Drift alternatives before Drift retires in 2027

This page is about Drift the software, the one people also search for as Drift chat or Drift by Salesloft. Drift put bots on B2B websites that greeted visitors, asked qualifying questions, routed good leads to sales reps and booked meetings for them, which its owners call conversational marketing. In March 2026 Clari + Salesloft, the company that owns it, announced “the gradual sunset” of Drift and said it would refer existing Drift clients to 1mind as the successor. A Salesloft help centre FAQ dated 22 September 2026 now says “Drift will be retired on January 31, 2027”.

So the useful question is what Drift did for you. If it booked meetings for a sales team, you want another AI sales agent, and 1mind, Qualified, HubSpot and Fin for Sales from Intercom are the four below. If it mostly answered visitors’ questions about your product, you want something that answers well rather than something that qualifies, and that’s Deacon, Tidio or Crisp. We read every price on the vendors’ own pages on 25 September 2026, and each one links to where we read it.

Deacon is ours, and it’s built for that second group. It’s an AI customer support agent for founders who answer their own support. It answers your visitors in seconds from your own docs, brings you only the chats that need a person, and shows you what customers are stuck on and asking for. The free plan needs no card and has no end date.

Drift alternatives side by side

Drift is in the last row for comparison, and none of its prices are public now.

What happened to Drift, in its owners’ words

Salesloft announced that it had bought Drift on 13 February 2024, describing it as “the buyer experience and Conversational AI company”. Clari and Salesloft then merged, completing the merger on 3 December 2025, and the combined company calls itself Clari + Salesloft.

Clari + Salesloft announced a partnership with 1mind in a press release dated 6 March 2026 and a post in Salesloft’s newsroom. Under a heading about sunsetting Drift, the announcement says Clari + Salesloft “is announcing the gradual sunset of its Drift conversational marketing solution”. Under an exclusive agreement with 1mind, it “will refer existing Drift clients to 1mind as the successor to ensure a seamless transition”.

Neither the release nor the newsroom post gives an end date, says what happens to Drift contracts or data, or tells customers what to do next. Salesloft’s help centre does. Its Drift Sunset FAQ, dated 22 September 2026, says “Drift will be retired on January 31, 2027”, and that your access ends then “or on the end date of your current contract, whichever comes first”. It says the Drift chat widget “will stop functioning after January 31, 2027”, and names 1mind as the recommended replacement for Drift’s chatbot. Drift’s own addresses now lead to Salesloft. drift.com and its old pricing page send you to a Salesloft page about AI chat agents, which says “We’ve transitioned from Drift to 1mind” and shows no prices. Salesloft’s menu still had a Log in to Drift link on 25 September 2026.

Salesloft says the FAQ “will be updated as new details are confirmed”, so check it before you plan a switch.

Deacon, for founders who used Drift to answer questions

If your Drift bot spent most of its day answering questions about your product, your pricing and how to set things up, you don’t need a sales agent to replace it. You need answers that are right. Deacon is an AI customer support agent that answers your visitors in seconds, at any hour, from your help pages, files and pasted text, and it replies in the language they wrote in. There are no playbooks or decision trees to build. You add one script tag, point Deacon at your docs and it starts answering.

When your content doesn’t cover a question, Deacon says it doesn’t know rather than guessing, and asks for the visitor’s email. You get an email when someone leaves their address or asks for a person, and the reply you type in the dashboard appears in their chat while they still have it open. Every answer you write for a question Deacon missed becomes something it knows, so it needs you less the more you answer.

Deacon also shows you what visitors came to ask. Topics group similar questions, count the people behind each and label most of them as a feature ask, a bug report, a how-to or a pricing question, so the questions in your chats become a list of what to fix and what to build. The same script runs website analytics, with visitors, sources, goals and funnels, so there’s no second tag to add.

What Deacon leaves out is Drift’s sales half, and it’s better to know that before you switch. Deacon doesn’t qualify leads, book meetings or route chats to a sales team. It doesn’t identify visiting companies. It never starts a conversation either, because the widget opens only when a visitor clicks it or your site calls Deacon.open().

Every feature is on every plan, and the plans differ only in answers, knowledge, crawled pages and seats. Free gives you 50 answers a month and 1 seat, with no card and no end date. Starter is $50 a month, or $40 a month billed yearly, for 1,000 answers a month and 3 seats. Growth is $150 a month, or $120 a month billed yearly, for 4,000 answers a month and 10 seats. Nothing is billed past your plan’s answers, and there’s no “powered by” line on any plan.

1mind

1mind is the company Clari + Salesloft chose as Drift’s successor, so it’s the first call for a Drift customer who runs sales on Salesloft. It describes itself as an AI sales agent platform that gives B2B revenue teams photorealistic AI “Superhumans” to engage, qualify and convert buyers. Its page for Drift customers calls 1mind “the exclusive AI successor to Drift” and sets what it calls dynamic, contextual dialogue against Drift’s scripted playbooks and decision trees.

