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Desk.com (discontinued) vs. Kayako vs. Salesforce Agentforce Service

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    Overview
    ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price

    Desk.com (discontinued)

    Score8.3 out of 10
    N/ADesk.com was a helpdesk, ticketing, and customer support product offered by Salesforce, and oriented towards the needs of small businesses. It is no longer sold and support has been discontinued. Salesforce recommends its modern Service Cloud as a replacement.N/A

    Kayako

    Score6.8 out of 10
    N/AKayako is a help desk and customer support platform that helps businesses automate workflows, improve agent productivity, and deliver personalized customer experiences across email, chat, and social media.

    $79

    per month

    Salesforce Agentforce Service

    Score8.5 out of 10
    N/AService Cloud is a customer service platform that helps businesses manage and resolve customer inquiries and issues. It provides tools for case management, knowledge base, omni-channel support, automation, and analytics, enabling companies to deliver exceptional customer service experiences.

    $25

    per month

    Pricing
    Desk.com (discontinued)KayakoSalesforce Agentforce Service
    Editions & Modules
    No answers on this topic
    Kayako One
    $79
    per month
    Enterprise
    Contact Sales
    Starter Suite
    $25
    per month
    Pro Suite
    $100
    per month per user
    Enterprise
    $165
    per month per user
    Unlimited
    $330
    per month per user
    Agentforce 1
    $550
    per month per user
    Offerings
    Pricing Offerings
    Desk.com (discontinued)KayakoSalesforce Agentforce Service
    Free Trial
    YesYesYes
    Free/Freemium Version
    NoNoYes
    Premium Consulting/Integration Services
    NoNoNo
    Entry-level Setup FeeNo setup feeNo setup feeNo setup fee
    Additional Details———
    More Pricing Information
    Community Pulse
    Desk.com (discontinued)KayakoSalesforce Agentforce Service
    Considered Multiple Products
    Discontinued Products
    Chose Desk.com (discontinued)
    We liked it as a tool because of the ease and advantages offered by the tool compared to the other solutions evaluated.Due to its ease of implementation and ease of use it adapted very well to the needs of the company, that was the reason why we chose desk.com.
    Incentivized
    Chose Desk.com (discontinued)
    Desk.com is comparable, on a smaller scale. We went with Desk.com because it provided the functionality we needed and was more affordable.
    Incentivized
    Chose Desk.com (discontinued)
    • Kayako
      • Interesting, but really clunky and unstable at the time.
    Kayako
    No answer on this topic
    Salesforce
    Chose Salesforce Agentforce Service
    Salesforce Service Cloud offers deep integration with our current and expanding CRM data, along with numerous pre-built features that didn't exist in Kayako when we used it. (We used to use an instance Kayako installed in a private cloud environment.) Salesforce Service Cloud …
    Incentivized
    Chose Salesforce Agentforce Service
    Desk.com was our previous foray into customer support, and it was functional and worked quite well. It was not exactly the most intuitive to update, but it got the job done and was reliable.

