Last Updated: February 2025
Looking for answers to Intercom Vs Drift? Well, this question has been circling around for ages in the business world. But, not anymore!
We have done a critical analysis of both these software and prepared a detailed comparison for you.
So, without much ado, let’s dive into the post.
In this post, you will get insights into the following details:
- What is Drift?
- What is Intercom?
- Intercom Vs Drift: A Quick Comparison
- Intercom Vs Drift: Live Chat Features
- Intercom Vs Drift: Customer Support Features
- Intercom Vs Drift: Marketing Features
- Intercom Vs Drift: Sales Features
- Intercom Vs Drift: Pricing Comparison
- Drift Vs Intercom: Is There A Clear Winner?
What is Drift?
David Cancel, the former chief product officer at Hubspot, founded Drift in 2015. It is, at its core, a revenue acceleration platform that prioritizes improving your sales and marketing.
Nonetheless, the method they use is simple. They enable you to engage in relevant, timely, and personalized conversations with your customers while also identifying underlying sales or marketing opportunities.
Drift makes it simple for buyers and sellers to have meaningful conversations across chat, email, voice, and video platforms. In addition, they offer chatbot solutions.
What is Intercom?
Intercom was founded in 2011 in San Francisco by Eoghan McCabe, Des Traynor, David Barrett, and Ciaran Lee. This platform has a significant role in introducing and popularizing the live chat feature.
As time elapsed, Intercom has evolved to be a go-to tool for engaging, supporting, and converting customers. Currently, they offer business messaging solutions through live chat, bots, interactive apps, self-service tools, and product tours.
Furthermore, the messenger solution of this app combines both professional and personalized approaches. This will benefit you to have more fruitful conversations that lead to increased sales and conversions.
Intercom Vs Drift: A Quick Comparison
Let’s have a quick comparison of some basic details of Intercom and Drift.
Drift | Intercom | |
Pricing Starts At | Free plan available | $74/month |
Features |
Shared Inbox Chatbots Knowledge Base Live Chat Viedo Messaging Landing Pages |
Shared Inbox Chatbots Knowledge Base Live Chat Product Tours Banners Surveys Conversation Management Ticketing |
Free trial | 14 days | Not available |
Rating | 4.4/5 | 4.4/5 |
Intercom Vs Drift: Live Chat Features
Features | Drift |
Intercom |
Customization | ✅ | ✅ |
Canned Responses | ✅ | ✅ |
Chatbot | ✅ | ✅ |
Proactive Chats | ✅ | ✅ |
Self-service option | ✅ | ✅ |
Ticketing | ❌ | ✅ |
Conversation Rating | ✅ | ✅ |
Video Chat | ✅ | ❌ |
Conversation Analysis | ✅ | ✅ |
- Customization – Lets you customize chat widget styling, welcome messages, font, color, etc.
- Canned Responses – Through canned responses, you can cut the handling time and instantly resolve customer queries.
- Chatbot – With chatbots, you can save time and improve the efficiency of your support, sales, and marketing teams.
- Proactive Chats – This lets you initiate a conversation with your customer by using triggers.
- Self-Service Option- Lets you integrate your knowledge base articles or Help center within the chat widget to minimize support tickets.
- Ticketing – Helps customers to raise their issues for escalations.
- Conversation Ratings – Helps you scale your chat quality via automated feedback requests sent to customers.
- Video Chat – Lets you connect with customers through video calls.
- Conversation Analysis – Gives you insights and reports on how well your live chat is performing. This feature also lets you help make data-driven decisions for improving your weak points.
Intercom Vs Drift: Customer Support Features
Features | Drift | Intercom |
Shared Inbox | ❌ | ✅ |
Knowledge Base | ✅ | ✅ |
Product Tours | ❌ | ✅ |
Analytics & Reports | ✅ | ✅ |
Voice Integration | ✅ | ✅ |
Social Media Integration | ✅ | ✅ |
Mobile App Integration | ✅ | ✅ |
Mobile Carousels | ❌ | ✅ |
Ticketing Workflows | ❌ | ✅ |
Workload Management | ❌ | ✅ |
- Shared Inbox – The common inbox for teammates to see all the conversations in one place.
- Knowledge Base – With a knowledge base builder, you can create a knowledge base for your company, thereby minimizing support costs.
- Product Tours – These are the in-app guides you can create to walk customers through your products.
- Analytics & Reports – With valuable reports and analytics, you can scale the performance of your agents, website, and conversations.
- Voice Integration – Through voice integration, your agents can quickly switch from chat to voice for providing better support.
- Social Media Integration – Lets you connect to social media channels like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, etc.
- Mobile App Integration – Helps you easily connect with your customers through a mobile app.
- Mobile Carousels – Let your customers see new product updates when they open the iOS or Android mobile app.
- Ticketing Workflows – Allows you to assign specific tickets to specific agents and ensure that no tickets take too long to respond to.
- Workload Management – Through workload management, you can make sure that work is equally distributed among agents.
