Leave Intercom without losing your help center

Ask anyone who's thought about leaving Intercom what's stopping them, and the answer is rarely the inbox. Inboxes are replaceable. The thing that feels unmovable is the help center — years of articles, written one support crisis at a time, quietly answering customers every day. Walking away from the tool shouldn't mean walking away from that.

It doesn't. Iris ships an importer that moves an Intercom (or Zendesk) help center in an afternoon. Here's exactly how it works, what carries over, what doesn't — and why the importer deliberately refuses to publish anything on your behalf.

The walkthrough

Get a token. In Intercom's Developer Hub, create an internal app and copy its access token — read access to articles is all the importer uses. For Zendesk it's your subdomain, account email, and an API token. Either way, the credentials are yours, used for the duration of the import, and never stored — Iris doesn't keep them, log them, or ask for them again.

Preview before anything happens. In the Iris help center screen, open the importer, pick your source, paste the credentials, and hit preview. You get back the shape of what would import: the total article count and the names of your collections. Nothing is written yet. This is the moment to notice that your "help center" is actually 340 articles, a third of which describe features you removed in 2023 — useful information before they land, not after.

Run it. The import pulls your articles page by page and creates each one as a draft in Iris — title, body converted from Intercom's HTML into clean, editable formatting (headings, lists, links, images), and your collection names carried over as categories, so the structure survives. A single article that fails to convert is counted and skipped, never fatal. And the run is safe to repeat: anything already imported is recognized and skipped, so re-running after a hiccup doesn't duplicate your library. The v1 cap is 500 articles per run — honest limit, stated up front in the preview.

Total elapsed time for a typical help center: minutes for the import, an afternoon for the part that matters — which is the next section.

Why drafts-first is the whole point

The importer will not publish a single article for you, and this is a feature, not a missing checkbox.

In Iris, publishing does two things at once: the article goes live on your public help site, and it becomes part of what your AI agent is allowed to say to customers. That second part deserves a pause. The AI answers only from your published articles — that's the safety property that makes it trustworthy — which means every article you publish is a sentence you're authorizing it to speak. Three years of accumulated helpdesk content contains real answers, but it also contains the pricing page from two redesigns ago and a returns policy you changed last spring.

So the migration has a built-in review gate. Work through the drafts in passes: publish the twenty articles you know are right today, fix the ten that are almost right, and let the stale tail stay drafted — invisible to the site, invisible to the AI — until someone decides it's worth saving. You're not migrating a database; you're re-editing your own knowledge with fresh eyes. Most teams come out of it with a smaller, sharper help center than they went in with.

Meanwhile, nothing breaks behind you. The import only reads from Intercom — your old help center keeps serving customers until the moment you point traffic at the new one.

What carries over, honestly

Articles carry over. Titles, bodies, formatting, and your collection structure as categories. One caveat worth acting on: images in your articles still point at Intercom's CDN. They'll keep loading for now, but before you cancel the subscription, re-upload the screenshots you can't afford to lose — an image URL you don't control is a countdown, not an asset.

Automations don't. Intercom's bots, custom workflows, and tours have no export path — from Intercom or anyone. Whatever you built there, you rebuild. Before that sounds like a dealbreaker, do the audit: most accounts have dozens of automations and actively rely on three or four. The migration is a chance to find out which.

The rebuilds map cleanly:

• Pre-chat qualification — the bot that collected an email and asked "what do you need help with?" before routing — becomes an Iris workflow: collect steps with validation, topic buttons that branch, then tag, assign, route, and hand off to the AI or a human. The answers stamp contact attributes your routing rules match on, so the flow doesn't just greet people — it files them.
• Onboarding tours and task lists become checklists: per-user progress, rendered in the messenger or embedded directly in your product with one command, with steps that complete from real product events — your backend confirms "connected payouts" server-to-server, instead of trusting a click.
• Resolution bot answers need no rebuild at all — the AI agent answers from the articles you just imported and published. The FAQ was the automation; you just moved it.

The order of operations

For a small team, the whole move fits in a week of margins, not a quarter of planning:

1. Import — token, preview, run. Minutes.
2. Review and publish the top of your library — an afternoon.
3. Turn the AI on. It now answers from everything you published in step 2.
4. Connect your domains — the help site on your subdomain, email sent from your own address.
5. Rebuild the two or three automations that mattered as workflows and checklists.
6. Cancel — after re-hosting those images.

The years of answers were never the reason to stay. They were the reason leaving felt expensive — and moving them turns out to be the easy part.