Kayako

Pros

I was able to resolve a customer issue quickly by tracking their ticket and providing a solution, all in one platform.

Cons

When I tried to find a specific report, the cluttered interface made it hard to locate the feature.

Pros

Really easy and streamlined customer experience. The support for a JWT-based sign in for customers into the help centre means that people have a single account to sign in to everything, rather than creating separate accounts like you'd have to do with Zendesk or similar, and it just makes life a whole lot easier overall. The widget is nicely-designed, neat and unobtrusive.

Cons

For a single agent, the plans are quite expensive, especially if you want functionality like customer SSO. I also find the notifications it provides are very iffy, sometimes not being delivered - and for some infuriating reason, there's no option to deliver emails for replies only when you're not already online!

Alternatives Considered

Reasons for Switching to Kayako

Pros

We were long time Kayako users. In the past, support was responsive. For the classic version, ticketing functions were functional.

Cons

Unfortunately, they were bought out by another company and have gone downhill. Support is often unable to assist with issues. Billing is frequently incorrect. The parent company is trying to move functions out of Kayako.

Pros

Kayako streamlines customer interactions by centralizing all inquiries onto a single platform. This enables efficient organization and tracking, while facilitating multi-channel customer engagement.

Cons

I have no negative aspects to point out regarding this platform.

Pros

It’s great to have all customer interactions in one place, making it easy to track and resolve issues, such as quickly finding past conversations to address a follow-up query.

Cons

I feel Kayako can be a bit overwhelming for new users. For example, navigating through all the features and setting up.

Pros

I like using Kayako because you can configure your customer support system to your own environment, and it's very easy to use. Customers can connect to the in your own environment, or directly via social networks.

Cons

there is a lot of improvement to do, like the customer service, but it is a good tool

Pros

Kayako has been the best communication platform for professional communication that I have used so far. Kayako is recommended for both inter-team and external - client communication. The best feature of kayako is that it allows you to organize your emails into folder based on departments, status and the nature of the email content.
Also using other type of email platforms has been a worry at times and time consuming when trying to find all the back and forth communication happened on one email thread by multiple people, but kayako provides the best solution by capturing all the communication happened on one subject/email which is sent and received by one or many, in the same email thread which we call a "Ticket"

Interface of kayako can be designed and created as per the user's requirement and preference.
Also referring to an email has been very convenient as each ticket carries its own unique Ticket ID.

It also provides reports on emails based on its nature. ex: overdue, received within 24hrs and etc based on rules we set which allows to the user to be more organized, effective and proactive.

Cons

Understanding and using the software is essential as it doesn't function like other email platforms but has its own organized interface. Inter team communication The software is mainly build for professional communication however I wish it could have few other options like adding colors, tables and etc but apart from that no other cons to mention.

Pros

It covers many areas of daily conversation handling activities: Ticket, Incident, Problem, and Complaint handling situations. If the basics do not suffice, custom fields and tracking options help iron out missing pieces. It contains a Knowledgebase that allows you to record Articles and information. Survey system (very handy for Event-Driven Surveys); Reporting options and quick access to tickets. One of the KEY FEATURES is that the tool is FAST and keeps a focus on the work area for staff, rather cluttering everything with detail fields. Finally, the web-interface is fully customizable and very useful in granting options to access the conversation handling tool. Did I mention Kayako Services being great in helping to resolve questions and issues when contacted? They do this very well!

Cons

It lacks a few items that I wish would be included (software is always under constant development, and Kayako customer service is very responsive and friendly): proper comprehensive auditing when tickets are handled (like automatically submitted communications recorded with date and time); Complaint Handling structures based on tickets; improved linkages between tickets (though possible it is not done in a single click); KBA link to tickets; Reporting is nice though it lacks options to customize charts, colors and the way detail can be presented (formatting through configuration rather customization). Another drawback in a recent release is that a lot of browser cell padding has been introduced causing the display of elements unnecessarily spread out across a regular HD monitor. Luckily this can be customized using CSS injection or system-wide CSS manipulation.

Pros

Kayako helps me organize my tickets into as many folders I want, thus making me work on those tickets conveniently and effectively. If I am an admin or have admin access to my staff folders I can also access all of their folders to get an update on tickets. It's easy to learn and use. I love the reports feature on Kayako. We can create as many reports we want and automate them. The follow ups feature is also great to keep track of pending tasks and serves as good reminder.

