Last Updated: April 2024
Drift is a feature-rich tool you can use for your customer service, marketing, and sales teams. Through its live chat and chatbot functions, you can easily engage with your customers and thereby reap better leads and grow your sales.
But what about Drift pricing? Is it affordable? How much does Drift cost actually?
Well, this post is all about finding answers to these questions.
After reading this post, you will get insights into the following details:
- A Quick Overview Of Drift’s Pricing Structure
- Detailed Breakdown Of Drift’s Pricing Plans
- Drift Plans Comparison In A Nutshell
- Why is Saufter Better Than Drift?
Let’s dive into the details!
A Quick Overview Of Drift’s Pricing Structure
Drift currently offers a free version with basic functions and pricing plans under three categories. Additionally, it also offers a unique plan for Startups with employees less than 50.
So, the pricing plans are categorized as follows:
- Free Plan
- Drift For StartUps – Custom pricing
- Premium Plan – Custom pricing
- Advanced Plan – Custom pricing
- Enterprise Plan – Custom pricing
No matter which plans you opt for, they always provide the below-given functionalities for your support:
- Customer Success Manager – You will get access to a customer success manager for easily handling Drift and dealing with any issues that may occur.
- Regular Strategy Reviews – Keeps you updated on how your strategies are working, whether it is yielding results or not.
- Onboarding – Helps you to make your start with Drift smooth and hassle-free.
- Chat Support – Through chat, the Drift team will assist you in resolving any queries or complaints you may have with them.
Let us now go through the details of each of these plans and their features.
Detailed Breakdown Of Drift’s Pricing Plans
1) Free Plan
Features Offered:
- Live Chat – Lets you engage with your customers in real-time and thereby improve customer engagement.
- Number of Agents – In this plan, only one agent seat is provided.
- Number of Contacts –The number of contacts you can handle is limited to 100.
- Integrations – Comes with in-built calendar integration for booking meetings and demos.
- Reports – Provides basic reporting functions.
Limitations Of The Free Plan:
- Does not provide chatbots.
- Canned responses are not available.
- Advanced reporting features are absent.
The Free Plan Is Good For:
This plan is good if you are just looking for a live chat feature and need only basic analytics.
2) Drift For StartUps
Features Offered:
- Number of Seats – The number of agents is limited to 10. However, it can be increased to a maximum of 20 if additional costs are paid.
- Number Of Contacts – Unlimited contacts.
- Custom Chatbots – You can create chatbots tailored to your needs to reduce handle time and avoid missed chats.
- Proactive Messaging – Lets you initiate conversations with customers to generate more sales.
- Round Robin Routing – Through this feature, you can make sure that the workload is equally distributed among your agents for improved employee satisfaction.
- Reports & Analytics – This plan provides basic reporting and revenue reporting features. You will also get conversation analysis for better understanding.
- Integrations – Integrates well with Slack, Zapier, Hubspot, Salesforce, and many more.
When You Should Go For The StartUp Plan?
If you think that this plan is available for every startup out there, you are mistaken. Initially, you have to submit an application to Drift. Once they are sure your business runs in alignment with their policies, you can onboard easily.
The conditions to check before opting for this plan are as follows:
- You are a new customer of Drift.
- Your employee count is less than 50.
- Your total funding amounts to $15 million or less.
- Your organization is less than 5 years old.
Sounds like you? Then, go for this plan right away.
Limitations Of The StartUp Plan:
- Once you outgrow their eligibility criteria, you will be automatically shifted to the Premium plan.
- No fixed pricing plans. The price is decided on your funding value.
- Monthly payment mode is not acceptable. There is only annual billing.
StartUp Plan Is Good For:
This plan is good if you are a startup and are looking for all the robust features to engage with customers like live chat and chatbots. Additionally, this plan also comes with a live view of website visitors, CRM routing, and custom branding options.
3) Premium Plan
Features Offered:
- All features in the free plan are included.
- Custom Chatbots – You can create your own custom, personalized chatbots to help customers and engage them. You can also use it for marketing and sales for qualifying leads and converting them into sales.
- Drift Intel – Through this feature, you can get data about every visitor to your website and provide a personalized experience to them.
- Drift For Salesforce App – Lets you easily connect with Salesforce for measuring your Drift performance.
