Top 12 Drift Competitors & Alternatives to try in 2024

Drift is a powerful customer communications platform that has established itself as a well-known brand within the chat app niche. It does many things well but has some clear downsides, which is why many users start looking for Drift alternatives.

In this article, we will give you the top 12 Drift competitors. We will first explain what makes Drift good and what this platform should do better. Afterward, we will move on to the best alternative options to Drift, showcasing their strengths and weaknesses.

Drift is a chatbot app that saves you time and effort by simplifying and speeding up communication with customers and prospects. It allows you to communicate directly via live chat but also has a highly customizable, incredibly responsive chatbot system that saves you hours every month by avoiding pointless queries. It is one of the biggest players in the sector, similar to Intercom.

Besides aiding you in customer support, Drift does a good job with marketing and sales activities, helping you warm up leads and eventually close sales. 

Drift has a clever AI that can intercept lead/customer requests and give automated answers where applicable. This feature alone will save countless hours of manpower, as the chatbot will answer all of the basic questions (as long as you have FAQ prepared). 

Drift lets you automatically engage with website visitors, depending on their interests. For example, someone viewing your pricing page is much more likely to buy or upgrade their plan than someone who troubleshoots problems in your knowledge base.

Because it is an established player in the market, Drift integrates with many popular apps, which means it will rarely interfere with your workflow. Overall, it is a potent software that does many things well but is far from perfect.

Main downsides of Drift 

There’s no denying that Drift is very powerful, which is the central reason for its popularity. Still, it has some major flaws their competitors are taking advantage of:

Not the best interface

Drift has plenty of powerful features, which is nice, but the truth is most businesses won’t need all of them from the get-go. Unfortunately, their dashboard is underwhelming and getting things to look and feel how you want them will be challenging. Getting used to it will take a while.

Problematic chatbot configuration

Drift chatbot is powerful, but only if you spend a hefty amount of time configuring them. Unfortunately, they cannot understand intents and entities and only rely on keywords. In other words, for a chatbot to answer a question, the customer will have to enter a keyword – even entering a synonym can be problematic.

Plus, multimedia options in Drift chats are pretty limited. You won’t be able to add galleries, videos, or audio, so your Drift chatbot replies won’t be as appealing and detailed.

Resource-intensive

Drift chatbot can save up a lot of time, but only if you have servers that can support the load. If not, your customers and prospects are likely to experience less-than-ideal load times, to say the least. The same will happen if your servers are fine but users have a weaker internet connection, which is common if you have an international audience.

Super expensive

While you can try Drift for free, if you want to use the platform to its fullest, you will need to consult your bank account – the cheapest premium plan starts at $2500/mo! That makes Drift suitable only for established businesses with more than decent revenue. Spending this much money each month on a chatbot app is all but wise for those still in the growing phase.

Even though Drift is a well-known player in the chatbot market, there are plenty of different solutions that do a great job in the same field. As you are about to see, almost all of the alternatives cost far less than Drift, making them a better option for small businesses.

Customerly is an all-in-one customer service and marketing automation platform designed to support your daily operations with cutting-edge chat features, improving conversions and spurring growth. Here’s what sets us apart:

Advanced live chat capabilities

Customerly puts an enormous amount of firepower in the hands of your sales reps and support agents. Besides the usual text live chat, they will be able to use Video Live chat, as well as engage with the customers on every step of a customer journey.

This feature will tremendously boost the efficacy of your support department, as they will no longer have to rely on third-party solutions to help customers. 

At the same time, communicating with prospects via videos and sharing screens will allow your sales reps to demonstrate what they are talking about, making their efforts much more convincing.

Customerly video live chat is also fully compatible with mobile devices, which is extremely important considering that more people browse from smaller screens than desktops.

Easy-to-use templates and visitor segmentation

Customerly lets you segment visitors and customers into lists, treating each differently. This is extremely important, especially for marketing and sales.

