments into multiple closed tickets, does not import attachments, and fails to import ticket fields if your Zendesk instance has more than 500 fields. Zendesk's 6 standard statuses collapse to Gorgias's 2 API statuses (Open and Closed) — Pending, On-hold, and Solved all become Closed. Teams with fewer than 10,000 tickets and no complex custom fields can use the native importer. Everyone else should use an API-based migration or a managed service.
Do not blindly PUT /tickets/{ticket_id}/custom-fields
That Gorgias endpoint uses replace-all semantics: any existing field value you omit will be deleted. Use single-field updates, or fetch the current values, merge, then write the full set. (developers.gorgias.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
-
Pull the real numbers out of Zendesk
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 Gorgias can hold your support model
Walk your current workflow through Gorgias: 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.
-
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 Zendesk → Gorgias 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.
Zendesk → Gorgias specifics
- Native Shopify integration
- Gorgias surfaces order data, refund actions, and shipping status directly inside the ticket. Agents can issue refunds, duplicate orders, and award loyalty points without leaving the conversation. Zendesk requires marketplace apps that offer less depth.
- Ticket-based pricing
- Gorgias charges by ticket volume and includes up to 500 agent seats on most plans. Zendesk charges per agent per month — at $55–$115/agent/month on Professional and Enterprise plans, this becomes expensive for teams with 20+ agents handling relatively low ticket volumes.
- E-commerce automation
- Gorgias Rules can trigger actions based on Shopify order data — auto-tagging by order value, auto-responding to "where is my order" queries with tracking info, or escalating orders above a dollar threshold. Zendesk triggers cannot access Shopify order data natively.
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
-
Take a full Zendesk 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 Zendesk 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 Zendesk 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.
-
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
Zendesk → Gorgias specifics
- Macro audit
- Review every imported macro. Delete or fix macros with Zendesk-specific actions that won't work in Gorgias.
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
-
Generate the first-pass Zendesk → Gorgias 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 Zendesk → Gorgias 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.
-
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 Gorgias has no equivalent, decide between a new custom field, a tag, or a note appended to the ticket body — and record which.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
Zendesk → Gorgias specifics
- Custom field verification
- Check that dropdown values, text fields, and checkbox fields transferred correctly. Pay special attention to multi-select fields.
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 Gorgias sandbox that reconciles cleanly and has been reviewed by real agents.
Keep these open
-
Stand up a Gorgias 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.
-
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.
-
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 Gorgias'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.
-
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.
Zendesk → Gorgias specifics
- Integration test
- Verify Shopify, email, chat, and social integrations are connected, receiving new tickets, and recognizing migrated customers.
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 Gorgias, agents working in the new system, and a rollback path that stayed available throughout.
Keep these open
-
Pre-load history before the freeze
Load closed tickets and contacts days or weeks ahead while Zendesk 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 Gorgias'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.
-
Freeze Zendesk 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.
-
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 Zendesk read-only rather than cancelled — cancelling the old contract on day one removes your only fallback.
-
Define your rollback criteria
what conditions trigger a revert to Zendesk? (See Rollback Plan below)
-
Keep Zendesk active in read-only mode for 7–14 days post-cutover
Do not decommission until Gorgias is validated in production.
Zendesk → Gorgias specifics
- Revert email routing
- Update MX records or forwarding rules to point back at Zendesk. DNS propagation typically takes 15–60 minutes for MX changes with low TTL.
- Reconnect social integrations to Zendesk
- Disconnect from Gorgias first to avoid dual-connection conflicts.
- Communicate to agents
- Have a pre-written Slack message or email ready: "We're reverting to Zendesk. Switch back now. Details at [link]."
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
-
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 Zendesk and Gorgias 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.
-
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.
-
Confirm compliance and produce the audit trail
Re-scan the loaded data for regulated fields, confirm retention and deletion policies are configured in Gorgias, 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 Zendesk 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.
-
Record count reconciliation
Total Zendesk tickets exported vs. total Gorgias tickets created. Account for skipped blank or deleted tickets.
