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JIRA Service Management vs Kayako comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive Summary

Review summaries and opinions

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Categories and Ranking

JIRA Service Management
Ranking in Help Desk Software
2nd
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
7.1
Number of Reviews
85
Ranking in other categories
IT Service Management (ITSM) (2nd)
Kayako
Ranking in Help Desk Software
45th
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
5.4
Number of Reviews
1
Ranking in other categories
Shared Inbox (11th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of February 2025, in the Help Desk Software category, the mindshare of JIRA Service Management is 10.4%, down from 12.2% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Kayako is 0.2%, up from 0.2% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Help Desk Software
 

Featured Reviews

Karim Yousef - PeerSpot reviewer
Efficiently track and document projects with seamless tool integration
We are a management warehouse that provides services to different customers in different sectors. Primarily, we serve the banking sector and the military sector. We manage all the software delivery projects through tools such as JIRA Service Management or TFS Confluence is a great tool for…
reviewer1712472 - PeerSpot reviewer
Flexible, straightforward implementation, and helpful support
We are in the process of switching from Kayako to ManageEngine Desktop Central. We went through a full review of our service desk processing and one of the solutions we purchased was a ManageEngine Desktop Central. When we were looking at the integrations into the Kayako system and how it works, we found that ManageEngine Desktop Central did very similar things. It had better layers of classification, other templating, and additional features that we did not have with Kayako. Our service manager made the decision to switch at that time. My advice to others wanting to implement Kayako would be for them to plan out their service processes first, prior to trying to implement them in the tool. We made the mistake of jumping in too soon back 10 years ago. I started using it in a way that we could have tooled it in a different way to make it better. We could have had more implementation process information to make sure we received what we wanted to out of the solution. I rate Kayako an eight out of ten.

Quotes from Members

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Pros

"The stability of JIRA Service Management is good."
"A good organizational tool."
"The links between the help desk and Jira issues and between Confluence and Jira issues are most valuable. I can write requirements in Confluence and link them to user stories in Jira and test cases. I can see my test coverage and all that kind of stuff. The integration between these three is very useful. It is pretty customizable, and it integrates well. There are a lot of add-ins and a lot of connectors to third-party products. In my last company, we used Test Royal for managing all the tests, and it integrated perfectly with that. For any issue or bug, we could see what tests have been run and the complete history of the tests."
"This is a flexible tool for logging and tracking issues efficiently."
"Everyone knows how to use it, so there's no need to teach new members."
"Using JIRA simplifies tracking issues and updates."
"One of the best things about JIRA is that it searches for answers while questions are being typed so some tickets do not need to be submitted."
"Its integration is most valuable. It is pretty open for integration."
"The most valuable feature of Kayako is its flexibility. We can do anything we want with it, which is nice."
 

Cons

"I'd like to update the dashboard so that more features are available."
"In general, JIRA has no relation to customers or financials. Therefore, marketplace add-ons are needed to make it work for customer-facing systems."
"The interface could always be updated and improved."
"It has change management and incident management, but CMDB is not there. It's also not as user-friendly as ServiceNow."
"From the customer side, it's not friendly used compared to other competitors, like ServiceNow or BMC. It's also not fully ITSM management if you compare it with ServiceNow or BMC. They have a full model of ITSM. In BMC they have TrueSight, they have Discovery, which helps IT to discover IT equipment with a serial number, with the specs, capacity of the server."
"The product does not allow customization of reports."
"As a consultant, I have used the support. Some of the support I have received has been good and other times it could improve."
"It would be beneficial if we could turn comments into subtasks or other JIRA tickets directly."
"Some of the reporting in Kayako could be improved. It only has two levels of classification and if there were additional levels added for reporting purposes it would be awesome for our environment."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The pricing is free for us because we are an associate partner for the product."
"The license we use is on a yearly basis. As a Solution Partner, we were using the free one and were using the free plugins. We were also giving our own plugins to the Atlassian Solution Partners for free. We don't pay anything to Atlassian."
"Do not forget to calculate add-on costs. These cost a percentage of the JIRA purchasing costs and are based on the number of JIRA users."
"It costs around $150 to $200 per user."
"I price of JIRA Service Management is reasonable."
"The cost has recently increased. It might be around $20 to $25 per user license."
"It's not really expensive, especially when you compare to ServiceNow or other solutions, and it's not expensive to maintain."
"It is one of the premium products on the market, but it is very costly, especially in the Indian market."
"Kayako is a highly affordable solution."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Computer Software Company
19%
Financial Services Firm
9%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Government
7%
No data available
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
No data available
 

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about JIRA Service Management?
JIRA Service Management is a very user-friendly solution.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for JIRA Service Management?
While JIRA Service Management saves time, direct cost savings are challenging due to licensing fees. Currently, it costs around $150 to $200 per user, a significant expense, especially given the la...
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Also Known As

JIRA Service Desk
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Overview

 

Sample Customers

mgm technology partners, Telestream, Build.com, Zend Technologies, OfficeDrop, PGS Software, American Diabetes Association, NEPTUNE Canada
Toshiba Canada, Disney, Avast, Namecheap, Texas Tech University
Find out what your peers are saying about ServiceNow, Atlassian, ManageEngine and others in Help Desk Software. Updated: January 2025.
832,138 professionals have used our research since 2012.