It’s entirely different to engage with someone who is a new user compared to someone who just got back to your pricing page again after abandoning it. The first person will likely need help onboarding, while the second is getting ready to pull the trigger and buy. Customerly lets you cater to their needs appropriately, ensuring maximal customer satisfaction.

But, what’s even more impressive, are Customerly live chat templates. They are an excellent starting point, as you can customize them to your liking. They also make it super easy to create tailored chat experiences for each user group, which will show in your conversions.

A unified dashboard

Customerly dashboard is extraordinary. First, it’s intuitive, and your reps or support agents will never feel overwhelmed with too many options.

It also integrates with different channels, keeping all in a single place. That means you will see live chat conversations, but also any emails that prospect/customer sent, as well as Facebook page messages. Moreover, you can connect your sources via REST API, making chat integration options practically unlimited.

To avoid cluttering, Customerly allows you to filter and split customer conversations by teams into separate inboxes. This will prevent confusion and allow team members to look at the message database if needed.

Excellent branding and customization capabilities

Chatbot applications often don’t fit the website theme and general branding, which spoils the visual user experience. Customerly is not like that.

You can choose live chat icons, set profile pictures, design your color hues, and connect to customers in 22 languages. Customerly will integrate seamlessly into your existing website layout and branding without interfering with design or functionality.

Powerful integrations

We have mentioned that Customerly supports REST API integrations. That means thousands of apps can work with Customerly: Slack, Google Analytics, Zapier, and Calendly, to name a few.

Workflow builder

Customerly workflow builder lets you create automated chat and email messages based on customer behaviors. That means you can automate every touchpoint, saving countless hours of support time – initial contact, onboarding, reviews, and recovering churns. As well as use numerous pre-made templates:

Moreover, because of the advanced segmentation and analytics, you will be able to optimize your campaigns further, making your bots even more efficient.

You can use Customerly to design your email marketing campaigns too. And, because it has a built-in CRM, you will always have the most relevant information about the customer you are engaging, significantly improving outcomes. 

In other words, it can replace many tools you would otherwise use, keeping all your marketing automation activities centralized.

Affordable pricing

Compared to the competition, especially Drift, Customerly costs only a fraction of the price. Even the Essential package has decent features to help the smallest companies grow their business and cover basic chat support services.

But, when you consider how much you get in premium plans, opting to try Customerly is a no-brainer, especially considering it has a 14-day free trial. So don’t wait, try Customerly now, and push your business communication and customer satisfaction to a new level.

Qualified tries to help businesses identify valuable visitors and immediately engage with them, converting sales. As such, it is primarily a revenue acceleration platform and does a good job with that. But, it lacks other aspects of user communication, especially those intended for support, which most of the best Drift alternatives have.

Qualified conversations

This feature aims to identify potential buyers, draw them into the pipeline, and push them toward conversions. It connects with the Salesforce Sales Cloud and uses advanced analytics to target potentially valuable leads.

Qualified has intelligent visitor segmentation that will allow your reps to isolate potential VIP visitors, who are most likely to have buyer intent. These are the ones who arrived via paid ads, outbound marketing platforms, or directly from Google entering high buyer intent queries.

Immediately after a VIP lead enters the website, Qualified will forward them to the appropriate rep. Everything is integrated with several popular apps, such as MS Teams, Slack, and it supports email and mobile apps, which means prospects will remain within reach no matter the technology they prefer.

Qualified Signals

Qualified Signals is intended for Account Based Marketing (ABM). ABM is an advanced B2B marketing and conversational sales tactic used for closing bigger deals.

Qualified signals monitor user behavior and their AI is configured to spot buyer intent from leads who can bring the most value to your business. Data from three sources is combined to identify that lead type, improving the chances of finding sales-ready accounts.

This feature will help you differentiate prospects into groups: those with research intent that need more nurturing and those with engagement intent that are ready for contact. 

Qualified for Outbound and Qualified for Advertising

Qualified Pipeline Cloud has some outbound marketing capabilities too, which is nice. With Outbound, you can reach out to hot leads via personalized emails and immediately get in touch with them via chat when they enter your website, improving your conversions.

