On January 31, 2028, Zendesk will deprecate Zendesk Chat. If your account is eligible for messaging, you must migrate before that date to avoid disruption to your conversational support experience. We recommend migrating to messaging as soon as possible.
Messaging supports real-time customer conversations and includes capabilities that aren’t available in Zendesk Chat. This article provides an overview of the migration process, including eligibility requirements, the main migration paths, and links to related resources.
This introduction includes the following sections:
As Zendesk Chat’s retirement date nears, we’ll be adding more information to this guide. Follow this page to receive notifications about new articles and other resources.
About the removal of Zendesk Chat
Zendesk Chat is a legacy product. It’s currently in maintenance mode, and it is no longer available to new Zendesk customers.
If your account uses Zendesk Chat and is on a Zendesk Suite or Support Suite plan, or includes both Zendesk Chat and Zendesk Support, you must migrate to messaging before January 31, 2028.
For more information about the removal Zendesk Chat, see our Chat removal FAQs.
Understanding the migration process
To migrate from Zendesk Chat to messaging, your account must meet the following requirements:
- Your account must have a Zendesk Suite or Support Suite plan, or include both Zendesk Chat and Zendesk Support.
- Your account must be using Agent Workspace. For more information, see Migrating to the Zendesk Agent Workspace.
If you are on a Chat-only plan (Chat Team, Chat Professional, or Chat Enterprise) you are not currently eligible for migration to messaging, and will receive more information from Zendesk at a later date.
The migration process usually includes two parts:
- Automated migration. The automated migration tool assesses many of your Zendesk Chat settings, recreates supported settings for messaging, and adds them to your messaging configuration.
- Self migration. Some Zendesk Chat settings aren’t migrated automatically and must be reviewed and recreated manually.
Your individual migration tasks may vary depending on your current setup. For example, your path may differ if you:
- are migrating for the first time
- started migrating previously but didn’t finish
- migrated earlier, then turned off messaging and returned to Zendesk Chat
As part of the migration process, you’ll review your current configuration and decide how you want messaging to work for your end users and agents. In particular, you should identify:
- which settings can be migrated automatically
- which settings must be recreated manually
- which Chat workflows you want to preserve
- whether you want to adopt additional messaging features after migration
The articles in this guide will help you complete the migration process, help you navigate and set up some of key messaging capabilities that are not available in Zendesk Chat, and provide you with use cases and sample configurations to achieve your goals:
- Overview of the migration workflow, a high-level, step-by-step guide to preparing for and executing the migration to messaging.
- Technical readiness assessment, questions you should consider and assessments you should make when preparing your account – and your team – for the migration from Chat to messaging.
- Migrating your live chat widget to the messaging Web Widget, for legacy Chat or Web Widget (Classic) users, a step-by-step walkthrough of the settings migration process, with information on both automated and manual migration tasks.
- Replicating common Chat workflows in messaging, examples of some of the more common Chat workflows, with instructions for re-creating them in messaging.
- Omnichannel routing from Chat routing, an introduction to Zendesk’s powerful ticket routing engine, with instructions for moving your routing setup from Zendesk Chat to messaging.
- Migrating from Chat analytics to messaging reporting, information to help you understand and set up real-time monitoring – a live, omnichannel approach to reporting – and the classic messaging dashboards in Explore.
- Choosing and creating your conversational style, descriptions of a number of ways you can style your conversational interactions with your customers, and example workflows for implementing them.
- Migrating Chat operating hours to business hours in messaging, options you can use to manage requests that come in when agents are offline, with links to configuration steps and strategies.
- Setting up the end-user experience for messaging, information to help you understand your options for designing an end-user experience in messaging, and a high-level walkthrough of a basic messaging setup, along with links to additional configuration options.
Additional resources
Use these resources to learn more about migrating from Zendesk Chat to messaging:
- Chat Removal FAQs
- Zendesk Deep Dive: Deliver better CX at scale with AI powered Messaging (webinar recording)
- From Chat to Messaging: Deliver better CX at scale with AI-powered Messaging (slide deck)
- Best practices: Chat-to-messaging migration map (slide)
- Chat-to-messaging migration customer stories:
Upcoming regional Chat-to-messaging migration webinars: