What Are the Best Kayako Alternatives in 2026? 10 Scored, With Real Prices

The best-scoring Kayako alternative in 2026 is LiveAgent, at 28 out of 30 on our published rubric and $15 per agent a month billed annually, followed by Zendesk, Intercom and Help Scout at 26. Kayako itself now publishes a single price, $1 per resolved ticket for its Kay AI agent, with no seat price, no free plan and no self-serve trial.

Macha publishes this page. Macha is not a help desk and is not one of the ten, so it is absent from the ranking and appears once, in a clearly marked section near the end. Every seat and AI rate here was read on the vendor's own live page, forced to the US region, on 22 September 2026, with one labeled exception.

How do the Kayako alternatives compare? (prices checked 22 September 2026)

Legend: ✅ native · ➕ configurable, you build it · ✖ not a focus.

The column that matters most for this particular search is self-serve start. Kayako's page has no trial and no price, so the single biggest difference between it and eight of the ten below is whether you can find out what you'd pay without a call.

What changed at Kayako, and why are people searching?

Three things, and only one of them is old news.

The pricing page is now an AI page. It leads with "$1 PER RESOLVED TICKET" and the line "No seat fees. No setup fees. Just results." The definition is unusually clear for this category and worth quoting: "A resolution is when Kay solves the customer's issue without human agent involvement — whether by taking action or providing an answer they confirm solves their problem. Escalations to humans and simple deflections don't count." The page also claims a 68% AI resolution rate and a cost per resolution of "$1 vs $4.60".

The platform price is gone. "Kayako One" is described as the full help desk with the AI included, white-glove onboarding and setup, and a button that says Talk to an Expert. There is no seat price on the page, no free plan and no self-serve trial. Every route in is a sales conversation.

The cloud-only move is still the thing people remember. A long-running r/sysadmin thread titled "Kayako going cloud only" still holds page one for this search, and Kayako Classic is still listed separately in the company's own footer. If you are on Classic, you are the reader this page is really for.

Worth naming the incentive before the list, because it explains most of what follows: a per-resolution meter earns the vendor more the more the AI closes, so the vendor writes the definition of "resolved". Kayako's definition is one of the stricter ones in this category, which is to its credit. A per-seat price earns more as you hire, so nothing in it rewards the vendor for deflecting anything. Seven of the ten below charge per seat, and you should read every AI line in that light.

What does a month cost with 8 agents and 400 AI resolutions?

Every row uses the cheapest plan on that vendor's own price list that carries its AI, annual billing where offered, eight agents and 400 AI resolutions a month.

Four notes before anyone quotes that.

The spread is nearly six to one on identical work, $184 to $1,024, and the cheap end is a real product. Zoho Desk Professional at eight agents carries omnichannel ticketing, SLAs, a knowledge base and Zia.

Deskpro's row is the only one inflated by a minimum. Its AI starts on Professional, and Professional has a ten-agent minimum, so an eight-agent team pays for ten. That is worth knowing before the seat price looks competitive.

Kayako's row is honest about what it is. At 400 resolutions its AI costs $400, which is cheaper than Zendesk's $584 at its committed rate, about the same as Intercom's $396, and more than Help Scout's $300 for the same work. What you cannot put in the table is the platform fee, because it is not published.

Front's $20 is the least certain figure here. Autopilot is priced "starting at $0.05 per conversation", and a starting price is a floor rather than a rate. That block is also only visible in a browser; a scripted read of Front's pricing page does not return it.

How were the Kayako alternatives scored?

Most pages ranking for this search are published by someone selling one of the products on them, and on this SERP the entire top five is a rival vendor's blog. Ours is no exception, which is why the scoring below is printed in full, with every score visible.

Six criteria, each scored 0 to 5, for a maximum of 30. A product needs 18 out of 30, or 60%, to get a full entry. Ties are broken by the independent review base, then by entry cost.

Three results that look wrong at a glance and aren't.

LiveAgent tops the table at 28 and it is not the best product here. The rubric measures published pricing, entry cost, channels, a calculable AI rate, review depth and self-serve access, and LiveAgent is unusually strong on five of those six: $15 a seat with a full call center, every messaging channel, 1,537 G2 ratings and a 30-day trial with no card. Where it loses is the interface, which is the most dated on this page, and that is not one of the six things we measure. If you'd rather have a beautiful product than a cheap complete one, read Help Scout and Front first.

Kayako scores 14 and takes a 5 for AI, the joint-highest AI score on the page alongside Zendesk and Intercom. Its score is low because of price transparency and self-serve access, not because of the product. A team that wants an outcome bought rather than a tool configured should read the Kayako page seriously.

Enchant takes 5 for pricing and 2 for reviews, because one published price with every feature included is as transparent as this category gets, and 65 G2 ratings is a thin evidence base for a system of record.

Macha is not scored here. It is not a help desk, and putting a non-help-desk on a help-desk rubric would rig the table in one direction or the other.

The ten best Kayako alternatives

1. LiveAgent, the most product per dollar

Best for: teams replacing a unified inbox who want email, chat, a call center and every messaging channel without paying per channel.

Key features: ticketing, live chat, knowledge base and a customer portal from the $15 plan; AI Agents from Small and AI Agents with full setup from Medium; call center and IVR, SLAs, SSO and custom roles from Medium; Facebook, Instagram, X, Viber, Telegram and WhatsApp on Large.

Pros: it publishes both the annual and the monthly rate side by side, which almost nobody here does, and the annual entry is $15 a seat. 4.5 from 1,537 G2 ratings is the fourth-deepest review base on this page. The 30-day trial needs no credit card, which is the longest self-serve runway here. Our LiveAgent explainer goes through the tiers.

Where it falls short: the interface is the most dated of the ten and reviewers say so; if the reason you're leaving Kayako is that it feels old, this is not the fix. The AI Agents are bundled into the seat with no published per-resolution rate, so you cannot forecast that line, which is why it scores 3 there. Call center minutes are a separate telephony cost. Our LiveAgent alternatives page covers the other direction.

Pricing: Small $15, Medium $29, Large $49, Enterprise $69 per agent a month billed annually; $19, $35, $59 and $85 billed monthly. 30-day trial, no card.

2. Zendesk, the governance answer

Best for: support organizations past about fifty agents that need routing, SLAs, reporting and governance handled for them.

Key features: omnichannel ticketing across email, chat, messaging, social and voice; the deepest business rules in the category; AI agents that resolve and a Copilot that drafts; the largest app marketplace here.

Pros: 4.3 from 7,075 G2 ratings and 4.4 from 1,049 on Gartner Peer Insights, the deepest independent evidence on this page, and AI billed per automated resolution. Zendesk's pricing page lists the rate, $1.50 committed or $2.00 pay-as-you-go, and 5 included automated resolutions per agent a month on Support Team and Suite Team and 10 on Suite Professional; Zendesk's help center describes that allowance in dollars: since 18 May 2026 each seat earns $2, $5 or $10 a month by plan, capped at $5,000 a year. Our Zendesk against Kayako comparison takes the head-to-head.

Where it falls short: it is the most expensive row in the cost model, and the AI arithmetic is genuinely confusing: two allowance models run at the same time, and Copilot is a further $50 an agent. For a team leaving Kayako Classic because it felt heavy, Zendesk is heavier. Our Zendesk alternatives roundup is the other side of that.

Pricing: Suite Team $55, Growth $89, Professional $115 per agent a month billed annually; automated resolutions $1.50 committed or $2.00 pay-as-you-go.

3. Intercom, if the AI is the point

Best for: chat-led SaaS companies who want the AI to be the product rather than an add-on, and who have the budget to prove it.

Key features: messenger, shared inbox and tickets; Fin across chat, email and messaging; proactive messages and a help center; workflows and custom actions.

Pros: a $29 Essential seat that already includes Fin and unlimited live chat, and the clearest outcome-based bill in the category at $0.99 per Fin outcome, where a resolution means no further help is requested after Fin's last answer. Procedure handoffs and disqualifications also cost $0.99 and qualifications $9.99; a plain handoff with no outcome is not charged. 4.5 from 3,913 G2 ratings on the listing, now titled Fin after the company renamed itself in May 2026.

