Front vs. Kayako

Overview
ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price
Front
Score 9.0 out of 10
N/A
Front is a communication hub that helps businesses keep the human touch in every interaction.
$29
per month per user
Kayako
Score 5.2 out of 10
N/A
Kayako 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
Pricing
FrontKayako
Editions & Modules
Starter
$29
per month per user
Growth
$79
per month per user
Scale
$99
per month (billed annually) per user
Premier
$229
per month (billed annually) per seat (50 seat minimum)
Kayako One
$79
per month
Enterprise
Contact Sales
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
FrontKayako
Free Trial
YesYes
Free/Freemium Version
NoNo
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
YesNo
Entry-level Setup FeeNo setup feeNo setup fee
Additional DetailsDiscount for annual pricing on Starter and Growth plans. Scale and Premier plans are annual price only.
More Pricing Information
Community Pulse
FrontKayako
Features
FrontKayako
Incident and problem management
Comparison of Incident and problem management features of Product A and Product B
Front
7.8
6 Ratings
5% below category average
Kayako
2.0
11 Ratings
122% below category average
Organize and prioritize service tickets8.46 Ratings1.011 Ratings
Subscription-based notifications7.04 Ratings1.08 Ratings
Ticket creation and submission8.04 Ratings7.011 Ratings
Ticket response8.04 Ratings1.011 Ratings
Expert directory00 Ratings1.05 Ratings
ITSM collaboration and documentation00 Ratings1.07 Ratings
Self Help Community
Comparison of Self Help Community features of Product A and Product B
Front
7.2
6 Ratings
11% below category average
Kayako
1.0
9 Ratings
156% below category average
External knowledge base7.26 Ratings1.09 Ratings
Internal knowledge base00 Ratings1.08 Ratings
Multi-Channel Help
Comparison of Multi-Channel Help features of Product A and Product B
Front
8.8
4 Ratings
10% above category average
Kayako
1.0
10 Ratings
156% below category average
Customer portal8.43 Ratings1.07 Ratings
Social integration9.33 Ratings1.04 Ratings
Email support9.14 Ratings1.010 Ratings
Help Desk CRM integration8.52 Ratings1.06 Ratings
IVR00 Ratings1.02 Ratings
Best Alternatives
FrontKayako
Small Businesses
Agiloft Service Desk (discontinued)
Agiloft Service Desk (discontinued)
Score 9.0 out of 10
Agiloft Service Desk (discontinued)
Agiloft Service Desk (discontinued)
Score 9.0 out of 10
Medium-sized Companies
Agiloft Service Desk (discontinued)
Agiloft Service Desk (discontinued)
Score 9.0 out of 10
Agiloft Service Desk (discontinued)
Agiloft Service Desk (discontinued)
Score 9.0 out of 10
Enterprises
SysAid
SysAid
Score 8.9 out of 10
SysAid
SysAid
Score 8.9 out of 10
All AlternativesView all alternativesView all alternatives
User Ratings
FrontKayako
Likelihood to Recommend
8.9
(35 ratings)
1.0
(22 ratings)
Likelihood to Renew
9.0
(1 ratings)
7.8
(11 ratings)
Usability
9.4
(9 ratings)
10.0
(1 ratings)
Availability
-
(0 ratings)
7.5
(2 ratings)
Support Rating
9.8
(5 ratings)
2.1
(4 ratings)
Implementation Rating
-
(0 ratings)
9.0
(2 ratings)
User Testimonials
FrontKayako
Likelihood to Recommend
Front
I think Front is very useful for every company with multiple teams working together on different emails from clients. Not so useful if a lot of different teams need to work on a request at the same time, because when an email is sitting in multiple shared inboxes things can get messy. Also would not recommend for teams that work is individualized, as team work is the main point of Front.
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.
Read full review
Pros
Front
  • Even if you are just trying to compose a single email, Front gives a smart system that has options such [as] organized templates, tags, alerts, [and] changing your outbound dpt email.
  • Tasks- with Front you will not miss any interaction. When you are required to get assistance from a coworker, you only need to mention him/her and that notification will appear automatically in their inboxes.
  • Smart Notifications- sometimes we are just overwhelmed about the several notifications on our devices that we tend to miss some of them, but Front offers a new way to notify every email, discussion, mentioning, or tag that you really would not want to miss.
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.
Read full review
Cons
Front
  • Their integration to Salesforce is lacking. As the owner of our productivity tools and how they are used, I have very little control over what things to enforce, or even change what objects are available. For example, we don't use Cases in Salesforce but with the Salesforce integration the Cases object shows up. There's no need to have that there. I've heard there is a roadmap improvement forthcoming.
  • One of our uses is for our sales development reps to prospect with visitors. Because of the high volume of inquiries it's difficult for our reps to efficiently manage all their follow ups. It would be nice if we could run a "scheduled campaign" where a predesigned cadence of email follow ups can be sent automatically. To be clear, they do have a scheduling capability, but it just can't be used as a prebuilt option.
  • Integrations to other systems require you have a user account to those systems. We have SSO and therefore we don't always have a user account. For example, out integration to Jira uses SSO so we don't each have individual Jira logins. This is an outage for us.
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.
Read full review
Likelihood to Renew
Front
We are very happy with Front and don't anticipate changing
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
Read full review
Usability
Front
It's very easy to understand and use by new customer support agents as well. Be it a technology, product, or marketing person, we have trained most of the company folks to read and respond to customer conversations in their free time with the help of the Front app. It is also easy to set up for an admin and manage his/her team with communication rules.
Read full review
Kayako
I did not come from an IT background and I picked this program up quickly
Read full review
Reliability and Availability
Front
No answers on this topic
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.
Read full review
Support Rating
Front
The support is good, and it's definitely prompt, but still lags when it comes to technical requirements, as I guess they are slow in developing newer features fast. So no complaints in terms of responsiveness, but yeah, at times it's not very helpful when you need certain features or are blocked on things which can't be unblocked.
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.
Read full review
Implementation Rating
Front
No answers on this topic
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.
Read full review
Alternatives Considered
Front
This is something I am not familiar but it seems like it is [available] in Gmail. Thus I cannot give any feedback about it. What I am sure about is Front works for our team and I see Zoom using the service in the Customer Success Organization in a long run.
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.
Read full review
Return on Investment
Front
  • Saved our executive team considerable amount of time chasing support questions through different channels.
  • Gave our team clear accountability for who was lead on a support issue and how to escalate.
  • Customer regularly say our support is the best in the industry.
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.
Read full review
ScreenShots

Front Screenshots

Screenshot of Screenshot of Screenshot of Screenshot of Screenshot of