Cons

There are a few issues I encountered as I worked on Kayako. Kayako doesn't allow us format the font or content, so underlining, italicizing etc is not possible in an email. We cannot include images, charts or graphs in the body of the email. When you hit reply on a ticket, the original email thread is not included. So if you need to know the previous conversation, we need to copy and paste the email.

Pros

The new interface is very modern and much more exciting than the other interface. It is much faster and friendlier to use. The support is available for questions and bugs, whereas some competitors do not offer support of implementation. The price of the software is a little steep when comparing it to competitors that offer more, but being a Kayako customer for 10+ years on a perpetual license granted us a pretty steep discount that made the pricing make more sense for us.

Cons

I wish they had more features such as ability to get more customer feedback which would help our product development. There are other software similar to Kayako that have a feedback component that allow users to voice their "opinions" and then other users can vote on that. I would like to see this in Kayako and have been asking for about 10 years now.

Pros

I found Kayako to be an easy-to-use product. The user interface is intuitive, making it straightforward to manage customer inquiries. Overall, a positive experience

Cons

While my experience with Kayako has been generally positive, I must note that I did not extensively explore its analytical features (if any). As such, I'm unable to provide specific feedback on that aspect. However, incorporating robust analytical tools could potentially enhance the platform's overall utility and offer users valuable insights. It might be worth considering as a future addition to further elevate the user experience

Pros

this software really allowed me to develop communication and develop a good customer system within our organization. very easy to use

Cons

I do not encounter any problem in the use of this software. But the price is high.the free version looks a bit different to me than the paid version

Pros

As we use Kayako for a long time (since 2012?) you get used to it which makes it difficult answer. Thinking about it stability comes into mind. Beside usual software bugs our system is very stable and reliable and doesn't need much maintenance. We like the new UI that came with classic 4.90 as it gives a modern look. From the feature perspective ticket management works very well for us in general but there isn't a particular feature to high light.

Cons

In first place we are missing the commitment for Kayako classic. Nothing has happened since two years (going to cloud announcement). However, this might change now. There are a lot of things that can be improved like Knowledge Base, File management, workflow, troubleshooting, etc. Back porting some of the new cloud features would be also much appreciated team collaboration, one workflow, etc. Lastly a much better and faster context aware search would help us a lot.
All of this has recently discussed with our new Kayako contacts.

Pros

- Fast to load
- Just enough features to handle customer support request via a ticketing system

Cons

- Cumbersome and ugly UI makes difficult to find what you're looking for if you don't know where to look
- Lack of flexibility to manage tickets and assign them to the team
- Some features missing

Pros

Kayako provides the flexibility we need to keep engaged and communicated both with our external and internal customers. Our support departments love the simplicity and clarity of the communication, and our clients have gained a tool through which they feel close to our team. Working with Kayako has made our life easier!

Cons

There are not many cons to our experience. Even as we believe that the tool might help us better integrate additional internal users to simplify the behind-the-scenes processes we have, we do believe that they way the tool is built now is great.

Pros

Email queue functionality and the user interface.

Cons

It does not have much capability in reporting functionality.

Pros

Customer support are great, they're really helping and I'm getting a great service.
They're answering tickets really quick as well.

Cons

1. Reports aren't that professional with the Classic Kayako, and the KQL is hard to understand, i believe that you have to make it a bit easier and user friendly.

2. I would like to upgrade to Cloud Kayako, but there is a missing feature which is highly important for me, the "Follow up" feature, this feature letting me create a trigger that will open my ticket after several minutes, this feature implanted only in the Classic Kayako.

3. From the moment you've changed your pricing method, it's a bit expensive.. and while having customers that would like to get reports (most important for them) Kayako Classic at least doesn't give the best value here, i don't know about Cloud Kayako.

Pros

Kayako is an efficient ticket management system and it's affordable.

Cons

Occasionally there will be issues when creating tickets or adding attachments and multiple attempts will need to be made.

Pros

Value for money, we've been using Kayako for years now and it works perfect with high volume of mails.

Cons

Keeping the software up to date, it takes us time to upgrade and go offline for a few moments. But that's also on us, cause we host it ourselves.

