2025 Drift Chatbot Full Review: Features, Pros & Cons, and Pricing

Jacob Morrow

2024-06-27 17:26:01

3242 Views, 8 min read

In the era when chatbots are seen everywhere, Drift stands at the forefront of the chatbot industry. Drift chatbot is a conversational marketing and sales platform that empowers businesses to interact with customers in a more personalized and effective way. Today, Drift has over 50,000 customers who had more than 41 million conversations last year. This makes Drift a dominating leader in the chatbot space. So, what makes Drift chatbot so special?

This comprehensive guide explores Drift chatbot’s features, benefits, pricing, and alternatives, helping you determine if Drift is the right conversational AI solution for your business.

Part 1: Full Review of Drift Chatbot

Drift chatbot offers a single platform for personalizing conversations at all stages of the buyer's journey. It leverages natural language processing (NLP) and machine learning to understand the context behind the customer queue and provide the exact response they are looking for.

Amazed by Drift chatbot capabilities? Let's get deeper into the Drift chatbot review and look at its key features and other details.

Key Features of Drift Chatbot

Real-Time Interactions: It integrates with your website and responds to customers with immediate answers in real-time.
All-in-one Bot: It can act as a virtual marketer, sales rep, or support agent for different customers. It can answer product-related questions, book a meeting, or troubleshoot issues.

Chat Routing: It provides intelligent chat routing support. You can create rules for routing conversations, instantly direct conversations to the right person or team, and keep customers engaged in a single chat window.

Support Wide Chatbot Elements: It can offer a wide range of chatbot elements such as delays (for human-like conversation flow), images, videos, audio, attachments, links, emojis, buttons, and more.

Conversation Analysis: It stores and analyzes all open-text conversations to smartly identify common themes and provide more personalized responses.
Customer Engagement: When a customer arrives on the website, it can begin conversations or respond to visitor queries promptly. It can automatically identify and understand visitors and fire custom playbooks that convert.

Personalization: It learns from all the past conversations it has with customers. This makes it able to understand the message context and offer accurate responses that match the customer's preferred tone and style.
Conversational Marketing: It dominates for its exceptional conversational marketing capabilities. It engages with customers in real-time dialogues to tackle their needs and turn them into potential leads.
Integration: Other than the website, it can integrate with plenty of other platforms, such as Clearbit, Databox, Salesforce, Facebook Messenger, HubSpot, Zapier, and more.

Analytics: It provides comprehensive analytics, such as the number of conversations emails captured, meetings, etc. These insights can help in decision-making related to content personalization or segmentation.

All the above key features of Drift Chatbot make it a powerful chatbot for marketing, sales, and customer support. However, there are a few unique features you get to experience with Drift Chatbot, as follows:

Convert High-Volume Traffic: It can intelligently identify previous website visitors, grasp their intent, and then deliver them unique experiences to make them your next customers.

Better Target Account Pipeline: It can smartly pinpoint target accounts and their interactions with your site so that you can engage with them 1:1 at the right time.

24/7 Meeting Scheduler: It can autonomously schedule meetings at the customer's preferred time.

AI Engagement Score: It provides real-time intent insights on prospects to better prioritize prospective efforts.
GPT Integration: Its GPT integration offers AI-suggested replies in live chat to sales representatives so that they can provide immediate responses to customers without delays.

In short, the Drift chatbot is an advanced, feature-rich chatbot platform that empowers you to create a super-intelligent chatbot that increases engagement and drives sales autonomously.

Drift Chatbot Pricing

From the above Drift chatbot review, it is evident that you won't be getting this tool at a lower price. That's exactly what we can see in its pricing plans.

Drift has only three pricing plans: Premium, Advanced, and Enterprise. It only displays the Premium plan, which starts at $2,500/month (billed annually). This plan is meant for small businesses and offers custom chatbots, live chat, conversational landing pages, real-time notifications, meetings, and intel.

The Advanced and Enterprise Drift Chatbot pricing plans require you to interact with the sales teams. They offer everything you get in Premium and more, like Fastlane, A/B testing, flex routing, AI-powered chatbots, etc.

