On September 14, 2026, Zendesk announced the removal of help center templating APIs v1, v2 and v3. If your Zendesk help center still runs on one of those theme versions, this is work you now have to schedule. Here is what the announcement actually says, who it affects, and a question worth asking before you start the migration.
The deadline is stated plainly: "You need to upgrade your help center theme to templating API v4 before July 31, 2027."
The timeline on Zendesk's announcement page:
Two practical points follow from those dates. First, the tooling comes after the announcement: there is no Zendesk upgrade tool until November 25, and no in-product one until March 1. Second, the in-product path is described as an upgrade "with a few clicks and a manual QA check" — so even the easy route ends with someone checking every page of your help center by hand.
This is a separate track from Zendesk's other announced changes. Don't add it to any list of deadlines you are already tracking as if they were one project; it has its own dates and its own tools.
This deprecation costs very different amounts depending on what your help center is.
If your help center is a design project — custom templates, your own HTML and CSS, layout changes, code a developer or agency wrote — then this is a genuine migration. Custom code has to be moved to v4, tested, and signed off, on a calendar Zendesk set. The ZCLI tool exists for exactly this team, and it only arrives on November 25.
If your help center is a place customers find answers — your logo, your colours, good articles, and nobody on the team has touched a template in two years — then the honest question isn't how to migrate. It is why your help center lives inside a theming system you don't use, and whether the next forced upgrade will be the one that breaks something nobody remembers building.
Both are legitimate. They just want different products.
DeskLeap is built for the second team only, and it's worth being specific about what that means.
DeskLeap's help center has a fixed layout. You set your organisation's logo, one brand colour, the help center's name and address, whether it is public or private, and the search title and description for each knowledge base. Then you write articles. That is the whole design surface.
There's nothing to migrate, because there's nothing to customise. DeskLeap's portal is a fixed layout: your logo, one brand colour, your articles. If you need custom templates, that's a real limitation and you should know it before you sign up.
What you get instead is a help center that sits in the same place as your tickets and live chat, and a knowledge base your AI agent can answer from if you choose to add one. The platform is 100% free with unlimited human agents; an optional AI Agent add-on is $29/mo each.
If any of these are requirements, Zendesk is the right product and DeskLeap is not:
Zendesk's theming is genuinely more capable than anything DeskLeap offers. The migration is the price of that capability; for teams that use it, it is worth paying.
If your help center is logo, colour and articles, you can see whether DeskLeap's fixed layout is enough by creating a free account and publishing a few articles — the platform is free, so trying it costs nothing but time. For the full comparison, including the other places Zendesk is stronger, see DeskLeap vs Zendesk.