Pros

Having complete control of the software including custom branding makes using Kayako a good software support system. Everything is very simple to use and new users can pick up the software very fast.

Cons

There are features that are confusing to a beginning user. It does not integrate with other software very easily if at all where other support systems do.

Pros

1. Easy to install
2. Intuitive UI
3. Very responsive customer support

Cons

1. Tickets searching should be improved to make it faster and more efficient

Pros

The download version is excellent software and has many great features for supporting customers via email, telephone and live chat.

Cons

Kayako charge existing customers that have perpetual licenses extremely high charges for support. Kayako introduced new excessive support and upgrade charges well beyond the original agreement that perpetual licences holders had originally agreed and signed up for. Failure to pay the additional charges means that software updates are not available. Kayako has many bugs which are resolved with the upgrades.

Pros

The Kayako helpdesk is very helpfull
Various options to customize your ticket fields
Easy users permissions/role management

Cons

UX is bad
Ticket search options have some annoying restrictions
Kayako doesn't have many options to link to other systems
Reports seems at first fine but when trying to do more fancy stuff the KQL language proves to be very limited
Kayako can 't be compared to other systems like the Atlassian HelpDesk tool

Pros

Kayako has a modern fast interface that will guide you what queries you want to know , and the fast response from the server , also its mobile application .
Easy update the tickets , replay , attach files . Users and department managing is

Cons

I was fetching a query to make csv or excel report exported for the tickets opened during last year for example , I made copy and past for all pages ! . I wonder if there is a way to export the list of critical tickets for example other than the way I used .
Also , Manual Backup was removed from the tools .
The monthly fees is high related to the dollar increasing .

Pros

- Great help center - one of the best
- Good article search
- Innovative customization in the messenger

Cons

- Not easy to set up integrations
- Chats & emails are hard to differentiate between
- User interface/user experience for agents & admins could use improvement

Pros

Easy to identify what we need to use to support customer

Cons

Kayako most of the time is laggy and affects overall performance of our agents

Pros

It is one of the best ticketing and support system I have worked on. It user interface is quite friendly. I can managed unassigned tickets easily by assigning it to relevant persons. It keep the track of all tickets, open, in progress and closed ones. The thing I liked the most is its on going monitoring of tickets, once a ticket cross a specified time defined, that ticket has got highlighted which means an overdue ticket requires you immediate attention. Further I can make Marcos, which helps me to use standard answers without writing the whole message again and again. It has provided to manage and generate customer reports as per your need, which is quite a good feature. It allows to make different sections and sub section which helps for better management of your tickets. Its knowledge base option is fantastic where we can made glossary of different topics and FAQ for users in order to help the community. Adding notes to the users and on current tickets is one of the great features of this software which allows the other users to understand the user and help them accordingly.

Cons

The only problem I have experienced is, there has been a lag while using it with FirFox in Windows 7 Plate form. Sometime the keyboard stops responding and despite the typing nothing has been going to write on the answer section of the ticket which sometimes is very annoying.

Pros

Kayako handles general ticketing and routing reasonably well. It also provides a good self-service portal for end-users.

Cons

The complexities of building usable reports made the reporting part of the system unusable. Although the system was overall a decent system, we found that the costs and lack of support from the company were the biggest reasons we stopped working with Kayako.

Pros

1- Beautiful user interface.
2- It Supports all activities in a helpdesk process.
3-14 days free trial
4-Good localization, so you can add your own translations to (just) on-premise version

Cons

1- When you are Kayako admin and at the same time one of the staffs (Agent), you have to switch so many times between Admin / Staff panel to do your tasks. sometimes it makes me confused because knowing which setting is in admin panel and which one is in staff(Agent) panel sometimes is difficult.
2-I can say that Kayako is designed for too many clients for a limited number of services. If you have too many services each of them assigned to a client, Using Kayako would be difficult (But Possible). for example, you have to set permissions for widgets separately.
3-Kayako is not suitable for small teams. it requires a lot of time and effort for setting up.
4-Kayako integration and API's are limited. We couldn't integrate Kayako with our Self-Built project management and timesheet system.
5- Localization in cloud version doesn't work very well. We couldn't use Arabic in cloud version

Pros

- Standard support tracking software not trying to "re-invent" how support should run.
- Price is "ok", but alternatives should be considered first, given more mature platforms are available for the same price point.
- Ability to offer Email / Chat / Social support which are well integrated
- KB articles is included which is good, fairly configurable on the visual front (ie more than Intercom)
- Ready to go if you are looking for a simple support system with a single team / person / level of support.

