Jira Service Management vs. Kayako

Great to manage your issues in a clear and centralised way. If your development teams work with Jira, it will all naturally come together. Great way to manage the issues from end to end. - Very flexible if you have people who understands the set up and is able to configure it for your needs - Maybe not the best if you want something with very easy set up

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

• Manageable workflow to ensure all users follow the same process.
• Can ban boards for easy visual of ticket status.
• Very flexible tool that can adapt to lots of different uses outside of the traditional service desk model.
• Added communication tools help you get out of e-mail jail.

Incentivized

• 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

• Ability to control the number of email notifications received (Note: this is a new feature in the Latest release but I personally haven not extensively looked at it and how well it solves the existing problem).
• No way to reply to multiple tickets at once, say you got 4 tickets in for the same issue, there is no way you can reply to them in one stroke. Other Ticketing systems do have this ability.
• Using a large number of add-ons to customize and add additional features adds up quickly and can become rather expensive.
• Request forms are very basic and there is no native dynamic field ability available.

Incentivized

• 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

• 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

I gave JIRA a score of 9 since I am happy with the service it offers. I can easily see the SLA since it gives me visibility. I can pull up the reports I need. I can reach out to our clients using the PR ticket so it is hassle-free for me.

I did not come from an IT background and I picked this program up quickly

Incentivized

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

I have not used the technical support from Atlassian. In terms of online help and resources, they are a bit limited thus making it more of a challenge to troubleshoot issues and learn more functionality. There aren't a lot of resources available on the Atlassian site besides developer documents. It would be nice to have a blog or forum where users can get the help they need.

Incentivized

• 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

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

When I evaluated Spiceworks, it was not going to be replacing any ticketing systems. However, I did evaluate it and was not extremely impressed by the short demo I did. JIRA was selected because a branch of our company was already using it, so it made sense to consolidate into one service desk solution, and JIRA was the better option since it was less expensive and geared towards being a ticketing system.

Incentivized

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

• JIRA has been incredibly useful. Our work is more organized and easier to view by the team members as well as upper-level people.
• Our work is correctly assigned and when there are issues, they can be immediately addressed within the tool.
• Users can attach screenshots or files of issues that help clarify the ticket. Developers can attach relevant data as well.

Incentivized

• 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