Drift vs Intercom in 2026: Only One of Them Is Still for Sale
Drift vs Intercom is no longer a fair fight: Drift is being sunset into Salesloft. What Intercom actually costs, and what to buy for the job Drift did.
If you are running a Drift vs Intercom comparison in 2026, the first thing worth knowing is that you are not choosing between two purchases. One of them is not on sale.
Drift's pricing page is no longer a pricing page. Load drift.com/pricing and you get a redirect notice that reads "If you are not redirected automatically, click here", pointing at salesloft.com/platform/drift. There is no tier table behind it, no seat price, no per-conversation rate, no quote-on-request form for a product called Drift.
So this post contains zero Drift prices. Not because we are being coy, but because none are published to quote, and a comparison built on half-remembered 2023 figures would be worse than no comparison at all. What follows is what actually happened to Drift, Intercom's real numbers from its own pricing page, and how to pick depending on which of the two jobs you were hiring for.
What happened to Drift
Salesloft acquired Drift in February 2024. Salesloft later combined with Clari, and on 5 March 2026 the merged company announced "the gradual sunset of its Drift conversational marketing solution", alongside a partnership with 1mind. The same announcement says the company "will refer existing Drift clients to 1mind as the successor."
Visit salesloft.com/platform/drift today and the product on the page is called Chat Agents, powered by 1mind. The headline is "Turn Website Visitors Into Pipeline", the pitch is that "AI chat agents capture the buyer signal" and Salesloft's Predictive Revenue System decides what to do with it, and the page states plainly: "We've transitioned from Drift to 1mind."
Two details matter for anyone mid-evaluation. A Drift login still appears in Salesloft's site header, so existing accounts are still running, and no hard end-of-life date has been published. That is a product in wind-down, not a product switched off. It is also not a product you can currently buy standalone, evaluate against a competitor, or budget for from public information.
Salesloft does not publish prices either. Its pricing page carries the heading "Pick your winning plan" and a form that books a 15-minute call with sales. So the Drift side of this comparison is unpriced at both ends: the product that used to have a price no longer publishes one, and the platform that absorbed it never did.
All of the above is as of publication. If you are reading this months later, check the redirect yourself before trusting any of it.
What Drift was for, in general terms
Worth being clear about what people are usually looking for when they type this comparison, because the two products were never doing the same work.
Drift's historical positioning was B2B conversational marketing. The chat widget on the site existed to produce pipeline, not to close tickets. Its job was qualifying anonymous traffic, routing the promising visitors to a sales rep while they were still on the page, booking meetings straight from the chat window, and running different playbooks for named target accounts. It generally lived in the marketing budget, reported to a demand-gen leader, and got measured in meetings booked and pipeline sourced.
Intercom sells customer service. The Messenger, the shared inbox, the ticketing system, the help center, and Fin, its AI agent. Same widget shape in the bottom-right corner of a website, completely different economics and a different buyer.
That is why "Drift vs Intercom" was always a slightly odd search. In 2026 the question resolves cleanly, because only one of them can be bought.
What Intercom actually costs
Every figure in this section comes from Intercom's pricing page as captured on 2026-08-21, and is accurate as of publication.
There are three plans, all of which include the Fin AI Agent. Essential targets individuals, startups and small businesses, and covers Fin for service, sales and ecommerce, the Messenger, a shared inbox with ticketing, pre-built reports, and a public help center. Advanced is the growing-team tier: multiple team inboxes, a workflows automation builder, round robin assignment, and a private plus multilingual help center. Expert covers large teams with SSO and identity management, HIPAA support, SLAs, and a multibrand Messenger and Help Center.
Seats come in two kinds. Full seats are paid and required for anyone who talks to customers. Lite seats are free on Advanced and Expert, give limited internal-collaboration access, and cannot send messages or use outbound features. Advanced includes 20 of them and Expert includes 50. One Full seat is the minimum to start, with no required platform fee beyond it.
The per-seat dollar figures are the one thing Intercom does not publish in readable form. On its pricing page they render as an animated digit counter rather than static text, and they did not survive the capture behind this post. We will not print three numbers we cannot verify against the vendor's own page. For a real figure you have to run Intercom's calculator with your team size and expected volume, or talk to sales.
The second meter is published clearly, and it is the one that decides most bills. Fin costs $0.99 per outcome on every plan with no included allowance. Intercom counts an outcome when a customer confirms the issue is resolved, when the customer does not ask for more help after Fin responds, or when Fin completes a workflow (a Procedure), including handoffs. One charge per conversation regardless of how many questions Fin answers inside it. Read the second condition twice: a customer who reads the answer and closes the tab bills the same as one who says thanks.
Fin is also sold standalone, on top of a helpdesk you already own including Salesforce, at the same $0.99 per outcome with no seat costs and no setup, integration or platform fees. Intercom's page gives an example minimum monthly commitment of 50 outcomes and claims setup in under an hour.
Three add-ons sit above all that. Copilot, an in-inbox assistant for agents, is $29 per agent/month billed annually or $35 billed monthly for unlimited use, with every agent already getting 10 Copilot and 10 AI auto-translation conversations free each month. Pro starts at $99/month and includes Operator plus analysis of 1,000 conversations and 2,000 credits a month, with extra credits at $0.01 each and hard limits available. Proactive Support Plus is $99/month including 500 messages, covering product tours, surveys, in-app messages, mobile push and carousels.
