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Espressive Barista vs Kayako comparison

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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

Automation Anywhere
Sponsored
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
6.9
Number of Reviews
638
Ranking in other categories
Business Process Management (BPM) (2nd), Robotic Process Automation (RPA) (2nd), Process Mining (1st), Intelligent Document Processing (IDP) (1st), Agentic Automation (1st), Business Orchestration and Automation Technologies (1st), AI Legal & Compliance (1st), AI Finance & Accounting (1st), AI Procurement & Supply Chain (1st)
Espressive Barista
Average Rating
8.8
Reviews Sentiment
7.2
Number of Reviews
9
Ranking in other categories
Help Desk Software (36th), AI-Powered Chatbots (9th), AI-Agents for HR (2nd)
Kayako
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
5.4
Number of Reviews
1
Ranking in other categories
Help Desk Software (55th), Shared Inbox (11th)
 

Featured Reviews

Venkat Sivaprakash - PeerSpot reviewer
Management Consultant at Accenture
Has significantly improved document-driven workflows and reduced processing time across finance and HR functions
Automation Anywhere has evolved significantly and upgraded itself to provide agentic AI and AI-based automation solutions for document automation. The product has matured considerably over time. We can create workflows that can call an API. We can include prompts in particular workflows for ChatGPT-related functions, connecting to an LLM and RAG to perform tasks. For document automation, modern features are available to train documents, ensuring high accuracy and repeatability over time. The system is very easy to use. I recently completed a course in document automation, typically designed for people involved in coding and technical aspects. Though I understand coding comprehensively, I don't do actual coding. The course was very accessible. Currently, extensive coding isn't necessary due to the hybrid model incorporating GenAI aspects, low-code, no-code capabilities, APIs, and numerous pre-built objects in Automation Anywhere. The features include GenAI-driven prompting methods and workflow creation capabilities. In these workflows, we can create decision boxes and call APIs without coding. We simply pull objects, drop them, connect them, and add minimal coding when needed. The most crucial aspect isn't coding but rather sizing the automation and fleshing out the details. Automation Co-pilot takes notes and performs automated analysis. It can extract details from videos, summarize conversations, and provide detailed information. During calls, it identifies instructions and performs tasks such as preparing reports and reconciliation. Automation Anywhere can also connect with Microsoft Co-pilot. Through Co-pilot, real-time operations can be executed, allowing direct interaction between vendors and automation through this component.
Jim Lobao - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Manager for End User Support Services at Five9
Has helped enhance our support ability, reduced our resolution time, and reduced our service desk costs
Espressive Barista's natural language processing and conventional AI still have room for improvement. We haven't yet found anything that resembles true AI that can learn autonomously without human intervention. However, Barista does help us identify and address some of these areas, allowing my team to step in and create intents and responses to questions. When a user asks a question that Barista doesn't immediately understand, we can recognize the pattern, capture it, and link it to a common intent. This is highly beneficial for acquiring such data, but it's a reactive approach and still requires curation. Natural language processing still has some way to go. One of our challenges is that our internal employees haven't yet adopted a natural way of interacting with Barista. Getting people to be concise and to the point, rather than being verbose as if they were interacting with a human, has been an ongoing challenge. While they may feel comfortable being conversational in Slack, expecting a human-like response, Barista is a different entity. Barista isn't interested in their recent vacation; it just wants to know they're locked out of their account. So, some users may assume Barista understands their intent when they say, "I'm back from vacation and locked out of my account." Barista, however, may interpret this as a request for the holiday schedule. Therefore, we're gradually educating our users to adapt their communication style for better success with Barista. Conversely, we desire Barista to adapt its behavior based on the interaction, the language used, and the way people communicate. I wholeheartedly desire an AI that can continuously learn and adapt to our organization's evolving needs. This is the most challenging aspect, as it involves understanding our organization's terminology, procedures, and toolsets. We've made significant progress in this area. However, from an NLP standpoint, we still face challenges with our nearly 3,000 Slack channel users, each with their unique communication styles. People ask questions in various ways, and sometimes there are misunderstandings. They want to interact with us naturally. However, we still struggle with natural language processing. People don't always realize that the bot is a virtual agent designed to be concise and efficient. Sometimes, less is more. It's been a difficult transition for people to grasp that they're conversing with a virtual agent, not a human. They still expect human-like interactions, such as discussing their weekend or holidays or simply pasting screenshots of errors. However, the bot can't interpret screenshots. If they provide the error code and some context about the application, the bot can better understand the issue. So, the key challenge is bridging the gap between human expectations and the bot's capabilities in terms of natural interaction.
reviewer1712472 - PeerSpot reviewer
Operations and Support Manager at a consultancy with 501-1,000 employees
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

