Published August 16, 2026

Migrating Between HubSpot and Zendesk

In either direction the data is the easy part. What breaks is everything you built around it.

What moves

Tickets, conversations, attachments, contacts, companies and knowledge base articles all move with importers or a migration service. Expect to check threading order and attachments on a sample rather than trusting the whole import.

Associations are the fiddly part in the HubSpot direction, because tickets attach to contacts, companies and deals, and a migration that flattens those relationships loses most of what made Service Hub worth using.

What has to be rebuilt

Workflows or triggers and automations, in whichever direction.

Macros, snippets and canned replies.

Views or saved filters, and the routing rules behind them.

SLA policies and business hours.

Ticket forms, properties and custom fields.

Every report anyone relies on.

This list, not the data, is your timeline. Four to eight weeks is realistic for an established setup.

Which direction makes sense

HubSpot to Zendesk usually happens because support volume outgrew the tooling: routing, queue management and reporting depth.

Zendesk to HubSpot usually happens because the company standardised on HubSpot and the shared record is worth more than support depth.

Both are legitimate. What is not legitimate is migrating to fix ticket volume, since volume follows your customers rather than your helpdesk.

Clean before you export

Merge duplicate contacts and companies first. Importing duplicates recreates them in the new system and splits every future ticket, and it is far cheaper to fix before the move than after.

Measure your duplicate ticket rate at the same time. Migrating a queue that runs a tenth duplicates means paying to import work that should not exist, then buying seats to handle it again.