Kayako vs Messagely
Kayako was founded in India in 2001, but its headquarters are now based in London. The company is completely bootstrapped and hasn’t raised funds from external investors, which is rare for a Software as a Service (SaaS) startup.
In February 2018, Kayako was acquired by ESW Capital, a private equity firm based in Austin, Texas. The company currently has offices in the UK, India and Singapore, and serves 50,000 customers in over 100 countries. Notable clients include French automotive manufacturer Peugeot and America’s National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA).
Kayako has undoubtedly established a name for itself in the customer messaging space; from startups to Fortune 500 companies, it has no lack of customers. But how does Kayako fare when stacked up against newer entrants such as Messagely? Does Kayako deliver value in all aspects, or are there certain areas in which it doesn’t meet the mark? Read on to find out more.
Should you switch from Kayako? Factors to consider.
Price
Chatbots
Scope of tool
Price
There are plenty of customer messaging tools in the market, but not all of them offer reasonable prices and transparent price plans. Before you commit to any one tool, be sure to go through their Pricing page thoroughly; the last thing you want to do is to be locked into a long-term contract with plenty of hidden costs.
When it comes to transparency, Kayako fares pretty well. They offer four pricing plans in total, and the differences between these plans are displayed clearly and unambiguously on their Pricing page. Kayako’s “Scale” plan costs $60 per agent per month, and their Enterprise plan will set you back $100+ per agent per month.
Messagely also delivers when it comes to transparency; it offers three plans which are priced at $29, $49 and $79. Now, comparing absolute figures, it seems that Kayako and Messagely’s prices don’t differ all that much. If you benchmark Kayako’s highest-tiered plan against that of Messagely’s, for instance, Messagely’s is slightly more affordable.
However, the differences become apparent when you start working out the costs based on your team size. Unless you’re a solopreneur, and you don’t need to purchase added seats, Messagely is likely to be significantly more affordable than Kayako here. Say you want to add nine users to bring your total users up to 10, for instance. Kayako charges $100 per month per user and Messagely charges $25 per month per user, so this works out to $1,000 that you’ll spend on Kayako vs $304 that you’ll spend on Messagely.
Don’t forget that Kayako does not come with an in-built chatbot feature, while Messagely does. If you want to use chatbots to power up your operations, and you’re a Kayako user, you’ll also have to fork out extra for a standalone chatbot tool.
Chatbots
Want to increase your team’s productivity, without hiring additional employees? The answer lies in… chatbots! These bots are a huge asset to sales, marketing, and customer support teams. Now you can automate all the tedious, manual tasks that, quite frankly, aren’t worth your effort, and focus on fine-tuning your campaigns and strategies.
Kayako doesn’t come with chatbot functionality, which means that you’re missing out on a huge opportunity to streamline your workflow, and increase team productivity. Messagely, on the other hand, comes with multi-functional chatbots that help you generate leads, schedule meetings, answer customer queries and more.
Take Messagely’s support chatbots, for instance. These really provide you with a win-win: they allow customers to get instant replies to their questions 24/7, and they allow you to automate responses to simple questions, and reduce the strain on your customer service team. Who doesn’t like to do more with less?
Scope of tool
Yes, most software tools come with an extraordinary number of integrations these days… but it still makes sense to invest in an all-in-one tool (as opposed to signing up for multiple “specialist” tools that just do one thing). Wouldn’t you rather use a single platform to take care of all your customer acquisition, engagement and support needs, rather than use several tools to do the same thing?
When you serve your customers on one unified platform, you essentially keep all your data and analytics in one place. This helps you track your key metrics more accurately, which in turn helps you fine-tune and improve your strategies. On top of that, using an all-in-one-tool often works out to be more affordable than signing up for multiple tools.
We’ve already discussed how LiveChat lacks the all-important chatbot functionality, but that aside, it’s also limited to the specific use case of supporting customers. Messagely, on the other hand, does a gamut of things; apart from utilizing it for customer support, you can also use the tool to generate leads and engage your existing users.
To drill down further, Messagely lets you send your customers targeted in-app messages or emails, and engage them from there. Say you want to reach out to new users on their free trial, for instance. You can use Messagely to trigger an onboarding series to this particular segment, and this will help boost your trial-to-paid conversion rate.
Kayako has been around for almost two decades now, and it’s definitely won over its fair share of customers in this period of time. But when you pit it against Messagely, it’s obvious that Messagely delivers more value in terms of features and functionality.
That aside, in the vast majority of cases, Messagely also works out to be more cost-effective than Kayako. All in all, Messagely is a worthy Kayako alternative – one that’s worth switching to.
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