Help Scout is help desk software. The vendor’s value proposition is that that their solution reduces time spent on training users because Help Scout is simple to use and set up and scales like any enterprise product. This solution includes multiple mailboxes to support as many email addresses as needed in order to work collaboratively across teams, and manage several products or brands from one account. Reports on conversation trends, team performance, productivity, and customer happiness are…
$30
per month starts with 100 contacts
Kayako
Score 6.6 out of 10
N/A
Kayako is a help desk and customer support platform that helps businesses automate workflows, improve agent productivity, and deliver personalized customer experiences across email, chat, and social media.
$79
per month
Pricing
Help Scout
Kayako
Editions & Modules
Standard
$30
per month starts with 100 contacts
Plus
$90
per month starts with 200 contacts
Company
Contact sales team
Kayako One
$79
per month
Enterprise
Contact Sales
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
Help Scout
Kayako
Free Trial
Yes
Yes
Free/Freemium Version
Yes
No
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
No
No
Entry-level Setup Fee
No setup fee
No setup fee
Additional Details
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More Pricing Information
Community Pulse
Help Scout
Kayako
Features
Help Scout
Kayako
Incident and problem management
Comparison of Incident and problem management features of Product A and Product B
Help Scout
8.8
Ratings
9% above category average
Kayako
2.0
Ratings
120% below category average
Organize and prioritize service tickets
9.00 Ratings
1.00 Ratings
Subscription-based notifications
10.00 Ratings
1.00 Ratings
Ticket creation and submission
8.10 Ratings
7.00 Ratings
Ticket response
8.10 Ratings
1.00 Ratings
Expert directory
00 Ratings
1.00 Ratings
ITSM collaboration and documentation
00 Ratings
1.00 Ratings
Self Help Community
Comparison of Self Help Community features of Product A and Product B
Help Scout
8.5
Ratings
8% above category average
Kayako
1.0
Ratings
155% below category average
External knowledge base
9.00 Ratings
1.00 Ratings
Internal knowledge base
8.00 Ratings
1.00 Ratings
Multi-Channel Help
Comparison of Multi-Channel Help features of Product A and Product B
Small businesses that want a conversational type of customer support experience. Nothing wrong with support tickets, but it does make you feel like a number. Also, we needed to get up and running quickly so the "inbox" feel of the dashboard was already familiar with the team so they could adopt the new software quickly.
Kayako is suited for a small company that is just getting started. We are in the web-hosting industry and it was very hard to fully adapt the system the way we would have liked to. Kayako would be very good if you were hosting an ecommerce shop or customer service business where you can look at each customer interaction as separate and not over a long-term period.
Extremely simple to use and understand as a user - treats communications like human beings and provides a much more personal feel to communication (as opposed to making people feel like numbers).
The email newsletter.
They are super responsive. They are pretty rad and transparent: if something goes wrong on their end they are not afraid of admitting fault. Which leads me to trust them because I can believe them. I know that tells you very little about the product, but as leadership, that's something that I really need
Help Scout does exactly what it needs to (facilitate organized, efficient conversations between customers and support people) without getting in the way.
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.
I have not tried to use the actual Workflow function for awhile so this issue may have been resolved. When we tried to use it, it was cumbersome and did not offer much flexibility as to meeting the needs of different departments.
This may no longer be an issue but if someone was knowledgeable about KQL and knew how another department was set up, they could write a report accessing their data even though they do not have permission to view/edit that departments data.
Perhaps adding the function of "Read Receipts" to end-users when opening a ticket.
When a ticket is closed, automatically include information from the initial creation of the ticket so the end user knows at a glance what issue has been resolved without looking up the Ticket ID.
We are receiving feedback from the organizational level that they may want us to transition to a different solution to provide consistency across the company.
I am no longer with the company that was using this, and they were recently bought out by a larger organization that uses an internally developed software suite. It is unlikely for that reason that they will renew or keep any service with Kayako.
Help Scout is a great solution for support teams. There are many articles and webinars to help you learn how to use Help Scout. There are also many features to help make your workflows easier and more efficient. I would readily recommend Help Scout to any small or medium-growing support teams.
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.
This is tricky because there's helpdesk apps and chat apps (now Help Scout offers both). We first used just an email inbox (of course not scalable but we were very small), then we turned to Freshdesk, which was painful to use. It had some cool features but in general it was ugly, slow, using the interface was very non-intuitive and the prioritization was hard. I have to say this was more than a year ago, so probably they have changed, but anyway. Zendesk is very expensive considering the features are almost the same AND the chat app needs to be paid separately. As chat we used Tawk.to, it was functional but metrics were not that good and it was buggy at times. Comparing Help Scout with their competitors, at least for us, made it a no-brainer to hire them. The price was very attractive considering the amount of features, the great support and the quality of the app. I don't regret my decision at all because Help Scout, unlike other helpdesk companies, tries to have their app "smart" and not a big, corporate thing piled with features. It does what it needs, it's easy to use and helps you achieve your goals regarding support for your customers.
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.
We are able to retain our customer base due to the outstanding customer service our Customer Experience department provides. Without an organized tool like Help Scout, this would not be possible. We pride ourselves in quick response times to customers and are able to do so by effectively routing tickets to the right agents.
Kayako has helped our business to grow by allowing us to scale our help desk to accommodate more client companies in an efficient manner.
Kayako has allowed our customers to have more direct control over their help desk tickets and has made it easier for them to interface directly with our help desk staff.
The built-in chat features in Kayako that tie to our main website has allowed prospective customers to chat with our sales teams right away, resulting in more business.
