9 Drift alternatives for 2026, priced, after the sunset

Drift, the product that invented conversational marketing, is being wound down. Its domain now redirects to a Salesloft page whose own copy reads "We've transitioned from Drift to 1mind." The named successor publishes no prices and, by its founder's own account, signs an average contract in six figures. The rest of the shortlist is being bought by the platforms: Qualified is being absorbed into Salesforce, and Warmly into HubSpot. Docket, the strongest independent left, starts at $3,000 a month and turns away anyone under $2,000. Every established door in the category now opens onto an invoice of $20,000 a year or more, and most of them only after a sales call. Below that line sit support-first products with free plans that do part of the job. What follows is the map of nine Drift alternatives as they actually price out, with every claim linked to the page it was read from.

1mind is a serious product with serious customers: photorealistic AI teammates that answer technical questions face to face, run demos inside the conversation, and join sales calls as an on-demand engineer. The case studies name HubSpot, Pipedrive and ZoomInfo, and the numbers in them are strong. It is also priced like what it is. Founder Amanda Kahlow told TechCrunch that her customers all have annual contracts, "not experimental budgets", and that the "average contract is six figures". One procurement analysis puts the floor at roughly $100,000 a year and the top of the observed range around $400,000, before an implementation that takes one to two months of persona workshops and avatar production. There is no trial and no pricing page; we priced 1mind from the public record in a post of its own.

Here is the problem with that as a succession plan. Drift sold to thousands of companies at five-figure contracts. If you were one of them, the official path forward starts at several times what you were paying, for a product you cannot try before a demo call, delivered after a two-month project. The successor was not chosen for you; it was chosen for the largest accounts on the list.

There is a second admission in the same interview, and it is worth more than the price. "I'm not playing in outbound," Kahlow told TechCrunch; her agent handles inbound sales, the buyer who already arrived. So the official successor confirms what the whole succession implies: the job Drift did, answering and qualifying the visitor your marketing already paid for, is the job that still matters. What changed is the ticket price of having it done.

Other lists on this search fill their count with support chatbots, and it is fair to include them as long as the label is honest: these four are support products first, and they book a meeting as a side effect of answering. Intercom Fin is the most capable and the only one with a sales-side meter: fin.ai/pricing lists $0.99 per Fin outcome for support and $9.99 per qualification for its inbound sales product, with Intercom seats at $29 to $132 a month on top, a 14-day trial, and a free first year for startups. Fin is also mid-acquisition: Salesforce signed in June 2026 to buy the company, so a Drift customer leaving Salesloft for Fin trades one platform's roadmap for another's. We compare the two agents on our Intercom Fin comparison page.

HubSpot's chatbot builder is free with no credit card required, with premium chatbot functionality in the paid Hubs. It is the door Warmly's customers are being walked toward, and if HubSpot is already your CRM it is the obvious first thing to try. It is a template-and-branches builder, not an AI SDR: in its own words you "use if/then branches to triage sales questions" and "book meetings and qualify leads automatically" by the rules you script, personalised from your HubSpot CRM; the page does not mention an AI model, and the enrichment Drift ran before the visitor typed is not on it.

Chatbase and Tidio are the two agent builders you can buy with a card. Chatbase's pricing page runs from a free plan to $40, $150 and $500 a month, with extra credits at $40 per 1,000 and a 7-day trial on the paid tiers; its agent answers support questions, runs backend actions such as order lookups, and its sales agent will "engage prospects, answer product questions, and guide conversations toward revenue", its words, which is not the same as qualifying a visitor and briefing a rep. Tidio's pricing page runs from a free plan with 50 conversations to $24.17, $49.17 and $300 a month, with its Lyro AI agent metered from $0.50 a conversation on top; it is built for ecommerce stores whose customers write on WhatsApp and Instagram. Both are honest products at honest prices. Neither enriches the account before the visitor types or briefs a rep, which is the half of Drift's job that the pipeline vendors charge $20,000 a year for. We hold both to the same standard on our Chatbase comparison page and our Tidio comparison page.

The pipeline side of the table has no free plan and no trial at all: 1mind, Qualified, Docket and Warmly each start with a sales call, and the cheapest published chat plan among them is Docket's $3,000 a month. Everything free is on the other side of the line. HubSpot's chatbot builder is free and stays free. Chatbase's free plan deletes an idle agent after 14 days but costs nothing while you use it, and its first paid tier is $40 a month. Tidio's free plan carries 50 conversations and 10 seats, and its first paid tier is $24.17 a month. Intercom Fin has no free plan, but a 14-day trial and a free first year if you qualify as a startup. Algomo, our product, has a free plan, then a monthly amount you set between $50 and $4,300 that is also the most any one charge can be; the numbers are on our pricing page.

The honest caveat on every free row but ours, and you should apply it to ours too: check what the free tier actually contains. HubSpot's is a template-and-branches builder whose page names no AI model. Chatbase's and Tidio's are support agents that answer product questions; neither enriches or briefs. If what you are replacing is the SDR half of Drift, the free plans that do that half are the ones to test, and there are fewer of them than the count suggests.

Put the pieces together and a gap appears that nobody in the consolidation is addressing. The successor's own founder says the product is inbound, so the job is confirmed. The successor's own pricing says the job now starts at six figures. Warmly's cheapest tier that includes chat starts at $20,000 a year, and that is the cheapest established door there is. Docket's bounce page draws its line explicitly at $2,000 a month. Below twenty thousand a year, the pipeline category as constituted today sells nothing at all; what it leaves you is support chatbots that capture a lead and stop.

Drift did not sell to a few hundred enterprises; it sold to thousands of mid-market companies, and those companies did not stop having websites, visitors or quarters to make. They have three honest options now: keep riding a product that has been retired by its owner and breached in the recent past, drop down to a generic support chatbot and give up the qualification job entirely, or pay an enterprise ticket for a mid-market problem. The gap between the second and third option is a market, and every established vendor named above has chosen to price itself out of it.