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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
7.0
Number of Reviews
87
Ranking in other categories
IT Service Management (ITSM) (2nd)
Kayako
Ranking in Help Desk Software
46th
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
5.4
Number of Reviews
1
Ranking in other categories
Shared Inbox (10th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of August 2025, in the Help Desk Software category, the mindshare of JIRA Service Management is 8.8%, down from 12.1% 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

"Jira Service Management has a workflow feature you can configure for your specific requirements. It also lets you efficiently manage service requests with team members."
"This service management solution has a good user interface. It helps improve your IT request requirements and makes tracking requests easier."
"The most valuable feature of this solution is that it is user-friendly."
"The tool's stability is very good."
"The query language and the ability to create views of the data are very useful."
"The platform is easy to use."
"The customer portal allows users to register tickets themselves."
"Easily integrates with other tools."
"The most valuable feature of Kayako is its flexibility. We can do anything we want with it, which is nice."
 

Cons

"I feel that Atlassian isn't really interested in fixing everything because if they did, the partners that are developing the fixes and features would not have a place in the market."
"I rate Atlassian support two out of 10. It takes a lot of time to reach them and get ahold of someone who understands my problem enough to provide a solution. Also, I live in Israel, so my work week is Sunday through Thursday, but I can only contact them from Monday to Wednesday."
"In-built chat is missing in JIRA Service Management."
"Include a split configuration in a layer part to allow cloud services to have almost full admin rights in SaaS."
"Its UI is a bit overwhelming for new users. That has been the problem with Jira for a long time. If they could put some fields that we could use to simplify the UI, it would be good."
"The initial setup is very complex."
"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 support we received was not fully provided at that time."
"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

"But about the plugins, I found one plug-in — its name is Actionable Metric I think — and it is $3000. That is very expensive for users in Iran."
"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."
"The price for JIRA Service Management is reasonable and cheaper than other ITSM solutions, but the licensing model is different, so you cannot compare it with other solutions. Overall, the pricing for the solution is acceptable."
"Jira Service Management has affordable license fees. It's $12 a month per person."
"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."
"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."
"It is a cheaply priced product."
"The cost has recently increased. It might be around $20 to $25 per user license."
"Kayako is a highly affordable solution."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Computer Software Company
17%
Financial Services Firm
9%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Government
6%
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: August 2025.
865,295 professionals have used our research since 2012.