Qualified vs Drift

Drift is closed to new buyers and being sunset; Qualified is the Salesforce-centered replacement, and Salesforce now owns it. Drift helped define chat-led inbound. Clari and Salesloft announced its sunset on March 6, 2026, named 1mind as the successor and stopped selling it to new customers, with no published end-of-life date. The two companies have operated as one Salesloft brand since September 2, 2026 following their December 2025 merger, so the contract conversation now runs through Salesloft. Qualified moved the other way. Salesforce signed a definitive agreement to acquire it in December 2025 and completed the acquisition in April 2026 according to Salesforce's Form 10-Q, and says it intends to fold Qualified into Agentforce Sales and Agentforce Marketing. That reshapes the evaluation: you are no longer buying an independent chat vendor, you are buying a component of a Salesforce roadmap. The product difference between the two was always modest, since both put conversation, qualification and routing on the website. For a Drift customer the live question is not which is better but which replacement you can stand up before access ends, and whether tying inbound conversion to Salesforce's agent stack is a direction you want to commit to.

Qualified: Custom quote. Checked against the vendor on September 25, 2026. Qualified pricing and plans

Drift: Custom quote. Checked against the vendor on September 25, 2026. Drift pricing and plans

Qualified fits B2B companies running on Salesforce with real inbound traffic, SDRs able to respond live, and marketing ops to maintain playbooks. It combines live chat, voice, a visitor view of who is on the site, and Piper, its AI SDR agent. Those four pieces are sold together, so the evaluation question is which of them you would genuinely staff rather than which of them exist.

Routing reads account ownership from Salesforce rather than from a separate rules engine, which is the specific reason it lands well for teams whose territory model already lives in the CRM. Test it against your messy cases, not a clean one: a subsidiary that matches the wrong parent account, a visitor from a personal address, and an owner on leave will each expose whether the matching logic is usable.

Salesforce ownership cuts both ways, and the upside is real. The product is unlikely to be sunset the way Drift was, and it is being pulled toward Agentforce rather than left to age.

Piper covers the hours when no rep is free, which is what usually kills a chat rollout. Global traffic against a single-timezone SDR team is exactly where an agent earns its cost. Ask to see transcripts from an agent handling a question it was not scripted for, because the failure people remember is a confident wrong answer to a pricing question, not a missed reply.

Pricing model: Qualified does not publish prices. Its page lists three tiers, Premier, Enterprise, which adds enterprise-grade APIs and custom cookie and data retention policies, and Ultimate, which adds multiple agent profiles and production instances (checked September 2026 on qualified.com). There is no seat arithmetic to do, so model it against pipeline instead. If 2,000 high-intent visitors a month reach your pricing and demo pages and Piper books 2%, that is 40 meetings a month, and 480 a year is the number to weigh against SDR headcount or paid spend.

Who it fits best: Drift customers who want to keep a chat-led motion, already run Salesforce, and have people to staff live conversations.

Drift is not a fit for new buyers at all. The honest case for it now is narrow: it is a product you already own, already configured, still running.

Its remaining value is time. Use the access period to rebuild routing and qualification logic in the replacement and test it against live traffic, rather than cutting over against a deadline. Teams that wait for an end-of-life date before starting the rebuild end up configuring a new platform in the same weeks they are losing the old one, which is how routing rules get approximated instead of reproduced.

The conversation history is the most useful asset in the account. It is a record of what actually converted on your site and the best brief anyone can hand to whoever configures the replacement, so export it before access ends. Read the transcripts for the questions visitors asked repeatedly too, because those belong in the website copy regardless of which tool you buy next.

Existing playbooks transfer as specifications even though they do not transfer as files. Screenshot every branch, qualification question and routing rule while the product is still live.

Pricing: Drift was always a custom quote based on traffic or conversation volume, chat seats and features. The only pricing question left is exit terms, meaning your access end date, whether renewals are offered and on what basis, and what 1mind offers Drift customers who move (checked September 2026 against published sunset coverage from Docket and Warmly).

Who it still fits: existing customers working through a planned, dated migration, and nobody else. Even then, treat it as a system you are decommissioning rather than operating: stop building new playbooks in it, and put any configuration effort into the replacement.

Do not sign a new multi-year Drift commitment. Get your access end date from Salesloft in writing, and treat any renewal offer as a bridge with a defined exit instead of a plan.

Handle security before any replacement touches the CRM. In August 2025 attackers used stolen Drift OAuth tokens to export data from hundreds of Salesforce orgs, and Salesforce kept the Drift app disabled. Revoke Drift tokens and audit every connected app before wiring in a successor.

The hidden costs in this switch are rebuild costs, not license costs. Playbooks, routing rules, qualification logic, calendar integrations and reporting all have to be recreated, and that is RevOps time nobody budgeted. Qualified also asks for ongoing attention: reviews summarized by Breakout say smaller teams may struggle to staff it, so name the owner before signing.

The Salesforce acquisition creates a real commercial question. Ask whether Qualified is still sold standalone, how renewals will be handled once it sits inside Agentforce, and what happens to your contract if the product is repackaged. Get those answers in writing rather than from a roadmap slide.

You may not need chat at all. 1mind is the successor Salesloft points to, but it is built around AI video presenters and does not replace every Drift workflow. Chili Piper and Default route and book instantly without anyone staffing a chat window, and for many teams the meetings come from the demo form anyway. Launch the replacement on your pricing and demo pages first, keep Drift running elsewhere, and compare meetings booked per 1,000 visitors over the same weeks.

Neither shortlist survives a demo unchanged, so write down the one workflow that has to work before you take the call. Our research and ranking method explains how we weigh these trade-offs.