Here's the trap. You are shopping for conversational marketing, every roundup lists Drift among the leaders, and you go to look at it. What loads is a 334-byte page whose title is the word Redirecting.
Drift was acquired by Salesloft and the deal closed in February 2024. It is now a layer inside the Salesloft platform rather than a product you can buy on its own. That is more than two years ago, and the recommendation articles have not caught up.
So this page covers what its domain actually does today, what the acquisition means if you are on a legacy contract, and why this particular one keeps getting recommended when others do not.
What does drift.com do now?
We fetched it on 29 August 2026. It returns a 334-byte HTML page containing a meta refresh, pointing at salesloft.com/platform/drift, with a single line of fallback text offering a link if you are not redirected automatically.
The destination is a live Salesloft product page titled "AI Chat Agent for B2B Sales". The Drift name has gone from the title, and it survives in the URL path and on the page itself.
Does the product still work?
Yes. This is not a shutdown, and it is worth separating the two because buyers conflate them constantly. Drift's capability is alive and being sold, on Salesloft's platform, under Salesloft's roadmap. The Salesloft page describes web chat that triggers seller actions and feeds forecasting, which is recognisably the same product with different priorities around it.
What has ended is Drift as a purchasing decision. You cannot evaluate it against alternatives on its own merits, because you are not buying it on its own terms. Our own note puts it plainly: buying it standalone in 2026 means buying into another vendor's platform strategy, so evaluate Salesloft, not Drift.
Why do roundups still recommend it?
Because a redirect is not a 404, and most listicles are refreshed by updating the year in the title. A tool that vanishes gets noticed. A tool that quietly becomes a feature of something else keeps its backlinks, its reviews and its search presence, and nothing breaks to signal the change.
It is the same failure we found across the directory when we checked which vendors still exist: the check that catches this is cheap and almost nobody runs it. Our four checks before you shortlist a tool take about a minute each, and fetching the homepage is the first one.
What should you look at instead?
This is the question the acquisition actually leaves you with, and the answer depends on which half of Drift you wanted.
- If you wanted web chat that qualifies and routes, at a price you can see: Chatbase at $40 or Landbot at $45, both self-serve with free tiers. They are narrower than Drift was and they will not act on your systems, and we set out how the two differ separately.
- If you wanted an autonomous agent handling real conversations: that is the enterprise half of the category, where sixteen of eighteen tools publish no price at all. Intercom Fin is the only one with a published rate, at 99 cents per outcome, and its billing definition is worth reading before its feature list.
- If you wanted the sales engagement platform Drift now sits inside: then the honest answer is that the acquisition has already made your decision, and the comparison is Salesloft against Outreach rather than anything to do with chat.
Notice that no single product replaces what Drift was, which is usually what an acquisition means in practice. The capability gets split between a cheap tier that does less and an enterprise tier that will not quote you.
What should you do if you are on a Drift contract?
- Find out which entity you are actually contracted with, and on what terms. Acquisitions often novate contracts, and the renewal you receive may look different from the one you signed.
- Ask what the migration path is and what it costs, in writing, before your renewal date rather than at it. A product being folded into a platform usually means eventual consolidation onto that platform's licensing.
- Evaluate Salesloft on its own merits at renewal. That is the actual decision in front of you. Our record's caution on both incumbents applies: below about twenty reps you are buying governance you do not need yet.
- Check your exports work now. Conversation history and routing rules are the things worth having if you leave, and the time to confirm you can get them is while everything is still running.
The answer to the question in the title is that Drift was bought, folded in, and is being unwound as a brand slowly enough that its name still appears in a URL and its reputation still appears in search results. It is not gone. It is just no longer a thing you can choose. If Salesloft is now the decision in front of you, it is an engagement platform rather than a CRM, and below about twenty reps what it adds is governance rather than capability.