Where it falls short: Essential has one shared inbox, no workflow builder and no round-robin assignment. A Kayako team that relied on routing will want Advanced at $85 a seat annually, which takes the eight-agent month from $628 to $1,076. Intercom has also shown a $19 Essential price in a live pricing test, so check the page on the day you buy. The 50-outcome monthly minimum on Fin applies only when Fin runs on a help desk other than Intercom. Salesforce completed its acquisition of the company on 10 September 2026, which is worth knowing before a multi-year commitment.

Pricing: Essential $29, Advanced $85, Expert $132 per seat a month billed annually ($39, $99 and $139 monthly); Fin $0.99 per outcome, qualifications $9.99.

4. Help Scout, the least disruptive move

Best for: small teams whose support is mostly email, mostly one person per thread, and who want it to stop feeling like a ticket queue.

Key features: shared inboxes, Docs knowledge bases, an embeddable chat widget, saved replies, workflows and reporting; AI Answers for resolution and AI drafting for agents.

Pros: the pricing page is one of two here that publishes both the seat rate and the AI rate: Standard $25, Plus $45, Pro $75 per user, with AI Answers at $0.75 per resolution and a three-month free trial on it. The free plan covers five users with one inbox and one Docs site, so a small team can run on it indefinitely. Our Help Scout pricing breakdown goes tier by tier.

Where it falls short: channels. There is no social, no voice and no WhatsApp, which is why it scores 3 there and why it is the wrong move for anyone using Kayako as an omnichannel desk. AI Answers at $0.75 is also the second-highest per-resolution rate on this page once you get past a few hundred a month. Our Help Scout alternatives page covers the rest.

Pricing: Free for 5 users, 1 inbox and 1 Docs site; Standard $25, Plus $45, Pro $75 per user a month as displayed. AI Answers $0.75 per resolution.

5. Zoho Desk, the cheapest complete desk

Best for: budget-constrained teams, and anyone already running Zoho CRM or Zoho One.

Key features: omnichannel ticketing, a self-service portal, SLAs and blueprints; Zia across the product as Support Specialist and Resolution Expert agents; deep links into the rest of Zoho.

Pros: the cheapest paid seat of the ten and a free tier for three agents. 4.4 from 7,947 G2 ratings is the largest review base on this page, larger even than Zendesk's. For a Kayako Classic refugee on a small budget, this is the shortest distance to a modern desk.

Where it falls short: we could not read its dollar prices at all. zoho.com serves our location in rupees from both a script and a real browser, so the figures below come from G2's pricing tab, which states it was last updated on 29 April 2026. Zia is bundled into the seat with no published per-resolution meter, so the AI is free in the sense that you cannot meter it or easily audit it. Our Zoho Desk explainer has the product detail.

Pricing (from G2's pricing tab, last updated 29 April 2026, because zoho.com serves us rupees): Free $0 for up to 3 agents; Express $7, Standard $14, Professional $23, Enterprise $40 per user a month.

6. Freshdesk, most of Zendesk for a third

Best for: teams that want Zendesk's shape at a third of the seat price and will do more of the configuration themselves.

Key features: omnichannel ticketing, automations and SLAs; a customer portal and knowledge base; Freddy AI Agent for answering customers and Freddy AI Copilot for drafting on Pro and above.

Pros: $19 a seat is the cheapest full ticketing entry after Zoho Desk, and the AI meter is simple arithmetic: 500 Freddy AI Agent sessions free, then $49 per 100. 4.4 from 3,771 G2 ratings. In the cost model it does the same 400 resolutions for a third of Zendesk's total. Our Freshdesk against Kayako comparison takes the head-to-head.

Where it falls short: Freshdesk has no free plan. The old "up to 10 agents, free forever" tier is gone from the pricing page. What remains is a 14-day trial and a Free program for up to 2 agents that lasts 6 months. The 500 complimentary Freddy sessions are once per account rather than monthly, Copilot is $29 an agent on Pro and above only, and the chat AI agent needs Freshdesk Omni rather than plain Freshdesk. Our Freshdesk alternatives page is the other side.

