Drift no longer exists as a standalone product to buy. As of August 29, 2026, drift.com/pricing redirects to Salesloft, where the chat agent sits inside a B2B revenue platform with no published price, and the page says they've transitioned from Drift to 1mind. If you came for conversational marketing, Salesloft is where it went. If you actually wanted your website to answer customer questions, that's a support tool, and Answer HQ costs $199 or $299 a month flat.

Sorting out which of those two things you need saves you a lot of money. Drift was built to catch buyer intent and route hot leads to sellers, and Salesloft has taken it further in that direction: chat agents feed signals into their Predictive Revenue System to trigger seller actions. Nothing about that is aimed at answering "where's my order" or "how do I reset my device". Answer HQ points the other way: it reads your website and documents, answers questions from that content with a citation on every reply, and hands anything it can't answer to you by email. No lead scoring, no CRM sync, no seller workflow.

What happened to Drift

Salesloft acquired Drift, and the standalone pricing page is gone. Visiting it today sends you to Salesloft's chat agent page, which describes AI chat agents that use web activity, CRM data and past conversations to qualify visitors and pipe intent into a seller's workflow. That page also states they've moved from Drift to 1mind.

Practical consequence for a small business: there's no self-serve plan to sign up for and no public number to compare against. You talk to sales, and the product you get is priced and shaped for a revenue team.

Are you buying a sales tool or a support tool?

Worth being blunt about, because the widgets look identical on the page.

Sales chat exists to identify who's worth talking to and get them to a human fast. Success is a booked meeting. Support chat exists to resolve the question without a human at all. Success is nobody needing to reply.

Tools built for the first job tend to be bad at the second, because qualification flows aren't answers. If most of your chat volume is existing customers with questions, you want the support one. If you're a B2B company chasing pipeline off website traffic, Salesloft is the honest recommendation and this post isn't for you.

What Answer HQ does

You point it at your website and upload your documents. It crawls them into a private Knowledge Vault, and the chat widget answers from that content, with Quick Citations linking the exact page each answer came from. Retrieval is two-stage: vector search, then a reranker.

Install is one script tag, or the Shopify app from the App Store using a theme app embed with no theme code editing. Capital City Motorcycle Club was live five minutes after signup.

The widget has two tabs, Chat and Help. Help holds your help center inside the widget with categories, articles and search, and it appears once you've published an article. Articles are unlimited and also hosted as a public help center, with three visibilities: published, Assistant only for content that informs answers without being cited or public, and draft.

Answers come back in the customer's language. ZURIGA serves German customers this way, and their team's own accuracy test against four competing tools found Answer HQ significantly more accurate on four of five questions.

What it doesn't do, including the Drift-shaped parts

  • No proactive outreach, chat campaigns, playbooks or lead qualification flows.
  • No CRM integration. Connectors cover Zendesk, Shopify, Cal.com and Google Drive only, on Pro and Growth, and they're in beta. No HubSpot, no Salesforce, no Zapier.
  • No live chat with a human agent, no agent console, no queue, no routing, no SLAs.
  • No phone or voice, no SMS, no WhatsApp for customers, no social DMs, no mobile app.
  • No workflow builder or rules engine.

Handoff works one way: the customer uses a contact form inside the conversation and the message lands in Tickets, threaded by email, on every plan.

The pricing comparison you can actually make

I can't compare Answer HQ to a price Salesloft doesn't publish, so here's ours in full. Basic is $199 a month for 1,000 AI answers, 100 knowledge pages and monthly re-imports. Pro is $299 for 5,000 answers, 500 pages and weekly re-imports, and adds Insights, Autopilot, Connectors in beta, API keys and custom widget themes. Growth is a conversation, with unlimited answers, 1,500 pages, re-imports every three days, multiple websites and custom branding. Yearly billing gives you two months free, and there's a 14-day trial on Basic and Pro. No per-agent charge on any plan. The pricing page has the comparison table.

Turning chat into better content

The reason I keep pushing content rather than flows: on Pro and Growth, Insights groups questions into Topics by meaning instead of keyword, works across languages including Chinese, Japanese and Korean, and ranks the knowledge gaps where a customer asked something your content couldn't answer. Each gap has a flow that starts an article with the title, category and the customer's real questions pre-filled, and saving it marks the topic resolved.

Autopilot, same plans, is a dashboard agent you can ask about your own support data, and it can take actions with your approval on anything risky like publishing an article or re-importing your site.

The Breather deflected over 1,200 tickets in their first 30 days this way and cut inbound volume nearly 40% across email and phone. Their write-up is here.

FAQ

Is Drift shut down?

Not shut down, but not sold as a standalone product either. As of August 29, 2026, drift.com/pricing redirects to Salesloft's chat agent page, which states they've transitioned from Drift to 1mind and offers no public pricing. Check it yourself before assuming anything, since acquired products keep moving.

What's the best Drift alternative for a small business?

Depends which half of Drift you used. For qualifying website visitors and feeding a sales team, look at sales-focused chat tools including Salesloft's own. For answering customer questions from your documentation, Answer HQ is what I'd point you at, and I built it, so weight that accordingly.

Does Answer HQ capture leads?

Not as a feature. The contact form inside a conversation collects an email and creates a ticket, which is a support handoff rather than lead capture. There's no lead scoring or CRM sync.

Can I run it alongside a sales chat tool?

Yes, the widget is independent and installs with one script tag. Some teams run sales chat on marketing pages and Answer HQ on docs, support and account pages.

Is there a free plan?

No. A 14-day free trial on Basic and Pro, and a demo for Growth. No free tier.

The rest of the cluster

If you're evaluating support tools rather than sales tools, the same comparison exists for Zendesk, Intercom and Tidio.

Point it at your site and see what it answers: start a 14-day trial.