Zendesk → Gorgias specifics
- Message-level spot checks
- Sample at least 50–100 tickets across channels, priorities, and statuses. Verify message count, body content, timestamps, private/public visibility, and agent attribution.
- Tag integrity
- Export the Gorgias tag list and compare against Zendesk.
- Send-log check
- Confirm no outbound messages were triggered during import by reviewing Gorgias's sent message log.
- SLA validation
- Confirm SLA policies are firing on new tickets with correct thresholds.
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.
Zendesk Gorgias Data Mapping
| Zendesk field | Gorgias field | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Tickets | Tickets | Zendesk ticket IDs are not preserved. Gorgias assigns new IDs. Store the original in external_id for traceability. |
| Ticket Comments (public) | Messages | Each comment becomes a Gorgias message. Must set sent_datetime or Gorgias will attempt to send the message to the customer. |
| Ticket Comments (internal) | Internal Notes | Map using channel: "internal-note" in the Gorgias API. |
| End-users / Requesters | Customers | Matched by email address. Users without ticket activity are not imported by the native tool. Gorgias does not allow CSV customer import — API only. |
| Agents | Users | Must be pre-created in Gorgias with matching email addresses before loading tickets. Assignment mapping requires exact email match. |
| Organizations | — | No equivalent. Gorgias has no Organization object. Store org data as customer tags or custom attributes. Teams managing 50+ organizations should consider a naming convention like org:company-name for tags. |
| Groups | Teams | Must be created manually in Gorgias before import. |
| Tags | Tags | Direct import, but only tags attached to tickets are included by the native importer. Standalone tags are skipped. |
| Macros | Macros | Native tool imports text templates, but macros with Zendesk-specific actions (Set Priority, Add CC, Change Form) lose all non-text actions. Liquid markup variables (e.g., {{ticket.requester.name}}) must be rewritten to Gorgias variables (e.g., {{ticket.customer.name}}). |
| Ticket Fields (custom) | Ticket Fields (custom) | Fails entirely if Zendesk has 500+ fields. Gorgias allows many fields but only 25 can be active at once. Multi-select and regex-validated fields need manual mapping. (docs.gorgias.com) |
| Triggers / Automations | Rules | Not migrated. Must be rebuilt manually. Zendesk automations are hourly checks; Gorgias Rules are event-driven. |
| SLA Policies | SLA Policies | Must be rebuilt manually. Gorgias SLAs are channel-based with tag and ticket-field conditions. (docs.gorgias.com) |
| Satisfaction Ratings (CSAT) | — | Not imported by native tool or API. Export from Zendesk Explore before decommissioning. |
| Attachments | — | Not imported by native importer. API-based migration can handle them, but each file requires a separate upload request via POST /api/upload. |
| Views | — | Not migrated. Rebuild in Gorgias. |
| Zendesk Talk recordings | — | No migration path. Gorgias does not store call recordings from Zendesk Talk. Export and archive separately. Voice tickets import as text-only records if comments exist. |
| Knowledge Base (Guide) | Help Center | Articles can be imported via CSV or the Help Center import tool. Categories and sections are restructured into Gorgias's flat collection model. Article-level SEO metadata (meta descriptions, canonical URLs) may need manual review post-import. |
Risk matrix
Per-object risk for this pair. Plan extra validation around anything marked high.
