Drift

Drift is a conversational marketing platform built to turn website visitors into sales conversations and booked meetings rather than form fills. It popularised the idea that a B2B site should greet a visitor with a chatbot that qualifies them and routes them to a rep in real time. Salesloft acquired Drift in 2024, and Salesloft has since moved its chat capability to a partner product, so Drift is now best understood as a legacy platform rather than something actively sold to new buyers. Anyone evaluating it today should treat that as the headline fact.

What you can actually do with it

These are the capabilities Drift became known for, and what existing accounts are still working with.

• Qualify visitors with chat playbooks. Branching bot conversations ask visitors who they are and what they need, then branch differently depending on the answers and the page they landed on.
• Route live to the right rep. Qualified conversations get handed to a specific salesperson or team based on territory, account owner or round-robin rules, with the handoff happening while the visitor is still on the page.
• Book meetings inside the chat. The bot can surface a rep’s real calendar availability so the visitor picks a slot without an email exchange.
• Treat target accounts differently. Company identification lets you show different greetings, playbooks and routing to visitors from named accounts, which is why it was popular with account-based marketing teams.
• Feed conversations into the CRM. Integrations with Salesforce, Marketo, HubSpot and similar systems push chat activity and leads back into existing records.
• Report on pipeline, not just chats. Reporting focused on meetings booked, opportunities influenced and revenue attributed to conversations rather than support metrics.

Who it fits best

Drift was built for B2B marketing and sales teams with a considered, higher-value sales cycle — software vendors, agencies and services businesses where a demo request is worth chasing in real time. It assumed you had sales reps available to jump into conversations and a CRM already in place.

Today, the realistic audience is different. If you are an existing Drift customer, this is a page about planning your migration and getting your conversation data and playbook logic out. If you are a small business shopping for website chat for the first time, Drift is not the tool to start with — look at actively developed alternatives instead.

Things worth knowing before you commit

• It is being wound down. Salesloft’s own platform pages describe a transition away from Drift to a partner chat product, and no equivalent replacement is being sold under the Drift name.
• Plan an exit, not an implementation. Export conversation history, contact records and your playbook logic early. Support and roadmap attention on a sunsetting product only go one direction.
• It always needed staffing and process. Even at its peak, Drift only worked when reps actually responded to handoffs and routing rules matched how your team was organised. Without that, it was an expensive chatbot.
• Pricing was enterprise-shaped. It was sold through sales conversations with annual contracts rather than self-serve tiers, and the features most teams wanted — account targeting, advanced routing — sat in the higher packages.
• It was never a support desk. Drift optimised for capturing and qualifying demand. Ticketing, SLAs and post-sale customer service were not what it did.

Alternatives to compare it against

For website chat aimed at sales conversations, Qualified is the closest direct equivalent for Salesforce-centric teams, and Intercom covers chat plus in-product messaging for software companies. If your need is simpler — a widget, a few automated questions and a way to reach a human — LiveChat or Tidio will be quicker and cheaper to run. If the real goal is booking meetings from your site, a scheduling tool plus your existing marketing automation may replace most of what Drift did. And if you want visitor identification and intent signals for outbound rather than chat, that is now a separate category of tool worth evaluating on its own.

Product status, packaging and pricing for Drift and its successors are changing quickly. Confirm current availability and terms with Salesloft directly before making any decision.

Further reading

• How to Integrate Live Chat with CRM Systems — the Salesforce and HubSpot plumbing you will need to rebuild on whichever tool replaces Drift.
• 10 Proactive Chat Best Practices ‘ Examples 2024 — the playbook thinking behind Drift’s greetings, portable to any chat platform you migrate to.
• AI Chatbots for Business Messaging: 2024 Guide — covers the current generation of qualification bots you would shortlist as a replacement.
• Chatbot ROI: Ultimate Guide 2025 — a framework for judging whether a Drift-style bot justified its enterprise contract in the first place.

Have you used Drift?

One sentence is enough. Would you pick it again, and why or why not? We publish the critical reviews too — that is the point.