Zendesk vs. Kayako

With Zendesk, you get an already powerful customer service solution with options to supercharge functionality with AI. Zendesk AI sets up in minutes, not months, without deploying IT and dev teams or sitting through costly training classes.

Here are a few AI-powered features and automations that Zendesk offers to help create an excellent customer and employee experience:

• Chatbots are pre-trained to handle common types of customer service issues and use machine learning to improve with every interaction.
  
• Intelligent routing detects customer sentiment, intent, and language. It ensures requests go to the best-suited agent based on availability, workload, and priority.
  
• Intelligence in the context panel acts as a copilot in the Agent Workspace (a unified, conversational interface), surfacing the customer's intent, language, and sentiment, suggesting prewritten responses, and recommending next steps to the agent handling the request.

Kayako’s help desk solution does not have built-in AI, requiring add-ons or integrations to gain those capabilities. Its shared inbox does offer limited automations, like ticket routing based on predetermined criteria, prewritten responses, and automated workflows.

Zendesk provides a flexible system with pre-built apps and easily integrates with tools and systems your team depends on—like customer relationship management (CRM) software, order management systems, and marketing automation tools—specifically designed for customer service. The Zendesk Marketplace features:

• More than 1,500 apps and third-party API (application programming interface) integrations that help improve agent productivity, collaboration, and communication.
• An easy-to-navigate interface that can filter apps by keyword, category, rating, price, or collection.

In addition to enabling you to tailor your software to meet your business needs, it also streamlines data into a centralized workspace, creating a 360-degree view of the customer. That means more personalized support and less toggling for agents, increasing efficiency.

Kayako does not have an app marketplace, making it more challenging to find integrations or apps that sync with its platform. They mostly rely on Tray.io or Zapier to create third-party integrations for their software. Kayako lacks a channel integration framework—meaning, to integrate with additional channels, users need to customize your API or use Zapier.

With an omnichannel ticketing system, your support team can organize requests from across channels and track them easily throughout their life cycle.

Zendesk features an omnichannel ticketing system that provides a unified view of all ticket requests. The interface (Agent Workspace) consolidates tickets, full conversation history, personal data, and context. With ticket tabs, agents can move seamlessly between tickets in one browser, easily adding updates, responding to customers on their preferred communication channel, or collaborating with teammates with side conversations.

Kayako has a help desk ticketing system that gathers requests from several channels and puts them into a shared inbox. Its channels are limited to email, social media, and messaging—but most importantly, Kayako lacks crucial native channels, like voice and SMS.

Zendesk comes with pre-built reporting and analytics dashboards that provide popular customer service metrics so you can start generating reports from day one. Zendesk also offers advanced reporting tools that let you customize the dashboard with point-and-click actions—no coding required—to display the metrics most important to your business.

The reporting dashboard updates in real time, giving team leaders the data they need to make quick decisions. With our powerful business intelligence (BI) tool, you can identify areas where you can improve your products, services, or team performance.

Kayako offers limited out-of-the-box reporting, with only four dashboards available. Users can run custom reports but they must be exported to a comma-separated values (CSV) spreadsheet. To get reporting and analytics that let you create a personalized view of the metrics you need, users have to search for a compatible third-party integration.

Zendesk provides a variety of self-service tools to help your customers find answers on their own, like:

• Self-service portal software.
• Knowledge base software.
• Community forum software.
• Help center software.

What’s more, Zendesk makes knowledge base management easy with tools like Content Cues, content blocks, and team publishing. These tools automate and streamline the process of finding outdated information or content gaps, looping in the right people to address the gaps.

Kayako also offers a self-service portal that allows customers to find articles from its help center. It lets agents set up automated replies to common questions that direct customers to the help center and provides metrics on topics customers are searching for.

However, on the G2 Grid for Customer Self-Service, peer reviews place Kayako in the bottom left quadrant, grouping them with fellow low performers for that feature. In comparison, Zendesk leads the pack, ranking at the top of the Leaders quadrant for best self-service.

Even in the digital age, people still like to connect with businesses via phone. Zendesk offers cloud-based native voice software that sets up fast. It integrates seamlessly with most phone systems and has features like interactive voice response (IVR) and computer telephony integration (CTI) that help enhance the customer and agent experience. With the Zendesk IVR, you can:

• Route customers to the right agent or department
• Provide recorded responses for frequently asked questions
• Deflect calls by allowing customers to switch from a live call to text messaging

Kayako does not have a native integration with a third-party system. Not only does that mean IVR and CTI are not available, but an entire channel is absent, creating a massive barrier between customers and support.

With a highly-customizable Agent Workspace, Zendesk makes it easy to reference previous conversations relevant to the current interaction and features tools that streamline collaboration. The side conversations feature allows you to loop in management, teammates, or subject matter experts to collaborate on an issue without adding the conversation to the main ticket conversation.

Additionally, Zendesk offers service-level agreements (SLAs) and operational-level agreements (OLAs), or written agreements that define standards and expectations for your team to meet with customers and internal business operations.

Kayako has a shared inbox that helps teams offer multichannel support. But users report a negative case management experience. Some challenges mentioned include difficulty searching for tickets, managing ticket details and statuses, the inability to attach documents, and no capability to close tickets automatically.

Kayako is a help desk software for customer service. It aims to create a great customer service experience, though it lacks essential tools and features—like native voice and telephony, advanced reporting, case management, and an app marketplace—that leading software, like Zendesk, possess.

In addition to ranking Zendesk #1 in Best Software Products and #1 for Mid-Market Products, G2 rated Zendesk #2 in Software for Small Business. Kayako is not ranked.

Zendesk is a highly-customizable system with more than 1,300 integrations in its app marketplace to enhance capabilities and functionality. With Zendesk, businesses can tailor their platform to match their needs and seamlessly scale to adapt to any changes in their environment.

Kayako doesn’t emphasize the same advanced feature set or customization that leaders like Zendesk do. Most customer service solutions offer an app and integration marketplace that lets users connect to mission-critical tools, like CRMs, order management systems, and marketing automation tools. With Kayako, users must work with third-party tools, like Zapier, to manage integrations. That restricts the flexibility admins and users have over their agent and customer experience.

Many small businesses use Zendesk for reasons such as these:

• It’s easy to set up
• It’s easy to use
• It grows with you
• We offer partnership and exceptional support

This creates a low total cost of ownership and enables businesses to start seeing a faster return on their investment. Because Zendesk is transparent with costs and offers support to help small businesses get the most out of the software, customers trust Zendesk and form long-term partnerships.

Zendesk helps businesses handle any customer service use cases. That means new products, new customer segments, and evolving communication channels. Zendesk is a complete customer support software with the flexibility to scale with businesses and adapt to changes as they grow.