Kayako pricing in 2025: A guide to its plans & costs

Trying to figure out Kayako pricing feels a bit like you’re being asked to solve a riddle. Their official website is often down for maintenance, and if you go looking for a pricing page, you’ll come up empty-handed. If you’re just looking for a straightforward answer on costs for a customer support platform, you’ve probably already hit a dead end.

That’s what this guide is for. We’ve done the legwork, digging through recent user reviews and market data to give you a clear picture of what’s going on with Kayako’s plans, features, and pricing. Let’s be honest, when a company isn’t upfront about its pricing, it can feel like a red flag. It’s often a sign that it might be time to look for a more modern, transparent alternative that can actually improve your support without all the guesswork.

What is Kayako?

So, what exactly is Kayako? At its heart, it’s a customer support tool designed to pull all your customer conversations, from email, live chat, and social media, into one place. Think of it as a central hub for tracking customer issues from the moment they come in until they’re marked as resolved.

For a long time, they offered two main flavors: Kayako Cloud, a typical SaaS product, and Kayako Classic, a self-hosted option for companies that wanted to run the software on their own servers. But with their website being unreliable and some big shifts in their business model, the company’s direction feels uncertain. It has left a lot of potential customers scratching their heads and wondering what’s next.

Decoding the Kayako pricing plans

It wasn’t always this mysterious. A few years ago, you could pop over to Kayako’s website and see their pricing tiers laid out clearly. Not anymore. The company has moved completely to a quote-based model, meaning you won’t see a single dollar sign until you’ve talked to their sales team. This lack of transparency is a major hurdle for teams trying to compare their options and figure out their budget.

Based on what we could gather from review sites and competitor analysis, here’s a breakdown of their current plans.

Current Kayako pricing plans (quote-based)

Kayako now funnels everyone into two main packages, and for both, you’ll need to request a custom quote.

Kayako Cloud / Essential Plan

This is their cloud-based solution, aimed at larger teams and enterprise businesses. Since it’s hosted by Kayako, you don’t have to deal with managing your own servers.

• Key Features: It comes with the essentials you’d expect: an advanced ticketing system, live chat, social media integrations, a knowledge base for customer self-service, some basic reporting, and access to over 700 integrations through Zapier.

• Pricing: This is where things get murky. The price is entirely custom. The best clues we have come from user reviews on sites like G2. Some former customers reported that their costs shot up to over $100 per agent per month after Kayako changed its pricing policies, which is a pretty steep price for this kind of tool.

Classic On-Prem / Enterprise Plan

This is the self-hosted version. It’s for organizations with strict security or compliance rules that require them to keep everything on their own servers.

• Key Features: You get everything included in the Cloud plan, plus the freedom to customize the PHP source code, use a more advanced reporting tool called Kayako Query Language (KQL), and integrate VOIP phone systems.

• Pricing: Just like the cloud plan, this is quote-based. On-premise solutions almost always carry a higher total cost of ownership. You’re not just paying for the license; you also have to factor in the cost of the hardware to run it and the IT staff needed to maintain and update it.

What the shift to quote-based Kayako pricing means for you

When a company puts a "Contact Sales" wall in front of its pricing, it usually means a few things for you as a customer.

• You can’t compare costs easily. Without a public price, you can’t quickly see how Kayako stacks up against competitors. This makes doing a simple cost-benefit analysis impossible without sinking a lot of time into their sales process.

• Get ready for a long sales cycle. Your decision-making process immediately slows down. Instead of just signing up for a trial and exploring the tool on your own time, you’re pushed into a series of demos, discovery calls, and back-and-forth negotiations that can easily drag on for weeks.

• The price is probably high. A quote-based model is often a sign that a company is targeting enterprise clients with large budgets. This can price out small to medium-sized businesses or leave them with very little room to negotiate. It’s a completely different world from modern SaaS tools that offer clear, predictable pricing for everyone.

graph TD

A[You: Need a support tool] –> B{Find Kayako};

B –> C[Visit Website];

C –> D{Look for Pricing Page};

D –> E[Find ‘Contact Sales’ Button];

E –> F[Fill Out Form & Request Demo];

F –> G[Wait for Sales Rep to Contact You];

G –> H[Schedule & Attend Discovery Call];

H –> I[Attend Product Demo];

I –> J[Negotiate Back and Forth];

J –> K[Finally Receive a Custom Quote];

Pro Tip: As you evaluate tools with hidden pricing, don’t forget to factor in the cost of your team’s time spent in meetings and demos. That time isn’t free. When you add that to the risk of a surprise price hike when it’s time to renew, an "affordable" initial quote can end up being far more expensive than you thought.

Plan Name	Target Audience	Key Features	Pricing Model
Kayako Cloud / Essential	Large teams, Enterprises	Unified Inbox, Live Chat, Social Media, Knowledge Base, Basic Automation	Custom / Quote-Based
Kayako Classic / Enterprise	Organizations needing self-hosting	All cloud features + Customizable Source Code, Advanced Reporting, VOIP	Custom / Quote-Based

Beyond the sticker price: Kayako’s features and limitations

Okay, let’s look past the price tag for a minute. What do you actually get with Kayako? And more importantly, what are the pain points that current and former users are talking about?

Kayako’s core feature set

On the surface, Kayako provides the basic tools you would expect from any help desk software.

• Unified Inbox: It pulls customer conversations from different places like email, live chat, and social media into a single, shared dashboard for your agents.

• Ticketing System: This is the main engine of the platform. It helps you keep customer requests organized with tags, priorities, and assignments so that nothing falls through the cracks.

