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
View PricingOverview
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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- Competitors
- Tech 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 Mid-sized Companies (51-1,000 employees).
Comparisons
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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
(1-4 of 4)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.
- Ticketing
- SLA Tracking
50%
5.0
N/A
N/A
76%
7.6
- Quick responses to questions.
- Gives users a platform to submit trouble tickets, including security issues.
- Created a collaborative support culture.
- Spiceworks and Zendesk
Kayako is way more scalable than Spiceworks' helpdesk offering. We had trouble visualizing our current layout within their environment.
Zendesk was priced quite a bit higher than Kayako while offering similar functionality. It didn't make sense to want to migrate to a new platform.
We have also evaluated various Sharepoint-based help desks, but their speed and reliability did not match our standards for what a help desk should be.
Zendesk was priced quite a bit higher than Kayako while offering similar functionality. It didn't make sense to want to migrate to a new platform.
We have also evaluated various Sharepoint-based help desks, but their speed and reliability did not match our standards for what a help desk should be.
Yes. We believe that premium support is necessary for such an important system. It's sad they really don't hold their end of the bargain anymore. When we used their on-premise version they were attentive, and supported most of the issues we'd run into. Now, it's difficult to get any support.
Yes
Early on, yes, but within the last 6 months we've had many issues, and none of them seem to be fully resolved, and none in any kind of timely fashion. We don't know when anything goes down until we're waiting for pages/tickets to open and nothing happens. Then we open a ticket, (don't try emailing the support box on their website, it doesn't work!) and we wait hours, things get restored and we get a generic "there was a system wide outage today for x hours"
No
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
71.66666666666667%
7.2
75%
7.5
18%
1.8
- Kayako was fairly priced at the time for the On-Prem solution, so good ROI because the investment was small
Jira is much more pricey but more complete. It integrates with our Scrum Board and Agile Software Development platform. So we can much more easily turn Tickets into User Stories, and our techs and devs only have to live in one software platform instead of having to switch between multiple and copy and paste so much.
December 20, 2014
Kayako Review
We use Kayako as our online support interface for all issue affecting our software. In the support department this is the only outside tool we use. This is used across our whole organization as a way to support and track software issues.
- Easy to use
- I have never had a failure
- Has great reporting features
- Great interface
- I have had only one issue with selecting different views. This is a pretty solid product.
- I know this helps our efficiency in support! The ability to track all these tickets and see exactly how much work each person is doing is phenomenal.
150
Support and Sales, we mainly use it to track all software issues and to track sales.
- Don't know
Yes
Within hours we have had all issues resolved.
We had an instance where our interface was not usable for a few hours. They got it back up and running quickly.
- Just the everyday tracking of support issues is GREAT. The ability to quickly filter tickets by any measure is incredibly helpful!
- Color codes are well thought out and give you information about tickets at just a glance.
- The views have caused me some issues.
Yes
I have only used it a few times outside of the office, but it is a great way to provide support without opening your PC.
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.
- Customers get an immediate reply even when our team is backlogged with requests
- Customers who wouldn't normally pick up a phone can get quick access to a rep for help with purchasing decisions. Reps can address multiple customers at a time over live chat assuming that they are not being overly demanding.
- When compared to our old methodology of using Outlook to handle a high volume of customer requests Kayako is not only more efficient but gives the CS Manager a lot more accountability for her reps.
- Zendesk,LivePerson
We went with Kayako at the time of purchase because there was a much more cost effective self-hosted option that we have been able to leverage to our benefit. That option has become much more expensive now, but we feel like we'd still make the decision again.
8
Our customer service team accounts for the bulk of our Kayako usage.
1
- Familiarity with Linux and the LAMP/LEMP stack is essentially if you are using the self hosted version
- We don't use the SaaS offering but I imagine it would be a lot more hands off
- Live Chat for customer facing support
- Handles all inbound email for our customer service team
- Provides reporting to our Management team re: the efficacy of the CS Team
- We continue to add ticket parsing and filtering as a way to make sure the right people see the right tickets
- As new issues develop we continue to add canned replies to aid our team
- Implemented in-house
No
Change management was a big part of the implementation and was well-handled
Cutting them off from their old solution cold-turkey was very important to user adoption. There was some initial resistance at first but we managed to overcome it over the course of a few weeks.
- Users dragged their feet and did not want to change their very broken workflow
Yes
Yes, and within less than 10m from start to finish.
Kayako support went above and beyond by helping me work out kinks with what at the time was a technically unsupported configuration (we had accidentally upgraded to too new of a version of PHP)