Overall, Drift pricing plans are among the most expensive, and they seem to be affordable only to well-established enterprises.

Pros

Ease of Use: It has a user-friendly interface that does not require technical expertise or software experience.
Customer Engagement Capabilities: Its personalized responses, real-time dialogues, rich chatbot elements, auto meeting schedules, chat routing, and other capabilities keep customers engaged.
Wide Integration Options: It supports many integrations to offer omnichannel experience to customers across different platforms, such as Shopify, Facebook, HubSpot, Salesforce, etc.
More Leads and Productivity Boost: It helps generate and qualify more leads. It can collect personal details, schedule sales calls, provide AI engagement scores, and more to help teams increase leads and sales.
Responsive Support: It can troubleshoot customers' issues in real time with personalized responses.
Detailed Analytics: It provides comprehensive analytics of all chatbot activities and outcomes to make data-driven decisions.

Cons

High Cost: It is more expensive than many other platforms. If you want to deploy the Drift chatbot for multiple teams and access its full capabilities, it will cost you thousands of bucks per month. For instance, its Premium plan is meant for small businesses, and that costs $2,500/month (billed annually).
Learning Curve: An initial learning curve is required to build and configure the chatbot.
Challenging Integration: Technical expertise is required to integrate the Drift chatbot with other platforms.
Multiple Teams only in Enterprise Plan: It does not allow you to use the chatbot for multiple teams unless you subscribe to its most expensive "Enterprise" plan.
Bugs: Users have reported bugs and slow performance in both its web and mobile apps.

Part 2: How to Build a Bot Using Drift

Now that we have thoroughly looked into the Drift chatbot review, the next important thing to learn is how to build a bot using Drift. Here are the steps you need to follow to build a bot using Drift:

Step 1. Go to the Drift website and sign up or sign in.

Step 2. Copy-paste the Drift JavaScript snippet into your website header to install Drift.

Step 3. Link your calendar to schedule meetings automatically.

Step 4. Specify lead routing rules so that the Drift chatbot sends prospects to the right member.

Step 5. Invite and add team members.

Step 6. Copy-paste questions to the leadbot visual builder.

Once done, your chatbot is ready to run and integrate wherever you want.

Part 3. Best Drift Chatbot Alternative

While Drift is a powerful conversational AI platform, its high costs and complexity may not suit every business. Here are some top alternatives to Drift chatbot:

1. GPTBots Enterprise AI Agent (Top Recommended)

GPTBots Enterprise AI Agent stands out as the best Drift chatbot alternative, especially for enterprises seeking advanced AI capabilities without complexity or high costs. GPTBots provides a highly customizable, no-code chatbot builder designed specifically for enterprise-level businesses. It simplifies chatbot creation, seamlessly integrates with existing enterprise tools, and offers robust workflow automation capabilities—significantly reducing operational costs compared to Drift.

Additionally, GPTBots offers a free customized demo, allowing you to experience firsthand how its powerful features can address your unique business needs.

Key Advantages of GPTBots over Drift:

Highly customizable, no-code chatbot builder
Advanced enterprise-grade workflow automation
Seamless integration with CRM, marketing, and collaboration tools
Cost-effective pricing tailored for enterprises
Free personalized demo to match your business requirements

2. Intercom (Best for Customer Support & Engagement)

Intercom is a popular Drift chatbot alternative, renowned for its comprehensive customer support and engagement capabilities. It combines chatbot automation with live chat, targeted messaging, and detailed analytics, making it ideal for businesses focused on enhancing customer interactions and driving conversions.

Why Choose Intercom?

Robust chatbot and live chat integration
Advanced customer targeting and messaging
Extensive analytics and reporting features
Strong integration ecosystem with popular business tools

3. HubSpot Chatbot Builder (Best for HubSpot Users)

HubSpot Chatbot Builder is seamlessly integrated within HubSpot's CRM and marketing automation platform, making it an excellent Drift chatbot alternative for businesses already leveraging HubSpot's ecosystem. It simplifies customer data management, automates marketing workflows, and provides personalized conversational experiences.