Qualified for Advertising helps you prioritize and customize your paid traffic, ensuring your ad budget doesn’t go to waste. Once a high-priority lead arrives at your site via a paid ad, your sales team will be notified and instantly engage with them. This prompt action will help you close more deals and target those leads with future advertising, ensuring they are converted once they return.

Freshchat is a multi-platform messaging app with good chatbot capabilities. While it does an excellent job of being available across different devices and channels, it lacks some features some other Drift alternatives on the list have, such as built-in video chat and screen sharing.

Multi-channel support

Freshchat stands out from most competitors as it allows you to get in touch with customers via website and mobile chat, but also Facebook Messenger, Instagram, SMS, Telegram, WhatsApp, Apple Business chat, and LINE. You can even integrate your channels that aren’t on the official list. This means Freshchat will serve as an entire customer communications platform.

Decent chatbot capabilities

Freshchat has automated chatbot capabilities, saving support time. With them, you can program and serve answers to the most common questions, reducing agent time without compromising customer satisfaction. 

Bots aren’t complicated to configure, but they take time if you want to set them up optimally. They support API integrations, which means you can connect them with popular apps you already use. It’s worth noting, however, that Freschat chatbots are nowhere near Drift’s standards, so don’t expect miracles.

Well-put team dashboard

Freshchat does a good job regarding team collaboration, as it has a unified inbox every member can access. Each agent will see the context and the conversation in a single place, making their job easier. This is come in handy in situations when complex problems occur or if there’s an ongoing ticket that multiple team members are working on.

Olark is a chat app geared towards small or medium-sized businesses, aiming to simplify the process of conversational sales and customer support and organize customer data. It looks very nice and works well, but lacks Drill’s robustness or some advanced features other competitors have, which Olark charges extra.

Easy to customize

Olark lets you visually tweak how chats look in detail. Customizations include colors, shapes, profile pictures of chat agents, and even language selections. You can also change the position of the chat, redesign the button, and more.

Olark is fully accessible to people who have disabilities. It supports screen readers and large text and can be used keyboard-only, which is great.

Decent chatbot and automation features

Olark allows you to preset chatbots and automate messages to save time or ensure you don’t miss a lead. 

You can set automated messages to trigger based on user behavior, such as browsing the help section on your website. Olark supports custom chatbot forms, which are a handy way to get more information before a support agent jumps in, but also for collecting leads. 

Good analytics panel

In a glimpse, you can see the number of chats agents made, conversation length, and customer satisfaction ratings. You can easily filter through messages by tags. There’s also a convenient reporting feature – Olark can summarize chat activity and send periodic reports by email.

Premium add-ons

Olark has a few extras that are excellent but are pretty expensive. Some other tools on the list already include similar features in their regular plans. Olark charges up to $99/mo for each:

• Visitor co-browsing will allow your agents to see visitors’ screens, further enhancing support. 
• Visitor insights will give you an in-depth analysis of each user your agents can access while communicating, which can lead to better sales outcomes and improved support quality.

Conversica aims to enhance your sales and marketing with smart, AI-powered chatbots. It is ultra-powerful but super expensive, as some plans surpass Drift’s, making it a good option only for enterprise clients.

Powerful NLP 

Conversica features natural language processing and can understand customers’ intent and act proactively. The platform has a superb AI model, making the conversations much more human. This will tremendously influence the success of your marketing and sales teams and customer support.

Customer lifecycle monitoring

Conversica, as the name suggests, is primarily about improving conversions. As such, this tool gives you comprehensive customer behavior analysis throughout the whole cycle.

Every piece of information collected will be presented visually, as Conversica does an outstanding job with graphs and charts. You will have actionable insights and will spot gaps as well as opportunities with ease. 

Cross-platform support

Conversica works on the web, but it can also leverage SMS messages as well as emails. This means you will be able to target leads in different ways, improving the effectiveness of your campaigns. But some other tools on the list support more communication channels.

