How to Migrate from Gorgias to Freshdesk

First, understand the two buckets

Every artifact in your Gorgias account falls into one of two categories, and the split decides your whole plan.

Records are the historical facts of your support operation — tickets, the people who raised them, the companies they belong to, and your help center articles. These are rows of data, and rows of data move. A migration tool reads them out of Gorgias' API and writes them into Freshdesk's, preserving the relationships between them.

Configuration is the logic that acted on those records — the macros your agents insert, the Rules that auto-tagged and auto-assigned tickets, the views, and the statistics dashboards. This is behaviour, not data, and it does not transfer. Freshdesk's automation engine is structured differently from Gorgias', so even a rule that does "the same thing" has to be rebuilt in Freshdesk's own grammar. There's no export file that turns a Gorgias Rule into a Freshdesk automation.

Hold onto that distinction and everything below falls into place. (New to the platform you're leaving? Our what is Gorgias primer and Gorgias pricing explained cover why the volume-based model pushes scaling brands to look elsewhere.)

Step 1: Get your data out of Gorgias

Gorgias gives you two honest ways to extract data, and both matter for a migration.

The native CSV export is the built-in path. Per Gorgias' export documentation, you can include up to 1 million tickets per export, but there are limits worth reading twice. When you export ticket message history, you're restricted to "the most recent 30 days of data from the selected period, up to a maximum of 100,000 tickets." Only public messages are included — "internal notes, ticket events, Facebook wall posts, Instagram media messages, and Instagram ad media messages aren't included in the export." The download link is live for 14 days, and it can take up to an hour to export 100,000 tickets, up to ten hours for a million. Macros are a separate export: you can pull them out with the Export Macros as CSV option.

The REST API is the fuller path. Because the CSV export drops notes, events, and social conversations, most real migrations reach for Gorgias' API to pull complete threaded history. That's where a migration tool connects, and it's the honest export surface below.

Our deeper guide to exporting data from Gorgias covers the CSV-vs-API tradeoff in full.

Step 2: Prepare Freshdesk to receive the data

Before you import anything, set up the target so records land cleanly:

1. Create agent profiles in Freshdesk so tickets attach to the right owners.
2. Recreate custom fields you use in Gorgias (order number, subscription status, whatever your ecommerce workflow depends on) so the importer has somewhere to map them.
3. Turn off automations and dispatchers before the import runs — this is the single most important prep step, and it gets its own section below.
4. Connect your Shopify store to Freshdesk's Shopify app so order context is ready when tickets arrive.

Step 3: Move the records — what maps vs what you rebuild

This is the heart of a migration. Here's what actually happens to each artifact when you move from Gorgias to Freshdesk. The record side follows what Help Desk Migration transfers into Freshdesk, the most widely used third-party service and the one on the Freshworks marketplace.

The macro row is the one that surprises people. Your Gorgias macros are logic plus variables plus, often, embedded Actions that touch Shopify — none of that structure survives a data export. You rebuild them inside Freshdesk, which is a genuine chance to prune the fifty macros nobody uses down to the fifteen that matter.

The macro and rule rebuild is the real work

Macros and Rules are why a Gorgias→Freshdesk move is more implementation than copy-paste. In Gorgias, a macro can insert canned text and run Shopify Actions (issue a refund, apply a discount) in one click; Rules can auto-tag by intent and route to the right agent. Freshdesk models this differently — canned responses for the text, automations (the "Supervisor," "Observer," and "Dispatcher" rules) for the behaviour. There's no importer that translates one into the other, so budget real time to map each Gorgias Rule to its Freshdesk automation equivalent and each macro to a canned response or scenario. Treat it as a fresh build, not a restore.

Mind the Shopify-widget parity gap

For an ecommerce team, this is the gap that stings if you skip it. Gorgias' whole pitch is a deep, native Shopify sidebar — agents look up orders, issue refunds, cancel shipments, and generate discount codes without leaving the ticket, with the customer's full Shopify profile in view. Freshdesk reaches parity through its Shopify app, but you have to set it up. Per Freshdesk's Shopify integration docs, the app "fetches customers' details and provides instant access to their recent orders, payment status, and shipping information right within Freshdesk," and you can "optionally connect multiple stores or configure the options to allow agents to perform cancellations and refunds directly from the Freshdesk widget."

The honest read: the core order-context and refund/cancel actions are available on both, but Gorgias' version is deeper out of the box (discount codes, editing orders, richer templating). Audit which Shopify Actions your team actually uses in Gorgias before you migrate, then confirm each has a Freshdesk equivalent — either native in the app or filled by a custom tool that calls the Shopify API directly. Don't discover the gap after cutover.

