Drift Alternatives: A Verified Comparison for Teams Leaving Drift

On March 6, 2026, Clari + Salesloft announced the gradual sunset of Drift and named 1mind as its exclusive AI successor for referred customers. No public hard shutdown date has been published as of this writing, but the direction is final: Drift, the product that defined conversational marketing, is going away, and every Drift customer needs a plan.

The complication is that Drift was a bundle: live chat, chatbot playbooks, company-level visitor intelligence, ABM integrations, and meeting booking. No current tool sells that exact bundle. So the honest way to compare Drift alternatives is not a ranked listicle; it is a map from the Drift capabilities you actually used to the tool built around those capabilities. That is how this comparison is organized.

We picked five tools that keep showing up on Drift migration shortlists and verified each one’s current positioning and public pricing tier against its own pricing page (linked in the sources below) at the date on this post. Where a vendor does not publish pricing, we say so instead of repeating third-party estimates as fact.

• Primary job: what the product is actually built to do, per its own positioning.
• Chat capability: whether it provides a website chat or AI answer surface.
• Company identification: whether it tells you which company an anonymous visitor is from, natively.
• Entry price: the lowest published tier, monthly billing, at time of checking.
• Who it fits: the team profile the product serves best, in our judgment.

Prices and packaging were checked against each vendor’s public pricing page at the date on this post; all of them change their packaging periodically, so treat the vendor page as the authority.

Intercom has repositioned around Fin, its AI agent, and is the most mature option here for customer service chat. Fin is priced at $0.99 per resolution on top of seat pricing, which means costs scale with how many conversations the AI successfully closes. For a team that used Drift primarily as a support front door, Intercom is the strongest like-for-like upgrade.

The honest caveats: Intercom is a support platform first, so Drift-style pipeline features are secondary, it does not tell you which companies are browsing anonymously, and outcome-based pricing is hard to forecast until you have a few months of resolution data. Budget-sensitive teams should model the resolution volume before committing.

Qualified is the closest philosophical successor to Drift’s original conversational marketing pitch: its AI SDR, Piper, engages website visitors to generate pipeline, and the platform is built natively around Salesforce. If you ran Drift as an enterprise ABM engine with an SDR team, Qualified belongs on your shortlist.

Qualified does not publish pricing; it sells through an enterprise sales process, and third-party write-ups consistently describe contracts in the tens of thousands of dollars per year. We have not verified any specific figure against a primary source, so treat those numbers as directional. The practical filters are simpler: if you are not on Salesforce, or an enterprise contract is out of range, Qualified is not your Drift alternative.

Chatbase lets you train an AI agent on your website and documents and embed it in minutes. Paid plans start at $40 per month (Hobby) with a free tier, and usage is metered in message credits, with more expensive AI models consuming more credits per response. It is a good answer bot; it has no visitor identification, no native lead scoring workflow, and it will not tell you who asked. We compare it in depth in our Chatbase alternatives post.

Tidio is a budget live chat and help desk with Lyro, its AI agent, sold as a metered add-on: paid plans start at $29 per month, but Lyro conversations are capped on lower tiers and priced separately beyond that, and the plan ladder jumps steeply from its $59 Growth tier to a $749 Plus tier. Fine for small support teams; not built for B2B pipeline, and no company identification.

PageFox exists for the team that used two parts of Drift: the chat widget and the panel showing which companies were on the site. Instead of buying a chatbot and a separate visitor identification tool, PageFox combines an embeddable AI chat widget, company-level visitor identification via IP intelligence, and lead scoring in one product.

• AI answers are grounded in your own site content and cite their sources, rather than free-styling.
• Anonymous visits resolve to companies where IP intelligence finds a match, and passive mode runs identification with no visible widget if you are not ready to change your chat experience.
• Lead scoring shows the signals behind each score, so you can see why a lead is rated hot instead of trusting a black box.
• Install is a single script, about five minutes, and the free tier requires no credit card.

What PageFox is not: it is not an enterprise ABM orchestration platform, it does not have Drift’s decade of intent-data and ABM integrations, and it does not identify individual people, only companies where a match exists; no IP-based tool honestly identifies every visitor. If those are your requirements, Qualified or the AI SDR category is the truthful recommendation.

1. Pull your last quarter of Drift usage and write down the two or three features with real activity.
2. Map those features to a category: support chat (Intercom, Tidio), enterprise AI SDR (Qualified), trained answer bot (Chatbase), or chat plus company identification (PageFox).
3. Shortlist two tools and run them on live traffic; free tiers make this cheap for everything here except Qualified.
4. Judge on your own data: answer accuracy on your top ten real visitor questions, and how many of last week’s visits resolve to companies you actually sell to.
5. Decide, then follow the export and cutover checklist in our Drift migration guide.