Many integrations

Conversica will seamlessly integrate with other tools you use in your operations. This includes all kinds of CRM, MAP, or ABM platforms, as well as platforms for inter-team communication and more. With these integrations, you can automate the whole pipeline and reduce agents’ time wasted switching apps and searching for data.

ZoomInfo Chat is another tool primarily intended for aiding sales teams, making it easier to close deals. However, if you are looking for a chatbot solution to help in other areas of your business besides sales, you are better off with other tools from our list.

Filtering and connecting buyers with the right rep

ZoomInfo Chat will help you close more deals by immediately contacting a buyer based on their activities and connecting them to a sales rep. Its AI can determine if the visitor is a hot lead with a strong intent to buy or just someone casually browsing. 

In other words, your agents will waste less time reaching out to people who are not ready for purchase and instead focus on those closer to converting.

Sales-intended chatbot

ZoomInfo Chat has an advanced chatbot builder you can use to customize the whole experience in-depth. The builder is an excellent way to get started, as it will lead you through the process and ensure you don’t get stuck. You can always tweak things later.

The chatbot supports customer segmentation and even lets you A/B test different solutions. This means you will continually improve your campaign, leading to better conversions in the long run.

A lengthy integration list

ZoomInfo chat has a separate marketplace where you will find many integrations and partnerships with other tools. All the popular CRM, ATS, communication, and analytics tools are there, including Slack, MS Teams, Salesforce, Hubspot, AWS, and more.

Scheduling appointments

The appointment scheduler will help you book sales calls right from the chatbox itself, simplifying the process and helping you close more deals. The scheduler works in live chat, but customers can also book a meeting when interacting with the chatbot.

Everything scheduled will automatically integrate with your calendar and CRM, ensuring you have an open spot and connecting the right person to the customer.

Crisp is a solid, budget-friendly chat solution for startups and smaller businesses. It is a full-service chat app that can help with any kind of communication. You will get many tools, but some lack depth and functionality you find in many of their competitors.

A good amount of live chat features

Crisp helps your agents do their job by providing them with many handy tools. 

Visitors can not only get answers from the chatbot but actually access your whole knowledge base right from the chat window itself, saving hours of support time. Crisp helps you to build your knowledge base too, which is excellent.

Depending on user type and behavior, you can design your chatbot scenarios, which can drastically increase the success of your sales campaigns and the overall support quality. The chatbot builder will navigate you through the process, making it simpler.

Multi-channel support

Crisp works on the web but integrates with Instagram, Facebook Messenger, Twitter, email, and others. Moreover, it supports social selling features, allowing you to send previews in the chat.

Good inbox management

Crisp shared inbox will allow your team to gain instant insights into customer behavior. You will see analytics about each customer, which will help decision-making and improve customer experience. 

This inbox will also integrate all means of communication into a single place, and agents won’t have to waste time switching from app to app.

Ticketing system

Crisp also integrates a ticketing system that you will find helpful if you provide direct customer support. With it, your agents can solve burning questions immediately through live chat, speeding up the process significantly. 

You can even configure bots to take over and offer first-contact support, reducing your agents’ time answering basic FAQs.

Birdeye is a review management and chat tool that works best for local businesses. While it does offer some unique features, it isn’t cheap, as its best features are locked in more expensive plans.

Get more reviews, rankings and listings

Birdeye’s key selling point is growing your presence by collecting reviews and improving your rankings. For this reason, Birdeye is best used by local businesses interested in getting high in the local search results.

Excellent analytics

Birdeye not only collects reviews but is also an excellent tool for surveys. Automating surveys is a great way to collect even more customer feedback and improve your processes.

Once collected, Birdeye analyzes all of those reviews and surveys and combines them with social media information and other data you have about customers, giving you exceptional reports. You can spot negative and positive trends, providing data-driven opportunities to grow.

