How to Import Tickets & Contacts Into Gorgias

The three ways data gets into Gorgias

Before you touch anything, know which lane you're in — because they don't overlap cleanly.

The native importer is Gorgias' own in-app tool (Settings → Imports). It has a first-class connector for Zendesk and an Email Import path, and it's free. It's the fastest route if your source is one it supports, but it comes with hard caps on time range, status fidelity, and comment count that we'll get into.

CSV and the REST API are the bulk route. Gorgias can ingest CSV files, and its API lets you create tickets, customers, and messages programmatically — useful when your source isn't Zendesk, or when the native limits box you out. This is the most flexible path and also the one that needs the most engineering care.

A paid migration tool — Help Desk Migration is the common one — automates the reconstruction of threaded tickets, comments, attachments, and knowledge base content from a wide range of sources into Gorgias, and preserves the relationships between them. It's the path most teams with real ticket history end up on.

Pick the lane before you pick the tool, and the rest of the plan follows.

Using the native importer (and its real limits)

The native importer is genuinely good for what it covers — but "what it covers" is narrower than the button suggests. Per Gorgias' own import documentation, the Zendesk connector brings in tickets, macros, users, tags, and ticket fields, and it will import "up to two years of your most recent data," prioritizing the most recent 14 days first so your team can start working while older history backfills.

The caveats are where planning happens, and they're specific:

• Status fidelity is lossy. "Only open or closed ticket statuses will be retained." Pending tickets import as closed; anything else imports as open. If your reporting leans on granular statuses, expect them to flatten.
• Long threads get split. "Any ticket with more than 250 comments will be split into multiple, closed tickets." Rare, but it happens on escalated B2B threads.
• Deleted and blank tickets are skipped entirely — usually a feature, occasionally a surprise if you were counting on a full row count to match.
• Users only come across if they participated. "Users are imported based on whether they're assigned to or have commented on a ticket," so inactive agents won't transfer.
• Macros arrive thin. "Only reply text and status change macro actions are supported" — a macro that also tags, assigns, or sets a custom field imports with an empty action list, so budget time to rebuild macro logic. Our Gorgias macros explainer covers how to reconstruct them.
• Field ceiling. "If you have more than 500 ticket fields in Zendesk, ticket fields will not be imported" at all.

None of these are dealbreakers. They're just the difference between assuming the importer is a mirror and knowing it's a lossy, recent-history connector. If you're coming from Zendesk specifically, the native path is the right first attempt; if you're coming from anywhere else, you're in the bulk or paid lane.

Bulk import via CSV and API

When the native connector doesn't fit — a different source platform, more than two years of history, or macros and custom fields you can't afford to lose — CSV and the REST API are the flexible fallback. Gorgias accepts CSV files for tickets, customers, tags, and comments, and its API can create the same records programmatically for anything a spreadsheet can't express.

The honest trade-off is engineering effort. Contacts are the easy case: a clean CSV of names, emails, phone numbers, and tags imports without much drama, and because Gorgias matches customers on a unique identifier, re-importing updates the existing record rather than duplicating it. Tickets are the hard case. Reconstructing a threaded conversation — who said what, when, public reply versus internal note, with attachments attached to the right message — out of flat files is fiddly, and doing it through the API at volume means you have to respect Gorgias' rate limits. In practice, the most common cause of an incomplete bulk migration is a script that doesn't back off politely on 429 responses and silently drops records. If you go the API route, build retries with exponential backoff before you build anything else.

For anything beyond a contact list, this is also where a paid tool earns its fee: it does the threaded-ticket reconstruction and rate-limit handling for you.

What moves vs what you rebuild

Here's the mapping that decides your whole plan. Records move; the logic that acted on them mostly doesn't.

The pattern is the same as any platform move: records are data and data moves; automations, rules, and reports are behaviour and behaviour gets rebuilt. Gorgias' rules engine is structured its own way, so even a "matching" rule from your old desk has to be re-authored in Gorgias' grammar. Treat the rebuild as a fresh Gorgias implementation rather than a copy-paste, and it stops being a nasty surprise. If your source is Freshdesk specifically, our Freshdesk-to-Gorgias migration guide sequences the whole thing.

The historic-ticket gotcha nobody warns you about

The single most common way an import goes wrong isn't lost data — it's your live Gorgias rules firing on imported historical tickets. Import ten thousand old tickets and any active rule can wake up: auto-replying to a customer about an order from 2023, reopening resolved threads, or reassigning closed work to an agent who no longer exists.

