The Complete Guide to Migrating from Tidio to Trengo

Moving your customer communication hub from Tidio to Trengo consolidates multiple channels into a single inbox. The technical work is real — API rate limits, data model mismatches, and attachment quirks will slow you down if you don't plan for them.

This guide covers the migration logic, object sequencing, known failure points, and what you cannot migrate at all.

Defining Your Migration Scope

Before you begin moving data, you must categorize what goes where. Not every piece of information is handled the same way.

What to Migrate via API

The bulk of your historical and structural data should be moved through the API to maintain accuracy and save time.

This includes your list of operators, the departments they belong to, and your entire database of identified contacts.

Most importantly, the history of your conversations, including the tickets and the individual messages within them, should be pushed through the API to ensure they are correctly linked to the right customers and agents.

What to Configure Manually

Certain elements of your setup are better built by hand to take advantage of Trengo's unique features. Your general project settings, branding, and authenticated project information fall into this category.

Logic-heavy components, such as your AI assistant's data sources and the specific paths of your automated journeys, also require manual attention.

While you can export the raw data from Tidio's Lyro, the interactive logic must be reconstructed within the Trengo interface.

What to Archive

You may find that some data is no longer useful for daily operations but remains necessary for compliance or long-term reporting.

This might include viewed page histories that are older than 30 days or logs of operators who are no longer with the company.

Instead of cluttering your new Trengo environment with this data, export it into a CSV or external database for safekeeping.

What Cannot Be Migrated

Some data has no equivalent in Trengo or is lost in translation between the two platforms:

• Tidio live visitor tracking data — real-time page view sessions and browsing paths have no corresponding object in Trengo. This data is gone once you leave Tidio.
• Lyro AI conversation logic — the trained AI model and its decision trees do not export. You get the underlying data sources, but the interactive flows must be rebuilt from scratch in Trengo's Journeys.
• Tidio chatbot flow structures — visual chatbot builders are platform-specific. The flow logic (conditions, branching, fallback paths) has no API export and no Trengo import equivalent.
• Operator-level analytics and performance history — historical agent metrics (response times, satisfaction scores per operator) are not portable. Trengo starts tracking fresh from the moment you go live.
• WhatsApp message templates — old templates cannot be imported. Each template must be re-submitted and re-approved through Trengo's interface before use.

Knowing what is lost up front lets you plan workarounds — or set expectations with stakeholders — before migration day.

Prepare Trengo for Data Import

Setting the stage in Trengo is critical before you start pushing data through. If you skip these steps, imported records will land without proper associations and you will spend more time fixing than migrating.

Complete these configurations first:

• Define your custom fields for both contacts and tickets so there is a designated spot for every Tidio property.
• Establish your teams to mirror or improve upon your Tidio department structure.
• Create your user accounts for all active operators to ensure they can be assigned to historical tickets.
• Set up your communication channels, such as email or WhatsApp, to receive the incoming message history.
• Create your help center structure, including categories and sections, if you plan to move your knowledge base articles.

Migrate Objects

The secret to a successful migration lies in the order of operations. You must build the framework before you can populate it — get the sequence wrong and foreign key references break silently.

Step 1: The Structure (Custom Fields and Teams) Begin by pulling your contact properties and departments from Tidio. In Trengo, these become custom fields and teams. This step is essential because it defines the categories and groups that your data will eventually reference.

Step 2: The People (Users and Contacts) Once the structure exists, move your operators into Trengo as users (e.g., POST /v2/users). Follow this by importing your contacts (e.g., POST /v2/contacts). Tidio identifies contacts by name, email, or phone number, which maps to Trengo's contact profiles. If a contact already exists in Trengo with the same email, the API may silently skip the record or create a duplicate depending on your configuration — validate this behavior in your test environment first.

Step 3: The Content (Tickets and Messages) With your users and contacts in place, you can now migrate tickets (e.g., POST /v2/tickets). Once a ticket is created in Trengo, import the messages that belong to it. The assignee_id on the ticket must reference an existing Trengo user ID, or the assignment silently fails and the ticket lands unassigned. Verify every agent mapping before running the production import.

