Can you migrate from Zendesk to Freshdesk without losing the history?
Yes, and both offer tools for it, but "without losing anything" is a promise worth qualifying. Tickets, contacts and articles move fine. What almost never survives intact are the automations, the custom fields with logic behind them and the historical reports, and that is what makes a migration take weeks rather than an afternoon.
Short answer
Yes, and both offer tools for it, but "without losing anything" is a promise worth qualifying. Tickets, contacts and articles move fine. What almost never survives intact are the automations, the custom fields with logic behind them and the historical reports, and that is what makes a migration take weeks rather than an afternoon.
In detail
What moves without drama
Tickets with their messages and attachments, contacts and companies, help centre articles, and tags. It is the bulk of the data volume and the part migration tools genuinely handle.
What has to be rebuilt
Automations and routing rules, custom fields, reply templates and reports. Neither platform models these things the same way, so it is not a conversion: it is building them again, and it is worth using the opportunity to throw out what nobody uses.
The published links
If your help centre was indexed, the URLs change. Without redirects, you lose the search traffic those articles brought, and that damage is invisible in the first month. It is the most forgotten part of a support migration.
When it does not pay off
When the reason is price alone. The cost of migrating — hours, weeks of reduced output, training — usually eats the first-year saving on a small team. It pays off when something fundamental about how you work changes too.
Terms that come up here
Other questions in this thread
Is Freshdesk cheaper than Zendesk?
On the per-seat rate yes, nearly always, and the gap is noticeable on the entry plans. But the saving narrows as soon as you move into the higher plans of either, and it disappears entirely if what pushed you to switch was the cost of the AI, because there both charge separately and on a similar model.
Which helpdesk should I choose with three people in support?
With three people, what decides is not the feature list but two things: the work being visible — who owns what and what is outstanding — and answering not forcing anybody onto another screen to find a fact. Nearly every tool in the category handles the first; the second is where they separate, and it is what you feel every day.
What is the difference between a chatbot and an AI agent?
Where the answer comes from and what it can do with it. A chatbot answers from what is written in your documentation: it handles the questions whose answer is the same for everybody. An agent also reads the account state of whoever is asking and can run actions, so it resolves the questions that depend on that specific customer too.
Where this question comes from
Zendesk in detail →