Drift vs Hubspot Conversations
Last Updated: April 2024
Unable to find a solution between Drift vs Hubspot Conversations? Since both software is jam-packed with excellent live chat features it may be a confusing decision to make.
But, not anymore! In this post, we will go through a detailed comparison of the features of Drift and Hubspot Conversations with details including:
- What is Drift?
- What is Hubspot Conversations?
- Drift Vs Hubspot Conversations: A Quick Comparison
- Drift Vs Hubspot Conversations: Live Chat Features
- Drift Vs Hubspot Conversations: Customer Support Features
- Drift Vs Hubspot Conversations: Marketing Features
- Drift Vs Hubspot Conversations: Sales Features
- Drift Vs Hubspot Conversations: Pricing Comparison
- Drift Vs Hubspot Conversations: Is There A Clear Winner?
What Is Drift?
Drift was founded in 2015 by David Cancel, the former chief product officer at Hubspot. Rather than a simple live chat software, it is a revenue acceleration platform to improve your sales and marketing margins.
Even though it may sound complex, they do this task by engaging in relevant, timely, and personalized conversations with your prospects, leads, or customers. In fact, Drift is a pioneer of conversational marketing. Simply put, this software captures the marketing and sales scope that goes unnoticed in chat, email, voice, and video platforms. What’s more, they also offer chatbot solutions.
What is Hubspot Conversations?
Hubspot was founded by Brian Halligan and Dharmesh Shah in 2006. Instead of live chat software, it can be best described as software that offers a series of products in customer relationship management, social media marketing, content management, lead generation, web analytics, etc.
Hubspot Conversations is their unified platform to manage your customer conversations from email, live chat, and Facebook Messenger. Thus, it is a go-to tool for providing personalized support, generating more leads, and closing more deals.
Since it embraces a multichannel approach and includes a chatbot builder, your customer conversations can be handled productively without sacrificing quality.
Drift Vs Hubspot Conversations: A Quick Comparison
Before we dive into in-depth details, have a look at the comparison of some basic features.
| Drift | HubSpot Conversations | |
| Pricing Starts At | Free plan available | Free tools available |
| Features | Shared Inbox Chatbots Mobile App Live Chat Video Messaging Landing Pages Internal Collaboration | Shared Inbox Chatbots Mobile App Live Chat Landing Pages Internal Collaboration Ticketing |
| Free trial | 14 days | 14 days |
| Rating | 4.3/5 | 4.4/5 |
Drift Vs Hubspot Conversations: Live Chat Features
| Features | Drift | Hubspot Conversations |
| Customization | ✅ | ✅ |
| Canned Responses | ✅ | ✅ |
| Chatbot | ✅ | ✅ |
| Proactive Chats | ✅ | ✅ |
| Self-service option | ✅ | ✅ |
| Ticket Management | ✅ | ✅ |
| Conversation Rating | ✅ | ✅ |
| Video Chat | ✅ | ✅ |
| Conversation Analysis | ✅ | ✅ |
| Offline Bot | ✅ | ✅ |
| Chat History | ✅ | ✅ |
| Multilingual support | ✅ | ✅ |
| Channel Switching | ❌ | ✅ |
- Customization – This allows you to create personalized live chat widgets by changing the themes, fonts, and colors to match your brand.
- Canned responses – This helps your agents to provide pre-set answers to common questions from customers.
- Chatbot – Allows you to provide a quick resolution to your customers or handle them until an agent is available.
- Proactive chats – This lets you initiate a conversation with a customer using triggers.
- Self-service option – Enables you to embed your knowledge base, FAQs, or help articles within the chat widget.
- Ticket management – Assists your customers to raise tickets from the live chat itself. You can then organize and prioritize them to provide a speedy resolution,
- Conversation rating – This helps you to analyze your chat quality by sending post-chat feedback requests.
- Video chat – This lets your agents interact with your customers in real time via video calling.
- Conversation analysis – Gives you insights and analytics on the performance metrics of your live chat. This feature lets you identify your weak points and work on them accordingly.
- Offline bot – When the agent is unavailable, these bots can route the visitor to available teams or simply collect the visitor’s information to offer a follow-up.
- Chat history – With chat history, you can engage in personalized conversation with prospects without losing continuity.
- Multilingual support – This enables you to interact with your customers and prospects in their native language.
- Channel switching – Allows your agents to switch between channels while chatting for more fruitful conversations.
Drift Vs Hubspot Conversations: Customer Support Features
| Features | Drift | Hubspot Conversations |
| Shared Inbox | ❌ | ✅ |
| Knowledge Base | ✅ | ✅ |
| Multichannel | ❌ | ✅ |
| Analytics & Reports | ✅ | ✅ |
| Voice Integration | ✅ | ✅ |
| Social Media Integration | ✅ | ✅ |
| Mobile App Integration | ✅ | ✅ |
| Ticketing Workflows | ❌ | ✅ |
| Customer Portal | ❌ | ✅ |
| Email Templates | ✅ | ✅ |
| Conversation Intelligence | ❌ | ✅ |
- Shared inbox – Provides your agents with a shared workspace wherein you can view all your customer conversations from multiple channels.
- Knowledge base – With a knowledge base builder, you can promote self-service. A typical knowledge base may include FAQs, how-to guides, product and service information, etc.
- Multichannel – With multichannel support, you can engage with your customers across various platforms, including live chat, email, website, etc.
- Analytics & Reports – Helps you analyze customer satisfaction rates, agents’ performance, first response time, etc.
