TrustRadius: an HG Insights company

Save this comparison

Save this comparison

Add Product

Recommended Comparisons

    Overview
    ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price

    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

    Parature (Discontinued)

    Score5 out of 10
    N/AParature was a self-service customer support platform providing a self-service knowledge base to connect with customers across multiple channels. The company was acquired by Microsoft in January 2014 and reached EOL in 2017.N/A
    Pricing
    KayakoParature (Discontinued)
    Editions & Modules
    Kayako One
    $79
    per month
    Enterprise
    Contact Sales
    No answers on this topic
    Offerings
    Pricing Offerings
    KayakoParature (Discontinued)
    Free Trial
    YesNo
    Free/Freemium Version
    NoNo
    Premium Consulting/Integration Services
    NoNo
    Entry-level Setup FeeNo setup feeNo setup fee
    Additional Details——
    More Pricing Information
    Features
    KayakoParature (Discontinued)
    Incident and problem management
    Comparison of Incident and problem management features of Kayako and Parature (Discontinued)
    Feature
    Kayako
    2.0
    11 Ratings
    122% below category average
    Parature (Discontinued)
    -
    Ratings
    Organize and prioritize service tickets1.011 Ratings00 Ratings
    Expert directory1.05 Ratings00 Ratings
    Subscription-based notifications1.08 Ratings00 Ratings
    ITSM collaboration and documentation1.07 Ratings00 Ratings
    Ticket creation and submission7.011 Ratings00 Ratings
    Ticket response1.011 Ratings00 Ratings
    Self Help Community
    Comparison of Self Help Community features of Kayako and Parature (Discontinued)
    Feature
    Kayako
    1.0
    9 Ratings
    156% below category average
    Parature (Discontinued)
    -
    Ratings
    External knowledge base1.09 Ratings00 Ratings
    Internal knowledge base1.08 Ratings00 Ratings
    Multi-Channel Help
    Comparison of Multi-Channel Help features of Kayako and Parature (Discontinued)
    Feature
    Kayako
    1.0
    10 Ratings
    156% below category average
    Parature (Discontinued)
    -
    Ratings
    Customer portal1.07 Ratings00 Ratings
    IVR1.02 Ratings00 Ratings
    Social integration1.04 Ratings00 Ratings
    Email support1.010 Ratings00 Ratings
    Help Desk CRM integration1.06 Ratings00 Ratings
    Best Alternatives
    KayakoParature (Discontinued)
    Small Businesses
    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
    Enterprises
    Front
    Score9.2 out of 10
    Front
    Score9.2 out of 10
    All AlternativesView all alternativesView all alternatives
    User Ratings
    KayakoParature (Discontinued)
    Likelihood to Recommend
    1.0
    (22 ratings)
    6.7
    (10 ratings)
    Likelihood to Renew
    7.8
    (11 ratings)
    6.1
    (10 ratings)
    Usability
    10.0
    (1 ratings)
    2.0
    (2 ratings)
    Availability
    7.5
    (2 ratings)
    7.5
    (2 ratings)
    Support Rating
    2.1
    (4 ratings)
    1.0
    (1 ratings)
    Implementation Rating
    9.0
    (2 ratings)
    -
    (0 ratings)
    User Testimonials
    KayakoParature (Discontinued)
    Likelihood to Recommend
    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
    Discontinued Products
    The single element of Parature I've not seen in any other system of this kind is the Download Module. You can post files in the open, or protect them by any number of entitlement methods. The solution is also appealing to those who don't want to manage the back-end/IT needs as it is a hosted solution and has proven to be very reliable.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Pros
    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
    Discontinued Products
    • Clean/Friendly UI. It was extremely easy to navigate around Parature's menus at a high level, and you could take advantage of the more robust features as you became more comfortable and familiar with how Parature operates!
    • Strong Knowledge Base. Writing KB articles or ticket summaries and making use of the search function within Parature allows for expedient recovery of past ticket information. Being able to search for a fix action, or at least a troubleshooting article that can guide you towards a resolution is extremely valuable.
    • Enhanced Notation Capability. Being able to send/post internal or external updates to a ticket is great! You can leave the wordy technical details for other employees while making sure to communicate the high-points and fix action to the end-user.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Cons
    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
    Discontinued Products
    • Reporting is barebones at best. If you need special reports, we had to go through Parature to have them built.
    • The use of frames on a website is very 1990s. It actually impacts usability of the product, especially when combined with how Parature handled sessions. An engineer could only work one ticket at a time which, honestly, isn't very realistic for a busy support team that is working on several issues at a time.
    • Support was often unresponsive when contacted for unplanned problems.
    • The knowledge base was not very friendly for clients and it provided no real encouragement for it to be used.
    • It took several clicks to do something as simple as edit and assign a ticket or to close a ticket.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Likelihood to Renew
    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
    Discontinued Products
    Parature has been the best option for this campus in terms of what we use it for and there is no alternative
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Usability
    Kayako
    I did not come from an IT background and I picked this program up quickly
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Discontinued Products
    It was bulky, cumbersome, and didn't allow us to handle the volume of cases we received on a daily basis. Many of our issues were highly technical in nature and we would often need to work on 2 or 3 at once. The poor design choices prevented this, which was unfortunate.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Reliability and Availability
    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
    Discontinued Products
    They recently had one very extended outage. It was a data center issue - but they were not diversified enough so in the end the system was down for almost 8 hours. There are also periods of time where for no reason the system simply doesn't respond. This small outages are usually short (just a few minutes), and have in fact been occurring less often, so it appears some corrective actions have been taken.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Support Rating
    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
    Discontinued Products
    Nothing ever seemed to get resolved
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Implementation Rating
    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
    Discontinued Products
    No answers on this topic
    Alternatives Considered
    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
    Discontinued Products
    There are services that do bits and pieces of what Parature does. We liked the idea of having one service that meets our needs
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Return on Investment
    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
    Discontinued Products
    • Parature allows for better Customer Service
    • Can follow up automatically for tickets
    • Will automatically close tickets that haven't been responded to.
    • Allows customers to reopen tickets easily and not allow them to be missed.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    ScreenShots