Drift pioneered conversational marketing, chatbots that qualify leads in real time instead of making a visitor fill out a form. That history matters less than what's happened to the product since: checking Drift's own page for this comparison, I found something that changes the calculus for anyone still evaluating it. The company barely exists as an independent brand anymore, and that changes how anyone should approach evaluating it.
Drift Has Been Absorbed Into Salesloft, and the Page Shows It
Drift's current page carries the title "AI Chat Agent for B2B Sales," not "Drift." The word "Drift" appears exactly once on the entire page. Every call to action reads "Talk to Sales," five separate times, with no self-serve pricing, no plan comparison table, and no dollar figure anywhere in the static content. Drift was acquired by Salesloft in 2023, and what used to be a standalone product with its own brand identity and a roughly $2,500/month starting price is now a feature inside Salesloft's broader sales engagement platform. If you're evaluating "Drift" as a distinct purchase decision, that's no longer really an option, you're evaluating Salesloft, with Drift's chat and lead-routing capability as one component of it.
That's not necessarily worse for the buyer. Salesloft's platform brings sales engagement, cadence automation, and conversation intelligence together with what used to be Drift's chatbot and meeting-booking functionality. But it does mean the ROI conversation has changed: you're no longer pricing "chat widget that books meetings," you're pricing an entire sales engagement platform where the chat capability is bundled in, and the quote you get depends on which parts of Salesloft's stack your sales team actually needs.
Intercom's Real Pricing, Confirmed Directly
Intercom's pricing page confirms Essential at $39 per seat/month, Advanced at $99 per seat/month, and Expert at $139 per seat/month, all verified directly from the page's own structured pricing data. That $39 figure for Essential is worth flagging specifically: it's neither the $74 figure that circulates in some product databases nor the $29 that shows up if you mistake the Copilot add-on price for the base plan, Copilot itself runs a separate $29 per agent/month billed annually on top of whatever base tier you're on.
The other cost variable that catches people off guard: Fin, Intercom's AI agent, is priced at $0.99 per resolved conversation, confirmed directly in the page's own offer data, on top of your plan's seat fees. That's a real, unpredictable line item, a support team that suddenly gets a traffic spike and Fin resolves 2,000 extra conversations that month just added roughly $2,000 to the bill without anyone changing a setting. Budget for Fin's usage-based cost as a variable, not a fixed line item, especially if your support volume swings seasonally.
Two Products Built for Genuinely Different Motions
Drift, now folded into Salesloft, is built for sales-led B2B: qualifying inbound visitors, routing hot leads to reps in real time, and booking meetings directly from a chat conversation. It's not a support tool and never really was, reactive ticket handling was always secondary to the lead-qualification motion. If your business model depends on high-ACV deals where one converted chat conversation justifies months of platform cost, that motion still works inside Salesloft's version of the product.
Intercom is built for product-led SaaS: live chat, yes, but also proactive in-app messaging, product tours for onboarding, and a genuine help desk for reactive support. Fin's AI resolution sits on top of a real ticketing system, not just a lead-routing bot. Companies where support and product engagement overlap, where you need to nudge a user who hasn't activated a specific feature, get more out of Intercom's breadth than Drift ever offered even before the Salesloft acquisition.
Cost at Real Team Size
A 10-agent support team on Intercom Advanced pays $990/month ($99 times 10), before any Fin AI resolution costs get added. If Fin handles even 500 conversations that month at $0.99 each, that's another $495, pushing the real monthly cost past $1,485, a number that never shows up on the pricing page's headline figures. Budget for Fin's usage cost the same way you'd budget for API overage charges: estimate conservatively, then check the actual bill the first month before assuming the estimate holds.
There's no equivalent seat-based math to run for Drift, because there's no published number to run it against. A company sized for Drift's old ,500+/month tier should expect a Salesloft quote to land somewhere in a comparable range once cadence automation and conversation intelligence get bundled in, but the actual number now depends entirely on a sales conversation rather than a public rate card. That's a genuine loss of transparency for anyone trying to compare vendors without picking up the phone first, and it's worth building an extra week or two of lead time into any procurement timeline that assumed a self-serve quote would be available.
Data Handling Worth Checking Before Rollout
Intercom's own documentation states that Fin processes conversation data but customer data isn't used to train Intercom's underlying AI models, and the platform offers regional data hosting across US, EU, and Australia along with SOC 2 Type 2 certification. That's a reasonably strong baseline for a support platform handling customer conversation content, and it hasn't regressed from what's been publicly stated for a while.
Drift's data handling is harder to evaluate independently now that it's folded into Salesloft's broader platform, since the standalone Drift privacy documentation that used to exist is no longer the primary reference point. Any security review evaluating the Salesloft version of Drift should ask directly which entity's data policies actually govern the chat and lead data, Salesloft's or a carried-over Drift policy, rather than assuming continuity from before the acquisition.
What Actually Changed Since the Category Was Last Compared
The direct comparison here is genuinely new territory for this site, but the underlying products have shifted enough that any older pricing reference for either one is probably stale. Drift's transformation from standalone product to Salesloft feature is the bigger of the two changes, it affects how you'd even structure a purchase conversation, not just what it costs. Intercom's pricing restructure, landing at $39/$99/$139 with Fin billed separately, is a smaller shift but still enough to throw off anyone budgeting from an old quote or a stale comparison chart.
The Recommendation
If your team is sales-led with dedicated SDRs and high-ACV B2B deals, evaluate Drift's chat and lead-routing capability as part of a full Salesloft conversation, not as a standalone purchase, that's simply how it's sold now. Budget accordingly: you're pricing a sales engagement platform, not a chat widget. If your team needs live chat, in-app messaging, product tours, and a real help desk in one place, Intercom at $39-139 per seat plus Fin's per-resolution cost is the more complete platform, and the one still available as a standalone product you can actually self-serve into without a sales call.
For a broader look at how Intercom stacks up against pure support platforms, the Zendesk vs Intercom comparison covers that angle directly, and if open-source or lower-cost alternatives matter to your evaluation, the Chatwoot vs Intercom vs Zendesk comparison is worth reading before committing to either platform covered here.