Drift Shutting Down: A Founder-Written Migration Guide

On March 6, 2026, Clari + Salesloft published a press release announcing a partnership with 1mind and, inside the same announcement, the gradual sunset of Drift, the conversational marketing product Salesloft acquired in early 2024. Under an exclusive agreement, existing Drift customers are being referred to 1mind as the designated AI successor.

Two details matter more than the headline. First, the announcement describes a gradual sunset, not an immediate shutdown, and as of this writing no public hard end-of-life date has been published. Second, the referral to 1mind is a referral, not an obligation. You can evaluate it alongside everything else.

Because there is no published cutoff, your real deadline is whatever your contract and account team say it is. Some third-party posts circulating after the announcement quote specific migration windows of 60 to 90 days. We could not verify any such window against a primary source, so treat those numbers as unconfirmed and get your own date in writing.

Context helps you judge how urgently to move. Salesloft acquired Drift in February 2024. In August 2025, attackers exploited Drift’s OAuth integration with Salesforce in a supply-chain attack that affected hundreds of downstream organizations. Cloudflare publicly disclosed its exposure on September 2, 2025, reporting that attackers accessed its Salesforce support-case data through the compromised Drift integration.

The breach did not cause the sunset by itself, but it shaped the environment the announcement landed in: many Drift customers had already disconnected integrations or begun evaluating replacements months before March 2026. If your security team was one of them, you may have less institutional Drift knowledge left than you think, which makes the export step below more important, not less.

Export is the only migration step with a real deadline. Vendor evaluation can slip a week; data access cannot slip past whatever your sunset date turns out to be. Do this first, even if you have no idea what you are migrating to yet.

• Contacts and captured leads: export every contact record Drift captured, with emails, company fields, and source attributes. Reconcile against your CRM so you know what exists only in Drift.
• Conversation history: export transcripts your sales or support team references. Even if the new tool cannot import them, you want the record for deal context and compliance.
• Playbook and routing logic: most chat playbooks do not export as portable files. Screenshot or document each playbook’s triggers, questions, branching, and routing rules manually. This documentation becomes your requirements list for the replacement.
• Meeting booking setup: note which calendars, routing rules, and round-robin configurations are wired into Drift meeting booking, because they stop working when Drift does.
• Reports and attribution: export or screenshot the reports you actually cite (pipeline influenced, conversations by page, booked meetings), so you can validate the replacement against a known baseline.
• Integration inventory: list every system connected to Drift (CRM, marketing automation, Slack, data warehouse) and what data flows each way. This is also the moment to revoke Drift OAuth tokens you no longer need.

One honest warning: export formats and menu locations change during sunsets, sometimes without notice. We deliberately do not give click-by-click UI instructions here because they may be stale by the time you read this. Ask your Drift account team for the current supported export path and confirm what formats you will receive.

Drift sold a bundle: live chat, chatbots and playbooks, visitor intelligence, ABM integrations, and meeting booking under one conversational marketing label. Nobody sells that exact bundle at that scope today. The market has split into four categories, and the right one depends on which parts of Drift your team actually used.

• AI support chat platforms (Intercom, Tidio): strongest at answering customer questions and deflecting support volume. If Drift was mostly your support front door, this category fits, but pipeline features are secondary.
• AI SDR platforms (Qualified, 1mind): enterprise products that pursue pipeline conversations, typically sold through sales-led contracts. Closest to Drift’s high-end conversational marketing positioning, and priced accordingly.
• Visitor identification tools: reveal which companies visit your site from IP intelligence, with no chat surface at all. If Drift’s intel panel was the part your sales team lived in, this category replaces that piece.
• Combined chat plus company identification (PageFox): an AI chat widget and company-level visitor identification in one product, aimed at small B2B teams rather than enterprise ABM programs.

A useful exercise: open your Drift usage for the last quarter and write down which three features generated real activity. Most teams find they used far less of the bundle than they paid for, which usually means the replacement can be simpler and cheaper than Drift was.

Any vendor telling you migration is painless is selling something. Here is what does not transfer cleanly, whichever direction you go.

• Playbook maturity: years of tuned playbook logic, targeting rules, and copy do not port. You will rebuild flows in a new paradigm, and the first version will be worse than what you had.
• Conversation history continuity: even where transcripts export, most replacements cannot import them as native conversation records, so historical context lives in an archive, not in the new tool.
• ABM ecosystem depth: Drift’s integrations with ABM and intent platforms were built over a decade. Newer and smaller tools, PageFox included, do not match that integration surface today.
• Attribution baselines: your Drift-era dashboards and the new tool will count conversations, leads, and influence differently. Expect a quarter of messy comparisons before new baselines settle.
• Team muscle memory: sales reps knew where everything lived in Drift. Retraining cost is real even when the new tool is simpler.

The compensating truth is that the bundle was also the problem: many teams paid for enterprise conversational marketing to use a chatbot and a visitor feed. Losing the bundle can be a downgrade in surface area and an upgrade in fit.

1. Confirm your access window with your Drift account team, in writing.
2. Run the export checklist above and store everything somewhere your team controls.
3. Write your real requirements from actual usage: which Drift features had activity last quarter, who used them, and for what outcome.
4. Pick the category first, vendor second, using the four categories above. Shortlist two vendors, not seven.
5. Run both on your live site in parallel with Drift if your access window allows. Judge answer quality and lead usefulness on your own traffic, not on demos.
6. Rebuild only the top three flows from your playbook documentation. Resist recreating everything on day one.
7. Cut over, revoke Drift’s OAuth grants and API keys everywhere, and remove the script tag.

PageFox sits in the fourth category: an embeddable AI chat widget plus company-level visitor identification and lead scoring in one product. The chat answers from your own site content with grounded, source-backed responses; the identification layer resolves anonymous visits to companies via IP intelligence where a match exists; and lead scoring surfaces which conversations and visits deserve follow-up, with the signals behind each score visible rather than hidden.

Two Drift-relevant details: install is a single script that takes about five minutes, and passive mode runs the company identification with no visible widget at all, which matters if you want the visitor intelligence back before you have decided on your chat experience. The free tier requires no credit card, so you can validate match quality on your own traffic during the evaluation window.

Where PageFox does not fit: if you ran enterprise ABM orchestration, deep intent-data integrations, or a large SDR team living inside Drift, PageFox is not that product, and the AI SDR category above is the honest place to look. PageFox is built for small B2B teams that used Drift for the chat widget and the who-is-on-my-site feed, and want both without an enterprise contract.