Data Mapping

Common Failure Points

• Duplicate contacts — If your Tidio export contains contacts with the same email address, Trengo's behavior depends on your deduplication settings. Without pre-processing, you risk duplicate records that fragment conversation history across two profiles.
• Encoding errors — Tidio exports may contain UTF-8 characters (emoji, accented names) that break if your import script does not explicitly handle encoding. Validate a sample batch before running the full import.
• Missing foreign keys — If you import messages before their parent ticket exists, or tickets before the assigned user exists, the records either fail silently or land unlinked. Always follow the sequence: structure → people → content.
• Attachment expiry — Uploaded files that are not immediately attached to a message are automatically purged by Trengo. Your script must upload and send in a single atomic operation.

Post-Migration Configuration

Once the data is in, you need to activate the operational layer of your new inbox:

• Rebuild your automated workflows and rules to ensure incoming tickets are routed to the right teams.
• Create your quick replies to help agents answer common questions faster.
• Set up your ticket results to track why customers are reaching out.
• Configure webhooks if you need to send Trengo data to other internal systems.
• Set up your reporting dashboards to begin tracking agent performance and ticket metrics.

Insider Secrets

1. Trengo has a strict rate limit for importing historical messages. You are restricted to 60 messages per minute. If you have a large history, plan for your script to run over several days. As a rough benchmark: 10,000 messages at the rate limit takes approximately 2.8 hours assuming zero errors or retries.
2. Tidio's "General" department is a catch-all that includes every operator. When migrating this to Trengo, you should decide if you want to keep it as a broad team or split it into more specialized groups for better efficiency.
3. When importing messages, Trengo distinguishes between text-based messages and email-based messages. Make sure your migration script identifies the original source channel in Tidio to use the correct import endpoint in Trengo.
4. Attachments in messages require a two-step process. You must upload the file first and then send the message immediately after, as unused uploads are cleared out of the system automatically. There is no grace period — treat this as an atomic operation in your script.
5. If you are moving WhatsApp data, you cannot simply import old templates. You must get your templates pre-approved again through the Trengo interface before you can use them for proactive outreach. Factor in approval lead times, which can take 24–48 hours depending on Meta's review queue.
6. Tidio identifies contacts through a distinct_id or contact ID. Store this ID in a hidden custom field in Trengo during the import so you can cross-reference the original Tidio source for troubleshooting or audit purposes.
7. Help center articles in Trengo are built using "blocks" — structured content units rather than raw HTML. When migrating your knowledge base, you need to parse your Tidio HTML into these block formats. Malformed HTML (unclosed tags, inline styles) will produce broken blocks.
8. Notes in Tidio are often buried in contact properties. In Trengo, they have their own dedicated endpoint, which makes them much more visible to agents during a conversation.
9. Don't forget to map your "Favorited" tickets. Trengo has a specific endpoint to mark tickets as favorites, allowing you to preserve the "high priority" status your agents were used to in Tidio.
10. If you use custom channels in Tidio, Trengo provides a "Store custom channel message" endpoint that is perfect for non-standard integrations.

Rollback Plan

Migrations fail midway more often than people expect. Before you start, have a rollback strategy:

• Keep Tidio active until you have fully validated the Trengo environment. Do not cancel your Tidio subscription or delete data until post-migration QA is complete.
• Tag all imported records in Trengo with a migration identifier (e.g., a custom field value like source: tidio-migration-2025). If you need to purge and re-run, you can isolate migrated records from any new data created in Trengo.
• Maintain your ID mapping file (Tidio ID → Trengo ID) for every object type. This is your single source of truth for debugging orphaned records, re-running partial imports, or verifying data integrity.
• Document the exact sequence and script version used for each batch. If a batch fails at message 4,500 of 10,000, you need to know exactly where to resume without duplicating records.

Summary

Migrating from Tidio to Trengo requires strict sequencing — structure first, people second, content last — to avoid broken foreign key references and orphaned records.

The API handles the bulk data transfer, but the rate limit (60 messages/minute), the two-step attachment process, and the lack of portability for AI logic and chatbot flows are the constraints that will shape your timeline.

Manual work in the help center and automated journeys defines the quality of your post-migration experience. Know what cannot be migrated, test in a sandbox first, and keep your rollback plan ready.

If you'd rather focus on your revenue instead of wrestling with mapping sheets and pagination loops, ClonePartner can handle the full migration for you. Every project gets a dedicated engineer who understands the nuances of both APIs and ensures zero downtime.

Further reading

• Tidio API Reference
• Trengo API Reference