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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
86
Ranking in other categories
IT Service Management (ITSM) (2nd)
Kayako
Ranking in Help Desk Software
44th
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
5.4
Number of Reviews
1
Ranking in other categories
Shared Inbox (10th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of April 2025, in the Help Desk Software category, the mindshare of JIRA Service Management is 9.7%, down from 12.4% 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 most valuable feature of Jira is that it is free of cost, which is a significant advantage."
"This solution has helped us a great deal in project management tracking and forecasting."
"Jira Service Management is flexible. It is easy to navigate without requiring extra learning. The user experience has been good."
"It's easy to set up the solution."
"Everyone knows how to use it, so there's no need to teach new members."
"Customizations are most valuable. The customization of workflows is the main power of the Atlassian tools in general."
"The product is not lacking anything that a QA will want to use."
"Easy to use and user-friendly."
"The most valuable feature of Kayako is its flexibility. We can do anything we want with it, which is nice."
 

Cons

"The price is a point of contention for me. It does overall work out as a significant amount of money that will be spent over a shorter period of time."
"The licensing model could be improved. There needs to be a different licensing model for large numbers of employees, as it remains one of the main barriers to using JIRA Service Management across our entire company."
"They need to work on the speed of Jira."
"The interface could be made easier to use."
"The support we received was not fully provided at that time."
"Jira Service Management is expensive and not worth the money compared to monday.com."
"JSD has some analytics, but it's pretty much basic and simple dashboards. There's no mobile application for JSD. It really would benefit from better implementation with other vendors. We're heavily reliant on some external marketplace applications."
"During the updates, when another version gets released, whatever I am tracking at that time gets lost and I have to type it all over again."
"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

"I would suggest to always buy licenses through an Atlassian partner, so you can also rely on their expertise."
"We have paid $20,000 recently for a one-year license for our on-prem server."
"It's not really expensive, especially when you compare to ServiceNow or other solutions, and it's not expensive to maintain."
"The price of the solution is becoming expensive and it should be reduced."
"I rate Service Management four out of 10 for affordability. The price could be better, especially for companies using more than one Atlassian product. It's suitable for SMBs that can afford it. I don't think there's another tool that's both better and cheaper. All help desk tools are relatively expensive."
"On a scale of one to five, with one being really high and five being good, I would rate the price of this solution as a four."
"For the people like us, the lower the price, the better. But when compared to other competitors, I think it's Jira's price is okay."
"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."
"Kayako is a highly affordable solution."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Computer Software Company
19%
Financial Services Firm
10%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Retailer
7%
No data available
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
No data available
 

Also Known As

JIRA Service Desk
No data available
 

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: March 2025.
845,406 professionals have used our research since 2012.