I believe that buyers should beware of Kayako
We used Kayako as our main ticket and helpdesk system to provide automated ticket generation and job management.
Starting at $29 per month
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What is Kayako?
Kayako is a help desk / ticketing product and is available is both SaaS and on-premise configurations. Is is built in PHP and uses my SQL. The product competes with HelpSpot, ZohoSupport, Freshdesk and Zendesk. The Kayako Engage edition may be…
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Popular Features
- Ticket creation and submission (11)7.070%
- Organize and prioritize service tickets (11)1.010%
- Ticket response (11)1.010%
- Email support (10)1.010%
Reviewer Pros & Cons
Pricing
Inbox
$15.00
Cloud
Per User Per Month
Growth
$30.00
Cloud
Per User Per Month
Scale
$60.00
Cloud
Per User Per Month
Entry-level set up fee?
- No setup fee
Offerings
- Free Trial
- Free/Freemium Version
- Premium Consulting/Integration Services
Starting price (does not include set up fee)
- $29 per month
Features
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Product Details
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What is Kayako?
Kayako Competitors
Kayako Technical Details
| Deployment Types | Software as a Service (SaaS), Cloud, or Web-Based |
|---|---|
| Operating Systems | Unspecified |
| Mobile Application | No |
Frequently Asked Questions
Kayako is a help desk / ticketing product and is available is both SaaS and on-premise configurations. Is is built in PHP and uses my SQL. The product competes with HelpSpot, ZohoSupport, Freshdesk and Zendesk.
The Kayako Engage edition may be deployed as a live chat system without ticketing at a reduced cost, featuring click-to-call and site visitor monitoring for customer targeting and engagement.
Kayako starts at $29.
Reviewers rate Ticket creation and submission highest, with a score of 7.
The most common users of Kayako are from Small Businesses (1-50 employees).
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Reviews and Ratings
(46)
Community Insights
TrustRadius Insights are summaries of user sentiment data from TrustRadius reviews and, when necessary, 3rd-party data sources. Have feedback on this content? Let us know!
- Business Problems Solved
- Recommendations
Kayako Fusion has been widely adopted by organizations to improve their customer service operations. Users have found that the software allows them to efficiently handle support tickets and maintain a personalized approach to customer interactions. The canned replies feature has proven to be effective in addressing common issues, while still providing a hands-on feel in customer communications. The self-hosted version of Kayako Fusion has demonstrated its reliability even during heavy traffic spikes, ensuring seamless customer support. The software's email support ticketing system has simplified the process for customers to send support requests and has enabled easy tracking and distribution of work to employees. Additionally, users have leveraged the powerful API provided by Kayako Fusion to create tools that enhance and expand the functionality of the software. For example, websites built using the Kayako Fusion API display real-time ticket queue information and alert the help desk about new tickets, resulting in quicker response times. The ability to directly interface with the database has allowed users to customize Kayako Fusion by building modules tailored to their specific business needs, such as a billing module with customized billing rules. Users have also appreciated the ease of configuration modifications and file uploads within Kayako Fusion's database-centric architecture, eliminating the need for permissions on multiple directories. With features like the option to choose between storing file attachments in the database or on the file system, Kayako Fusion offers flexibility in managing the database footprint. Regular backups of both the webserver directory and database ensure data reliability and safety for organizations using Kayako Fusion. Overall, customers have expressed satisfaction with Kayako Fusion, praising its performance as a reliable and versatile system for managing support tickets and facilitating effective customer communications. The software has been utilized across various industries and departments, serving as a case management tool, workflow tool, and company-wide ticketing system. Whether it is used by managed service providers to track service requests across different client companies or by organizations for software issue support and tracking, Kayako Fusion has consistently delivered the desired results. Users have found Kayako Fusion to be easy to program and have appreciated its reliability and the availability of customer support. The software has proved valuable as a help desk system, efficiently routing trouble tickets to the appropriate IT professionals and improving overall efficiency and reliability compared to previous systems. Kayako Fusion has been utilized in many ways, including organizing customer issues, requests, and ideas, facilitating direct communication with clients, tracking user issues and resolutions in IT departments, serving as a ticketing system for clients to submit support questions or issues, and functioning as a knowledge base for self-help documentation. The versatility of Kayako Fusion is evident in its institutional-wide use for IT and academic technology support in educational institutions, benefiting students, employees, and faculty members. Moreover, Kayako Fusion has been utilized by customers and potential customers for various purposes, including sales, support, customer service, and accounting. The software seamlessly converts emails into tickets and organizes them based on their status, progress, source, time, assignee, and intended procedure. Integration with third-party apps and APIs allows for the automatic import of tickets from different channels, such as Gmail and the company's built-in support system. For IT departments specifically, Kayako Fusion serves as a comprehensive tool for tracking user issues and resolutions, managing change and patch management processes, as well as handling permissions requests and user access changes. In addition to its efficiency in streamlining support operations, Kayako Fusion also serves as a ticketing system that provides a paper trail and historic record of client communications. Users have leveraged this feature to maintain a documented history of interactions with clients. In summary, Kayako Fusion has proven itself as a versatile solution used in various industries and departments to enhance customer support operations, track service requests and issues efficiently, improve workflow management, facilitate direct communication with clients, and serve as an institution-wide tool for IT support in educational institutions.
