Kayako vs. Salesforce Experience Cloud

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

For well-suited, this product is great for your external clientele groups that you would not necessarily want to have a high user fee rate for. So basically general public or a group that will be authorized to come in and just do a few things here and there, but you don't necessarily want them access to all of your systems and your data points for groups that it would not be a great use for. I'd say probably your high level internal staff, they're going to be using a lot of the backend functionality automations, evaluating data, managing data, and doing custom inputs. That's just not what's intended for.

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

• Easy to use, just like Salesforce's other products. Many users can sit down and figure it out in no time, and with a little training become power users.
• Fast and secure - Salesforce is a leader in the cloud world so you get consistently fast results and security that is top notch in the industry.
• Accessible from anywhere - if you use cloud CMS already this is a no-brainer, but for those that do in-house CMS still, this is a major difference. Mobile access from anywhere on the planet without a VPN is something you just can't do without the cloud.

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

• Unlike other CMS platforms like Wordpress and Adobe Experience Manager, Salesforce does not provide a fully featured editor with a drag-and-drop design tool.
• Our content creators and marketing team often struggle with permissions and how to distribute content across different experience cloud sites.
• Also, there is no side-to-side comparison view for content editors to update the content easily.

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

Renewal exercise is already underway. Platform is to ubiquitous to not leverage, especially at a Fortune 50 firm

Incentivized

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

Incentivized

Strengths: - Intuitive for Salesforce Users – If you’re already working within the Salesforce ecosystem, the Salesforce CMS is easy to navigate, with a clean UI, drag-and-drop content management, and reusable assets for quick updates. - Seamless Integration – Since it connects natively with Experience Cloud, Marketing Cloud, and CRM, it allows for efficient multi-channel content distribution without needing extra third-party tools. - AI-Powered Personalization – The ability to deliver dynamic content based on user profiles and engagement data is a huge plus, making content delivery more relevant and impactful. Challenges: - Learning Curve for New Users – If you're not already familiar with Salesforce, the interface can feel overwhelming, requiring training to fully leverage all features. - Limited Customization & Workflow Automation – While it works well for structured content, advanced approval workflows and deep editorial customization are limited compared to enterprise CMS platforms like Adobe Experience Manager. - Media & Design Limitations – Salesforce CMS is not as robust for managing rich media-heavy content, which can be frustrating for teams needing more flexibility in multimedia presentation.

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

Again, since we provide and recommend solutions, I can't speak to every client's individual experience, but can offer general reflections as to keep their collaborations private, that they are satisfied with the experience. We hear a lot about how this system helps to encourage collaborations between their own business partners, customers, and internal members, and enables quality integrations with other products that help drive revenue.

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

Although support from Salesforce itself can be quite unresponsive sometimes, the community hub is incredibly helpful. The large user base of Salesforce products contribute to troubleshooting and the forums are a powerful tool for finding solutions and possible bugs and response times can be quite fast compared to your regular support channels.

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

Salesforce Experience Cloud was selected due to its tight integration with our existing Salesforce CRM platform. Customization of the portal was much, much simpler compared to Sharepoint - especially with role-based security parameters that are ultimately inherited based on attributes within the Salesforce CRM platform. Salesforce Experience Cloud was a natural fit for this customer-facing purpose.

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

• Time savings for our customer success team - no need to continually follow up on tickets as customers have access to see status themselves
• In the future, it will also allow us to create more impactful knowledge articles that will increase self-service over ticket creation

Incentivized