Cons

- The integration with the KB articles is incomplete and there is no value-add in using a single platform for both KB + Ticketing.
- Live Chat messenger is limited in functionality
- We have discovered that the software was completely overhaul 2 years ago to make it cloud-based (previously server installed) and not as stable as one would expect for a 10 yo company.
- Their support is passing the "buck" continuously and ends up closing issues which were not resolved.
- features are promised to be delivered with ETA and are either not delivered or half-baked
- full disclosure we are planning on migrating away within 3 months.

Pros

The software was ahead of its time when my company started using it in 2011. Easy to organize. Nice ticket merging. Accountability with being able to assign tickets to staff with notifications, etc. When the new version of Kayako came out there was a lot of confusion on merging, upgrading, and it never ended up happening for my business.

Cons

The utter lack of respect I was given as a long time customer was frustrating. I asked to get out of contract in the middle of a year long term for a partial refund. It took over 2 months to get a final 'no' answer. When the contract was up, it auto-renewed, even though I'd made it perfectly clear I had another system in place and no longer needed Kayako. I asked for a refund immediately and was told it wasn't possible. I had to do a chargeback on my card to get the refund, and THEN Kayako agreed to the refund. Why leave such a bad taste in my mouth as a long-time customer? It just makes no sense and pretty much guarantees I will NEVER be back.

Pros

Kayako automates a lot of the communication and tracking processes for us. Since my company has put the time into setting up Kayako to meet our companies needs, I am able to focus mostly on client communication and not administrative tasks.

Cons

The system is very particular about what you can and can't do. Things that seem like they would be obviously included do not exist (seeing all open tickets from an organization, for example), and must be either set up manually or gotten to in a roundabout way. Kayako also requires a steep learning curve and is not an intuitive system.

Pros

I like how effective Kayako's support team is. They reply in a timely manner to help fix the issues at hand. I also enjoy how easy it is to use, and allows for employees to stay on top of logged faults, tasks and other items within the system while providing detailed updates to keep the customers in the loop. Kayako has been our main helpdesk software for the past 7 years.

Cons

There is not too much I don't like about Kayako, I believe their live chat incorporation to websites could use some work. It would also be perfect if they can link it to CRM as we currently have to use these separately.

Pros

I have used kayako as a knowledge base for my software. I have integrated pages into my software and spent development dollars in doing so, and written hundreds of articles for the knowledge base. A few days ago I received an email from kayako requesting that I contact them about my renewal. When I did, they informed me they would be increasing their pricing by 600% for this year, and an additional 25% each year thereafter. I was shocked, and asked for clarification, explaining that I am a small company that is in the events industry - I have been shut down due to events being shut down because of the pandemic. Even in normal circumstances, I wouldn't be able to afford that ridiculous price increase. They informed me they would be cancelling my service. I have spent hundreds of hours creating these knowledge base articles, thinking I would be using these for years to come - now I have to spend development dollars to integrate a new knowledge base into my software, and re-do all of the articles on a new platform. Very dishonest business practices - untrustworthy services - and costing the client time and money.

Cons

Raising prices by 600% out of nowhere, causing my small business to have to move to another platform, after spending time and money.

Pros

It brings most, if not all functionality we need. The company still provides an on-premise version of the product. Support has reasonable reaction times, also they most only provide workarounds instead of solid fixes and solutions.

Cons

Kayako feels out-dated all along. After two years of the 7.0 php release it still is not even fully compatible with any php 7.x release and up to today relies on the out-dated php 5.x versions. There are many other issues like the HTML-Mailparsing which have not been fixed completely in years now. Also we know Outlook 20xx do not create great HTML-mails still a lot of customers are using it and it is one the most spread applications in companies. But still the emails are not parsed correctly through Kayako. This should definitely have more priority. The forum is full of long threads and requests about this topic. Many people were upset, because resources were spent on creating a new webinterface instead of fixing basic functionality. Maybe customers should be involved in creating the roadmap for the product or at least help prioritizing issues.