Help Desk Migration's Gorgias migration checklist is blunt about the fix: "To ensure ticket statuses don't change during migration, be sure to disable any active rules in Gorgias before you get started." The sequence:

1. Before importing, turn off automations. Go to Automation → Rules and toggle off anything marked On so historical records can't trigger replies, status changes, or reassignments.
2. Run a demo or small batch first. A paid tool's free demo covers "20 random tickets and 20 knowledge base articles," or you can hand-pick a custom set. Verify that comments and their authors transferred, tickets landed on the right agents, and customers and attachments came across — before you commit to the full run.
3. Do the full import, then spot-check the results against your source counts (remembering deleted and blank tickets won't appear).
4. Re-enable rules one at a time. Switch automations back on gradually, not all at once, so a misfiring rule hits one ticket and not your entire imported backlog.

That "one at a time" discipline on the way back up is the whole difference between a calm cutover and a support queue full of angry replies to ghosts.

What doesn't come out — and what that means for imports

Worth knowing before you plan a round trip or a fallback export: Gorgias' own CSV export is deliberately partial. Per the export documentation, "internal notes, ticket events, Facebook wall posts, Instagram media messages, and Instagram ad media messages aren't included in the export." You can include "up to 1 million tickets per export," but a message-history export is capped to "the most recent 30 days of data from the selected period, up to a maximum of 100,000 tickets," and large exports are slow — "up to an hour to export 100,000 tickets" and "up to 10 hours to export 1 million tickets."

The practical implication cuts both ways: if you're importing from another Gorgias account or reconciling a migration via CSV, you can't rely on that export to carry internal notes or social-channel content — you'll need the API for those. Our guide to exporting data from Gorgias covers the full picture.

Where an AI layer fits — after the import lands

Here's the reframe. The heaviest part of any migration isn't moving the tickets — it's rebuilding all the behaviour: the rules, macros, and routing that used to run your queue. If you're re-authoring that logic in Gorgias from scratch anyway, it's the natural moment to ask whether every rule needs to be a brittle if-this-then-that, or whether some of that work belongs to an AI agent that reasons over the ticket instead.

That's the seam where an AI agent layer fits. Macha is one such layer: it runs on top of the Gorgias you just imported into as a native connector — it does not replace your help desk, and it isn't a Gorgias alternative. Connect Macha to Gorgias and it reads and writes the same tickets you migrated: drafting or posting grounded replies from the knowledge base that came across, triaging by intent so the right ticket reaches the right team, and looking up order or account status through a custom tool that turns your store's REST API into something the agent can call. For an ecommerce team, that's "where's my order" and returns handled the moment the import finishes — while Gorgias stays the system of record. (Credits are consumed per AI action, not per resolution — see the pricing breakdown.)

New to the platform? Our what is Gorgias primer covers the fundamentals before you commit to a migration.

FAQ

Can I import tickets into Gorgias for free? Partly. Gorgias' native importer (Settings → Imports) is free and handles Zendesk and email sources, and CSV import for contacts costs nothing. But the native path caps at two years of recent data, flattens statuses to open/closed, and imports macros with only reply-text and status-change actions. For years of threaded history from other platforms, most teams use a paid migration tool.

What are the limits of the Gorgias native importer? It imports "up to two years of your most recent data," retains only open or closed statuses (pending becomes closed), splits any ticket with more than 250 comments into multiple closed tickets, imports users only if they were assigned to or commented on a ticket, and skips ticket fields entirely if you have more than 500 of them. Deleted and blank tickets are not imported.

Does importing bring my rules and macros across? Rules and automations do not transfer — you rebuild them in Gorgias' own engine. Macros transfer only their reply-text and status-change actions; any tagging, assignment, or custom-field actions arrive as an empty action list, so plan to rebuild macro logic after the import.

How do I stop imported tickets from triggering emails and status changes? Disable active rules under Automation → Rules before you import, per Help Desk Migration's checklist, so historical tickets can't fire replies or change statuses. Run a small demo batch to verify, then re-enable rules one at a time after the full import so any misfire hits a single ticket rather than your whole backlog.

Can I add AI to Gorgias after importing without replacing it? Yes. An AI agent layer like Macha connects to Gorgias as a native connector and runs on top of your imported help desk — it doesn't replace Gorgias. It resolves tickets using the knowledge base you brought across and triages by intent, while Gorgias stays the system of record.

Just imported your history into Gorgias and rebuilding your rules from scratch? Start a free trial of Macha and connect it to your Gorgias in minutes.