Sync Zendesk Knowledge Base Articles to Airtable with Markdown Conversion

Who is it for

• Customer service or support teams who want to use their Zendesk articles in other tools.
• Content/Knowledge managers consolidating or migrating knowledge bases.
• Ops/automation specialists who want Markdown versions of articles (could be adapted to Notion, Google Sheets, or any Markdown-friendly system).

How to get started

• Download the template and install it on your instance
• Set Zendesk and Airtable credentials
• Modify the Zendesk base_url and Airtable's table and base
• Run the workflow once manually to get your existing articles
• Finally, modify the Schedule Trigger (by default it runs every 30 days) and activate the workflow

Prerequisites

• Airtable base set up using this template . It includes the fields Title , Content , URL and Article ID .
• Zendesk account with API access (read permissions for help center articles)
• Zendesk API credentials (see instructions below)
• Airtable API credentials (see instructions below)

Getting Your Credentials

Airtable:

1. Sign up or log in to Airtable .
2. Go to your account settings and generate a Personal Access Token (recommended scopes: data.records:read , data.records:write ).
3. In n8n, create new Airtable credentials using this token.

Zendesk:

1. Log in to your Zendesk dashboard.
2. Go to Admin Center > Apps and Integrations > Zendesk API .
3. Enable “Token Access,” and create an API token.
4. In n8n, add Zendesk credentials with your Zendesk domain, email, and the API token.

How it works

1. Triggers

• Manual: For first setup, use the Manual Trigger to fetch all existing articles.
• Scheduled: Automatically runs every N days to fetch only new or updated articles since the last run.

2. Fetch Articles from Zendesk

• Calls the Zendesk Help Center API, using pagination to handle large volumes.

3. Extract and Prepare Data

• Splits out each article, then collects fields: id , url , title , and body .
• Converts the article body from HTML to Markdown (for portability and easier reuse).

4. Upsert Into Airtable

• Inserts new articles, or updates existing ones (using Article ID as the unique key).
• Fields stored: Title , Content (Markdown), URL , Article ID .

Airtable Template

• Use this Airtable template as your starting point.
• Make sure the table has columns: Title , Content , URL , Article ID . You can add more depending on your needs.

Example Use Cases

• Migrating Zendesk articles to another knowledge base.
• Building an internal knowledge hub in Airtable or Notion.
• Creating Markdown backups for compliance or versioning.

Service

If you need help implementing the template or modifying it, just reach out 💌