Pros

Ease of use and consistency, quality cost effective

Cons

Nothing really, just the spam. Too many spam sometimes but you'll learn to cl;ean it up

Pros

Kayako allowed us to manage our Help Desk while keeping costs down but still providing enough functionality to streamline our support and communication to the users.

Cons

There wasn't any integration withour Scrum and Agile software tools (and it didn't have the functionality on its own) so it made it double work to move a Trouble Ticket to a Task

Pros

Easy to use software, makes customer tracking, communication, and support more efficient. I use it mainly for the ticketing system to keep the company as well as the customers who log faults up to date on the status of their support ticket.

Cons

As I have used many live chat software in my field, I am not too fond of the live chat ability of Kayako for websites. The implementation is not very user friendly.

Pros

It's been easy to use, and makes it easy to stay on top of many different customer issues. Whenever we have had a question Kayako support is able to fix the issue quickly in real time.

Cons

I really don't have a negative comment to say about the software. It's invaluable to our operation. Kayako customer support is alway able to assist quickly in real time.

Pros

Easy to use, depending on your license is very customizable.
Once the ticket is created adding notes, screenshots and files is really simple and fast

Cons

API or link to CRM directly is really needed
External add on works but with serious limitations.
Old kayako had a voip system to do phone calls

Pros

Chat + Ticket system integrated

Cons

Not localized (just English)

Pros

The Database management and queue management is the thing I lile best about this software.

Cons

The data security will need an improvemnt here.

Pros

Simple, Easy to Use, Customisable and Good Support. We've used this software for over 6 years now and it's never let us down.

Cons

Some areas could use updating but they're not broken, just need some improvement :) Also the recent pricing increase was expected but of course paying more for something is always a dislike :)

Pros

I love it's UX design that feels modern and easy to use. The conversation metaphore is very powerful and automation macros system is really neat.

Cons

Software internationalization and available translations are poor.
Even if my team contributed full UI translation for language 'it' on transifex most of the UI is not translated yet. More than a year has passed since then.
If you need to support multi-language for your users, check that required languages have full support.

Pros

It has an app. It's kind of customizable.

Cons

The migration to the new version was horrible. There was little communication and I had to keep following up. I don't think they realizing that by migrating us, I had to give my customers a heads up on the migration as well. I'm still using the old version and being less usable every single day.

Pros

The interface has not changed in a very long time. For a quick open/close ticketing system it works great. It is very easy for a person to just start using it with about a 15 minute explanation.

Cons

The software hasn't changed in a long time. It looks very dated. The functionality is very much lacking. There are bugs that are unresolved. Things can get very lost very easily. There are some easy features that can be added that would enhance the software a lot.

Pros

The look and feel. the customization options and custom insights. Filtering and suspending messages options. Ability to send all the messages we want to our inbox and not the ones we don't want.

Cons

Can't tab through and select "type, priority" etc. quickly without clicking (you could in the old Kayako). Can't forward or CC a message easily. Images and attachments not perfect. A little slow.
I also can't figure out how to remove the "message sent from Kayako" signature. This should not be required since we pay for the product and it can be embarrassing when we're trying to send professional emails, so we opt out and use Outlook for those.

Pros

It it nice to be able to pull up multiple conversations/tickets within one window, as it made it easy to switch between current ongoing projects and also complete research with little confusion. Also, Kayako shows in real-time who is looking at a ticket, thus it made it easy for Customer Service as we could see if someone was already working on that ticket. One of the nice things about Kayako was the ability to see when the recipients of an email opened it or looked at it. If there were several recipients, it would break down who opened the email, when. Thus, from a documentation standpoint, if someone was claiming to have never received an email, we were able to show that they had in fact opened the email.

Cons

There were few reporting tools and there was no way to set follow-up tasks. We relied on setting reminders on another system like our Google calendar. Also, Kayako was getting quite expensive, which was one of the big factors in our company switching to a different ticketing system.

Pros

Being able to manage incoming emails as tasks that can be assigned to people and then easily marked as complete when done has allowed us to work faster and more efficiently.

Cons

Some of the options could be easier to use. I think that macros, templates and automated replies could be more user-friendly.

Pros

Software is basic, has basic helpdesk. The basic helpdesk worked for us for some time, chat worked for us for some time, but literally did not keep up.

Cons

The software has not kept up with the rest of the market. Zero product innovation in the last 1-2 years.