Drift Vs. Intercom For Conversion Growth and Lead Generation

Drift and Intercom can improve website conversion rates and accelerate turning prospects into leads with real-time communication. Which is best for you?

In this article, I’ll compare Drift vs. Intercom from a web growth & growth marketing perspective to help you decide which is a better option. Both tools have overlapping functionality and one may be a better fit for you depending on your needs.

Which is Better for Lead Generation & Sales?

Drift is best for marketing teams and organizations looking to grow new business. Drift’s integration with Salesforce shows active opportunities in dashboards and offers deeper sales routing options such as by account name, type, geography, and additional factors. 

Additionally, since Drift supports more chat routing logic and branches it’s much easier to test different chatbots and manipulate lead pre-qualification before handing off to sales depending on lead quality and opportunity conversion rates. Lastly, Drift also provides deeper reporting on chat performance hours, responsiveness, and individual team performance. Should a representative fail to respond within a given time frame, Drift also provides more options to route to additional team members to ensure better response rates. 

Drift’s calendar booking function also can drive better demo attendance and completion rates and improve MQL to Opportunity creation rates. However, you can also increase demo attendance with Calendly's free API.

Which is Better for Product-led Growth?

Intercom is a much better choice for in-app messaging or to support a product-led growth (PLG) strategy. Intercom supports many different custom fields and values, which can be fed in via an API or additional integration, allowing reps to see more detailed account information and product usage. Intercom also has deep segmentation & targeting based on these fields (which Drift does not) making it easy to target specific marketing campaigns to customers in a free tier, who have not used particular features or enhanced targeting with a PLG product data layer.

Intercom also offers in-app onboarding (pending your plan) which makes it easier to drive specific prospect behaviors in-app without needing to rely solely on chat.

Which is Better for Chatbots?

Drift has much better chatbot functionality, with support for multiple branching paths based on user responses, attributes and other conditional criteria (such as if reps are available or not). Drift also has better chatbot reporting to show user selections and drop-off rates and provides this visibility for different chatbot versions. 

Intercom does support chatbots but only offers more rudimentary path routing and logic – to replicate the functionality from Drift you’d need to set up multiple chatbots targeting different user criteria which can get messy quickly.  

Which has a Better API?

From a web growth and digital marketing perspective, Drift has a better product API and makes it much easier to add custom user attributes with tag management tools like Google Tag Manager. Intercom also supports the ability to update/change user attributes but in my experience due to the timing of how Intercom loads this requires more manual management to consistently inflate values like user dimensions. 

If you’re using a third-party lookup like ClearBit, DemandBase or ZoomInfo for example, it’s much easier to apply these to visitors with Drift’s API since you can apply these to anonymous visitors. At the time of this writing, Intercom only supports this for authenticated visitors (visitors whose email address is already known).  

Additionally, it’s easy to integrate web forms with Drift’s meeting booking (FastLane) to allow users to book meetings as soon as they submit web forms.

Drift vs. Intercom Pricing

Intercom’s pricing is heavily based on add-on modules vs. being primarily priced by tier (as Drift is). Intercom’s pricing tends to be cheaper due to their overall cost per seat and the ability to add multiple read-only users with significant access granularity. Lastly, in my experience, Intercom sales reps are more likely to provide the ability to test specific features (such as chatbots) for a limited time (ie. 30 days) at no cost which makes it easier to make a business case for additional spend by proving the impact of new functionality with a proof of concept.  

Salesloft Acquires Drift

On February 13, 2024 Salesloft acquired Drift. While Salesloft promised no impact on Drift's product or pricing for the foreseeable future, Drift will eventually be rolled into Salesloft solutions. As a result, the organizational structure and Drift’s product and support will likely change as a result of the acquisition and should be another key factor when evaluating Intercom vs. Drift.