The short answer. Salesloft states on its own product page that it has "transitioned from Drift to 1mind", and that 1Mind now powers its conversational AI. No end-of-life date or migration timeline is published. If you are running Drift today, start evaluating replacements now rather than waiting for a notice.

Which replacement is right depends on something most lists skip: Drift did two quite different jobs, and the tools that replace one are a poor fit for the other.

  • If you used Drift to route high-value website visitors to sales — playbooks, ABM targeting, booking meetings off the chat widget — you need a conversational marketing tool. HubSpot or Intercom.
  • If you used Drift as a support and conversation inbox — answering questions, deflecting tickets, a chat widget on a product site — you need a support chat tool, and you will likely pay a fraction of what you were paying. Tidio, Crisp, LiveChat or Olark.

Buying the wrong half is the most expensive mistake available here, and it is the thing a generic "top 10 Drift alternatives" list will not tell you.

What we have and have not done

Not yet independently tested by First Response Lab. Every product below is in our test queue but none has yet been through the ten-step protocol. This page is built on vendor-published information and our own category analysis, and each claim is labelled with where it came from.

We are publishing it now because the Salesloft change is live and people are deciding today. When the tests are done, this page is rewritten around measured numbers — setup time, real cost at 5, 10, 20 and 50 agents, and cancellation friction — and the date above will change.

What actually happened to Drift

Verified, 4 October 2026. Salesloft's Drift product page states: "We've transitioned from Drift to 1mind." The page presents 1Mind as the engine behind Salesloft's conversational AI, feeding buyer signals into its Predictive Revenue System.

Not verified. Salesloft does not publish, on that page, whether Drift is formally sunset, any end-of-life date, what happens to existing Drift contracts, or a migration path for current customers. We are not going to invent those details. If you are a current customer, the only reliable source for your situation is your Salesloft account manager — and getting that in writing is worth doing this month.

What we can say plainly: a product that a vendor has publicly moved away from is not a product to renew a multi-year contract on.

The seven replacements

Tool Replaces which half of Drift Pricing model Free plan Pays us?
HubSpot Service Hub Sales-led conversations Per seat, plus platform fees Yes Potentially
Intercom Both, closest like-for-like Per seat + per AI resolution No No
Tidio Support chat Per month, conversation-tiered Yes Potentially
Crisp Support chat, multi-channel Flat per workspace Yes Potentially
LiveChat Support chat Per agent No Potentially
Olark Support chat, simple Per seat No Unknown
ManyChat Social messaging only By contact volume Yes Unknown

Pricing models are verified from each vendor's own pricing page. Specific prices are deliberately absent where we have not yet read and dated them — see how we test on why we would rather show a gap than a guess.

1. Intercom — the closest like-for-like, and it pays us nothing

Best for: teams that used Drift for both marketing conversations and support, and want one tool to keep doing both.

Intercom is the most direct functional replacement for a full Drift deployment. It covers the inbound chat widget, routing, bots, and an AI agent, and it is built for the same B2B SaaS buyer Drift targeted.

The catch is the one everybody already knows: it is expensive, and it has moved to charging per AI resolution on top of per-seat pricing, which makes the bill hard to forecast. Teams leaving Drift over cost will not find relief here.

We want to be explicit about something. Intercom runs no affiliate programme we can join, so we earn nothing whatever we say about it. We are naming it first among the like-for-like options anyway, because for a full Drift deployment it is the honest answer. Our affiliate disclosure lists every vendor that does and does not pay us.

2. HubSpot — the pick if the conversations were really about pipeline

Best for: marketing-led teams that used Drift to qualify and route visitors, especially if sales already lives in a CRM.

If what you valued in Drift was playbooks that caught a visitor on the pricing page and booked a meeting, that job belongs with your CRM rather than with a standalone chat tool. HubSpot's chat and bots sit directly on its CRM, so a conversation becomes a contact record and a routing rule without an integration in between.

Verified: HubSpot offers both a free plan and a free trial. Pricing is tiered and bundled with platform fees, which is exactly the kind of structure that makes a published "from $X" figure misleading — we will publish real numbers at 5, 10, 20 and 50 seats once we have run the test.

Worth knowing if you are coming from Drift: the free tier is genuinely usable for a small team, which makes this a low-risk thing to trial in parallel before your Salesloft contract decision.

We may eventually earn a commission from HubSpot. We are not yet approved and have earned nothing.

3. Tidio — the cheap, fast landing spot for support chat

Best for: small teams, and anyone who was using Drift as a glorified chat widget and resenting the price.

Tidio is live chat plus bots aimed squarely at small and e-commerce teams, with a free plan and a paid range we have observed at roughly $29–$95 a month for small teams (vendor-published, 4 October 2026 — note Tidio prices partly by conversation volume, not purely by seat, so your bill moves with traffic).

If you used Drift for support conversations rather than pipeline, this is likely to be the biggest cost reduction available to you. It is not a replacement for Drift's ABM and sales-routing side, and we would not pretend otherwise.

4. Crisp — flat pricing instead of per-seat

Best for: teams of five or more where per-agent pricing has become the problem.

Crisp bundles a multi-channel inbox, chat widget and help centre, and prices per workspace rather than per agent. For a growing support team that structural difference matters more than any feature comparison: adding your sixth agent does not add to the bill.

We have not yet verified Crisp's current price points and will not quote a figure until we have.

5. LiveChat — mature, focused, per agent

Best for: teams that want a dedicated chat product with a long track record and no ambitions to be a CRM.

LiveChat does one thing and has done it for a long time. Per-agent pricing, no free plan. If you want chat and nothing else, and you want it to be boringly reliable, this is a reasonable shortlist entry.

6. Olark — the simple one

Best for: small teams who want chat installed this afternoon, and who care about accessibility.

Olark is the least ambitious tool here and that is the point. It takes accessibility more seriously than most of the category, which matters if you have obligations in that area.

7. ManyChat — only if your conversations were on social

Best for: Instagram and Facebook messaging automation, not website support.

ManyChat is on this list because it appears on most Drift alternatives lists, and we want to be clear that it is doing a different job. If your Drift use was a website widget, ManyChat is not your replacement. If you are actually trying to automate Instagram DMs, it is the strongest option here.

How to choose, in about ten minutes

  1. Work out which half of Drift you used. Open your Drift reporting and look at what the conversations actually produced. Meetings booked for sales, or questions answered? That single answer removes four of the seven options.
  2. Count your agents, then count them again at the headcount you expect in a year. Per-seat tools and flat-rate tools cross over somewhere around five to eight agents, and the crossover is usually where the real money is.
  3. Get your Salesloft position in writing. Ask your account manager directly what happens to your Drift instance and when. Do that before you sign anything else.
  4. Trial two, not six. One from the sales-led column, one from the support column, if you genuinely are not sure which job you need done. More than two in parallel and you will not give any of them a fair run.
  5. Export your conversation history before you cancel anything. This is the step everyone skips and nobody gets a second chance at.

What we will add to this page

This article is honest about being pre-test, and the gap is the point of the site rather than something to hide. Once the protocol has been run, this page gains: measured time from signup to a first ticket in the queue for each tool; the real monthly cost at 5, 10, 20 and 50 agents including add-ons; what each vendor's AI features actually cost and how they are billed; and how hard each one is to cancel and export from.

If you want to be told when that lands, or you are mid-decision and stuck, the contact page reaches a person.

Sources