Kayako
A helpdesk veteran from 2001 — unified ticketing, live chat, and self-service with AI triage on Cloud plans.
Acquired — still operating
Acquired by ESW Capital in March 2018; product remains active with Kayako AI rolled out to Cloud customers in 2024.
About
Kayako is a long-running customer support platform combining a shared helpdesk inbox, live chat, self-service portal, community forums, and SLA management in one dashboard. Founded in 2001 in the UK, it was acquired by ESW Capital in March 2018. Conversations from email, chat, and social land in a single queue with automated routing, ticket tracking, and analytics; Kayako Classic also offered an on-premises deployment. In mid-2024 Kayako rolled out Kayako AI to Cloud customers at no additional cost (per the vendor's own reporting), adding automated ticket triage, AI-suggested reply drafts, and sentiment-aware routing. Pricing is per agent with a free trial; it sits well below the big-suite price tags, which is why small and mid-size teams historically picked it. No independent published benchmarks of response-time improvements were found, so efficacy claims are treated as provider-claimed.
What it can do
- Unified shared inbox across email, live chat, and social channels
- Kayako AI: automated ticket triage, AI reply drafting, sentiment-aware routing (Cloud plans)
- Self-service help center, knowledge base, and community forums
- SLA management, ticket tracking, and performance analytics
- Automated routing, triggers, and workflow rules
- REST API plus integrations (Salesforce, Slack, Jira, HubSpot, and others)
- Mobile agent apps for iOS and Android
Setup
- Start the free trial on kayako.com and create your support domain.
- Connect your support email so inbound mail becomes tickets automatically.
- Add the live chat widget to your site or app and configure canned replies.
- Build help-center articles and enable the self-service portal.
- Set up teams, SLAs, and automation rules for routing and escalation.
Prerequisites
A paid per-agent subscription after the trial; a support email address to forward into the shared inbox.
Use cases
Works with
Trust score — 6/10
Scored 6/10 (METRICS tier, metrics-v1). Evidence: operating since 2001, acquired by ESW Capital in 2018 (PR Newswire), Kayako AI rolled out to all Cloud customers in 2024. Strengths: genuinely unified inbox for chat, email, and social at a low per-agent price; free AI triage for existing customers. Docked for: (1) private-equity ownership since 2018 with little public roadmap visibility — future direction is opaque; (2) no independent benchmarks or current third-party ratings located; (3) smaller integration ecosystem and community than current leaders. License: proprietary SaaS, closed-source.
How the trust score is built
Full methodology →- Adoption · stars/downloads, log-scaled vs peers
- 6.0/10
- Maintenance · recency, releases, issue load
- 6.0/10
- Openness · license + docs
- 3.0/10
- Manual review · sanity read + red-flag check
- 6.0/10
- · Founded 2001; acquired by ESW Capital March 2018
- · Kayako AI (triage + reply drafting) rolled out free to Cloud customers mid-2024
- · No current independent review scores or published benchmarks found
Sources
Every fact above was checked against these sources. Where a claim comes from the provider and couldn't be independently verified, the text says so.