- Voice integration – Assists your agents in switching from live chat to voice calls. Along with that, they can also provide follow-up through phone calls.
- Social media integration – This lets you interact with your customers across various social media platforms.
- Mobile app integration – This helps you easily connect with your customers through a mobile app.
- Ticketing workflows – Includes automation, pipelines, and routing of tickets. With these workflows, your team can easily segment and prioritize tickets as per triggers.
- Customer portal – Provides customers with a single place to view, open, and reply to tickets raised by them.
- Email templates – Assists you in making your emails more conversational and engaging.
- Conversation intelligence – This helps you integrate your customers’ feedback directly into your CRM and train your team accordingly.
Drift Vs Hubspot Conversations: Marketing Features
| Features | Drift | Hubspot Conversations |
| Lead Qualification | ✅ | ✅ |
| IP Recognition | ✅ | ❌ |
| Visitor Identification | ✅ | ✅ |
| Customer Data Platform | ❌ | ✅ |
| Book Meetings | ✅ | ✅ |
| Automated Campaigns Builder | ✅ | ✅ |
| ABM Routing | ✅ | ✅ |
| Conversational Landing Page | ✅ | ❌ |
| Targeting Conditions | ✅ | ✅ |
| Website Analytics | ✅ | ✅ |
- Lead qualification – Analyzes a list of prospects, and predicts who among them will make an actual purchase.
- IP recognition – This lets you identify the IP of the company or the client.
- Visitor identification – This lets you provide personalized conversations with website visitors by identifying them and analyzing their website activity.
- Customer data platform – Provides you with real-time access to customer data spread across multiple touchpoints and platforms.
- Book meetings – With this feature, customers can easily book meetings without leaving the conversation.
- Automated campaigns builder – Helps you to have a close look at the lead by the actions taken by them.
- ABM routing – ABM stands for ‘Account-based marketing’. This feature will help you focus on the right leads by combining sales and marketing strategies.
- Conversational landing page – These landing pages will be account-based, and have a small bit of information about your product or service, and a CTA.
- Targeting conditions – These conditions are pre-set rules you can assign to qualify a lead into the marketing pipeline.
- Website analytics – Assists you in gaining deeper insights into how your website is performing. The data may include which conversation matters the most, the time taken to close a deal, etc.
Drift Vs Hubspot Conversations: Sales Features
| Features | Drift | Hubspot Conversations |
| Automated Outreach Sequence | ✅ | ✅ |
| CRM Synchronization | ✅ | ✅ |
| Real-time Notifications | ✅ | ✅ |
| Key Account Timelines | ✅ | ❌ |
| Lead Scoring | ✅ | ✅ |
| Custom Properties | ❌ | ✅ |
- Automated Outreach Sequence – With this feature, you can drive deeper engagement with a prospect to add to the sales pipeline.
- CRM Synchronization – Assists you in synchronizing data with your existing CRM.
- Real-time Notifications – Alerts you when a targeted account is visiting your website or moving forward in your sales pipeline.
- Key Account Timelines – Assists you in staying up to date on the latest developments on specific accounts.
- Lead Scoring – It is the method by which the value of a lead is assessed based on their interest in your products and services.
- Custom properties – Allows you to link specific data points to contacts, companies, and deals.
Drift Vs Hubspot Conversations: Pricing Comparison
So, far we have gone through the features of Drift and Hubspot Conversations. Now, let’s have a look at the pricing structure of both these tools:
Drift Pricing Structure
Drift provides pricing plans tailored to your specific business requirements. To access their comprehensive set of features, you have the option to select from three tiers of pricing plans: Premium, Advanced, and Enterprise.
For those looking to get started, the Premium plan is a suitable choice.
- Premium Plan: Starting at $2,500 per month when billed annually
- Key Features: Live Chat, Meetings, Custom Chatbots, Intel, Real, Time Notifications, Conversational Landing Pages
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)
Hubspot Conversations Pricing Structure
As this is HubSpot’s shared inbox for managing customer conversations, the pricing is equivalent to HubSpot’s pricing.
Initially, they offer a 14-day free trial. After that, instead of a free version, they offer some free tools for sales, marketing, and service teams. However, these free tools only have limited features, For more advanced features, you can opt for their paid versions categorized as follows:
- Free: $0
- Starter – $18/ month
- Professional – $450/month
Have more questions? Then please go through our post on Hubspot Pricing: Which Plan Is Best for You? (Complete Breakdown).
Drift Vs Hubspot Conversations: Is There A Clear Winner?
After all, these comparisons, have you got a one-word answer for this? Most probably, the answer would be no. Because both are jam-packed with a lot of features. Furthermore, the suitability of either of these will be largely decided by your business model.
However, consider the following points to make a better decision:
- Hubspot conversations has an equal focus on support, marketing, and sales features. However, if you are more into a sales platform, Drift may be the better choice.
- When it comes to chatbots, the chat flows of Hubspot are limited compared to those of Drift.
- On comparing the pricing structures, it is clear that the pricing plans of Drift are not so transparent, whereas Hubspot Conversations has a clear-cut pricing structure.
Bottom Line:
Since both HubSpot Conversations and Drift offer similar features, it is a confusing decision to choose between the two. However, based on the feature comparisons we’ve done thus far, it shouldn’t be too difficult if you’re clear about your business requirements.
Additionally, if you want to improve the efficiency of your customer service team, equip them with Saufter.io.
With its live chat, automated workflows, and many advanced features, your team could easily support your customers. Furthermore, they also provide customized pricing plans.
So, what are you waiting for?
