Pricing for SaaS products like Drift isn’t always clear, but we’re here to help. On this page, we’ll break down Drift’s subscription structures and how the solution compares to alternative vendors. Plus, find out how our purchasing teams help unlock optimized Drift pricing by leveraging market intel on what other businesses are paying. 

What Drift can do for you

Drift is an AI-driven buyer engagement platform that uses conversational marketing and sales techniques to help businesses increase revenue and customer lifetime value. Through chatbots, live chat, and personalized messaging, the platform enables companies to answer questions, address concerns, schedule meetings, and qualify leads as customers browse their websites. 

A key selling point of Drift is the targeted experience it can provide. The platform uses artificial intelligence to identify website visitors and understand their intent — analyzing behavior such as pages visited and for how long — in order to predict their needs and interests. Based on the information gathered, Drift can tailor the website experience to each visitor through personalized messages, chat greetings, or product recommendations. 

Benefits of deploying the Drift platform on your website include:

• Improved lead generation and qualification – By engaging with website visitors in real time, Drift can help businesses capture more leads. Details gathered in chat conversations can also aid lead qualification, helping sales teams focus on the most promising potential customers. 
• Higher conversion rates – Personalized experiences and targeted communication can improve customer conversion rates by ensuring messaging aligns with the intentions of your visitors. 
• Better customer experience – With Drift, businesses can provide a bespoke and responsive experience specific to each customer.
• Sales and marketing alignment – Drift makes it easier for your sales and marketing teams to work together and engage more effectively with potential customers. 
• Improved efficiency – Seamlessly connect Drift with the rest of your stack through native SaaS integrations, Zapier automations, and a developer API, increasing performance across your business. 

By facilitating conversations on customers' terms, Drift helps businesses build trust, understand needs, and accelerate sales. It also provides insights and analytics to measure performance and optimize strategies. The ultimate result? Your business can have meaningful interactions with customers, driving conversions to grow your revenue faster.

Drift pricing structures and tiers

Drift offers three main pricing tiers plus an exclusive tier for startups, although public pricing is only available for the Premium plan. Withholding pricing is a common practice among SaaS vendors, because it helps them retain an advantage during contract negotiations. Solutions like the SaaS Purchasing Platform from Vertice can help here — our customers get access to market intel on what other businesses are paying, which is useful leverage when it comes to negotiating subscriptions. 

All Drift pricing plans include support for single sign-on (SSO) and role-based access control (RBAC). Staff can access Drift via desktop or mobile app, and the Drift platform is compliant with SOC2 Type II, GDPR, SOC2, PIPEDA, APA, and FERPA. 

You’ll find more information about each Drift pricing tier below. 

Drift pricing – Premium

Cost: from $2,500 per month (billed annually)

Premium is the cheapest Drift pricing plan. It allows users to engage in real time with site visitors through live chat, gather intel on prospective customers by deanonymizing web traffic, and schedule meetings on Google and Microsoft calendars directly from the chat window. 

Users can create custom chatbots to qualify and convert customers 24/7, and configure conversational landing pages to take buyers directly from an ad to chatting with your bot or team. 

Drift Premium also supports round robin and firmographic routing, video messaging, account-based marketing (ABM) notifications, and ten hours of chat-to-call per seat. Insights and reporting include pipeline and revenue, conversation and conversion, service and support, and more. 

Drift pricing – Advanced

Cost: contact sales

Advanced Drift pricing includes everything in the Premium tier along with some additional features. 

The Fastlane tool lets you prioritize and connect with leads by using machine learning to score website visitors and predict which ones are most likely to buy. These high-potential leads are then given priority and connected with your sales team.

Support for webhooks is included, allowing Drift to pull data from external sources into the chat to enable actions like answering customer questions, providing self-service options, and nurturing potential buyers in a more personalized way. For example, webhooks can be used to check order status, start free trials, or address specific plan inquiries.

There’s also support for flexible routing of site visitors, more advanced audience segregation, and A/B testing so you can perfect your messaging. 