Users commonly recommend thoroughly researching and testing different helpdesk products before choosing Kayako. They advise evaluating the organization's needs and comparing them to the features offered by Kayako. However, they think Kayako is overpriced for the features it delivers.
Users suggest trying Kayako to experience its usefulness, emphasizing that it is user-friendly and intuitive. They also recommend not being afraid to use Kayako and suggest it for small and mid-sized companies as it helps save time and efforts in organizing emails and messages. Proper training and defining processes are advised to avoid struggles with ticket creation and information retrieval.
Additionally, users recommend exploring other options like Salesforce Essentials or Agile CRM for integrated helpdesk features. They believe Kayako is an excellent product for basic customer support but may not be suitable for advanced functionality or robust custom fields. They recommend trying out the demo and contacting support for any questions.
Users find the knowledge base feature of Kayako great and easy to set up. However, they think the live chat and support platforms may be better in other products. They mention that customer service is easier and faster with Kayako compared to live chat.
Overall, users appreciate the ease of use, simple setup, and customer satisfaction of Kayako. They suggest reading the documentation for better understanding and utilization of the software. Furthermore, they recommend Kayako for companies in the beginning stages with budget constraints and basic support needs.
Lastly, users suggest adding more custom reporting options and introducing collaborators to the Inbox plan. They recommend using the cloud version of Kayako to avoid purchasing hardware but also mention that the self-hosted version can be considered as an alternative option.
Attribute Ratings
Reviews
(1-8 of 8)Companies can't remove reviews or game the system. Here's why
April 20, 2021
A solid, stable, feature-loaded help desk
We currently use Kayako as a company-wide ticketing system. We have multiple departments set up, and the whole experience is quite seamless. It's great being able to transfer tickets between departments. Once we started rolling this out, more departments asked to be added on, because they were impressed with the system. We also have a huge network of external users who communicate with our support departments almost exclusively through Kayako.
- Ticketing system.
- Multiple departments/groups.
- Ease of use for all users.
- Insight and reporting.
- SLA Management and visibility.
- Price continues to increase.
- There are some quirky errors, sometimes a response isn't recorded properly and an SLA is missed because of it. Sometimes an error message pops up that doesn't actually affect anything.
- Could always use more reporting.
- Macros could be a little more configurable.
- The performance has been really bad lately. Minutes to load tickets, or the inability to log in.
February 19, 2020
Kayako worked great while it lasted
- We used Kayako as our primary IT Help Desk ticketing system. We purchased and used the On-Prem version and quite some success in its implementation.
- Kayako allowed us to easily manage Help Tickets, communicate with our users, document all our past tickets, and create a knowledge base to help users and personnel look up and store past issues and solutions.
- Help Desk Ticketing
- Knowledge Base
- The usability could be improved to reduce the learning curve.
- Make it easier to reply to a customer
March 29, 2018
Kayako is BETTER than you think!
Our entire organization uses Kayako to conduct business. It is used to transfer work from one person to another, escalate to another group and until just recently, track efforts in our Development Department.