Pricing: Growth $19, Pro $55, Enterprise $89 per agent a month billed annually; Freddy AI Copilot $29 per agent; Freddy AI Agent 500 free sessions once per account, then $49 per 100.

7. Front, for teams working the same thread

Best for: teams where several people work one conversation and internal comments matter more than ticket fields.

Key features: shared inboxes across email, SMS and social; internal comments and shared drafts; rules and workflows; Copilot for drafting, Autopilot as the AI agent, Smart QA and Smart CSAT.

Pros: the highest satisfaction score on this page, 4.7 from 2,511 G2 ratings, and Autopilot at "starting at $0.05 per conversation" is by a distance the lowest AI unit rate we found anywhere in this research. For a Kayako team whose real complaint is that ticketing gets in the way of collaboration, this is the closest thing to a different philosophy.

Where it falls short: the add-ons stack up. Copilot is $20 a seat a month, Smart QA another $20, Smart CSAT $10, with a $25 bundle for the last two. Starter at $25 a seat is single-channel, so omnichannel really starts at $65. And the $0.05 rate is a floor that only appears in a browser, so treat the $540 total above as a best case. Our Front alternatives page covers the rest.

Pricing: Starter $25 a seat up to 10 seats, Professional $65 up to 50 seats, Enterprise $105, billed annually; Copilot $20 a seat, Smart QA $20, Smart CSAT $10, bundle $25; Autopilot starting at $0.05 per conversation.

8. Enchant, one price, everything in it

Best for: small teams who want to stop comparing feature grids and just pay one number.

Key features: shared inboxes, knowledge bases, messengers and satisfaction ratings in a single plan; workflow automation, reporting and integrations; omnichannel across email, phone calls, SMS, WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger and Instagram; Enchant AI Starter included.

Pros: the simplest pricing on this page. One plan at $20 a user with every feature, no tiers and no sign-up fees, and the add-ons are published too: Advanced Security $5 a user, Enchant AI Standard $30 per 500 customers helped, Remove Branding $50 a month. A 30-day trial with no card, and 4.8 from 65 G2 ratings, the highest average of the ten. It also ranks on page one for this exact search with its own Kayako comparison, so it is competing directly for this reader.

Where it falls short: 65 G2 ratings. That is a thin evidence base for a system of record, and it reflects a genuinely small company. Two of the most interesting pieces, the Enchant AI Agent and Campaigns, are both in beta, free while in beta, and therefore unpriced for later. There is no free plan, only the trial.

Pricing: $20 per user a month, all features in one plan. Add-ons: Advanced Security $5 per user, Enchant AI Standard $30 per 500 customers helped, Remove Branding $50 a month. 30-day trial, no card.

9. HappyFox, support and IT from one vendor

Best for: organizations that want a customer help desk and an IT service desk from the same vendor, with a chatbot priced per resolution.

Key features: AI-powered omnichannel ticketing and a knowledge base; a separate Service Desk line with assets, changes and approvals; Autopilot for repetitive tasks; a chatbot; HappyFox AI across every channel; Workflows for process automation.

Pros: HappyFox publishes more AI unit rates than almost anyone here: the chatbot at $0.33 per resolution, Autopilot at as low as 2¢ per successful action, Assist AI from $1 a user a month. It wrote the page that ranks first for this search and lists itself first, which is worth naming plainly. A 14-day trial with no credit card, and 4.5 from 138 G2 ratings.

Where it falls short: the pricing page publishes nine starting points and no plans. Every "starting at" sits behind a See Pricing click, the Basic plan caps you at five agents, and annual billing is the only way to the advertised numbers (its FAQ says annual saves 20%). For a Kayako customer leaving because pricing was opaque, this is only a partial improvement. 138 ratings is also a modest base for a vendor this established.

Pricing: Help Desk from $24 per agent a month; Service Desk from $49; Contact Center Suite from $99; HappyFox AI from $14 per agent; Chatbot $0.33 per resolution; Autopilot from 2¢ per successful action; Workflows from $199 a month. 14-day trial, no card.

10. Deskpro, if you need to host it yourself

Best for: organizations with a data-residency or on-premise requirement, which is exactly the group Kayako's cloud-only move stranded.

