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    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

    Progress Chef

    Score6.5 out of 10
    N/AChef IT infrastructure automation suites were developed by Chef Software in Seattle and acquired by Progress Software in September 2020. The Chef Enterprise Automation Stack is an integrated suite of automation technologies presented as a solution for delivering change quickly, repeatedly, and securely over every application's lifecycle. The Chef Effortless Infrastructure Suit is an integrated suite of automation technologies to codify infrastructure, security, and compliance, as well as…N/A
    Pricing
    KayakoProgress Chef
    Editions & Modules
    Kayako One
    $79
    per month
    Enterprise
    Contact Sales
    No answers on this topic
    Offerings
    Pricing Offerings
    KayakoProgress Chef
    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
    Community Pulse
    KayakoProgress Chef
    Considered Both Products
    Kayako
    No answer on this topic
    Progress Software
    No answer on this topic
    Key User Insights
    Would buy again
    No answers on this topic
    100%
    Would buy again
    6 Answers
    Delivers good value for the price
    No answers on this topic
    100%
    Delivers good value for the price
    6 Answers
    Happy with the feature set
    No answers on this topic
    100%
    Happy with the feature set
    6 Answers
    Lived up to sales and marketing promises
    No answers on this topic
    100%
    Lived up to sales and marketing promises
    6 Answers
    Implementation went as expected
    No answers on this topic
    100%
    Implementation went as expected
    6 Answers
    Features
    KayakoProgress Chef
    Incident and problem management
    Comparison of Incident and problem management features of Kayako and Progress Chef
    Feature
    Kayako
    2.0
    11 Ratings
    122% below category average
    Progress Chef
    -
    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 Progress Chef
    Feature
    Kayako
    1.0
    9 Ratings
    156% below category average
    Progress Chef
    -
    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 Progress Chef
    Feature
    Kayako
    1.0
    10 Ratings
    156% below category average
    Progress Chef
    -
    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
    KayakoProgress Chef
    Small Businesses
    Help Scout
    Score9.3 out of 10
    Salt
    Score6.2 out of 10
    Medium-sized Companies
    LiveAgent
    Score8.8 out of 10
    Perforce Puppet
    Score8.5 out of 10
    Enterprises
    Front
    Score9.2 out of 10
    Salt
    Score6.2 out of 10
    All AlternativesView all alternativesView all alternatives
    User Ratings
    KayakoProgress Chef
    Likelihood to Recommend
    1.0
    (22 ratings)
    8.9
    (18 ratings)
    Likelihood to Renew
    7.8
    (11 ratings)
    -
    (0 ratings)
    Usability
    10.0
    (1 ratings)
    7.3
    (1 ratings)
    Availability
    7.5
    (2 ratings)
    -
    (0 ratings)
    Performance
    -
    (0 ratings)
    9.4
    (5 ratings)
    Support Rating
    2.1
    (4 ratings)
    7.7
    (3 ratings)
    Implementation Rating
    9.0
    (2 ratings)
    -
    (0 ratings)
    Contract Terms and Pricing Model
    -
    (0 ratings)
    6.4
    (1 ratings)
    Ease of integration
    -
    (0 ratings)
    9.6
    (5 ratings)
    Professional Services
    -
    (0 ratings)
    9.1
    (1 ratings)
    User Testimonials
    KayakoProgress Chef
    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
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    Progress Software
    Chef is a fantastic tool for automating software deployments that aren't able to be containerized. It's more developer-oriented than its other competitors and thus allows you to do more with it. The Chef Infra Server software is rock-solid and has been extremely stable in our experience. I would definitely recommend its use if you're looking for an automation framework. And it also offers InSpec which is a very good tool for testing your infrastructure to ensure it deployed as intended.
    Incentivized
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    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
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    Progress Software
    • Chef is great at deploying code to both small and large groups of servers.
    • We use chef to standup new servers as well as deploy updated code to existing servers and it does this very well.
    • Being able to make a change and have it push manually or automatically to any subset of servers has changed the landscape of how our IT teams operate.
    Incentivized
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    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
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    Progress Software
    • Chef could do a better job with integration with other DevOps tools. Our company relies on Jenkins and Ansible, which took some development and convincing for plug-ins to be created/available.
    • It would be nice if kitchen didn't only have a vagrant/virtual-box prerequisite. Our company one day stop allowing virtual-box to run without special privileges, and that caused a lot of issues for people trying to do kitchen tests.
    • Chef could use more practice materials for the advanced certification badges. There was not a lot of guidance in what to study or examples of certain topics.
    Incentivized
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    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
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    Progress Software
    No answers on this topic
    Usability
    Kayako
    I did not come from an IT background and I picked this program up quickly
    Incentivized
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    Progress Software
    The suite of tools is very powerful. The ability to create custom modules allows for unlimited potential for managing all aspects of a system. However, there is pretty significant learning curve with the toolset. It currently takes approx 3-4 months for new engineers to feel comfortable with our implementation
    Incentivized
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    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
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    Progress Software
    No answers on this topic
    Performance
    Kayako
    No answers on this topic
    Progress Software
    It loads quick enough for basically all our systems. Because we have this for local dev environments, speed isn't really a big issue here. Yes, depending on the system, sometimes it does take a relatively long time, but it's not an issue for me. One thing that is annoying is that if I want to make a small change to a cookbook and re-run the Chef client, I can't just make the change in the cache and run it. I have to do the whole process of updating the server.
    Incentivized
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    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
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    Progress Software
    Support for Chef is easily available for fee or through the open source community as most the issues you will face will have been addressed through the Chef developer community forums. The documentation for Chef is moderate to great and easily readable.
    Incentivized
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    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
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    Progress Software
    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
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    Progress Software
    We considered the three leading competitors in the field: Chef, Puppet and Ansible. Ansible is a very strong competitor and has a nice degree of flexibility in that it does not require a client install. Instead the configuration is delivered by SSH which is very simple. Puppet seems like it has fallen off the pace of the competition and lacked the strong community offered by Chef. We chose Chef because of the strong support by the company and the dynamic and deep community support.
    Incentivized
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    Contract Terms and Pricing Model
    Kayako
    No answers on this topic
    Progress Software
    The pricing seemed inline with our products in this space. Nothing out of the ordinary in contract, term, or pricing structure
    Incentivized
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    Professional Services
    Kayako
    No answers on this topic
    Progress Software
    The entire professional services team was great to work with. The curriculum was tailored to our specific use cases. The group we worked with were very responsive, listened to our feedback, was very easy to schedule and accommodate. I cannot say enough good things about our professional services experience
    Incentivized
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    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
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    Progress Software
    • Chef is a good tool for baselining servers. It will be a good ROI when there are huge number of servers. For less number of servers maintaining a master will be an over head.
    • One good ROI will be that the Operations Team also gets into agile and DevOps methodologies. Operational teams can start writing scripts/automations to keep their infra more stable and their application stack more reliable.
    • Implementation of Chef eliminates the manual mode of doing things and everyone aligns to automation mind set. It helps in change of culture.
    Incentivized
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