On channels, live chat, support email, in-app chats, banners and tooltips are free and unlimited on every plan, and inbound email support is included. WhatsApp, SMS, email campaigns and phone are pay-as-you-go on top, with rates that vary by region, volume and direction rather than appearing as flat figures on the pricing page.
There is a 14-day trial with no credit card that includes all features, Fin and add-ons. No contract is required on Essential or Advanced. Two discounts are live: 35% off Essential for new customers, and up to 93% off plus a year of Fin free for qualifying startups through the Early Stage program. The full tier-by-tier breakdown, including which add-ons quietly double a bill, is in our Intercom pricing writeup.
If you wanted Drift's job
You want chat that turns anonymous website traffic into sales conversations and booked meetings. Your options split three ways.
Follow the referral. Salesloft points existing Drift clients at 1mind, and its Chat Agents module is the continuation path if you are already on Salesloft or Clari and want the signal flowing into the same forecast. Neither company publishes a price, so budget for a sales cycle rather than a checkout.
Buy a B2B chat tool from a vendor that still sells one. The category did not disappear when Drift did. Qualified, Chili Piper's inbound routing and scheduling, and several others compete for the visitor-to-meeting workflow. Prices vary and mostly are not published, so this is a demo-and-quote exercise either way.
Use Intercom for it. Intercom's Essential tier explicitly lists "Fin for service, sales & ecommerce", so Fin will answer pre-sales questions. What Intercom does not do is Drift's core trick: real-time rep routing on account fit, meeting booking from chat, and ABM playbooks against a target list are not what a support platform is built around. If pipeline is the only goal, Intercom is a compromise.
If you wanted Intercom's job
You want deflection, faster replies, and a help center. Drift was never the right shortlist entry for that, and now the shortlist is Intercom against helpdesks. Zendesk is the closest structural comparison, and the deciding difference is the AI meter: Intercom charges $0.99 per Fin outcome from the first one, Zendesk charges more per unit but only on clean resolutions and with a seat-linked free allowance. That arithmetic, including where the crossover lands, is worked through in Intercom vs Zendesk.
If your interest in Drift came from the ecommerce side rather than B2B sales, the shortlist looks different again, and our Drift alternatives for ecommerce stores roundup covers the tools that handle order status and returns rather than pipeline.
Picking a winner, per use case
You are a current Drift customer with no immediate crisis. Stay put and plan. Nothing is switched off, no end date is published, and rushing a migration during a wind-down usually costs more than waiting a quarter and doing it properly.
You need chat-to-pipeline for a B2B sales motion. Not Intercom. Go to 1mind, Qualified or a direct competitor, and accept that you are entering a quote process.
You need support deflection with an AI agent. Intercom, comfortably. It is a mature product, the AI unit is defined in writing, and Fin can be tested on top of your existing helpdesk without a migration.
You want to evaluate an AI agent before replatforming. Intercom's standalone Fin is unusually good for this. No seats, $0.99 per outcome, roughly a 50-outcome monthly minimum.
Procurement needs a number before a call. Neither. Intercom hides the seat price behind a counter widget and Salesloft hides everything behind a form. Zendesk publishes three seat prices if that constraint is binding.
You run both motions and want one widget. Intercom, with clear eyes. You get the support half properly and the sales half approximately.
You are a small ecommerce store. Neither, and that deserves its own paragraph.
When neither one fits
A Shopify store with two people and 800 conversations a month is not the buyer either product was designed for. Drift was priced and built for B2B sales teams with a CRM, a quota and a named-account list. Intercom is priced for support departments: a Full seat minimum, then a $0.99 meter attached to conversations that are mostly "where is my order" on a $45 basket. Eight hundred of those is $792 in Fin outcomes on top of seats, for a queue where the answer already exists in Shopify's order record.
Ernest prices that specific case differently. It is an AI support, sales and product agent for Shopify and WooCommerce that bills by conversation volume with no per-seat fee and no separate AI meter: free for 100 conversations lifetime, then $49/month for 500, $149 for 2,000, $299 for 10,000, AI included at every tier. It reads live order data and the product catalog, handles cancellations and returns either automatically or behind one-click approval, always routes refunds to the merchant for sign-off, and replies in the customer's language. The limits are worth stating in the same breath: no phone, SMS, WhatsApp, Instagram or Messenger, no CRM or helpdesk integration library, no meeting booking, no outbound campaigns, and nothing resembling a rep-routing engine. For a B2B pipeline motion it is the wrong tool entirely, and for a fifteen-person support department Intercom wins on depth.
The short version
Drift vs Intercom stopped being a real comparison on 5 March 2026. One product is in a published wind-down with its customers referred elsewhere, and the other is an actively sold support platform with one meter it publishes precisely and one it renders as a spinning counter.
Decide by job, not by shortlist. If you need pipeline from website chat, price 1mind against the B2B chat vendors still selling into that category and expect every conversation to start with a demo. If you need support deflection, Intercom is a genuinely strong buy provided you model the $0.99 outcome line against your real volume before signing, and get the seat quote in writing, because that is the only part of the bill you cannot check from a public page.