Kayako vs. Pylon

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

I think Pylon is great for startups who are figuring out where they want to interact and how they want to interact with their customers. Pylon is also great for beginner account management in terms of keeping track of comms, usage, tickets, and a bit more. Overall, I think Pylon will scale nicely it just takes a bit of time to configure all (lots) of settings.I don't think Pylon is well-suited for teams who don't know much about support operations. The tool has so many great features an they ship super fast, but the product itself isn't very opinionated and the amount of options sometimes can be overwhelming

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

• Agent view customizations
• Account mangagement tools
• Feature / Tool feedback

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

• AI intentionality
• Linear integration

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

Incentivized

Overall, the UI is awesome and super intuitive. The features makes sense and everything is customizable to your liking. You don't need to create copies of filters, because the changing of filters on one saved few is THAT easy, which is something we love. Additionally, whenever we go to look for a capability or day dream about something... Pylon usually has it or its in the works. Only reason its not a 10 is that it can be overwhelming that it has everything, but a food problem to have

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

• 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

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

After evaluating both platforms, we chose Pylon for its superior user experience and deeper integration capabilities. Unlike Zendesk's frustrating UI and limited customization options, Pylon offered seamless integration with our existing tools like Salesforce, Linear, and PagerDuty, while allowing our team to stay within familiar Slack interfaces. The multi-channel notification system and AI-powered features like article generation provided the modern support infrastructure we needed, eliminating the complex rules and automations that made Zendesk cumbersome. Pylon's robust analytics and broadcast features also gave us valuable insights into customer engagement, making it the clear choice for streamlining our support workflows while enhancing both team efficiency and customer satisfaction.

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

• Team productivity
• Easier cross-functional collaboration
• better insights into customer issue tracking

Incentivized