Native import vs a paid migration tool

Freshworks supports two paths, and volume plus fidelity decide the right one.

Native CSV/API import is free and brings in contacts and companies cleanly. But reconstructing threaded ticket history, internal notes, timestamps, and attachments from flat CSVs is painful at scale — and remember, the Gorgias CSV export already drops notes, events, and social messages. For a small inbox with no history worth keeping, native import is fine.

A paid migration tool — Help Desk Migration is the marketplace option — automates the ticket-history reconstruction over the API and preserves associations. The free demo migrates a small sample (around 20 records) so you can sanity-check field mapping before you pay. It also offers delta migration (transfer only records created or updated after your initial full run) and interval migration (phased transfers), both of which matter when you can't freeze a live ecommerce queue. For years of threaded tickets with attachments, a paid tool almost always pays for itself in engineering time saved.

The downtime and sequencing question

Good news first: a modern migration is not a lights-out event. Tools read from Gorgias' API and write to Freshdesk's, so Gorgias keeps serving customers while records copy across, and delta migration catches the stragglers created during the run.

The real risk isn't downtime — it's your new Freshdesk automations firing on historical data. Import thousands of old tickets and an active rule can wake up and email customers about orders resolved a year ago. The sequence that prevents it:

1. Before import, disable automations — turn off Freshdesk's ticket-creation automations, time triggers, and scenario automations so historical records don't fire notifications.
2. If you can't disable them, tag migrated tickets during data mapping and exclude that tag in your rules.
3. Verify, then re-enable one at a time — after the import is spot-checked, switch automations back on gradually so you catch a misfiring rule before it hits every ticket.

That "one at a time" discipline on the way back up is what separates a calm cutover from a support team fielding replies to ghosts.

Where an AI layer fits — after you land

Here's the reframe. The most laborious part of this move is rebuilding all the behaviour — the macros and Rules that ran your Gorgias queue. If you're rebuilding that logic from scratch anyway, it's the ideal moment to ask whether every rule needs to be a brittle if-this-then-that automation, or whether some of that work belongs to an AI agent that reasons over the ticket instead.

Macha is one such layer, and it runs on top of Freshdesk once you've landed — it does not replace your help desk and isn't a Freshdesk alternative. You connect Macha to Freshdesk with your subdomain and API key, and it reads and writes the same tickets you migrated: drafting grounded replies from the knowledge base that came across, triaging by intent so the right team gets the right ticket, and looking up order or refund status through a custom tool that turns Shopify's API into something the agent can call — which happens to be a clean way to fill any Shopify-widget parity gap. If you're weighing whether to stay on Gorgias with AI instead, our Macha–Gorgias integration page covers that path too. Credits are consumed per AI action, not per resolution — see the pricing breakdown.

FAQ

Why do teams migrate from Gorgias to Freshdesk? Cost is the usual driver. Gorgias prices by ticket volume, so a growing ecommerce inbox can outrun its plan, while Freshdesk charges per agent seat and stays flat as ticket count climbs. Teams that don't need Gorgias' deepest Shopify features often find Freshdesk's economics better at scale.

Do my Gorgias macros and Rules move to Freshdesk? No. Macros, Rules, views, and statistics are configuration, not records — they don't transfer and must be rebuilt inside Freshdesk (canned responses for macro text, automations for Rule behaviour). Only historical data — tickets, contacts, companies, agents, knowledge base, and attachments — migrates.

What doesn't come across in a Gorgias export? Gorgias' native CSV export includes only public messages. Internal notes, ticket events, and Facebook/Instagram social messages are excluded, message history is capped at the most recent 30 days of the selected period and 100,000 tickets, and the download link expires after 14 days. To preserve notes and full history, migrations use Gorgias' REST API via a migration tool.

Will migrating cause downtime? Not inherently. A migration tool copies from Gorgias' API to Freshdesk's while Gorgias stays live, and delta migration catches records created mid-run. The bigger risk is Freshdesk automations firing on imported historical tickets — disable them before import and re-enable one at a time.

Can I keep Shopify order actions in Freshdesk? Yes, via Freshdesk's Shopify app, which surfaces recent orders, payment status, and shipping, and can be configured to allow cancellations and refunds from the widget. Audit which Gorgias Shopify Actions your team relies on and confirm each has a Freshdesk equivalent — natively or through a custom tool — before you cut over.

Just moved to Freshdesk and rebuilding your macros from scratch? Start a free trial of Macha and connect it to your Freshdesk in minutes.