Drift Alternatives

Qualified is the tool that does what most companies bought Drift for: turning anonymous website traffic into booked sales meetings. Its AI SDR agent, Piper, talks to inbound buyers on your site by chat, voice or video, captures the lead, qualifies it and books time on a rep's calendar. Agentic email conversations follow up with visitors who leave. Since Salesforce completed its acquisition of Qualified in 2026, the product sits inside the Salesforce family, which is good news if your pipeline lives in Salesforce and a question mark if you run HubSpot or another CRM.

Qualified sells three plans, Premier, Enterprise and Ultimate, each with a "Contact us" button instead of an amount. What the page does tell you is how the plans are sized: Premier covers 250,000 monthly web sessions and 2,500 monthly active email contacts, Enterprise 2 million sessions and 10,000 contacts, Ultimate 5 million sessions and 25,000 contacts. That gives you the order of magnitude before the first call: Qualified is priced like an enterprise tool, in the same bracket as Drift Premium contracts, not like a $50 chat widget. Our tip: pull your monthly session count from your analytics tool before the demo, because it decides your tier, and ask whether agent handoff (listed from Enterprise) is in the plan you are quoted. Teams that only used Drift as a support chat will pay for capability they do not need.

A lot of Drift setups were a bridge between the website and HubSpot: the bot qualified a visitor, then pushed the lead into the CRM for a rep. If HubSpot is already your CRM, the shortest path is to remove the bridge. HubSpot's live chat and chatbot builder are free, with no credit card, and its bots can qualify leads, book meetings and answer common questions. Every chat lands on the contact record, so routing, lead scoring and follow-up sequences work without a sync to maintain. Our HubSpot review scores the platform 4.2, held back mostly by value for money once you climb the tiers.

That climb is where the bill hides. Marketing Hub Professional, where the serious automation lives, starts at $800 a month billed yearly ($890 on monthly billing) with 3 core seats, extra core seats from $45 a month, and a required one-time Professional onboarding fee of $3,000. Your first year therefore costs at least $12,600 ($800 × 12 plus $3,000), before extra seats. Enterprise starts at $3,600 a month with a $7,000 onboarding fee. Our advice: rebuild your Drift playbooks on the free chatbot first. Many teams find that the free bot plus a meeting link covers what Drift did, and they only upgrade when they need workflows or reporting. If you are still weighing CRMs, the HubSpot alternatives guide covers the field.

Crisp is what you move to when you realise Drift was mostly a chat bubble for you. It prices per workspace, not per seat, which is rare in this category: Free includes 2 seats, Mini costs $45 a month with 4 seats, Essentials $95 a month with 10 seats, and Plus $295 a month with 20 seats and more. Essentials is the plan to look at if you are leaving Drift, because it adds the omnichannel AI chatbot and the no-code workflow builder you need to rebuild a qualification flow. AI usage is counted in credits: Mini includes $5 of AI credits, Essentials $25 and Plus $75. Our Crisp review gives it 4.2, with 4.6 for value for money.

Two details matter when you compare. The "We run on Crisp" watermark only disappears with Plus, through its white-labelling option, so a brand-sensitive B2B site may end up on the $295 plan anyway. And Crisp is a support and messaging tool first: it has no account-based routing or AI SDR agent like Qualified. For a team of eight that wants chat, a chatbot and a shared inbox, though, $95 a month replaces a five-figure contract. You can pay yearly by switching the billing mode on the Plans page inside the app after subscribing. If you are comparing with a lighter tool, read Crisp vs Tidio, and the Crisp alternatives guide covers the rest.

Intercom is the tool the comparison guides cite most often as a Drift replacement, and the reason is breadth. Drift was built for sales conversations; Intercom covers the whole conversation: a shared inbox for your team, a help center, outbound messages, and Fin, its AI agent, which answers from your content and hands over to a human when it cannot resolve. For a SaaS company, the same widget can greet a prospect on the pricing page and help a customer in the app. Proactive messages, product tours and surveys come with the Proactive Support Plus add-on at $99 a month for 500 messages.

Read the pricing as two meters. Seats cost from $29 per seat per month on Essential billed yearly (new customers currently get 35% off on yearly billing, 25% on monthly), $85 on Advanced and $132 on Expert. On top, Fin costs $0.99 per outcome. Take a team of five on Essential billed yearly that lets Fin close 300 conversations a month: $145 in seats plus $297 for Fin, $442 a month. That is a fraction of a typical Drift contract, but the Fin line grows with your traffic, so set a monthly cap before launch. Two rules soften it: Fin is charged at most once per conversation, refunded if the conversation is reopened, and nothing is billed when the customer asks for a human. Intercom is weaker than Qualified on the pure sales motion (routing a hot account to the right rep in real time). Our guide to switching from Intercom lists what people dislike once they are in, which is worth reading before you sign. To pass chat leads to your CRM, the Intercom Zapier integration guide shows the setup.

Warmly comes at Drift's job from the data side. Its starting point is web de-anonymization: it identifies the companies, and sometimes the people, visiting your site, scores them against your target accounts and alerts the right rep. Inbound Chat adds an AI chatbot built in its AI Studio, warm calling (live chat started by a rep with a known visitor), warm offers, chat metrics and automated email follow-up. For an account-based marketing team, that is close to what Drift's ABM features promised, with the identification layer built in.

Warmly publishes its prices, which is unusual at this level. AI Web-Deanonymization starts at $10,000 a year, Inbound Chat at $20,000 a year and AI Inbound Autopilot at $30,000 a year, each from 10,000 credits a month. The catch is the billing period. You can pay quarterly to try, but Inbound Chat then costs $6,500 a quarter, $26,000 over a year, so $6,000 more than the annual price. If you sign quarterly to test, put a calendar reminder to switch before the second quarter renews. Warmly suits teams with enough traffic from target accounts to justify five figures; a startup with a few hundred visitors a month will get more from Crisp or the free HubSpot chat. Browse our AI SDR ranking if you want agents that also prospect outbound.

Tidio is the budget end of this list. It bundles live chat, ticketing, Flows (automated chat sequences) and Lyro, an AI agent that answers from your knowledge base. Starter costs $24.17 a month billed yearly, $290 for the year, Growth starts at $49.17 a month, also billed yearly, and Plus at $300 a month plus usage. Lyro is a separate meter: every account gets 50 AI conversations for life, and they refresh monthly only on the Lyro AI Agent plan, which starts at $32.50 a month billed yearly. Our Tidio review scores it 3.6, held back by value for money once Lyro volume grows; the Tidio pricing breakdown details each meter.

The billing unit is the thing to understand. A billable conversation is one where a human agent replies; visitor messages you never answer and bot-only chats are not billed on that meter. That is fair for a store, less so for a B2B team that wants a bot to qualify hundreds of visitors, because qualification usually runs through Flows, capped at 100 visitors a month on the free plan. Tidio is built for e-commerce and support more than for B2B pipeline, and you will not find account identification or rep routing at Drift's depth. Removing Tidio branding is an add-on at $16.67 a month. See the Tidio alternatives guide if it feels too light.