Intercom vs Drift: one live product against a name that now points to Salesloft

What Drift's old address says now

Requesting drift.com/pricing on 7 October 2026 returned a redirect to salesloft.com/platform/drift. That page is headed "Turn Website Visitors Into Pipeline", calls its product AI chat agents, and says: "We've transitioned from Drift to 1mind. 1Mind feeds buyer signals into Salesloft's advanced Predictive Revenue System." It lists no plans or prices. Its own FAQ describes what the chat agents do: qualify leads by asking preset questions, capture key data and route high-intent visitors to sales reps, using website behaviour, CRM data and past conversations. The page also states that chat agents such as 1mind integrate with Salesloft, and that web chats can trigger seller actions in Salesloft's Rhythm workflow.

That is useful to a buyer in two ways. It tells you the sales-chat product you may remember is now delivered differently and sold through a sales conversation. And it means no Drift price can sit in a table on this page without being made up.

What Intercom charges

Source: Intercom pricing, read on 7 October 2026. Email campaigns, SMS, WhatsApp and phone are pay-as-you-go beyond the seat price.

A lead-qualification chat on Intercom, priced

Suppose a three-person revenue team staffs a website chat on Advanced and lets Fin handle the first response. Seats are fixed; Fin outcomes vary with traffic.

The variable part overtakes the seats quickly. At 2,500 outcomes Fin alone, $2,475, is nearly ten times the $255 of seats. Intercom also sells Fin without seats for teams that keep another helpdesk, so a team can price the AI agent separately from the desk. What an outcome means in your own traffic is the number to pin down before you budget: read Intercom's definition on its pricing page and apply it to a week of real chats.

Who owns the conversation

The split that matters is ownership, not feature lists. Intercom's plan descriptions centre on a shared inbox, tickets, a help center and a Messenger, which suits a team where support or customer success answers visitors and users. Salesloft's copy centres on visitor intent flowing into a seller's workflow, which suits a team where an account executive picks up a qualified lead and the conversation is a step in a pipeline.

For a SaaS with a free trial, the awkward cases are the in-between ones: a trial user asking about annual pricing, a customer whose card failed asking for an invoice copy, a champion asking about seat pricing before renewal. Decide in advance which team owns each, and which tool carries the plan, renewal date and payment status so that the person who picks up the chat sees them. Neither Intercom's nor Salesloft's page lists a billing connector, so those fields arrive by API or a CRM sync you build.

Judging either one on your own numbers

Because a quote and a seat price are not comparable, judge the chat on outputs you can count from your own systems. Take a fortnight of conversations and measure three things: how long a visitor waits for a first human or agent reply, what share of chats that end up as a booked demo or a trial start came with the visitor's company and email captured, and how many handoffs a seller had to reopen because context was missing. Intercom's Advanced plan includes 20 free Lite seats and Expert includes 50, so find out what a Lite seat can and cannot do before you count on it for part-time teammates such as SDRs or founders. On the Salesloft side, the claim to test is the one on its page: that a chat's buyer signal becomes a prioritised task for a seller. Ask to see that task appear in a sandbox, with your own CRM fields mapped.

Keep the cost lens as well. Fin's price is attached to an outcome at $0.99, which pushes you to ask whether a chat that books a meeting counts as an outcome and whether a chat that gets escalated to a human does. With a sales-chat quote, the equivalent question is what happens to price when conversation volume doubles after a launch.

If you were a Drift customer

1. Ask for the contract in writing: who the vendor is, the renewal date, and what the 1mind transition changes about price and support.
2. Export what you can: conversation transcripts, routing rules, meeting links and playbook copy. Write the logic down in plain language, because it will not import into another tool.
3. Decide whether your chat's job is support or pipeline. If it is mostly support, price Intercom with the table above.
4. Run the new path beside the old one for two weeks with a small share of traffic, and compare handoff time and qualified-lead counts from your own CRM.
5. Keep consent and cookie banner behaviour in the test, so the new widget respects the same choices.

Which to choose

• Intercom fits a SaaS that wants support, onboarding messages and an AI agent in one place and can plan for seats plus usage.
• Salesloft's chat agents fit a team already on Salesloft that wants website visitors scored and routed into seller workflows, and is willing to buy by quote.
• A small startup with no sales team probably wants neither at first. Intercom Essential at $19 a seat is the cheaper way to find out whether chat gets used.

Related reading: Intercom vs Customer.io, Intercom vs HubSpot, Zendesk vs Intercom, Intercom alternatives, tools for sales-led teams and the comparison index.