It is a very easy way to understand what issues a customer has, what the status of that issue is, who had it, what is the history of the effort on the customer's behalf and who has done what so far.
It is a very easy way to understand what issues a customer has, what the status of that issue is, who had it, what is the history of the effort on the customer's behalf and who has done what so far.
- 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.
- I personally find the reporting a bit difficult. We are on an older version of Kayako and I am told that reporting on the new version is much improved.
- There are some things missing in the new version that we were used to in the older version. Not sure how they came about what to keep or get rid of. Some of them are quite missed.
- Would like to see reporting done in a way that you pick what you want to report on and hit generate. No special "Language" skills needed.
October 17, 2017
Highly Priced Support/Upgrades
Score 1 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
The download version is excellent software and has many great features for supporting customers via email, telephone, and live chat.
- Customer Service Tickets
- Live Chat Functionality
- Terrible Customer Service
- Overpriced Support Charges For Existing Customers
- Many Bugs - Requiring An Expensive Support Agreement
April 08, 2015
Kayako API and direct database access
Kayako was used at a past organization for support tickets via email. We restricted use to email in most cases and did not expose the Kayako interface to our customers. We wanted a simple email address they could send support requests to that would allow us to track and distribute work to employees. Kayako provided this. We purchased and hosted Kayako in-house so there were not any 3rd party dependencies..
Kayako has an API that allowed us to build tools to interface and expand Kayako's functionality. We used the API to build a website that would show how many tickets were in queue and would alert the help desk to new tickets from a large display with an audible noise that had the website up 24x7. This allowed for us to have very quick response times to new tickets that came in as they had to be acknowledged to make the loud beeping alert stop.
Since Kayako runs on an open source database (mysql) and we had control of the infrastructure that it was hosted on, it allowed us to directly interface the database to further expand functionality. We built a billing module outside of what Kayako offers for billing that allowed us to pull the specific data we needed to bill our customers. This gave us the capability to apply different rules to customers and how they were billed based on defined rules we setup. The custom interface also put data in a format that was easier to work with for our billing department.
From a technical standpoint Kayako is versatile, but there are some oddities to the way they track certain things that may require internal business rules. For instance, they have the time worked and time billed as separate fields on a ticket. This can be very nice if used correctly, but seemed redundant to employees and sometimes they would not input data correctly. This was another reason we elected to write our own billing module so that we could have more insight into what data was pulled and highlight areas that may have been worked but not billed so that the differences could be investigated.
Kayako stores almost everything in the database. This is very nice for modifying things and not needing permissions on a bunch of directories for configurations and file uploads. For our organization (less than 10 users) this worked great and we never had any problems. I did worry about what response times would be from the database and if it would slow down in the event we were to have a large number of concurrent users. Every page load had numerous queries to the database. I would think it could benefit from memcached to assist in scaling to larger environments.
File attachment storage location was a configurable option as to whether they were stored in the database or on the file system, so that gave the option of keeping the database footprint much smaller.
Backups of Kayako were very straight forward. We backed up the directory for the webserver with rsync every hour, and the database was backed up daily with mysqldump and we also stored incremental backups every 15 minutes from mysql's binary logs.
Overall we were happy with how Kayako performed. It is not the cheapest system we evaluated, but it did work better than many of the open source solutions we evaluated.
Kayako has an API that allowed us to build tools to interface and expand Kayako's functionality. We used the API to build a website that would show how many tickets were in queue and would alert the help desk to new tickets from a large display with an audible noise that had the website up 24x7. This allowed for us to have very quick response times to new tickets that came in as they had to be acknowledged to make the loud beeping alert stop.
Since Kayako runs on an open source database (mysql) and we had control of the infrastructure that it was hosted on, it allowed us to directly interface the database to further expand functionality. We built a billing module outside of what Kayako offers for billing that allowed us to pull the specific data we needed to bill our customers. This gave us the capability to apply different rules to customers and how they were billed based on defined rules we setup. The custom interface also put data in a format that was easier to work with for our billing department.
