Best Front Migration Tools & Services (2026)

The three ways to migrate Front data

There are exactly three paths, and they trade off cost, effort, and fidelity against each other.

1. A migration service (Help Desk Migration). This is the default recommendation for most teams, and it works in both directions — Front as the destination you're moving into, or Front as the source you're leaving. Help Desk Migration (built by Relokia) advertises support for 90+ help desk platforms and 60,000+ users, with a no-code setup: you connect source and target, map fields, run a free demo, then run the full migration (help-desk-migration.com/front). Front itself endorses this route — the Help Desk Migration integration is documented in Front's help center and is available on all Front plans (help.front.com).

2. Front's native import + Support-gated export. For a handful of common sources, Front has built-in importers you'll find under Company → Imports (Zendesk, Freshdesk, and Help Scout). Going the other direction — getting your data out of Front — is the tricky part: there's no self-serve "export everything" button. You request an account data export by contacting Front Support, and it comes back lossy (more on that below).

3. API + CSV (do it yourself). Front has a well-documented REST API, and if you have engineering time, you can page through conversations, comments, and contacts yourself and reshape them into whatever your target expects. Total control, zero licence cost, and the most labour. Our Front API guide covers the endpoints and rate limits if you go this way.

What Help Desk Migration actually moves

The reason a service beats a raw export is fidelity. Per Help Desk Migration's Front documentation, an automated run carries Teammates, Contacts, Accounts, and Conversations with customisable field mapping. Each conversation keeps its subject, tags, channel, state, staff assignments, contact links, comments (with author, privacy, and attachments), and timestamps — the collaborative context that makes a Front conversation a Front conversation rather than a flat email thread (help-desk-migration.com/front).

It also handles knowledge base content (categories, folders, and articles, including translations), converts inline images to attachments, and supports custom objects for non-standard records like assets or warranties. Two features do the heavy lifting on downtime: Delta migration re-syncs records created or updated during the transfer, and Interval migration lets you keep working in either account while data moves in the background — Help Desk Migration frames this as zero downtime for your team.

The trade-off is cost and control. Pricing is not a fixed sticker: it scales with data volume, the automated options you enable, any customisations, and your support package, and Help Desk Migration only quotes an exact figure after you run the free demo migration (up to 20 records). That demo is the single most useful thing you can do before committing — it shows you real mapped output, not a promise.

Front's export is Support-gated and lossy — read this before you rely on it

If your plan is to leave Front and "just export the data," slow down. Front's account data export is not self-serve. You must be a company admin, and you request it by filling out Front's contact form with the line "Account data export request for {Customer name}"; Front verifies your admin status and acknowledges the request within 72 hours, then delivers CSV files organised by inbox (roughly 700MB per file), with attachments in EML format available on request (help.front.com).

Now the honest part — what that export leaves behind. Per Front's own documentation, the export does not include:

• Individual-inbox data — attachments, comments, conversations, or discussions from personal inboxes (only shared-inbox content ships).
• Contact data — your contacts and their custom fields are excluded.
• Message templates — none of your saved responses come along.
• Tags — the labels your rules and team rely on are not exported.

That's a big list. It's the reason a keyword like "front migration tools" almost always resolves to a service, not the native export: Help Desk Migration re-reads Front through the API and reconstructs contacts, tags, and attachments that the self-serve export drops. For the full mechanics of getting data out, see our dedicated walkthrough on how to export data from Front.

What moves vs what you rebuild

Here's the blunt version. This table assumes you're migrating between platforms (e.g. Front → another help desk, or a legacy tool → Front), which is where the gaps bite hardest.

The bold rows are the ones nobody warns you about. Front rules, shared drafts, message templates, and your historical analytics do not survive a cross-platform move — no tool ports the logic of your automation, only the data it acted on. Budget rebuild time for these regardless of which path you pick. If you're moving into Front, that's an opportunity to redesign your automation cleanly rather than carry forward cruft; our guide to what Front is covers how rules and shared inboxes fit together once you land.

Cost, downtime, and fidelity — the decision table

For a team with real ticket history and tags that matter, a service is almost always the right call — the labour saved dwarfs the licence cost. The native export is best understood as a compliance snapshot, not a migration. And DIY makes sense only when you have a non-standard target or the engineering bandwidth to treat migration as a project. Whichever you choose, cross-reference your target platform's importer support and your Front plan tier — Front pricing determines which native importers and API limits you're working with.

Where Macha fits (and where it doesn't)

Migration is a one-time data problem. What you do with the inbox afterward is the ongoing one — and that's where an AI layer earns its keep. Macha is not a help desk and not a migration tool. It's an AI agent layer that runs on top of whichever inbox you land in, including Front, through the live Macha–Front connector. It doesn't replace Front, move your data, or compete with your shared inbox — it reads the conversations that are already there.

Once your history is in place, Macha's agent can read an incoming thread, understand intent rather than keywords, pull a real order or account status through a custom tool, and draft or send a grounded reply. That's the difference between a migrated inbox and a smarter one. The broader category of AI agents for customer service exists for exactly this reasoning-heavy work. Macha's credits are consumed per AI action — never per resolution — because automation and reasoning have honestly different costs. Migrate first with the right tool; then layer the intelligence on top.

FAQ

What's the best tool to migrate to or from Front? For most teams, Help Desk Migration (by Relokia) is the practical default — it supports 90+ platforms, works with Front as both source and target, and preserves tags, contacts, attachments, and knowledge base articles that Front's native export drops. Run its free 20-record demo before committing to see real mapped output.

Can I export all my data from Front myself? Not fully. Front's account data export is Support-gated: a company admin requests it via a contact form, and it returns CSVs of shared-inbox conversations, messages, comments, and EML attachments. It explicitly does not include individual-inbox data, contacts, message templates, or tags — so it's better as a backup snapshot than a migration source.

Will my Front rules and automations move to a new platform? No. Rules, shared drafts, message templates, and historical analytics do not port between platforms — migration tools move the data, not the logic. Plan to rebuild your automation on the target platform regardless of which migration path you choose.

How much downtime does a Front migration cause? With a service like Help Desk Migration, effectively none — Delta and Interval migration keep both accounts usable while data syncs in the background. A DIY API migration is downtime-free too, but the engineering effort is on you.

Does migrating add AI to my inbox automatically? No — migration only moves conversations and contacts. To add AI, you layer an agent like Macha on top of your inbox after the move; it reads your existing threads and drafts grounded replies without replacing the help desk you migrated to.

Ready to turn a freshly migrated inbox into one that answers for itself? Start a free trial of Macha and connect it to your Front in minutes.