Move from Zendesk to Rinhelp
By Wilbert Liu, founder of Rinhelp · Facts checked · Markdown for AI agents
Zendesk tickets with their comments and internal notes, your macros and your “Help Center” articles all come across. Plan your login first: Zendesk is retiring API tokens in favour of OAuth.
| Conversations | Time to read them from Zendesk |
|---|---|
| 1,000 | about 5 minutes |
| 10,000 | about 50 minutes |
Limit used: 400 requests a minute (Growth and Professional plans), about 2 per conversation. Rinhelp takes up to 3,000 conversations a minute.
Free. Importing never emails your customers, never runs Rin and never counts toward a plan.
Needs a person. A Zendesk admin has to give your AI agent OAuth access. New API tokens can’t be created from 27 October 2026, and accounts opened since 28 July 2026 never had them.
Paste one prompt
Connect your AI agent to Rinhelp first, then paste the prompt for the app you use. It reads this page’s Markdown and follows Rinhelp’s steps.
Zendesk’s own MCP server is only promised as early access, so in this chat work from my public “Help Center”. Read https://rinhelp.com/migrate/zendesk.md, copy my published Zendesk articles into Rinhelp, and list any you couldn’t open.
Follow https://rinhelp.com/migrate/zendesk.md to move every Zendesk ticket, open or solved, into Rinhelp. Sign in to Zendesk with OAuth rather than an API token. Fetch each ticket’s comments, 100 per page, so the public flag keeps internal comments apart as notes.
What we measured
We imported the public help center at support.zendesk.com into a test workspace with Claude Code on : 4,608 articles in 8 sections came across as drafts in about 39 minutes, were published in about 6 minutes more, and every old address answered with a redirect. 64 conversations with 176 messages, shaped like its API’s responses, came across with their files. The full run.
Their words and ours
| In Zendesk | In Rinhelp |
|---|---|
| Ticket | Conversation |
| Comment | Message |
| Internal note | Note |
| Macro | Saved reply |
| Article | Article |
What stays behind
- Triggers and automations
- SLA policies
- Views
- Reports
Zendesk facts that shape the move
Zendesk lists its API limit by plan: 200 requests a minute on Team, 400 on Growth and Professional, and 700 on Enterprise. Source, checked .
The incremental export has its own cap of 10 requests a minute. Source, checked .
The ticket events export carries comment text only when you ask for the comment_events sideload. Source, checked .
New Zendesk API tokens can’t be created from 27 October 2026, and every token stops working by 30 April 2027. Source, checked .
Zendesk accounts created from 28 July 2026 can’t use API tokens at all. Source, checked .
A ticket’s comments come 100 per page from their own call, and each comment’s public flag tells a customer reply from an internal note. Source, checked .
Each Zendesk comment links its attachments by content_url, but inline images only show up there if you ask for them. Source, checked .
Macros list 100 per page, and an admin sees all of them, personal macros included. Source, checked .
Anyone can list published “Help Center” articles without signing in. Source, checked .
Zendesk has announced an MCP server for outside AI tools, but only as early access. Source, checked .
Questions
Can I still use my Zendesk API token for the move?
Only for now. Zendesk stops new tokens on 27 October 2026 and turns off all of them by 30 April 2027, and accounts opened since 28 July 2026 never had tokens. OAuth works either way.
How long will my Zendesk history take?
On Growth or Professional, Zendesk allows 400 requests a minute and each ticket needs about two, so roughly 200 tickets a minute. On Team, at 200 requests a minute, expect it to take twice as long.
Do personal macros come across?
Only if you agree. Your AI agent lists every personal macro for you and brings them in as shared, plain-text saved replies once you say yes. Have a Zendesk admin run the import, since only an admin sees every macro.