Please note that 'Variables' are now called 'Fields' in Landbot's platform.
If you’re reading this, you likely have playbooks in production, a renewal date ahead of you, and no published end-of-life date to plan against — that’s the real problem. Here’s what matters: what changed, whether the 1mind referral is worth taking, which alternative replaces which part of Drift, and what to export while it’s easy. Short verdict: Landbot if marketing wants the lead-capture and booking job back at a price you can read; Qualified or 1mind if you’re staying enterprise; Intercom, Chili Piper or HubSpot if the part you used was support, meeting routing, or your CRM’s own chat.
Key Takeaways
- The sunset was announced by Clari + Salesloft on March 5, 2026, with 1mind named the exclusive successor — existing Drift clients are referred to 1mind, not migrated to it.
- No public end-of-life date exists, and active development has stopped, so your renewal date is the practical deadline.
- Playbooks don’t export — targeting, qualification scripts and routing are Drift-specific config. Every option here means a rebuild, so export the data that can’t be rebuilt: contacts, transcripts, field mappings.
- Drift went to Salesloft and Qualified went to Salesforce on April 1, 2026 — the two closest like-for-like successors are now both owned by bigger platforms and both quote-only.
- Published pricing is rare here: Landbot (from €40/mo), Intercom ($39–$139/seat/mo) and Chili Piper (from $1,250/mo) publish numbers; Qualified, 1mind and Salesloft’s chat agents don’t.
What Happened to Drift: The Sunset Timeline
Here’s how Drift went from an independent product to being phased out in just over two years:
- February 2024 — Salesloft acquires Drift. Self-serve signup and public pricing disappear.
- August–September 2025 — a security incident involving Drift’s OAuth integration tokens affects 700+ organizations.
- August → December 2025 — Clari and Salesloft agree to merge (August) and close the combination on December 3, 2025.
- March 5, 2026 — Clari + Salesloft announces “the gradual sunset of its Drift conversational marketing solution” and an exclusive agreement to “refer existing Drift clients to 1mind as the successor.”
- Today — drift.com redirects to Salesloft’s chat-agents page. No end-of-life date has been published and product development has ended.
The practical deadline isn’t a shutdown date — it’s your next renewal. Salesloft has called this a “gradual sunset,” and products in that state typically see support and integration attention slow down over time, even without an official cutoff announced.
Should You Take the 1mind Referral?
1mind sells “Superhumans”: multimodal AI agents that engage buyers on your site, in product, in deal rooms and on video calls. It’s a real product — Salesloft’s announcement names 60+ enterprise and mid-market customers including HubSpot, Samsara and ZoomInfo, founded by 6sense founder Amanda Kahlow with $40 million raised. Three questions decide whether it’s your path:
- Are you standardizing on Clari + Salesloft? If your forecast and cadences already live there, 1mind is built to feed that system — that integration is the point of the exclusive agreement.
- Was Drift’s enterprise surface load-bearing or decorative? If ABM targeting, de-anonymization and SDR inbox workflows drove real pipeline, you need an enterprise successor. If you demoed them once, you’re about to re-buy them.
- Can you buy on a quote? 1mind publishes no pricing — the only route is a demo, and “referred” means introduced: you rebuild your conversational logic either way.
Take the demo, but price at least one option that publishes its numbers, so the quote has something to sit against.
Which Part of Drift Were You Actually Using?
If you used only one or two slices of Drift’s broad platform, find your closest match below.
Drift Alternatives at a Glance
Full transparency: Landbot is first on this list because it’s the closest match for the job most marketing teams actually used Drift for: capture, qualify and book, at a published price, without a sales cycle. Where a rival owns a job better, we say so — Qualified for Salesforce-native AI SDR work, 1mind inside the Salesloft stack, Intercom for support, Chili Piper for routing, HubSpot if the CRM owns your stack.
1. Landbot — Best for Marketing-Owned Lead Capture and Booking
If you bought Drift to turn traffic into qualified meetings and used maybe a fifth of the platform, this puts that fifth back in your hands. Marketing designs the conversation on a visual canvas — qualifying questions with conditional logic, scoring on the answers, an AI agent for open questions inside guardrails you define, and a calendar block that only appears once a visitor qualifies.
Key features
- Playbook logic, rebuilt as flows: per-URL launch conditions replace targeting rules; conditional blocks and lead scoring replace qualification scripts.
- Your stack, kept: native HubSpot plus webhooks, API and Zapier/Make for Salesforce and the rest — and WhatsApp as a first-class channel, which Drift never shipped.