    Freshdesk was our primary next decision, and we would have gone with them except we were …
    Incentivized
    Chose Salesforce Agentforce Service
    Service Cloud is a step up from Desk mainly because of its reporting, but if you can integrate other Salesforce products together, I'd recommend looking at its other solutions and looking at its own integrated CRM case closer. Service Cloud isn't the perfect solution, but it …
    Incentivized
    Chose Salesforce Agentforce Service
    We chose Service Cloud because of its deep, native integration with Salesforce, unified billing, and for the fact that we didn't have to learn or train on an entirely new platform. These other products were excellent, but for us it was more time and cost effective to use …
    Incentivized
    Chose Salesforce Agentforce Service
    Salesforce has increased their traction in the SMB space for service with the acquisition of Desk.com. It provides a good entry level solution for customer service and knowledge for less complex organizations. Additionally, it gets them up and running quicker. Without Desk.com, …
    Incentivized
    Key User Insights
    Would buy again
    78%
    Would buy again
    14 Answers
    No answers on this topic
    91%
    Would buy again
    52 Answers
    Delivers good value for the price
    88%
    Delivers good value for the price
    14 Answers
    No answers on this topic
    88%
    Delivers good value for the price
    43 Answers
    Happy with the feature set
    83%
    Happy with the feature set
    15 Answers
    No answers on this topic
    93%
    Happy with the feature set
    53 Answers
    Lived up to sales and marketing promises
    85%
    Lived up to sales and marketing promises
    11 Answers
    No answers on this topic
    88%
    Lived up to sales and marketing promises
    36 Answers
    Implementation went as expected
    87%
    Implementation went as expected
    13 Answers
    No answers on this topic
    87%
    Implementation went as expected
    39 Answers
    Features
    Desk.com (discontinued)KayakoSalesforce Agentforce Service
    Incident and problem management
    Comparison of Incident and problem management features of Desk.com (discontinued) and Kayako and Salesforce Agentforce Service
    Feature
    Desk.com (discontinued)
    -
    Ratings
    Kayako
    2.0
    11 Ratings
    122% below category average
    Salesforce Agentforce Service
    8.0
    81 Ratings
    2% below category average
    Organize and prioritize service tickets00 Ratings1.011 Ratings8.279 Ratings
    Expert directory00 Ratings1.05 Ratings7.857 Ratings
    Subscription-based notifications00 Ratings1.08 Ratings8.267 Ratings
    ITSM collaboration and documentation00 Ratings1.07 Ratings6.962 Ratings
    Ticket creation and submission00 Ratings7.011 Ratings8.779 Ratings
    Ticket response00 Ratings1.011 Ratings7.978 Ratings
    Self Help Community
    Comparison of Self Help Community features of Desk.com (discontinued) and Kayako and Salesforce Agentforce Service
    Feature
    Desk.com (discontinued)
    -
    Ratings
    Kayako
    1.0
    9 Ratings
    156% below category average
    Salesforce Agentforce Service
    8.7
    76 Ratings
    8% above category average
    External knowledge base00 Ratings1.09 Ratings8.567 Ratings
    Internal knowledge base00 Ratings1.08 Ratings8.874 Ratings
    Multi-Channel Help
    Comparison of Multi-Channel Help features of Desk.com (discontinued) and Kayako and Salesforce Agentforce Service
    Feature
    Desk.com (discontinued)
    -
    Ratings
    Kayako
    1.0
    10 Ratings
    156% below category average
    Salesforce Agentforce Service
    7.9
    81 Ratings
    1% below category average
    Customer portal00 Ratings1.07 Ratings7.858 Ratings
    IVR00 Ratings1.02 Ratings8.037 Ratings
    Social integration00 Ratings1.04 Ratings7.451 Ratings
    Email support00 Ratings1.010 Ratings8.880 Ratings
    Help Desk CRM integration00 Ratings1.06 Ratings7.870 Ratings
    Best Alternatives
    Desk.com (discontinued)KayakoSalesforce Agentforce Service
    Small Businesses
    Help Scout
    Score9.3 out of 10
    Help Scout
    Score9.3 out of 10
    Help Scout
    Score9.3 out of 10
    Medium-sized Companies
    LiveAgent
    Score8.8 out of 10
    LiveAgent
    Score8.8 out of 10
    LiveAgent
    Score8.8 out of 10
    Enterprises
    Front
    Score9.2 out of 10
    Front
    Score9.2 out of 10
    Front
    Score9.2 out of 10
    All AlternativesView all alternativesView all alternativesView all alternatives
    User Ratings
    Desk.com (discontinued)KayakoSalesforce Agentforce Service
    Likelihood to Recommend
    8.2
    (38 ratings)
    1.0
    (22 ratings)
    8.7
    (100 ratings)
    Likelihood to Renew
    8.4
    (14 ratings)
    7.8
    (11 ratings)
    6.2
    (8 ratings)
    Usability
    8.3
    (19 ratings)
    10.0
    (1 ratings)
    8.2
    (22 ratings)
    Availability
    1.0
    (2 ratings)
    7.5
    (2 ratings)
    8.4
    (45 ratings)
    Performance
    10.0
    (1 ratings)
    -
    (0 ratings)
    8.6
    (7 ratings)
    Support Rating
    8.2
    (21 ratings)
    2.1
    (4 ratings)
    7.0
    (20 ratings)
    In-Person Training
    -
    (0 ratings)
    -
    (0 ratings)
    10.0
    (1 ratings)
    Online Training
    -
    (0 ratings)
    -
