Drift shut down on March 6, 2026. If you are evaluating what comes next, you are probably looking at the same shortlist as everyone else.
Before you sign a contract, it is worth understanding what each option actually is — and what it was built to do. Most comparison content groups together tools that solve fundamentally different problems. Drift’s closest replacement category was never generic live chat or ecommerce support. It was conversational marketing and inbound pipeline orchestration — qualifying visitors, routing SDR workflows, syncing CRM activity, and feeding revenue operations. That is the use case these four tools are competing to replace, each with a different philosophy about how.
Qualified — website pipeline generation
Qualified is the most direct successor to Drift’s core use case for enterprise B2B revenue teams. Its AI SDR Piper qualifies and routes inbound website visitors in real time, books meetings without a human in the loop, and is built natively on Salesforce. For teams whose primary metric is pipeline generated from web traffic and whose CRM is Salesforce, Qualified is purpose-built for that job. It holds a 4.9 out of 5 across more than 1,400 G2 reviews — unusually high for enterprise software at this price point.
Where it stops: Qualified engages buyers during a live website session and has no mechanism to continue the conversation once they leave. Its value depends entirely on the volume and quality of traffic arriving at the website — if that traffic is declining, which it is across most B2B categories as AI search erodes direct site visits, Qualified’s opportunity set shrinks with it. Salesforce is a hard dependency. Year-one total cost of ownership typically runs $95,000 to $165,000.
Best for: B2B revenue teams with significant website traffic, deep Salesforce investment, and a primary goal of converting inbound visitors into pipeline.
Intercom — omnichannel customer engagement
Intercom’s philosophy is omnichannel conversation management — bringing every customer interaction across chat, email, phone, WhatsApp, SMS, and social into a single inbox, with AI handling common requests and routing the rest. Its AI assistant Fin handles routine queries while human agents manage what requires judgment. For teams that need scalable, mature, omnichannel customer communication with a strong integration ecosystem, Intercom is a well-established choice.
Where it stops: Intercom was designed for reactive customer service — managing conversations that come to it. Its proactive capabilities exist but sit at the edges of an architecture built for inbound response. Teams replacing Drift specifically for its SDR routing and CRM orchestration functions will find Intercom covers the conversation layer without the revenue operations infrastructure underneath it. Pricing scales per seat and per AI resolution — costs compound quickly at volume.
Best for: Teams that need sophisticated, omnichannel reactive support at scale with strong automation and a mature integration ecosystem.
HubSpot Breeze — CRM-native AI augmentation
Breeze is HubSpot’s philosophy made explicit: AI should augment what teams already do inside their CRM, not require a new platform. It layers AI assistance across marketing, sales, and service workflows — drafting content, summarising records, handling customer questions, assisting with prospecting — all operating inside the HubSpot data model. For teams already running on HubSpot as their system of record, Breeze is the lowest-friction AI upgrade available.
Where it stops: Breeze is powerful inside HubSpot and limited outside it. It can only reference HubSpot-hosted content and data. If customer context, support interactions, or operational workflows live beyond the HubSpot ecosystem — in other CRMs, helpdesks, or external systems — Breeze cannot access or act on them. It augments an existing architecture. It does not replace one.
Best for: Businesses already on HubSpot that want AI layered into existing workflows without adding another platform to the stack.
1mind — autonomous AI SDR
1mind is the official migration path Clari and Salesloft named when they announced Drift’s sunset. Founded by Amanda Kahlow of 6sense, its philosophy is full autonomy at the top of the funnel — AI agents that handle qualification conversations and live product demonstrations end to end, without human involvement in the initial interaction. For teams whose primary Drift use case was top-of-funnel qualification and whose appetite is for fully autonomous AI sales interaction, 1mind is the most direct philosophical successor to where conversational marketing was heading.
Where it stops: 1mind is purpose-built for the qualification and demo use case. It does not offer visitor de-anonymisation, post-conversation CRM orchestration, or the broader revenue operations infrastructure that Drift’s deeper integrations provided. Teams that relied on Drift for more than the conversation itself will find 1mind covers the front end of that workflow without the connective tissue behind it.
Best for: Teams whose primary Drift use case was autonomous top-of-funnel qualification and who want a fully AI-led initial sales interaction.
The question none of them answer
Each of these tools reflects a genuine philosophy about where AI should operate in the revenue and customer workflow. Qualified bets on the website conversation. Intercom bets on omnichannel support. HubSpot Breeze bets on CRM augmentation. 1mind bets on autonomous qualification.
What that map reveals is that every option is a bet on one moment. And the migration challenge teams are actually facing is not which moment to optimise — it is that Drift was threading context across all of them simultaneously. The routing logic, CRM continuity, SDR orchestration, and customer context that Drift managed did not live in the chat widget. They lived in the connections between it and everything else. Replacing the widget with a better widget leaves those connections broken.
The operational gaps that creates are specific and measurable.
A high-value prospect visits a pricing page three times in 48 hours. The outbound queue should reprioritise automatically, the assigned SDR should receive full context — pages visited, previous interactions, account history — and the CRM record should update before anyone logs in to check. None of the tools above produce that outcome without manual coordination between systems.
A customer escalates a support issue. Every promotional campaign scheduled for that account should suppress until resolution is complete, a recovery workflow should trigger automatically, and the CRM record should reflect what happened — across support, marketing, and sales simultaneously. That requires a layer reading all three systems at once.
A prospect responds to outbound with buying intent. The CRM record should update, the sequence should adjust, the rep should be notified, and the conversation should route to the appropriate next step — without anyone manually connecting the dots. Each tool on this list handles one part of that chain. None handle the whole.
Ephanti was built for the teams who recognise that gap. MEVA executes across the full customer and revenue workflow — reading every signal, connecting every system, acting on the complete picture in real time. The teams replacing Drift with one of the options above are solving for one moment. The teams choosing Ephanti are solving for the orchestration underneath all of them.
If you are in this evaluation and want to understand what that looks like in practice for your specific workflow, that conversation starts here.