We are deprecating Chat and helping legacy Chat customers migrate to messaging over the next 18 months. Messaging is the only option for new customers, and legacy Chat customers have been encouraged to migrate voluntarily over the past few years. The majority of Zendesk’s successful customers are already using messaging, which allows them to access the full power of Zendesk AI, including omnichannel routing, intelligent triage, AI agents, Copilot, and more.
This article addresses the following questions:
- What’s happening?
- What does Chat removal mean?
- What’s the plan?
- What’s the timeline?
- Will I lose the functionality of a live chat experience?
- What are the advantages of messaging?
- Migration sounds overwhelming. What should I do?
- What is Zendesk doing to make migration easy?
- What else?
- What happens if I don’t migrate?
- I’m ineligible to migrate. What should I do?
- Resources
What’s happening?
At Zendesk, it is our mission to power exceptional customer and employee experiences for every person on the planet. In the last two years, this mission has driven our singular focus on AI-powered service, leading us to launch the Zendesk Resolution Platform.
As a part of this focus on AI-powered service, we have decided to deprecate Zendesk Chat, which does not support Zendesk AI and has not received feature enhancements since 2020. It is currently in maintenance mode.
Instead, we have spent the last 6 years focusing our development efforts on messaging, which is the key to unlocking the full potential of Zendesk AI, including AI agents, Copilot, social messaging capabilities, and more.
This change allows us to focus more deeply on what we do best – helping businesses like yours deliver exceptional customer and employee service. With messaging, your teams can deliver faster, more accurate, and efficient customer service to every single customer who reaches out.
What does Chat removal mean?
We are sunsetting Chat products over the course of 18 months, which allows customers to adopt Zendesk AI and receive the latest and greatest Zendesk experiences.
What’s the plan?
Zendesk is helping customers migrate in groups based on their account complexity. If you have a dedicated CSM, they will provide you with resources and best practices to help you migrate. If you don’t have a CSM, you can migrate voluntarily, or the Zendesk product team will schedule a migration for you. You will be notified of this migration with in-product banners, notifications, and a personalized migration tracker to make sure your migration is successful.
If you are ineligible for migration, you will be notified separately. From there, you can upgrade to Agent Workspace and messaging – or you may choose to terminate your live messaging experience with Zendesk.
What’s the timeline?
Chat will sunset at the end of January 2028, approximately 18 months since its announcement on August 4, 2026. Chat’s deprecation began in 2020 when it stopped receiving feature enhancements, and it’s been in maintenance mode since then. You may migrate to messaging voluntarily at any time, or you will receive in-product notifications of your assisted, batched migration if you choose to wait. Zendesk recommends preparing for your migration, even if you opt for the assisted migration. Please review the messaging migration hub, which contains webinars, decks, and the messaging implementation guides to make your migration seamless.
Will I lose the functionality of a live chat experience?
No! messaging is flexible, and you can customize your instance to be exactly what you want, including live (synchronous) conversations, asynchronous conversations, or a combination of both.
Further, you can recreate a similar Chat experience on messaging, while also accessing new features, streamlining your workflows, and adding on AI.
What are the advantages of messaging?
- Messaging allows you to access Zendesk AI, enabling your teams to be efficient, accurate, and fast. Migrating to messaging future proofs your Zendesk instance.
- Messaging encompasses the best of Zendesk’s offerings. It has the newest features available and new innovations coming, including Audio Player, re-engagement on WhatsApp, as well as proactive messaging features, like targeted campaigns.
- Messaging allows multiple, persistent conversation styles, enabling your customers to continue their conversation on a different device or channel at a later time, rather than having to initiate a brand new chat and repeat themselves to a different agent.
- Messaging captures every customer conversation regardless of agent availability and can be handled by an AI Agent or a human agent when available, so there are no more missed chats.
Migration sounds overwhelming. What should I do?
We know migration can feel like a big change, so we’re focused on making the move to messaging as simple and supported as possible. With streamlined setup, guided workflows, and automation that handles key configuration steps for you, we want to help your team spend less time managing the transition and more time delivering better customer experiences. Access our messaging migration hub with resources to help you transition, and find our guided workflow in-product in Admin Center > Channels > Messaging > Messaging settings.
What is Zendesk doing to make migration easy?
-
Settings migration: When you’re ready
to get started, you can initiate a
voluntary migration
and move your Chat
settings and feature configurations to messaging on demand. As part
of the
migration experience,
Zendesk will help automate important setup steps,
including messaging routing workflows and offline ticket handling,
so
you can preserve key parts of your existing Chat experience while
moving to a
more modern messaging solution. The migration setup adapts to each
account's
history to ensure data integrity:
- First-Time migrations: Full step-by-step walkthrough of the transition.
- Legacy reverts: For accounts that migrated previously and reverted, successful settings are preserved and friction points from the previous attempt are resolved, so you can pick up where you left off.
- 24/7 migration support: For customers who do not have a dedicated account team, the messaging Migration setup assistant can provide 24/7, context-aware migration guidance directly in the product, helping answer setup questions and reduce configuration friction based on your messaging workflows. This function of the Migration setup assistant will be specifically engineered to aid in Chat to messaging migrations.
- Notifications to stay on track: As your account approaches key migration milestones, you’ll receive in-product notifications to point you to the right resources, steps, and support options to help you stay on track.
What else?
- Professional services: If you prefer not to handle the migration yourself, our professional services team can assist you. Please reach out to your account executive or CSM to discuss scope and pricing.
-
Migration webinars: Zendesk is leading a series of migration webinars, free to watch. We’ll use these to teach customers best practices for migration. See the schedule below and an existing, standalone Chat-to-messaging webinar here.
- Customer readiness assessment: We’re also offering additional ways to support customers who need more guidance. Some customers may be asked to complete a Migration Readiness Survey so we can better understand where they are in the process, identify any blockers, and help connect them with the right next step.
What happens if I don’t migrate?
If you don’t voluntarily migrate, Zendesk will migrate your instance automatically. You will see in-product banners 60 days in advance so that you can prepare. If you opt to wait for the automatic migration, we highly recommend that you prepare your teams and your instance for migration to ensure you retain workflows you value. The assisted migration period begins in September 2026, and Chat will fully deprecate in January 2028.
I’m ineligible to migrate. What should I do?
We’d love for you to upgrade to Zendesk Suite. Then, you’d be able to migrate to messaging automatically or configure an entirely new instance. If not, you’ll lose all access to Chat in January 2028, when the product sunsets.
Resources
- Messaging migration hub (includes messaging migration implementation guide)
- Existing how-to webinar: Chat to messaging migration webinar
-
Upcoming regional webinars:
- Best practices: Chat to messaging migration deck
- Best practices: Chat to messaging migration map
-
Examples: Chat to messaging migration customer stories