Key features: unified inbox across email, chat, phone, Slack, Teams, social, WhatsApp and SMS; a self-service help center; Deskpro AI and an AI-powered chatbot from Professional; multiple brand support and CRM sync; HIPAA-compliant hosting and a sandbox on Enterprise; a separate Deskpro Private on-premise product.

Pros: the widest channel list of the ten at the lowest tier, and the only vendor here that still sells a self-hosted edition, which is the single most common reason a Kayako Classic customer is reading this page at all. Prices are published per tier.

Where it falls short: the agent minimums. Team is $39 with a five-agent minimum, Professional $59 with a ten-agent minimum, Enterprise $99 with twenty-five, so an eight-person team that wants Deskpro AI pays for ten seats. 98 G2 ratings is the thinnest base on this page. Deskpro AI has no published per-resolution rate, and the buying flow is a self-guided tour and a Contact Us rather than a signup.

Pricing: Team $39 (minimum 5 agents), Professional $59 (minimum 10), Enterprise $99 (minimum 25) per agent a month. Deskpro AI from Professional.

Who should stay on Kayako?

Two situations where none of the ten is an upgrade.

You want an outcome, not a tool. Kayako's argument is that you buy resolutions at $1 each and the platform comes with them. If your problem is that nobody on your team has time to configure a help desk, that argument is real, and the white-glove onboarding is part of the product rather than a professional-services line item.

Your volume makes $1 a bargain. At 400 resolutions the AI costs $400, less than Zendesk's $584 for the same work at its committed rate. At 2,000 it is $2,000, against Zendesk's roughly $2,984 committed. The unknown is the platform fee, and that is the number to get in writing before comparing anything else.

What migrates from Kayako, and what does not?

Plan on a month of someone's time, and more if you're on Classic.

Migrates cleanly: users and teams, contact records, knowledge base articles as HTML, and ticket history as a flat export.

Migrates with work: macros and canned responses, which every vendor models differently, and SLA definitions, which usually get rebuilt by hand. Enchant advertises managed, free-of-charge data imports from other providers, which is worth asking every vendor about.

Does not migrate: automation and business rules, custom fields with logic attached, and anything built against Kayako's API. Those are rewrites. If you are on Kayako Classic and self-hosted, add a data-extraction step to the plan before you do anything else, and note that Deskpro is the only vendor on this list that would let you stay self-hosted.

What if the desk is fine and only the AI disappoints?

There's one more answer that isn't on the list, and it needs saying plainly because it's the one we sell.

If the ticketing works and the only frustration is the AI attached to it, you can add an agent layer instead of migrating. That's what Macha is: an AI agent layer that runs on top of the help desk a team already uses, never a replacement for it, and it's out of the ranking because it isn't a help desk and can't be scored as one. Every agent you build is set by you to reply to the customer, write an internal note for a human, or only change fields on the ticket. It's priced on monthly ticket volume, from $299 a month for 750 tickets, about $0.40 a ticket at every tier, with setup and monitoring by our team included on every plan. A ticket is one thread with one person, charged once however many replies it takes. Full detail is on our pricing page.

Where it falls short, in the same terms as everything above: Macha does not connect to Kayako, so this is not a way to keep the desk you have. It runs on Zendesk, Freshdesk, Gorgias and Front, and on Intercom and HubSpot; the current list is on our integrations page. It also has no independent review base at all, zero G2 ratings as of 22 September 2026, no voice channel, and an agent does what its instructions say, so vague instructions make a vague agent.

The honest version for this reader: four of the ten above are desks we connect to, so if your shortlist lands on Zendesk, Freshdesk, Front or Intercom you can choose the desk on its own merits and treat the AI as a separate decision later. Our piece on adding an AI layer instead of rip-and-replace makes that case, and our help desk roundup covers the wider category.

How was this researched?

We checked every seat and AI rate on the vendor's own live page on 22 September 2026, in a real browser forced to the US region: US locale, New York timezone, English-US headers and the MaxMind geoip lookup stubbed. Every figure printed here starts with a dollar sign on the page it came from, except Zoho Desk's, which we label twice because zoho.com serves our location rupees from both a script and a browser.

