Key takeaways
- Help Scout’s Inbox API allowance depends on the plan, is shared by the whole account, and counts every write as two requests.
- Help Scout mailboxes become Intercom teams, ticket types or both; decide before mapping.
- Intercom’s API accepts each conversation’s original creation date.
- Help Scout Docs uses a separate API and moves into Intercom Help Center collections.
What moves, and where it lands
| In Help Scout | In Intercom | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Customers | Contacts | Matched on email, never on name. |
| Mailboxes | Teams, ticket types, or both | Intercom has no mailbox object. |
| Conversations | Conversations or tickets | Created with their original date. |
| Threads: customer messages, replies, chats, phone notes | Conversation parts | In order, with the author kept. |
| Notes | Internal notes | Stay internal. |
| Attachments | Attachments | On the same message in Intercom. |
| Custom fields | Conversation or ticket attributes | Help Scout fields belong to a mailbox, so decide which to merge. |
| Docs articles | Help Center collections and articles | Read through the Docs API. |
| Saved replies, workflows | Recreated in Intercom | Configuration, not data. |
What sets the pace
Help Scout sets its Inbox API allowance by plan. The limit applies to the whole account, so every integration connected to Help Scout shares it, and every write counts as two requests. Intercom’s default limit is much higher, so on a large account, reading out of Help Scout decides how long the full run takes. The team keeps working in Help Scout during the full run, and a delta run at cut-over carries what changed since.
Help Scout returns several kinds of thread on a conversation. Line items record changes of state, such as assignments and status changes; they are history rather than messages, so they should not be replayed as replies.
Deciding what a mailbox becomes
- One mailbox per team (support, billing, sales): map each to an Intercom team.
- One mailbox per kind of request (refunds, bugs): map each to an Intercom ticket type.
- One mailbox per brand or region: map to teams, and use an attribute for the brand so reports can split it.
Before the full run, pause heavy integrations on Help Scout, create your teammates and teams in Intercom, and check a sample of long threads, attachments and notes in Intercom. With DataGrine you can run the migration self-serve on the platform or have the migration team handle it end to end, with 24/7 support either way.