    (0 ratings)
    9.0
    (1 ratings)
    Implementation Rating
    10.0
    (1 ratings)
    9.0
    (2 ratings)
    7.0
    (1 ratings)
    Ease of integration
    -
    (0 ratings)
    -
    (0 ratings)
    5.0
    (1 ratings)
    Vendor post-sale
    -
    (0 ratings)
    -
    (0 ratings)
    8.0
    (1 ratings)
    Vendor pre-sale
    -
    (0 ratings)
    -
    (0 ratings)
    8.0
    (1 ratings)
    User Testimonials
    Desk.com (discontinued)KayakoSalesforce Agentforce Service
    Likelihood to Recommend
    Discontinued Products
    Once I had to search the logs to find cases and data on a particular keyword, but I was not able to do so as there was no search tool available, nor was there a sort or filter tool. I was totally frustrated as I had to skim through the data to complete my task manually.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Kayako
    When it works, It's without a doubt a great help desk solution. It is perfect for our usage, and have rolled it out company-wide. It's great if you have multiple departments. We have it set up so most items come through a single desk that then hands out tickets to their proper department. There may be cheaper options for smaller organizations but for one that is as service-driven as ours, we really think Kayako is a great fit.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Salesforce
    I think Service Cloud is best suited for medium to large operations that require both proactive and reactive service. It’s a great fit for post-sales support. However, I wouldn’t recommend it for very small companies because it can be quite costly, and many of the features may go unused. Salesforce also performs best when you have a capable team managing it, so it’s important to consider your organization’s size and readiness before starting. Once you do, I recommend exploring other parts of the Salesforce ecosystem—Service Cloud works even better when integrated with Sales Cloud, since it allows better visibility across teams.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Pros
    Discontinued Products
    • Desk.com automatically tracks analytics on all cases coming in and going out.
    • Desk.com helps prevent multiple people from working on the same case. However, it does allow us to assign the case to someone else if we feel that person is more qualified to address the case.
    • Desk.com has very few bugs or server issues that we've seen. This helps prevent any delays in communicating with our customers.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Kayako
    • Gives a very good report on an individual level of what is being done for a customer or corporate issue.
    • Easy to understand who has what, what the tickets are about, how long they have been opened and how many times the customer/employee have gone back and forth with each other.
    • Nice dashboard view.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Salesforce
    • Email to case is an interesting piece of it. The threading is very strong, sometimes too strong, but it does very well at handling the incoming emails.
    • The omnichannel routing, using skill-based routing is really effective.
    • Pathing. So making the workflow and helping the team understand what it is that they're trying to do, what they have to accomplish, those step-by-step pieces. That's really helpful.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Cons
    Discontinued Products
    • Internal knowledge tools are clunky and annoying to access, outside the regular workflow of everyday staff
    • Arbitrary and confusing limitations in business rules and custom fields
    • Arbitrary and confusing limitations in case handling - for example, if you begin a case as a phone call you CANNOT email the customer from the case. As though no one working at Desk has ever sent a follow-up email...?
    • Not very good for B2B, mid-to-large businesses. Difficult to set business rules based on company information (for example, service level/tier) and nearly impossible to track key stakeholders and get clear insight into the relationship at a high level
    • Reporting tools are clunky, slow, and just all-around pretty useless
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Kayako
    • Departments need a bit of work. Even though you can have multiple departments, the only changes that can be made are globally. If you want independent queues within the departments, you have to do a lot of work that can be very confusing.
    • Survey system is not up to speed. Kayako really needs to add Net Promoter Score into their system. Also, if a staff user removes their name from an incident ticket, it removes them from the survey so you really can't even get a good estimate of how well your staff is in the eyes of the customer.
    • Very difficult to implement when you already have a customer base. Setting them up in organizations is difficult. Also, the sign-up for new customers is quirky. If you send an email to Kayako, it will say you are not an authorized user, however, it will store your email address. If you try to send an email a second time, it will go through. This is one of many reasons why we decided to move from Kayako to Oracle Service Cloud.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Salesforce