On a website, a 1mind Superhuman answers product and pricing questions from your knowledge base, runs a product demo inside the conversation, qualifies the visitor, and books a meeting or hands them to a rep. It writes what it learned back to your CRM, and 1mind names Salesforce, HubSpot, Dynamics and Pipedrive. The same agent can work inside your product and join sales calls on Zoom, Microsoft Teams or Google Meet, and Clari + Salesloft say its signals flow into Salesloft Cadences and Clari forecasts.

1mind publishes no prices. Its site has no pricing page, and it offers a demo instead. The Clari + Salesloft release puts its customers at 60 or more enterprise and mid-market companies, among them HubSpot, ZoomInfo and Pipedrive. It suits a B2B sales team with a CRM and a pipeline to feed, rather than a founder who mainly wants questions answered.

Qualified

Qualified sells Piper, which it calls an AI SDR agent, to B2B marketing teams. Piper greets visitors on your site, captures leads and converts qualified buyers into pipeline by live chat, voice or video, books meetings, and follows up by email. Qualified also runs a page for teams switching from Drift.

It’s built around Salesforce. Qualified calls itself the only conversational sales and marketing platform “purpose-built for Salesforce”, connects as a Salesforce app, and says its average implementation takes 30 to 60 days, run by its own Salesforce-certified team at no added cost. There’s also a version of Piper for HubSpot customers. Salesforce completed its purchase of Qualified on 1 April 2026.

Its pricing page lists three plans, Premier, Enterprise and Ultimate, and each one says “Contact us”. Premier includes one SDR agent profile and 250,000 monthly web sessions. There’s no free plan or trial on the page, so it suits a marketing team on Salesforce with the traffic to fill a plan that size.

HubSpot

HubSpot is the nearest thing to Drift you can start for free. Its free chatbot builder makes bots that qualify leads, book meetings and answer common support questions, which you build from a template in a visual editor. HubSpot’s free plan, for up to 2 users, includes live chat too. Whatever a bot collects is saved to HubSpot’s CRM. The free chat carries HubSpot’s branding, which comes off on Starter, at $10 a seat a month or $7 billed yearly, shown against a crossed-out $20 as special Starter pricing that HubSpot’s pricing page says is for new customers only.

Its AI that answers customers is the customer agent. HubSpot says it needs a Professional or Enterprise edition and runs on HubSpot Credits, using 50 credits, or $0.50, each time it resolves a conversation without a person. The cheapest plan with it is Smart CRM Professional, at $45 a seat a month billed yearly, or $50 paid monthly on a yearly commitment. Service Hub Professional, which adds HubSpot’s help desk, is $90 a seat a month billed yearly, or $100 paid monthly on the same commitment, plus a required one-time onboarding fee of $1,500. There’s more in HubSpot’s free and AI chatbots.

It suits you if your sales and marketing already live in HubSpot, because the bots, the meetings and the leads all land in the CRM you use.

Intercom

Intercom is a helpdesk with Fin, its AI agent, built in, and Fin for Sales turns Fin into an inbound sales agent. It answers prospects’ questions about pricing and features, asks the qualifying questions your sales team would, books meetings through Calendly or Chili Piper and passes the lead to your CRM. It can also open the conversation itself, set off by the pages a visitor views and events you track.

Fin for Sales needs one of Intercom’s current plans. Intercom’s help centre says it isn’t available when Fin runs on another helpdesk such as Salesforce or HubSpot. Essential is $19 or $29 a seat a month billed yearly, because Intercom is testing two prices on the same page. On top of seats, Fin charges once per conversation, by outcome, and nothing when it simply passes a conversation to your team. A resolution, a handoff you configured, a disqualified prospect or one sent to a self-serve signup costs $0.99. A qualification costs $9.99, and booking a call or starting a trial counts as one. There’s a 14-day trial with no card, and Fin for Sales has its own 14-day trial, which for an existing customer starts when you set it live.

Intercom is also the company’s old name. It’s called Fin now, and Salesforce completed its purchase of Fin on 10 September 2026, so Salesforce owns two of the tools on this page. Fin AI pricing has every Fin figure, and Intercom alternatives sets Intercom against the rest.

Tidio

Tidio is live chat with two kinds of automation you can buy on their own. Flows are no-code paths that start at set moments in a visit, and Tidio pitches them for lead generation and quote requests, which is the closest it comes to Drift’s playbooks. Lyro is its AI agent, which answers from your support content.