Competition monitoring

With Birdeye’s benchmarking feature, you can compare your online presence to competitors. Various criteria will let you spot the strengths and weaknesses of the competition and see how and where you can improve to beat them.

All-in-one chat

Birdeye will be the central hub for all of your communication channels. You will see your Instagram, Facebook, and website chat messages, coupled with your Google profile and reviews, giving agents a deep understanding and insights into customers’ needs. Plus, many integrations guarantee Birdeye can work with other apps you use daily.

It also features good team collaboration options within the chat. Agents can forward customers to other experts and even engage in group conversations. 

Terminus is an enterprise app that helps you improve your whole sales pipeline. As such, it is best suited for larger businesses that need all the key features and have the budget.

A comprehensive set of ABM tools

Terminus is designed to be the central hub of your Account Based Marketing and sales. It offers everything you need to lead a high-value lead through the whole funnel – from initial contact through nurturing to the closed deal and beyond.

Besides Chat Experiences, Terminus has platforms for ads, emails, sales, and web, allowing you to fully customize your online presence, all with a single goal – improving conversions. 

ABM intended chat

Terminus is designed for high-level conversions. It helps you identify and interact with VIP leads with strong buyer intent. You can immediately approach them and offer the correct type of content or service they need.

Customizable artificial intelligence driven chatbot

Terminus Chat has a great chatbot that is highly customizable and intended to convert high-end leads. You will be able to create unique campaigns targeting the most valuable customer profiles. Playbooks you make will lead those accounts through the whole funnel, always pushing the correct type of content at the right time.

Live feedback and routing

The dashboard will allow you to see who is on your website in real time, allowing you to engage any of the present VIP accounts. You can even set up Chat Experiences to automatically transfer those valuable leads to the appropriate agents, improving the chances of closing the deal.

LiveAgent is an affordable chat app that helps businesses help their customers. It works on multiple platforms and integrates with many other tools but lacks more advanced analytics and features geared toward improving sales.

Help desk & ticketing

LiveAgent accumulates customer questions from all channels into a single dashboard. This means email, phone, social media, and live chat, keeping everything streamlined and under control. It supports Facebook Messenger, Whatsapp, Viber, Instagram, Twitter, and Slack and constantly adds more.

Ticketing is the central way of solving problems in LiveAgent. Messages and questions will show as unresolved tickets, and your agents will know where to pay attention to solve the most urgent things. Your team can create internal tickets and make notes visible to other agents.

Canned answers and knowledge base

To speed up the ticket resolution process, LiveAgent utilizes canned answers you can preconfigure and a knowledge base. Even if customers open a support request, they will still have a chance to resolve their issue while they wait, as the knowledge base will be visible inside their ticket.

But, LiveAgent is also an excellent option for creating a standalone knowledge base. Questions are easy to create and customize, making it effortless for your agent to collect them on the go once they come up.

Call center 

One distinct feature LiveAgent has is the VoIP call center suite. With it, your agents can provide telephone support to customers. You will be able to assign numbers from different providers (important for international support) and will have all the calling devices and history within a single dashboard. 

Some key features include internal calls, transfers, call-back buttons, routing to a personal device, and various integrations with other tools you use daily, such as CRM. 

LiveChat is a popular and flexible chat solution that will help your team stay on top of support requests and improve sales. It does what it promises well but lacks some of the more advanced features Drift, and its other competitors have, such as chatbots, video calling, and a few others.

Faster replying with sneak-peek

LiveChat offers a very cool feature: it allows your agents to see messages as users type them, even before pressing enter/send. That will enable them to understand the question before it’s even asked, giving them time to think and search for answers. This can tremendously speed up the process and improve satisfaction and customer loyalty.

Canned responses and tagging

While canned responses are a feature all good apps have, LiveChat makes it super easy to create them on the go. After this, each agent can use tags to find and paste them, saving precious support time.

Tags can also be used for the whole conversation, allowing your team to find important tickets later. LiveChat has good filtering capabilities, too, making database search effortless.