Pricing:
One chat covers a whole conversation; extra chats €25 per 500, extra AI chats €0.10, extra seats €25/month. 14-day trial with Pro features, no card.
Pros:
- A number you can budget against today, and a flow live during the trial — no discovery call, no annual contract
- Marketing owns and edits the logic; changes ship without an admin or a deploy
Cons:
- Not an ABM tool: no visitor de-anonymization or intent data, and no SDR inbox or forecast tooling — if those drove real pipeline in Drift, look at the enterprise options above instead
- The free plan (1 seat, 100 chats/month) is for testing, not production volume
For the block-by-block mapping of every Drift component, see the Landbot vs Drift comparison.
2. Qualified — Best Salesforce-Native Successor
Salesforce completed its acquisition of Qualified on April 1, 2026, which makes Piper the default conversational layer inside Salesforce — and a harder pick if you’re not already on that stack. Otherwise, Qualified is the closest like-for-like to what Drift was trying to be: an agentic marketing platform whose AI SDR, Piper, engages visitors over chat, voice and video, qualifies them against Salesforce CRM data, and books meetings.
- Piper the AI SDR: conversations, meeting scheduling, AI-generated follow-up email and nurture offers.
- Salesforce-first architecture: account segmentation with enrichment, advanced routing, reporting in both Qualified and Salesforce.
Pricing: No public prices. Three tiers: Premier, Enterprise, Ultimate.
Pros:
- The nearest replacement for Drift’s enterprise ambition, with a genuinely productized AI SDR
- Deepest Salesforce alignment on this list, now that Salesforce owns it
Cons:
- Quote-only: no way to estimate cost before a demo cycle
- Built for Salesforce-centric revenue orgs — heavy if you just want a qualification flow live this week
3. 1mind — The Official Drift Successor
1mind is where Clari + Salesloft points existing Drift customers under the exclusive referral agreement. Its agents work text, voice and video across the customer lifecycle, and its signals feed Salesloft’s Predictive Revenue System — a closed loop between AI engagement, human follow-up and forecasting that nothing else here offers.
Key features
- Multimodal agents: website, in-product, deal rooms and video calls, not just site chat.
- Native Clari + Salesloft integration: buyer intelligence flows into cadences and the forecast.
Pricing: Not published.
Pros:
- The path of least resistance if you’re committed to the Clari + Salesloft stack
- More ambitious than Drift’s chat: agents that also work calls and deal rooms
Cons:
- A referral is an introduction, not a migration — you rebuild your logic regardless
- No public pricing, and a much younger product than the one you’re replacing
4. Intercom — Best If Your Chat Mostly Answered Questions
Plenty of Drift installs quietly became support desks: the widget was on the site, and most conversations were customers with questions rather than prospects entering a funnel. If that’s your reality, Intercom is the mature option — a full help desk with Fin, an AI agent priced per resolved conversation.
Key features
- Fin AI agent at $0.99 per resolution.
- Full help desk: shared inbox, ticketing, SLAs, help center, plus pay-as-you-go email, SMS, WhatsApp and phone.
Pricing:
Fin outcomes cost $0.99 each on top of any plan, and add-ons stack from there. For the fuller field, see our Intercom alternatives comparison.
Pros:
- Best-in-class support AI on a mature platform, with published seat pricing
- Outcome-based AI pricing is easy to reason about per resolution
Cons:
- Seats plus resolutions plus channel fees make bills hard to forecast
- Lead generation runs through an inbox built for support agents, not a qualification funnel
5. Chili Piper — Best for Meeting Routing and Booking
For some teams the irreplaceable part of Drift was never the chat — it was the handoff: qualified visitor, right rep, booked meeting, no back-and-forth. Chili Piper owns that job, and unusually for this list, it publishes prices.
Key features
- Routing & Scheduling turns inbound traffic into booked meetings from a form or a chat, with re-engagement automations built in.
- Experiences goes further — agent-powered web experiences with account identification and ABM targeting on intent signals, the closest published-price equivalent to Drift Intel.
Pricing:
Pros:
- The category leader for routing and booking, with real numbers on the page
- Experiences covers the ABM targeting most chat tools dropped
Cons:
- The $15K/year entry price is on the high end for a small team or a single lead-gen page
- Routing and scheduling first — conversational qualification isn’t the center of the product
6. HubSpot — Best If You Already Run on HubSpot CRM
If your CRM is HubSpot, its own chat is the lowest-friction way to keep a widget on the site: it ships with the free CRM tools, and every conversation logs against the contact record automatically.
Key features
- Live chat and rule-based chatflows are free with HubSpot’s free CRM tools.