| Object | Risk | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Tickets | medium | Tickets migrate but original Zendesk IDs are not preserved—Gorgias assigns new IDs, and tickets with 250+ comments are silently split into multiple closed tickets. |
| Ticket Comments / Messages | medium | Public and internal comments map to Gorgias messages and internal notes respectively, but the sent_datetime field must be explicitly set or Gorgias will attempt to re-send the message to the customer. |
| Contacts / Customers | low | End-users are matched by email address with generally reliable mapping, though users without ticket activity are excluded by the native importer and CSV import is not supported. |
| Organizations | high | Gorgias has no Organization object, so all organizational structures, hierarchies, and multi-contact account groupings must be flattened into customer tags or custom attributes. |
| Custom Fields | high | Import fails silently for all fields when Zendesk has 500+ fields, only 25 fields can be active in Gorgias at once, and several field types (lookup, multi-select, dropdown) lose their structured options during conversion. |
| Ticket Statuses | high | Four of Zendesk's six statuses (Pending, On-hold, Solved, Closed) all collapse to Closed in Gorgias, destroying operational distinctions critical to SLA tracking and agent workflows. |
| Attachments | high | The native importer does not migrate attachments at all, and API-based migration requires a separate upload request per file, making it time-intensive for large instances. |
| Macros | medium | Text templates import but all Zendesk-specific actions (Set Priority, Add CC, Change Form) and Liquid markup variables are lost and must be manually rewritten to Gorgias syntax. |
| Triggers / Automations | high | No migration path exists—all triggers and time-based automations must be manually rebuilt as Gorgias event-driven Rules, with no direct equivalent for hourly time-based automation checks. |
| CSAT / Satisfaction Ratings | high | There is no migration path for satisfaction ratings via the native tool or API; all historical CSAT data must be exported from Zendesk Explore and archived separately before decommissioning. |
The hard parts
What makes this specific migration difficult, beyond the mechanics.
Ticket Status Model Collapse
Zendesk's 6 standard statuses (plus custom statuses) must be flattened to Gorgias's 2 API statuses—Open and Closed—requiring tag-based workarounds to preserve operational meaning for Pending, On-hold, and Solved states.
No Organization Object Equivalent
Gorgias lacks an Organization entity, so B2B account structures with multiple contacts sharing an organization must be approximated using customer tags or custom attributes.
Automation and Workflow Rebuild
Zendesk triggers, automations (hourly time-based checks), SLA policies, and Views have no migration path and must be manually reconstructed as event-driven Gorgias Rules and channel-based SLAs.
Silent Custom Field Import Failure
The native importer silently skips all ticket field imports if the Zendesk instance contains more than 500 fields, and Gorgias limits active fields to 25, requiring aggressive field pruning before migration.
Attachment Migration Complexity
Attachments are not imported by the native tool and require individual API upload requests via POST /api/upload, potentially adding tens of thousands of extra API calls for large instances.
Ticket-Message Coupling Constraint
Gorgias requires every ticket to contain at least one message, so Zendesk tickets created via API or side conversations with no public comments will fail to import unless a placeholder message is attached.
Tools used in this playbook
All free, all run entirely in your browser — nothing is uploaded.
FAQ
How long does a Zendesk to Gorgias migration take?
The native Gorgias importer processes about 720 tickets per hour — roughly 6 days for 100,000 tickets. An API-based or managed migration can complete the same volume in 1–2 days. Including planning, testing, and cutover, the full project typically takes 2–3 weeks.
Can I migrate Zendesk to Gorgias without losing data?
You can migrate tickets, messages, tags, macros, users, and ticket fields without loss if you use the API and handle edge cases properly. Attachments, CSAT ratings, SLA policies, triggers, and organizations cannot be migrated via the native tool and require API-level work or manual rebuilding.
What data cannot be migrated from Zendesk to Gorgias?
Attachments, satisfaction ratings, SLA policies, triggers/automations, organizations, Views, and Zendesk ticket IDs do not transfer automatically. Triggers must be rebuilt as Gorgias Rules. Zendesk's 6 ticket statuses collapse to Gorgias's 2 (Open and Closed). Lookup fields and data older than 2 years are also skipped by the native importer.
What happens to Zendesk Pending tickets in Gorgias?
Pending tickets are imported as Closed in Gorgias but automatically tagged with 'pending.' You can create a Gorgias View filtering on this tag to replicate the Pending workflow, but Pending is not a native Gorgias status. On-hold and Solved are also mapped to Closed.
Can I keep support live during the migration?
Yes, if you keep channels single-homed and do a delta cutover. The Zendesk instance stays live during extraction and loading. Do not connect the same email or social integration to both Zendesk and Gorgias simultaneously — Gorgias warns this causes duplicate messages and breaks sync.