Drift vs Intercom
Intercom: Support-centric platform with live chat, chatbots, and customer messaging capabilities
Drift
The Conversation Cloud
As of 13 November 2026, Drift starts at $2500/month. Drift is a conversational marketing and sales platform that connects businesses with their customers in real-time. Softwr lists it under Live Chat. Drift is made by Drift Inc, launched in 2015, available on Web.
Overview
What Drift does
Drift is a conversational marketing and sales platform that connects businesses with their customers in real-time. Through intelligent chatbots and live chat, Drift helps companies generate more qualified leads, book more meetings, and close deals faster.
What people use it for
- Lead qualification
- Meeting booking
- Customer support
- Account-based marketing
- Sales acceleration
Related searches
The honest half
Where it falls short
Concrete and checkable, so you can decide whether any of them matter to you. This is the half of a review a vendor will not write about Drift.
- Product is being sunset by Salesloft with successor service (1mind) recommended
- Mandatory bundling within Salesloft increases cost
- No free tier available
- Customer support and knowledge base have been deprioritized
- Limited to enterprise B2B pipeline generation focus
Cross-shopped
What people choose instead of Drift
Each pairing was judged by two reviewers asking whether a buyer would genuinely weigh the two against each other. The ones that failed were deleted rather than published.
Drift vs Freshsales
Freshsales: CRM with integrated live chat and conversational sales features
Capabilities
Features
Live chat
AI chatbots
Meeting scheduling
Email sequences
Visitor intelligence
Conversation routing
Mobile app
Analytics dashboard
Salesforce
Integration with Salesforce
HubSpot
Integration with HubSpot
Marketo
Integration with Marketo
Slack
Integration with Slack
Answered, with sources
Questions people ask
Each answer names the page it came from, so you can check it rather than take our word for it.
What is the current status of Drift in 2026?
On March 6, 2026, Clari and Salesloft announced the gradual sunset of Drift's conversational marketing solution, with 1mind named as its exclusive AI successor. Drift remains available but its future is limited.
SourceHow much does Drift cost?
Drift pricing starts around $2,500/month ($30,000/year) for Premium chat-only capabilities, with Enterprise plans exceeding $80,000/year. Drift is bundled within Salesloft and billed annually only.
SourceWhat features come with Drift Premium?
Premium plans include live chat widget, custom chatbot flows, meeting scheduling with calendar integration, basic playbooks, email sequences, and standard integrations.
SourceDoes Drift offer a free plan?
No, Drift no longer publicly advertises a free plan as of 2026. All plans require annual billing through Salesloft.
SourceBehind it
Who makes Drift
- Company
- Drift Inc
- Based in
- Boston, MA
- Founders
- David Cancel, Elias Torres
Timeline
Drift over time
Keep looking
Where to go from Drift
- Drift alternativesEvery product people weigh against it
- Drift pricingPlans, floors and what the tiers exclude
- Drift badgesWhich rules it meets, and the figure behind each
- All Live Chat softwareThe full category
- Best Live Chat softwareThe shortlist, and how it was cut
Best Live Chat software for
Compare Drift with
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- Zendesk Answer Bot
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- Capacity
- Tidio
- LiveChat
- Smartsupp
- Pure Chat
- Slimchat
- Landbot
- ManyChat
- Bold360
- HubSpot Live Chat
- Olark
- Rasa
- Zendesk Chat
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Softwr does not host reviews and shows no star rating for Drift, because a rating we did not collect is not ours to publish. What is here is the pricing and platform detail from the vendor’s own pages, limitations we could state concretely, and alternatives a reviewer confirmed people weigh against it. Tell us if any of it is wrong.
More on Drift
Drift alternatives
What people switch to, and what they give up
Drift pricing
Every tier, and where the cost actually lands
Compare Drift
Put it head to head with anything we hold
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