Intercom Vs Drift: Marketing Features
Features | Drift | Intercom |
Lead Qualification | ✅ | ✅ |
IP Recognition | ✅ | ❌ |
Customer Data Platform | ❌ | ✅ |
Book Meetings | ✅ | ✅ |
Automated Campaigns Builder | ✅ | ✅ |
ABM Routing | ✅ | ✅ |
Conversational Landing Page | ✅ | ❌ |
Rep Performance Analytics | ❌ | ✅ |
Website Analytics | ✅ | ✅ |
- Lead Qualification – Helps in predicting which customers will make actual purchases from a list of potential customers.
- IP Recognition – Lets you identify the IP of the company.
- Customer Data Platform- Provides you with comprehensive customer data within the platform to offer a personalized experience.
- Book Meetings – Through this feature, customers can easily book meetings without leaving the conversation.
- Automated Campaigns Builder – Helps you to follow a lead or customer as per the actions taken by them.
- ABM Routing – Account-based marketing aka ABM routing combines sales and marketing strategies to focus on the right leads.
- Conversational Landing Page – Helps you to engage customers by employing chatbots. These landing pages will be account-based, and have a small bit of information about your product or service, along with a CTA.
- Rep Performance Analytics – Provides you with insights on key performance metrics of individual reps.
- Website Analytics – Helps you to understand the performance of your website like which conversation matters the most, the time taken to close a deal, etc.
Intercom Vs Drift: Sales Features
Features | Drift | Intercom |
Automated Outreach Sequence | ✅ | ✅ |
CRM Synchronization | ✅ | ✅ |
Real-time Notifications | ✅ | ❌ |
Key Account Timelines | ✅ | ❌ |
Lead Scoring | ✅ | ❌ |
- Automated Outreach Sequence – With this feature, you can drive deeper engagement with a prospect to add to the sales pipeline.
- CRM Synchronization – Lets you sync data with your existing CRM.
- Real-time Notifications – Alerts you when a targeted account is visiting your website.
- Key Account Timelines – Helps you to get an idea of what are the current developments on targeted accounts.
- Lead Scoring – Lets you score the engagement of a targeted account.
Intercom Vs Drift: Pricing Comparison
Drift Pricing Structure
Drift offers a customized pricing structure as per your business needs. This platform, however, has a free plan with limited features.
For additional features, you can opt for their paid plans categorized into Premium, Advanced, and Enterprise plans.
All these plans include assistance from a customer success manager, strategy reviews, onboarding assistance, and chat support.
Want to know more about the detailed pricing breakdown of Drift? Then, go through our post on Drift Pricing: Which Plan Is Best For You? (Complete Breakdown)
Drift does not mention how they calculate the price. Therefore, you have to contact their sales team to get information related to the number of agents, billing cycle, etc.
Intercom Pricing Structure
Intercom does not offer either a free trial or a free plan. Alternatively, it has a pricing plan starting from $74 per month tailored exclusively for Startups. This plan includes 2 agents. But, a maximum of 25 additional agents can be added at a cost of $19 per agent per month.
For most businesses, they offer paid versions which are categorized as Support, Engage, and Convert plans.
To get a detailed breakdown of Intercom’s pricing plan, have a look at our post on Intercom Pricing – Which Plan Is Best For You? [Complete Breakdown].
In comparison to Drift, Intercom provides a clear explanation of how they calculate the price. Intercom charges you based on the number of seats you select and the number of people who contact you. So, as they say, you only have to pay for the results.
Although choosing Intercom may sound appealing, keep in mind that there are a bunch of additional fees in the form of add-ons.
Consider the Starter plan. The plan begins at $74 per month. However, if you want to include their unique feature of “Product Tours,” it will cost you an additional $199/month. The same applies to the WhatsApp feature. You will be charged an additional $9 per month for this.
In short, Intercom does include a lot of hidden charges.
Drift Vs Intercom: Is There A Clear Winner?
So far, we have gone through a detailed comparison of Intercom Vs Drift. Now comes the ultimate question. Who is the rightful winner?
To be honest, there is no ready-made or one-word answer for this.
It all depends on your business requirements and business models.
Have a look at these points before you opt for one:
- Intercom is a wholesome chat solution for your support, sales, and marketing teams. Meanwhile, if you are more into a sales-minded platform, Drift is the best.
- Intercom provides ticketing solutions whereas Drift does not have such a feature.
- If you are an e-commerce store owner, Drift doesn’t provide any direct e-commerce integration, whereas Intercom does for Shopify.
- When it comes to integrations, Intercom offers more than 300 integrations, whereas Drift offers almost 100.
- For chatbot building flows, Drift is the best option since it comes with a visual builder. The reason is Intercom’s chatbot flow is way more complex.
- Compared to Intercom, Drift is your go-to tool if you want better onboarding support and assistance with strategy development.
That’s it! You must have got a solution to the dilemma of choosing between Drift and Intercom.
Bottom Line:
Long story short, Drift and Intercom are two robust chat solutions you can choose for your business. Nevertheless, how effective it will be for your brand depends on your business model.
If you want to improve the efficiency of your customer service team, equip them with Helpalama Helpdesk. We can assist your team with live chat, marketing automation, automated workflows, and much more. We offer customized pricing plans as well.
So, what are you waiting for?
Automate Customer Support
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