"We saved approximately 10,000 hours of work for ourselves, and there are a couple of projects that we have worked on where we could have saved approximately 4000 hours on just one project that we built in two to three weeks."
"What Automation Anywhere is offering is amazing from a back-end office accounting standpoint."
"Removing manual tasks has been beneficial. It works effectively."
"My experience with the deployment of Automation Anywhere was good. I have no complaints there. It was very straightforward."
"It is one of the popular RPA vendors offering powerful & user-friendly RPA capabilities to automate any complex tasks. It is one of the "Revolutionary Technology" that changes the way the enterprise operates. This tool combines conventional RPA with intellectual elements like natural language understanding and reading any unstructured data."
"We've been using a lot of object cloning and screen scraping, but we've also had success with: inbuilt email functionality, some integrations to incorporate heterogeneous systems like Python scripting, etc."
"We are able to satisfy our clients in ways that we did not think was possible."
"If anyone is looking for an efficient automation tool, I definitely recommend Automation Anywhere because it is very helpful, even for non-technical people."
"When it comes to neutral language processing and conversational AI, it's very good, very solid... We all have different ways of speaking or writing in English and the application does a very solid job of recognizing what's being asked regardless of how it's being asked."
"Our developers have used the Barista Control Center to extend the platform by adding content, and they've found it fairly easy to do and manage"
"Its ability to recognize phrases has gotten smarter over time."
"The solution is available to support us instantly as required."
"The bot is pretty easy to update and keep up to date. Espressive itself is pretty easy to work with."
"We have the ability to alter phrases, create new phrases, or enhance phrases, or change paths. From the dashboard, we are able to get a lot of information we need about what people are asking, where they are dropping off from conversations, and where they do not get the information they need."
"I like Expressive Barista's integration with Microsoft Teams."
"Our department received about a 70% deflection rate, so that was really great."
"The most valuable feature of Kayako is its flexibility, as we can do anything we want with it, which is nice."
 

Cons

"I would like to see more complex use cases coming out for our industry."
"I would like to see a comment feature that allows you to embed comments/notes into an action sidebar, without having to actually take up a line of code in order to write such a statement."
"The accuracy in Web Recorder needs to be improved, defective outputs found most of the time (not sure if is a website side issue)."
"Automation Anywhere has newly integrated the Generative AI feature. It should be more customizable. Currently, we can change certain parameters, but we would like to have the ability to do modifications within the LLM for better outputs."
"We want it to work with more APIs. It needs to integrate with multiple APIs. That would be something that I would like going forward."
"More interactions with PDFs would be great for Automation Anywhere. The ability to use more legacy technology for object cloning, flash plugins, etc. A lot of their Excel commands could use some improvement."
"They continue to release new features, but end users struggle to adapt to them."
"Sometimes, the bot struggles to initiate on the cloud, even when everything appears in place. This issue occasionally requires uninstalling and reinstalling a component on my PC, although I cannot recall the specific component involved."
"Espressive Barista's natural language processing and conventional AI still have room for improvement."
"What would make things easier is more detail, out of the box, about what is helping out of the box. We're struggling a little bit to get that data. We want more information about what Barista has brought in that the employees are using, out of the box. We want more visibility into the things that we ourselves haven't done the interaction for."
"I would like to see improvement to the out-of-the-box verbiage, with the questions going to the right place."
"The reports provided by the solution are not customizable."
"The knowledge management could definitely be improved."
"Although they've done some work on their metrics dashboard, there is some fine-tuning to do for people that just want to go in there at a glance and see their metrics."
"I would like to see the continued expansion of all of the automation capabilities."
"There aren't very many things that this product needs improvement on."
"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

"When you compare the cost of Automation Anywhere with UiPath and Blue Prism, those others are much less. Licensing-wise, UiPath wins the deal."
"Automation Anywhere is competitive... Pega is somewhat comparable, but Pega also requires a lot more infrastructure and a lot more experience to get up and running."
"Our pricing a year ago was $600 per license."
"Considering the cost, it is a bit high, but worth the price because the output accuracy is high."
"It is affordable for us."
"We have a few licenses. They cost roughly $10,000 each."
"This is a comprehensive automation offering with a scalable architecture and flexible pricing models."
"The pricing for Automation Anywhere is reasonable."
"It is expensive. It's not a cheap thing."
"The pricing isn't overly burdensome. It's going to be interesting to see how new models come in with new capabilities but, as it is, as a base system, it's pretty good."
"The price for the licensing is fair."
"User-based licensing has been working well for us, and we believe we are deriving significant value from it."
"The solution is affordable."
"Kayako is a highly affordable solution."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
17%
Manufacturing Company
12%
Construction Company
11%
Computer Software Company
7%
Manufacturing Company
14%
Healthcare Company
8%
Computer Software Company
8%
Construction Company
7%
No data available
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business154
Midsize Enterprise82
Large Enterprise535
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business3
Large Enterprise6
No data available
 

Questions from the Community

How good is Automation Anywhere for RPA processes?
It depends on your use case. Is it simply to automate a couple of processes? Is it to augment a human team? AA is ver...
How good is Automation Anywhere for RPA processes?
From my experience using AA tool, it depends on the applications that you want to automate, because there some applic...
How good is Automation Anywhere for RPA processes?
It is a highly preferred RPA tool. You can check my Automation Anywhere Review to know more.
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Also Known As

Automation Anywhere, Testing Anywhere, Automation Anywhere Enterprise, Agentic Process Automation System (Now Certified for WorkSpaces)
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Interactive Demo

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Overview

 

Sample Customers

Google, Linkedin, Cisco, Juniper Networks, DellEMC, Comcast, Mastercard, Quest Diagnostics
Information Not Available
Toshiba Canada, Disney, Avast, Namecheap, Texas Tech University
Find out what your peers are saying about ServiceNow, Atlassian, Zendesk and others in Help Desk Software. Updated: May 2026.
899,917 professionals have used our research since 2012.