From a technical standpoint Kayako is versatile, but there are some oddities to the way they track certain things that may require internal business rules. For instance, they have the time worked and time billed as separate fields on a ticket. This can be very nice if used correctly, but seemed redundant to employees and sometimes they would not input data correctly. This was another reason we elected to write our own billing module so that we could have more insight into what data was pulled and highlight areas that may have been worked but not billed so that the differences could be investigated.
Kayako stores almost everything in the database. This is very nice for modifying things and not needing permissions on a bunch of directories for configurations and file uploads. For our organization (less than 10 users) this worked great and we never had any problems. I did worry about what response times would be from the database and if it would slow down in the event we were to have a large number of concurrent users. Every page load had numerous queries to the database. I would think it could benefit from memcached to assist in scaling to larger environments.
File attachment storage location was a configurable option as to whether they were stored in the database or on the file system, so that gave the option of keeping the database footprint much smaller.
Backups of Kayako were very straight forward. We backed up the directory for the webserver with rsync every hour, and the database was backed up daily with mysqldump and we also stored incremental backups every 15 minutes from mysql's binary logs.
Overall we were happy with how Kayako performed. It is not the cheapest system we evaluated, but it did work better than many of the open source solutions we evaluated.
- Kayako handles email integration through pop very well
- Kayako is very configurable
- Kayako's API was well documented and easy to implement custom scripts against.
- Kayako has a large number of queries to the database for each page load. This is fine for small installations, but I would think it could become a burden in large instances (this is for self hosted version only)
- Kayako allows for so much information that it can take awhile to get it configured to just ask for what you need and not overwhelm you with options
- Not necessarily a Kayako issue, but we ran into a problem where a ticket was "stuck in the queue" It turned out that there was an attachment larger than what the php was configured to support, so the ticket would be created, but because the attachment would fail to upload correctly, it would not remove the item from the pop mailbox and it would download it again and again and again until we figured out the issue. If they were to wrap the ticket creation into a transaction and not create the ticket prior to fully processing the message they could then check the error response code on file upload and maybe create a single message that indicated the real problem.
February 25, 2015
Kayako is a Great Product!
We use Kayako for sales, support, customer service and accounting. Our customers and potential customers use this to communicate issues, advise of payments, and for troubleshooting technical issues.
- Great visibility as far as how old a ticket is and how urgent the issue is. This aids in prioritizing.
- The search engine could use improvement, it's very difficult to find things using the search engine.
February 04, 2015
Kayako has been everything we needed, and more!
We would not be able to do our job without Kayako. In the old days, we managed our customer issues in a Gmail inbox. This caused for double work, employees tripping over each other, and accidentally deleting information. This caused pain for ourselves and our customers when their issues would slip through the cracks.
With Kayako all those pains are gone. We love Kayako!!!
With Kayako all those pains are gone. We love Kayako!!!
- Work with multiple team members at the same time on multiple chains of communication.
- Keep on track of daily duties.
- Stay organized.
- They really do everything that we need. I know we don't take advantage of all the features that they offer.
August 01, 2014
Keep customers coming back with Kayako
We implemented Kayako Fusion (download) as a way to streamline the relationship between our Customer Service team and our customers. It allows us to use canned replies for common issues while still maintaining a very hands on feel to our customer interactions. We elected to use the self-hosted version and have had a great experience with it even during our heaviest traffic spikes.
- Over the years they've continued to enhance the product and user experience on all fronts. Changes have always felt well thought out and purposeful and the UI has only gotten easier to use over time.
- Kayako's mail parser allows you to easily sort, prioritize, and present the information needed by your staff to easily tackle an onslaught of customer tickets.
- The system has scaled very easily over the years. We use it for one of our Retail sites that has anywhere from 10k to 15k unique views a day and it has never felt sluggish or degraded even under a heavy load.
- Adjusting the templates can be very tedious as each update includes a manual reversion process. While it isn't a big deal if you're using a mostly vanilla design I can imagine it would become tedious for a more involved UI change.
- The update process is easy enough but could obviously take some pointers from Wordpress in terms of making them more streamlined.
- The price has gone up substantially since we originally bought in, while I feel that we'd still have gotten our money out of it either way it is definitely much more of a hurdle than it used to be.