- Encryption At Rest – Provides you with better privacy and security by keeping your data secure all the time.
- Drift Deal Room – This is a shared space for buyers and sellers for getting insights into sales interactions throughout the customer journey.
- Reports& Analytics – This plan comes with revenue reporting features.
Limitations Of The Premium Plan:
- The lead routing feature is not available.
- Does not provide the A/B testing feature for testing the front-end features of your website.
- Limited data on website visitors.
Premium Plan Is Good For:
This plan is ideal for you if you run a small business. You will be able to take care of your business with their reporting features and will have a thorough understanding of your customer journey. Additionally, this plan also guarantees your data security.
Features Offered:
- All Features in the Premium plan are included.
- Drift Fastlane – Lets you easily qualify buyers from lead forms and fast-track the best buyers to the right sellers.
- Drift Audiences – Provides you with the information of who, where, and what of your website visitors so that you can provide a personalized experience to them.
- A/B Testing – Enables you to generate more leads through conversations.
- Advanced Lead Routing – Lets you easily handle multiple teams through better routing rules.
Limitations Of The Advanced Plan:
- Cannot handle multiple brands and multiple languages.
- Chatbots are not AI-powered.
Advanced Plan Is Good For:
This plan is designed for medium-sized companies to efficiently handle both customers and employees. With its lead routing feature, you can optimize your agents’ workload. Along with that, you can generate more leads through the lead forms provided in this plan.
5) Enterprise Plan
Features Offered:
- All features in the Advanced plan are covered.
- Drift Workspaces – This feature provides you with a Drift workspace of your own settings, chatbots, reporting, and users.
- Multiple Languages – Gives you access to chatbots that can handle multiple languages so that your customers can interact with you in their native language.
- AI-powered Chatbots – Through AI, the chatbots will help you in scaling personalization, pipeline generation, and customer queries.
- Custom RBAC – Allows you to configure role-based access controls.
Limitations Of The Enterprise Plan:
- Chatbot builder is reported to be sub-par.
- Steep learning curve due to complex structure.
- Chat inbox does not always provide correct information.
Enterprise Plan Is Good For:
This plan is good if you are a well-running large organization. This plan is efficient enough to handle all your complex business needs like handling multilingual customers and creating a customized workspace for your agents.
Drift Plans Comparison In A Nutshell
So far, we have gone through the various Drift pricing and its comparison in detail. Now, have a look at the following illustration to get an all-around comparison of the features:
Why Is Saufter Better Than Drift?
Even though Drift is robust to handle your live chat, Saufter is still the better option. The basic reason is Drift has a complex structure and less pricing transparency. However, Saufter is easy to set up and is a very user-friendly tool that is ideal for your customer service team. Furthermore, Saufter offers custom pricing.
On a closer look at the features, it is obvious that Drift is not suited for e-commerce stores. Rather, it is ideal for B2B businesses for optimizing their inbound funnel and conversions.
However, Saufter comes with an in-built integration with major e-commerce platforms and is a boon for small businesses.
Here are some of the top reasons why Saufter is favored by e-commerce and online stores:
- It is a perfect ticketing system for your customer service team since unlimited tickets can be resolved on all its plans
- Lets you engage with your customers in real-time using the live chat feature.
- It offers native SMS and phone call integration.
- The e-commerce store owners love this CRM tool due to its native integration with Shopify, WooCommerce, and Magento.
- This is the only help desk that focuses on turning your customer service into a new marketing pipeline. It automatically identifies happy customers and messages them to collect reviews.
- Saufter offers AI-suggested responses based on previous tickets handled and thereby significantly reduces handle time.
- Compared to Drift, it provides the additional feature of automating your agents’ hiring and their training.
- Saufter also helps you in order and returns management.
To Sum It Up:
Finally, we are down to the point where we have to choose between Saufter and Drift, right? So, which tool is the best fit for your business?
In truth, it depends on your business model. Saufter would be the better option for e-commerce brands, whereas Drift is best for non-commerce businesses. So, choose accordingly.
To make your customer service team excellent, equip them with Saufter. It can help you automate many workflows, reducing the workload of your team. We offer customized pricing also.
So, what are you waiting for?