Benefits of HubSpot Chatbot Builder:

Native integration with HubSpot CRM and marketing tools
Easy-to-use, no-code chatbot creation interface
Personalized customer interactions based on CRM data
Cost-effective for existing HubSpot users

4. Tidio (Best for Small & Medium Businesses)

Tidio is a user-friendly chatbot platform tailored specifically for small to medium-sized businesses looking for an affordable and easy-to-implement Drift chatbot alternative. It offers intuitive chatbot creation, reliable customer support features, and budget-friendly pricing plans.

Why Small Businesses Prefer Tidio:

Affordable pricing plans suitable for SMBs
Easy setup and intuitive user interface
Reliable customer support and onboarding assistance
Integration with popular e-commerce platforms and CMS

5. Freshchat by Freshworks (Best for Omnichannel Engagement)

Freshchat by Freshworks is a powerful AI-powered chatbot solution designed to deliver seamless omnichannel customer engagement. It integrates effortlessly with other Freshworks products, providing a unified customer experience across multiple communication channels.

Advantages of Freshchat:

AI-driven chatbot with extensive customization options
Smooth integration with Freshworks' suite of products
Unified omnichannel customer engagement
Comprehensive analytics and reporting capabilities

Part 4. Why GPTBots is the Ideal Drift Chatbot Alternative

GPTBots is an advanced enterprise AI agent platform designed specifically for businesses looking to streamline customer interactions, automate workflows, and enhance user experiences without the complexity or high costs associated with Drift.

Highly Customizable No-Code AI Agent Builder

GPTBots offers a highly customizable, no-code AI agent builder that empowers enterprise teams to quickly create sophisticated conversational agents tailored precisely to their business needs. With its intuitive drag-and-drop interface, your team can rapidly deploy powerful AI-driven chatbots without any coding expertise.

Additionally, GPTBots provides pre-built templates optimized for various enterprise use cases, including customer support automation, lead generation, internal HR processes, and IT support.

Seamless Integration & Enterprise-Grade Scalability

Unlike Drift chatbot, GPTBots seamlessly integrates with your existing enterprise technology stack, including CRM systems, marketing automation tools, and collaboration platforms. Supported integrations include WhatsApp, Slack, Discord, Messenger, Telegram, Zapier, and more, ensuring your AI agent fits effortlessly into your existing workflows.

The key features of GPTBots include:

Click-based, no-code interface to build chatbot.
Pre-designed templates for fast bot creation for customer support, lead generation, etc.
Capable of building workflows to automate repetitive tasks.
Easily train bot with your company's knowledge base (one-click upload data from websites, documents, spreadsheets, etc.).
Support multiple input types on your bot, such as text, images, videos, etc.
Integrate easily across different platforms, including WhatsApp, Discord, Slack, Zapier, Messenger, iframe, Telegram, and more.

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GPTBots: No-Code Chatbot Builder Pricing

GPTBots offers flexible enterprise pricing designed to scale with your business needs. Rather than rigid pricing tiers, GPTBots provides customized plans tailored specifically to your enterprise requirements.

To experience firsthand how GPTBots can transform your customer interactions and automate your business processes, GPTBots offers a complimentary customized demo. This allows you to see the platform's capabilities tailored specifically to your organization's unique challenges and objectives.

Compared to Drift chatbot's expensive subscription model, GPTBots delivers superior functionality, ease of use, and scalability at a significantly lower total cost of ownership.

Conclusion: GPTBots as the Ultimate Drift Chatbot Alternative

While Drift chatbot offers robust conversational marketing capabilities, its high pricing, complexity, and steep learning curve can be significant barriers for enterprises. GPTBots Enterprise AI Agent emerges as the ideal alternative, providing a highly customizable, no-code AI agent builder that seamlessly integrates into your existing enterprise ecosystem.

GPTBots empowers your business to deliver exceptional customer experiences, automate complex workflows, and significantly reduce operational costs. Discover how GPTBots can transform your enterprise today.

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Learn more GPTBots and make it easier for your users to start conversations today.