- The AI customer agent — part of HubSpot’s Agent Hub, built on the Breeze AI brand — handles automated resolution and is billed in HubSpot credits, available from the Professional tier up.
Pricing:
Pros:
- Zero-cost entry with perfect CRM context if you’re already a HubSpot shop
- One vendor, one data model, no integration to maintain
Cons:
- Chatflow logic is basic next to a dedicated builder — qualification depth is shallow
- Real automation and Breeze agents need Professional seats plus credits
Export Your Data Before Your Access Stops Mattering
Don’t wait for a shutdown notice that isn’t coming — start now, before you lose access to data that can’t be rebuilt. Three things you should start doing:
- 1. Export contacts and conversation history while you have admin access — transcripts are the only asset that genuinely can’t be rebuilt.
- 2. Document each playbook (targeting, questions, scoring, routing, fallbacks) and every field mapping, Slack alert and calendar link. That inventory is your rebuild spec, and it’s usually shorter than people expect. After the 2025 OAuth incident, it’s also worth auditing which integration tokens are still connected.
- 3. Rebuild your two highest-traffic playbooks in whichever tool you picked, run them in parallel on one high-intent page, and compare qualified leads and booked meetings before renewal.
What the Conversational Marketing Category Got Right — and Overcharged For
Drift’s founding idea was sound and still is: a form makes a buyer wait, a conversation doesn’t. What made it expensive was everything bolted onto that idea — ABM targeting, de-anonymization, SDR workflows, forecast tooling — sold as one platform to teams that only needed the first part.
The teams getting the most from conversational lead gen now treat it as a funnel with one job: qualify, score, book, sync to the CRM — the core idea behind an AI agent for lead generation. If Drift’s enterprise surface was what earned its budget, Qualified or 1mind is the better fit; if the job was lead capture and booking, Landbot does that at a price you can see before you commit.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is Drift being discontinued?
Yes. On March 5, 2026, Clari + Salesloft announced the gradual sunset of the Drift conversational marketing product and an exclusive agreement to refer existing customers to 1mind as its successor. Drift is no longer sold standalone, drift.com redirects to Salesloft’s chat-agents page, and active development has ended.
When exactly does Drift shut down?
No public end-of-life date has been announced — the sunset was described as “gradual.” Existing deployments keep running for now while support, fixes and integration maintenance wind down, so most teams treat their renewal date as the real deadline rather than waiting for a shutdown notice.
Should I move to 1mind because Salesloft recommends it?
Only if you’re standardizing on Clari + Salesloft. The referral is a warm introduction under an exclusive commercial agreement, not a migration — your playbooks get rebuilt either way, and 1mind publishes no pricing, so the cost comes out of a demo cycle. Evaluate it alongside at least one option that publishes its numbers.
What is the best Drift alternative for lead generation?
For the capture, qualification and booking job most marketing teams bought Drift for, Landbot is the closest practical replacement: conditional-logic flows with lead scoring, an AI agent inside guardrails you define, calendar booking after qualification, native HubSpot and webhooks for other CRMs — from €40/month with a 14-day trial and no sales call. If you need Salesforce-native AI SDR work, Qualified is the enterprise answer; if your chat was mostly support, Intercom is.
What did Drift cost, and what should a replacement cost?
Drift stopped publishing prices after the 2024 acquisition, so there’s no current, official source for what it costs today. Legacy figures around $2,500/month billed annually circulate across third-party comparison sites, but they’re unattributable to Drift directly and should be treated as historical estimates, not verified numbers. Among replacements, the published numbers are Landbot at €40–€200/month (plus a custom Business tier for larger volumes), Intercom at $39–$139/seat/month plus $0.99 per Fin resolution, Chili Piper from $1,250/month, and HubSpot’s chat free with its CRM tools ($10/seat/month for Starter, scaling to $890+/month on Professional for AI agents and advanced chatflows, plus onboarding fees). Qualified, 1mind and Salesloft’s chat agents are quote-only — so price your real volume against a published tier first, and use that number as the floor when a quote arrives.
So — Do You Replace the Platform, or the Job It Did?
If Drift’s enterprise surface was load-bearing — account intent, SDR routing, forecast integration — replace the platform: take the 1mind demo, price Qualified, budget for an implementation.
But if you look at your account and see a widget that qualified visitors and booked meetings, replace the job instead. Pick your highest-intent page, rebuild that one playbook, connect your CRM and calendar, and let two weeks of real traffic tell you whether you ever needed the rest. Landbot’s free plan and 14-day trial (no credit card) make that test cost nothing — try Landbot free and decide before the renewal decides for you.
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