We captured each pricing page ourselves, declining non-essential cookies where a banner appeared, and rejected one capture because the banner dimmed the page. G2 returns a 403 to every scripted request, so all eleven G2 listings were read in a real Chrome session the same day. Kayako's G2 negative tags are all single mentions, which is too thin to describe as a pattern, so we don't. We did not build a help desk on any of these platforms for this guide, and we are not quoting benchmark results we did not run.

Frequently asked questions

How much does Kayako cost in 2026? Kayako publishes one number: $1 per resolved ticket for its Kay AI agent. The full platform, Kayako One, has no published seat price, no free plan and no self-serve trial; every route in is a sales conversation. That is a change from the tiered per-agent pricing older articles describe.

What is the best free alternative to Kayako? Zoho Desk's free tier covers three agents and Help Scout's covers five users with one inbox and one Docs site. Both are genuinely usable rather than demos. Freshdesk has no free plan on its pricing page, only a 14-day trial and a 6-month Free program for up to 2 agents, and LiveAgent's 30-day trial is the longest free runway of the ten.

What is the cheapest Kayako alternative? At eight agents and 400 AI resolutions a month, Zoho Desk Professional at $184 and Enchant at $190 are the two lowest, with LiveAgent Medium at $232 close behind. Per seat alone, Zoho Desk at $7 and LiveAgent at $15 are the cheapest published rates.

Which Kayako alternative is best for a small team? Help Scout if your support is mostly email, Enchant if you want one flat price with everything in it, and LiveAgent if you need chat, phone and messaging on a small budget. All three start self-serve, and Help Scout and Enchant both give you a real product without a sales call.

What happened to Kayako Classic? It is still listed as a separate product in Kayako's own footer, and the move to cloud-only is still the most-discussed thing about the company on r/sysadmin. If you are running Classic self-hosted, Deskpro is the only alternative on this page with a current on-premise edition.

Which alternatives can I actually try without talking to sales? Eight of the ten. Zendesk, Help Scout, Zoho Desk, Freshdesk, Front, Intercom, Enchant and LiveAgent all start with a free plan or a self-serve trial. HappyFox has a 14-day trial but a demo-led buying flow, and Deskpro leads with a self-guided tour and a Contact Us.

How do I compare AI costs between these tools? Convert everything to a cost per resolved conversation and read each vendor's definition of "resolved", because they differ. Kayako charges $1 and excludes escalations and simple deflections. Zendesk bills per verified automated resolution ($1.50 committed on its pricing page), Intercom charges $0.99 per outcome, Help Scout $0.75, HappyFox $0.33 for its chatbot, Front from $0.05 a conversation. Zoho, LiveAgent and Deskpro bundle AI into the seat with no meter.

Does Macha work with Kayako? No, and we'd rather say so than stretch. Macha runs on Zendesk, Freshdesk, Gorgias, Front, HubSpot or Intercom. Four of the ten platforms above are on that list, so if your shortlist lands there you can decide on the desk first and the AI layer second.

Which Kayako alternative should you pick?

The right Kayako alternative depends on why you're leaving. LiveAgent gives you the most product per dollar and tops our rubric at 28 out of 30, with a dated interface as the price. Help Scout is the least disruptive move for a small email-led team, and Enchant the simplest to buy. Zoho Desk is the cheapest complete desk, Freshdesk the best value with real depth, and Zendesk the answer when governance matters more than cost. Front suits teams who collaborate on threads, Intercom teams where the AI is the point, HappyFox organizations buying support and IT together, and Deskpro anyone who still needs to host it themselves.

Run the cost model on your own agent count before you compare headline prices, because the spread at eight agents is nearly six to one. And if the desk is fine and only the AI is the problem, adding an agent layer to the one you already run is cheaper than a migration, starting with $50 of free usage and no credit card.

Sources: Kayako pricing · LiveAgent pricing · Help Scout pricing · Freshdesk pricing · Front pricing · Enchant pricing · HappyFox pricing · Deskpro pricing · Zendesk pricing · fin.ai pricing · Macha pricing