• Self-Service Portal: You can build a knowledge base filled with FAQs and help articles. The idea is to let customers find answers on their own, which can cut down on the number of repetitive questions your team has to answer.

• Live Chat: It includes a chat widget that you can add to your website to talk with visitors in real time.

What users are saying (and it’s not all good)

If you spend some time reading user reviews from the last couple of years, you’ll start to see some consistent complaints pop up. These aren’t just minor annoyances; they’re fundamental issues that can get in the way of your team’s daily work.

• The interface feels old. A common gripe is that the user interface is clunky, slow, and not very intuitive. In the world of customer support, every second matters. An inefficient interface means slower response times, more clicks to get simple things done, and frustrated agents who just want to help customers.

• It can be buggy and slow. Performance is another major concern. Many users have reported that the platform is sluggish, with tickets taking way too long to load. Some have even run into critical bugs that stop them from recording or sending responses, a complete deal-breaker for a support tool.

• Customization and integrations are lacking. While you can do some basic tweaks, Kayako doesn’t have the flexibility of more modern platforms. The same is true for integrations. It connects to Zapier, but its list of native integrations is much smaller than many competitors. This can make it hard to build a smooth workflow with the other tools your team relies on.

• Their own customer support has gone downhill. It’s pretty ironic for a customer support software company, but many long-time users have pointed out a steep decline in the quality of Kayako’s own support. This seems to have happened after the company was acquired. When you run into a problem, the last thing you want is a slow or unhelpful response from the people who are supposed to be the experts.

This video provides a helpful overview of how Kayako works and what it offers for customer service management.

Time for a modern, AI-powered alternative?

All these issues with Kayako, the hidden pricing, the clunky feel, the long sales process, aren’t just small complaints. They point to a bigger trend where older, traditional help desks are having a hard time keeping up with what modern support teams actually need. The good news is, you’re not stuck with the old way of doing things.

Why transparent pricing is a big deal when considering Kayako pricing

Let’s start with the most obvious frustration: the price. When you’re trying to make a smart decision for your business, you need clear, upfront information.

That’s why a tool like eesel AI offers simple, predictable pricing with flat monthly plans. You won’t find any hidden per-resolution fees, so you don’t have to worry about a surprise bill at the end of a busy month. You can actually budget with confidence. You can even start on a monthly plan that you can cancel anytime, which gives you the flexibility to adapt as your needs change without getting locked into a long, scary contract.

You don’t need to ‘rip and replace’ your help desk

Feeling trapped with a platform like Kayako is a common problem. The thought of migrating your entire help desk to a new system is overwhelming. It’s a huge project that can take months of planning, data migration, and retraining your whole team. It’s expensive, risky, and frankly, a massive headache most teams would rather avoid.

But what if you didn’t have to throw everything out and start over? That’s where a different approach comes in. Instead of being a replacement, eesel AI is a smart AI layer that sits right on top of the tools you already use. You can connect it to popular help desks like Zendesk, Freshdesk, or Intercom in just a few clicks. The setup takes minutes, not months, so you can start seeing the benefits of AI without the pain of a full migration.

graph TD

subgraph Your Existing Tools

A[Zendesk]

B[Intercom]

C[Freshdesk]

end

subgraph Your Knowledge Sources

D[Confluence]

E[Google Docs]

F[Past Tickets]

end

Your_Existing_Tools –> G[eesel AI Layer]

Your_Knowledge_Sources –> G

G –> H[Automated & Accurate Support]

From basic rules to real AI

Kayako offers some basic, rules-based automation, like "if a ticket has the word ‘refund,’ assign it to the billing team." That was cutting-edge ten years ago, but today’s support teams need something smarter.

eesel AI provides flexible, intelligent automation that actually understands your business.

• It learns from your existing knowledge. It doesn’t use generic, one-size-fits-all templates. Instead, eesel AI trains on your past support tickets, help center articles, and other documentation you have in places like Confluence or Google Docs. This allows it to give accurate, on-brand answers that are specific to your customers’ questions.

• You can go live in minutes. The entire setup is self-serve. You can have a working AI agent ready to go in under five minutes without ever having to talk to a salesperson or sit through a mandatory demo.

• You can test it before you launch. This is a huge deal. eesel AI has a powerful simulation mode that lets you test its performance on thousands of your real historical tickets. You can see exactly how it would have answered, get a forecast of your resolution rate, and calculate your potential ROI before you ever flip the switch for live customers. It completely removes the risk of rolling out a new tool.

Factor	Kayako	eesel AI
Pricing Model	Opaque, Quote-Based	Transparent, Flat Monthly Fee
Setup Time	Days or Weeks (Requires Sales)	Minutes (Fully Self-Serve)
AI Capability	Basic Rules-Based Automation	Learns from Past Tickets & All Docs
Integration	Acts as a standalone help desk	Integrates with your existing help desk
Pre-Launch Testing	Not Available	Powerful Simulation on Past Tickets

Is Kayako Pricing Worth It?

Even though the exact Kayako pricing is a mystery, all the clues point in the same direction. With its move to an opaque, sales-first model, combined with widespread user feedback about an outdated interface, performance issues, and declining support, Kayako has become a risky choice for any business looking for an efficient, modern support solution.

For teams that want to scale their support, improve efficiency, and give their customers a better experience, the answer isn’t another rigid, all-in-one help desk. It’s flexible, smart AI that works with the tools you already love. AI-powered platforms that plug right into your existing workflow offer a more powerful, transparent, and future-proof way to support your customers.

Take the next step

Ready to try a support solution with transparent pricing and powerful AI that you can set up yourself? Give eesel AI a try for free and see how much you can automate in the next five minutes.