Drift pricing – Enterprise

Cost: contact sales

The Enterprise edition of Drift offers access to a few more advanced features. The main addition is AI-driven chat, which can tackle more complex customer conversations and deliver a highly personalized experience. On top of this, Enterprise customers can configure custom role-based access control (RBAC). 

Drift Enterprise pricing depends on the functionality you require, and can be customized on a granular level to suit your business needs. 

Drift pricing – Drift for Startups

Cost: up to 75% off (actual price available upon Drift Startup program acceptance).

Drift also runs a startup program, which unlocks discounts of up to 75% for businesses under five years old, with less than $15 million in funding, and 50 employees or fewer. It includes features like custom chatbots, live chat and video, meeting scheduling, and reporting tools. There’s a ten-seat limit for the startup plan.

Additional Drift costs to consider

A number of add-ons are available alongside your Drift subscription — here’s a quick round-up.

Additional seats

Add extra users to your Drift license at two different levels:

• Lite lets your sales team access meeting bookings, video calls, and email notifications;
• Pro offers your sales, marketing, and service teams access to the full Drift platform.

Drift Engage

Score the intent of each visitor to provide them the most relevant chatbot experience, and enhance visibility into your traffic.  

Workspaces

Control data segregation and user access to the Drift platform by function, business unit, or geography. 

Brands

Enhance the visual experience of your Drift chatbots in line with your branding through custom colors, logos, and positioning. 

Drift Email

Automatically sort your email inbox and route replies, while keeping records up to date through integration with your CRM or MAP solution.

Playbook optimization services

Get dedicated support from Drift experts who can help build and optimize your business’s conversational strategy. 

Health check services

Ensure your Drift configuration is aligned with your business needs through in-depth auditing and recommendations.

Other vendors offering conversational marketing software

As part of a strong procurement process, considering alternative vendors is invaluable — you might find a solution that’s better tailored to your specific business requirements, or that’s more aligned with your budget. Here are three competitors to Drift and how they compare. 

Drift pricing vs Intercom

Both Drift and Intercom are well-established players in the AI chatbot space, but they cater to slightly different needs. While Drift focuses primarily on marketing, Intercom leans more towards customer support, offering multi-channel communication alongside a knowledge base and ticketing system. 

Intercom pricing is simple and transparent, ranging from $39 to $139 per seat per month. This makes it significantly cheaper than Drift. Of course, while Intercom can be used for conversational marketing and sales use cases, it’s designed primarily with customer support in mind — Drift may offer a more robust set of features for converting prospective customers. 

Drift pricing vs Tidio

Tidio offers a fully-featured suite of conversational tools for both marketing and support. There’s an emphasis on automation of sales and customer service, and the platform includes an AI chatbot for self-service issue resolution. Tidio also offers personalized email campaigns to boost customer retention. 

In terms of cost, Tidio pricing is much cheaper than Drift so is particularly well-suited to smaller businesses. Its key features — helpdesk, chatbot, customer service automation, and email campaigns — are available à la carte, or you can access everything from $499 per month. There’s also a basic free tier available.

Drift pricing vs Qualified

Qualified is another solution offering conversational marketing through live and AI chat features, automation of communication workflows, and personalized experiences. However, there’s a much heavier focus on lead qualification and scoring when compared with Drift, helping companies with high-touch sales teams nurture the most valuable accounts. 

Compared to Drift, pricing for Qualified is more expensive. It starts at $3,500 per month (billed annually) for the Growth plan. Although Drift is the most versatile product, Qualified will likely best suit B2B companies who need a solution centered around ABM. 

Drift pricing – the Vertice verdict

Drift isn’t cheap, especially when compared to other customer communication platforms on the market. However, the real benefit of the solution is in its AI-driven conversational marketing and personalization, which can help businesses significantly increase conversions and grow revenue. If this is what you’re looking for, Drift’s price tag likely makes sense. 

Since Drift doesn’t publicly disclose costs for Advanced and Enterprise tiers, why not consider leveraging Vertice’s SaaS Purchasing Platform during procurement negotiation? Doing so gives you access to our pricing benchmarks, and we can even negotiate on your behalf to secure the best rates and discounts. To get started, simply fill in the form below.