Jira Software is a project management tool from Atlassian, featuring an interactive timeline for mapping work items, dependencies, and releases, Scrum boards for agile teams, and out-of-the-box reports and dashboards.
$81.85
per month 10 users
Kayako
Score 1.9 out of 10
N/A
Kayako is a help desk / ticketing product and is available is both SaaS and on-premise configurations. Is is built in PHP and uses my SQL. The product competes with HelpSpot, ZohoSupport, Freshdesk and Zendesk.
The Kayako Engage edition may be deployed as a live chat system without ticketing at a reduced cost, featuring click-to-call and site visitor monitoring for customer targeting and engagement.
Jira is much more pricey but more complete. It integrates with our Scrum Board and Agile Software Development platform. So we can much more easily turn Tickets into User Stories, and our techs and devs only have to live in one software platform instead of having to switch …
The Jira software works well for managing scrum boards and allocating resources to a task. When your Epics and Issues are set up properly, it can give you a good idea of where your team stands and the trajectory of your project. It is not the ideal solution if you need to provide documentation and support to people outside of your product teams or organization. It would benefit from having a public documentation or repository feature.
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.
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.
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.
This is because Jira Software generates a huge profit for an affordable price. Having a tool that makes team management transparent and effective is very valuable.
In addition, the renewal of Jira Software and all Atlassian tools is predictable and clear, as the prices are published on the Atlassian website and there is no pyramid of intermediaries.
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
JIRA Software is a pretty complex tool. We have a project manager for JIRA who onboarded us, created our board, and taught us the basics. I think it would have been pretty overwhelming to learn without her. JIRA offers so much functionality that I'm not aware of -- I constantly need to Google or ask others about existing features. Also, although they are all under the Atlassian umbrella, I find it difficult to switch between JIRA Software and Confluence.
Our JIRA support is handled internally by members of our Product Support team. It is not supported by a 3rd party. Our internal support will always sent out notifications for downtime which is usually done on the weekend unless it is required to fix a bug/issue that is affecting the entire company. Downtime is typically 3-4 hours and then once the maintenance is complete, another broadcast email is sent out informing the user community that the system is now available for use.
One of their strong points i stheir documentation. Almost all of the basic set up needed within JIRA is available online through atlassian and its easy to find and very precise. The more critical issues need to be addressed as well and hence the rating of 8 instead of a 9.
Take your time implementing Jira. Make sure you understand how you want to handle your projects and workflows. Investing more time in the implementation can pay off in a long run. It basically took us 5 days to define and implement correctly, but that meant smooth sailing later on.
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.
Jira Software has more integrations and has more features than many of its competitors. While some of its competitors do have better UI/UX than Jira Software, they have improved this greatly over time. Atlassian also acquired Trello years ago, so that adds better user interfaces to the system. They do also offer a pretty in-depth library of how to customize the platform that others don't.
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.
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.