The free plan covers 50 billable conversations a month and 10 seats, with 100 visitors a month reached by Flows and 50 Lyro conversations once. A billable conversation is one your team replies to. Starter is $29 a month, or $24.17 billed yearly, for 100 of them. Lyro costs extra, from $39 a month for 50 AI conversations, or $32.50 billed yearly. You can try any plan for 7 days without a card.

Messenger, Instagram, WhatsApp and email come into the same inbox, on the free plan too, and Tidio works with Shopify, which is why it suits an online shop. There’s more in Tidio alternatives.

Crisp

Crisp charges for the workspace rather than the seat, and its price doesn’t change with the number of conversations. The free plan gives 2 seats, the chat widget and a shared inbox, with no AI. Mini is $45 a month for 4 seats and adds chat triggers, which open a conversation based on what a visitor does on your site.

Hugo, Crisp’s AI agent, starts on Mini with $5 of AI credits, which Crisp puts at around 90 automated conversations. Essentials, at $95 a month, has 10 seats and $25 of credits, around 450 conversations, and adds the chatbot builder, a knowledge base and routing rules. Plus, at $295 a month, has 20 or more seats and removes the “We run on Crisp” watermark. Every plan has a 14-day trial with no card.

There’s more in Crisp chat alternatives, and Tidio vs Crisp sets those two side by side.

Which one fits you

Start from what your Drift bot actually did. Chatbot vs live chat sets out what each kind of tool covers and costs.

If it booked meetings for a sales team on Salesloft, 1mind is the successor Clari + Salesloft chose, and it feeds Salesloft Cadences and Clari forecasts. If your team runs on Salesforce and has the traffic, Qualified’s Piper is built for it. If your CRM is HubSpot, its free bots qualify leads and book meetings before you pay anything. If you want sales and support in one inbox, Fin for Sales runs in Intercom and charges $9.99 a qualification.

If it mostly answered questions, you don’t need a sales agent at all. Tidio suits an online shop, with Messenger, Instagram and WhatsApp in the same inbox, and Crisp suits a small team sharing one inbox at a flat price. If you answer support yourself and want the answers written for you, start with Deacon. It answers from your docs, brings you only what it can’t answer, and starts free.

Questions about Drift alternatives

Is Drift shutting down?

Its owners call it a sunset. In March 2026 Clari + Salesloft announced “the gradual sunset” of Drift and said it would refer existing Drift clients to 1mind as the successor. Salesloft’s help centre now says “Drift will be retired on January 31, 2027”. The Salesloft page that drift.com now leads to says “We’ve transitioned from Drift to 1mind”.

When does Drift shut down?

Salesloft’s Drift Sunset FAQ, dated 22 September 2026, says “Drift will be retired on January 31, 2027”. Your access ends then “or on the end date of your current contract, whichever comes first”, and the chat widget “will stop functioning after January 31, 2027”. The March press release and newsroom post gave no end date. Salesloft’s menu still had a Log in to Drift link on 25 September 2026.

What happens to my Drift data?

Salesloft’s Drift Sunset FAQ says your data stays accessible until your contract ends or 31 January 2027, whichever comes first, and that you can ask your account manager or support for an export. If your contract runs past 31 January 2027, Salesloft keeps the data offline until 30 April 2027 for an export request, and if none comes it deletes the data for good on 1 May 2027. Another help centre article describes two CSV exports from Drift. A static segment of contacts exports from Visitors › All contacts, through Manage members › Export CSV of segment, and the file arrives by email. The Chat data report exports from Reports › Conversations › Chat data, with Export as CSV. That article was written for a broken CRM connection, not for the sunset.

Which Drift alternative is free?

HubSpot is the closest, with free live chat and bots that qualify leads and book meetings for up to 2 users. Tidio’s free plan covers 50 billable conversations a month with 10 seats, and Crisp’s gives 2 seats with no AI. For answering questions rather than selling, Deacon’s free plan gives you 50 answers a month with every feature and no card. 1mind and Qualified publish no prices, and Intercom has a 14-day trial rather than a free plan.

Can Deacon replace Drift?

For answering visitors’ questions, yes, and you can start on the free plan. For selling, no. Deacon doesn’t qualify leads, book meetings or route chats to a sales team. It doesn’t identify visiting companies. It never starts a conversation either, because the widget opens only when a visitor clicks it or your site calls Deacon.open(). If your Drift bots booked meetings for reps, one of the sales agents above will serve you better.

Can I move from Drift to Deacon?

Yes, though nothing imports from Drift, so you bring your content rather than your bots. Give Deacon your website or help centre to crawl and tick the pages it should learn from, add single pages by their link, or upload files such as PDFs and Word documents of up to 10 MB each. Whatever your playbooks told visitors can go in as questions and answers with Add Q&A. Then replace Drift’s script with Deacon’s single tag.