    • We had a principle initially to try and use Omni as much as we can from the user experience perspective, but have found that fairly restrictive. It was very difficult to actually get the right customer experience and customer engagement going. So we're actually on a journey at the moment to replace all of our Omni with Lightning web components that gives us that flexibility. That's probably one area where we've had some challenges in terms of how we've used the product out of the box.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Likelihood to Renew
    Discontinued Products
    We will be very likely to renew our contract with Desk.com. It is easy to use, and provides us with everything we need to keep our customers and employees happy. They have also been very helpful in catering the application to our specific and unique needs, including working across brands and adding specific content for our products
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Kayako
    • We are grandfathered in on their old Software-assurance pricing and our continued use costs us only a few hundred dollars a year (excluding hosting expenses)
    • Our team's processes are now heavily ingrained in the system
    • We have not been shown a more compelling option that is more cost-effective while still offering all the features we've come to expect
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Salesforce
    Professional edition works best for a small company with lower call volumes and is very useful but as you grow exponetially I think it has limited ability to do all the things we want to - SLA management, defect, release management to name a few. Reports and dashboards being available in real time.
    Read full review
    Usability
    Discontinued Products
    Desk.com and Salesforce Service Cloud's usability is seamless to get up and running, administer, and scale across the organization. It allows us to get up and running in days rather than weeks and has transformed our customer support teams globally into efficient, world-class teams. The best practices that the Salesforce and Desk.com teams provide are also very valuable, as we have the right case studies and tips to implement right away in our organization.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Kayako
    I did not come from an IT background and I picked this program up quickly
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Salesforce
    I had Salesforce experience prior to using Service Cloud which made it a little easier to learn and navigate, but overall my team (some who had no Salesforce experience) caught on very quickly and found Service Cloud to be easy to use.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Reliability and Availability
    Discontinued Products
    We've never had a problem with Desk.com's availability.
    Read full review
    Kayako
    They are really good, but it takes a while to get back, because of the large time difference to the Eastern US. However, they are very helpful.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Salesforce
    Working on an application that caters to customer needs requires a platform that acts as a mediator between the actual person and the client. This mediator handles the customer and resolves many of their doubts, helps them map through the entire process, and automates the processes. Such a platform is Salesforce Service Cloud. For queries that cannot be serviced by the platform, it creates a separate ServiceNow ticket for us, and it is assigned.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Performance
    Discontinued Products
    Fast, responsive, gorgeous, and fun. It's always run like a thoroughbred for me.
    Read full review
    Kayako
    No answers on this topic
    Salesforce
    The Salesforce Service Cloud generally has very good performance, however the overall new Lightning user experience can bring that down. For example, if you have too many tabs open, then it can take a while for the Lightning UI to load. This UI is probably not well equipped to handle loading of all of that information at once, but Users tend to leave their tabs open all day long. It can also be fickle depending on which browser you use, what extensions you have installed, and whether you've cleared your cache. This can be the downfall with any software as a service though, not just Salesforce
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Support Rating
    Discontinued Products
    Their support leaves much to be desired. They do not respond quickly and do not follow up with feature requests. There is also a lack of on-demand or live training available for the teams to use as they learn a new tool. Because there is so much customization, a lot of questions do come up regularly.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Kayako
    • We didn't have to use support too much, but when we did, they were able to assist us and help us make everything work.
    • Mostly we used their Online KB and step by step instructions to get all of our issues resolved.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Salesforce
    Salesforce offers support, although it generally gets routed to overseas support teams first, and once they are unable to help, it gets escalated up the chain to higher tiers. Frequently, the answer back from support is that there is no native solution, and we either have to turn to the AppExchange for some solution provided by another developer, or custom build our own solution.