Excellent multimedia and chat window integrations

LiveChat windows support various files, meaning users and agents can easily send information, screenshots, PDFs, and even videos. 

But it also integrates with other tools, allowing agents to schedule calls and meetings inside the chat window itself, which is very convenient. They can also display cards and carousels within the chat, an excellent option for showcasing products.

Additionally, you can automate product announcements in the chat window, notifying casual visitors that something new is in the store. 

Last on our list, we have Vision Helpdesk, another tool primarily intended for customer support teams. It has decent chatbot features but can’t match Drift regarding full automation.

A solid chat feature set

Vision Helpdesk has a good set of very useful features. Agents can simply transform chat into tickets, transfer customers to other departments, share attachments, and create and send forms to gather further information.

Also, Vision Helpdesk features a chatbot that you can configure to replace agents, save support time, push customers deeper into the funnel, and improve conversions. Agents can also create and use canned responses for FAQs customers insist on asking themselves.

Help desk for quick support

With Vision Helpdesk, you will have a full suite of tools to help you manage customer tickets and complaints. Besides solving, this app also has excellent ticket billing capabilities, allowing you to track and charge for support hours. You can even create service packages.

There are options to create automation and workflows, which will help your agents in their activities, taking some of the burdens off their to-do lists.

You can also create a knowledge base and even optimize it for SEO, improving your site rankings and making it easier for users to find answers. 

Support desk features

If the chat help desk isn’t enough, Vison Helpdesk can also work as a full support desk. This is suitable for companies offering full remote IT support.

The support desk allows in-depth and swift incident management. That means customers will get help proactively, as your agents will see every issue as soon as it emerges. 

Here’s a visual summary of the most important features of all of the listed Drift alternatives:

App	Pros:	Cons:	Rating
Drift	Powerful chatbot Saves agent support time Helps with customer engagement and conversions	Resource-heavy Extremely expensive	8.5/10
Customerly	Excellent chat capabilities Built-in video chat and screen sharing Highly customizable User segmentation and advanced analytics An Essential version for as low as $7 per month and affordable premium plans with a free trial	Drift has a more powerful chatbot	9.5/10
Qualified	Helps to drive more sales Identifies high-value leads Streamlines all marketing channels	Too sales-oriented	8/10
Freshchat	Multi-platform support Good chatbot Team dashboard	Lacks some advanced live chat features	9/10
Olark	Excellent interface and customization Detailed analytics Behavior triggers	Better features require you to pay extra	8/10
Conversica	Sales-oriented chat powerhouse NLP and customer intent analysis Cross platform support and integrations	Super expensive	8.5/10
ZoomInfo Chat	Helps sales reps close more deals Custoemer segmentation and A/B testing Built-in appointment scheduler	Not the best solution for customer support	8/10
Crisp	Budget-friendly full-service chat app Multi channel support Ticketing and inbox management	Lacks some advanced features other competitors have	9/10
Birdeye	Review management Great for local businesses Analytics and competition monitoring	Not cheap, and not ideal unless you run a local business
Terminus Chat	Improve your whole sales pipeline from a single app AI chatbot ABM-oriented	Very expensiveSmaller businesses will not use most of the features	8.5/10
LiveAgent	A good desk and ticketing system Call center capabilities Affordable	Not that many sales and marketing features	8.5/10
LiveChat	Sneek-peek chat preview Great tagging and filtering systems Good integrations list	Lacks chatbot features	8.5/10
Vision Helpdesk	Good for customer support Can work as a help desk but also a full support desk center Easy to handle tickets and chat requests	Lacks sales and marketing features	8/10

Drift is very powerful, but fortunately, this pricey chatbot app does have hefty competition. Which of the Drift alternatives is the right for you will depend on your business needs and budget.

Customerly has enough features to stand out on its own in the saturated market of chat apps, primarily by providing excellent value and a unique feature set. Try it now, and see why 28,880 businesses already use Customerly as the backbone of their customer success and sales operations.