Drift Features

• Drift widget: Drift’s chat widget provides a great experience for customers on both mobile and desktop. Additionally, from a user point of view, messaging with your customers is also an intuitive experience, and quite useful.

• Teams: The Drift Teams feature is very useful for live chat and chat routing, but it requires upgrading, which should be expected. However, if you have multiple teams using the platform (e.g. sales & support), which most companies do, the teams feature requires upgrading to the Enterprise plan, which is their most expensive pricing tier.
• Chat routing: Create rules for routing leads and conversations to the correct person, group or team. There’s also a round-robin feature that’s good for leads being passed to your sales team.
• Mobile application: Drift has apps for iOS and Android devices.
• Drift Automation & Qualification Bot: Drift’s goal is to replace SDRs with this bot. That’s already happening with many bots, including this one, but no chatbot has fully achieved that goal at this point in time. The technology just isn’t there yet. However, this feature, as well as other AI-powered chatbots, is currently worth investing in. That’s because they work 24/7/365, can handle multiple conversations at once and can produce better results than humans.
  The catch with Drift’s Automation and Qualification Bot is that their Annotation Team needs to train and optimize the bots for you, which also requires you to be on their most expensive plan.

• Reporting and Tracking User Data: Drift has three report types accessible from the conversation view: Team Performance, which has metrics about your team's interaction with visitors such as their response times; Conversation Volume, which includes general data related to conversations; and Routing Rules, which is a report about where your conversations are being routed.
  Additionally, Drift’s ‘Contacts’ feature lets you filter contacts based on attributes and events. For example, you can create user segments for targeting via email or chat.
• Personalized Playbooks: This is a Drift feature that uses Cookies and IP data to deliver personalized greetings to your website visitors. It’s available when you upgrade to the Premium plan.

Drift Pros and Cons

Pros - Drift

• Lead generation and productivity features: Drift has tools for sales and marketing teams to generate and qualify leads. The platform is architected to help teams close more deals, schedule sales calls, and provide real-time responses. Drift also has tools for sales and support, such as smart notifications, email playbook, chat targeting, saved replies, dynamic routing, and contact activity history.
• Reporting dashboards: Drift’s unified dashboard provides a holistic view of performance metrics and interactions that impact your business. Drift’s dashboard displays useful information including the number of meetings booked, leads acquired, and conversations generated. Other features such as the reporting tool give you a more complete view of your agents’ productivity.
• Ease of use: Drift has an intuitive user interface and is found by us and others, as simple to use without any advanced technical skills or heavy software user experience.
• Integrations: Drift has a lot of great integrations, many of which are built natively on the platform. Some notables are Salesforce, Clearbit, Marketo, Shopify, Hubspot, and Zapier.

Cons - Intercom

• Pricing: Pricing is the number one objection to Drift. Drift gets expensive, quickly. If you have multiple teams and want to route leads and conversations among them, you need to negotiate enterprise-level pricing. If you want 24/7 support for your team, you need to negotiate enterprise-level pricing. Their most powerful automation features, like the Drift Qualification Bot, are also only available at the enterprise-level pricing plan.
• Cannot use Drift for multiple teams unless you’re on the Enterprise plan: Drift really pushes companies to get on their most expensive plan, which is understandable. However, recommending Drift for companies who want multiple teams to use its live chat features, such as routing leads and conversations to different departments, is only available at Drift’s highest price point. Other live chat providers have this functionality available at a much cheaper price point.
• Known to have bugs in both web app and mobile application: For whatever reason, both the web app and mobile application dashboards are slow to load, and there are multiple reports of their chatbots getting returning visitors and customers’ names/profiles mixed up with others.
• Chatbot builder is sub-par and only available from the Pro plan and up: When compared to the best chatbot builders, Drift falls short. And to add insult to injury, you can’t get access to the Drift chatbot builder for less than $400 per month.
• No solutions for messaging on major marketing channels: Unlike other top live chat software solutions, Drift is not available to use on channels such as SMS text messaging, Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp, and others. If you want to call yourself one of the best marketing chatbots, you have to provide solutions for these channels, not just live chat for your website.

Drift Review - Final Analysis

Drift is a solid messaging app that makes it easy for businesses to talk to their website visitors and customers in real-time. They have some advanced features, like their AI-powered qualification bot, which are definitely intriguing and valuable to a business.

The bottom line, however, is that you can’t get any of Drift’s most valuable features or services unless you’re on its Enterprise pricing plan. In fact, many of Drift’s features that are only available at the Premium or Enterprise plan pricing levels, are available on competitor platforms at their lowest pricing tiers, such as the chatbot builder and 24/7 chat support. Some of the best chatbot builders in the world are free, so it’s hard to justify a starting price of $400 per month, if you ask us.

For the price, Drift doesn’t do enough things well that a live chat platform should, and it doesn’t cover enough marketing channels to earn its ‘conversational marketing platform’ title.

Many of the top machine learning chatbots and enterprise-grade chatbots come at a lower price than Drift, so if you’ve done your homework, and you’ve read this far, unless you absolutely love Drift’s Enterprise package and services (which are good, yes), we strongly recommend that you explore other platforms.