    Read full review
    In-Person Training
    Discontinued Products
    No answers on this topic
    Kayako
    No answers on this topic
    Salesforce
    Our in-person training was provided by our implementation partner and it was quite good. This was in part because we were already working with them and so it naturally leant itself to a good training relationship. And because they were building our customizations and configuring things, they could then provide training on those things naturally.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Online Training
    Discontinued Products
    No answers on this topic
    Kayako
    No answers on this topic
    Salesforce
    Trailheads are great but it was often unclear what actually applied to our organization. This made it difficult to get a whole lot out of it. Part of it is that because the basic Salesforce features didn't quite work for us, we had to add customizations, which then nullified a lot of the training.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Implementation Rating
    Discontinued Products
    As I stated earlier, implementation of Desk.com went more smoothly than most. The resources in the "Support Center" are fantastic, and I never ran into anything that left me stumped, angry, or disappointed.
    Read full review
    Kayako
    Three years in we are about as happy with Kayako as we could be. We've had several employee's leave and on-boarding new hires was easier than it has ever been as things are uniform and consistent across the entire application.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Salesforce
    I would go through an implementation very differently knowing what I know now. It was difficult coming from systems we liked in post-sales service and having to adapt to the clunky and underwhelming feature set in Salesforce. I would trim back our expectations
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Alternatives Considered
    Discontinued Products
    Overall, it performs a lot better than all three combined, with a lot fewer glitches and a lot more user-friendly and user experience efficiency. Any new link that needs to be done, takes a lot less time to execute on desk compared to the three others. Simply advanced when it comes to execution this platform is.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Kayako
    We were using Spiceworks for a few years before switching to Kayako but found that it wasn't as customizable or as user friendly for our customers. The SNMP scanning and inventory features with Spiceworks was nice but we needed more of a Help Desk that would allow us to scale our services to more companies.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Salesforce
    We selected this product because we already had some competencies in Salesforce. We own a Salesforce partner with expertise in this area, and on top of that, Salesforce purchased it — it was originally called Velocity. When Salesforce decided to acquire it, that finalized the decision for us.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Scalability
    Discontinued Products
    No answers on this topic
    Kayako
    No answers on this topic
    Salesforce
    The product has scaled up with our company growth just fine. No issues here other than slowness in clicking around and running reports
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Return on Investment
    Discontinued Products
    • Better customer service and employee efficiency when dealing with cases
    • It's so universal, meaning that everyone can use it and it's easy to understand.
    • The only negative impact is that our IT department who is assigned tickets has responded to customers instead of to the local reps and we have to ensure they know to change the email if it's assigned to them.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Kayako
    • Tickets were definitely responded to faster once we implemented the audible alarm that would go off when new tickets came into the queue. This was possible because of the API.
    • Since the system was email based we could set our monitoring software up to generate tickets automatically via email for customers when it found something out of the ordinary.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Salesforce
    • We have cut our service team in half over the past 5 years due to the efficiency of the tool
    • The amount of direct inquiries to our technical team is less than 10% compared to the number support tickets that get entered in the system for them to work in a more organized manner
    • Responses are 100% more timely because tickets can be responded to by any individual in the queue or on the team, as opposed to direct emails to just one person
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    ScreenShots

    Desk.com (discontinued) Screenshots

    Screenshot of Desk.com ConsoleScreenshot of Desk.com Issue ScreenScreenshot of Desk.com Reporting and Analytics

    Salesforce Agentforce Service Screenshots

    Screenshot of Workflows and OrchestrationScreenshot of Service CatalogScreenshot of Contact Center