If you’re Googling “Intercom vs Drift,” you’re probably trying to figure out which enterprise chat platform deserves your money. And there’s no shortage of comparison articles that will walk you through feature matrices and Salesforce integration depths.
But here’s what those articles won’t tell you: if you’re a small business, neither Intercom nor Drift is built for you.
Drift’s Premium plan starts at $2,500 per month. Intercom’s Essential plan starts at $29 per seat per month—but the real cost balloons to $2,000+ per year once you add AI resolution fees, channel charges, and the add-ons you’ll inevitably need. Both platforms were designed for B2B enterprise sales teams with six-figure software budgets, dedicated support departments, and complex automation needs.
If that’s you, this article will help you choose between them. But if you’re a small business owner who just needs a way to chat with customers without spending a fortune? We’ll introduce you to a third option that costs $49 for the entire year—and does the one thing both Intercom and Drift make surprisingly complicated: getting customer messages to your phone.
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Intercom vs Drift: A Quick Overview
Before we bring PushEngage into the conversation, let’s compare the two heavyweights on their own terms.
Intercom started as a customer messaging tool and evolved into a full customer service platform. It’s strongest in post-sale support: help desks, knowledge bases, ticketing, in-app messaging, and AI-powered customer service. Intercom’s Fin AI agent can resolve common support questions automatically (for $0.99 per resolution). If your primary goal is supporting existing customers at scale, Intercom is the more natural fit.
Drift went all-in on the opposite end of the funnel: conversational marketing and sales. It’s built to engage anonymous website visitors, qualify leads through AI chatbots, and book meetings for your sales team—automatically. Drift was acquired by Salesloft in February 2024 and is now part of a larger revenue orchestration platform aimed squarely at B2B enterprise sales teams.
In short: Intercom is a customer support tool. Drift is a sales acceleration tool. They overlap in live chat, but their DNA is fundamentally different.
Intercom vs Drift: Feature-by-Feature Comparison
| Feature | Intercom | Drift |
|---|---|---|
| Primary focus | Customer support & engagement | Conversational marketing & sales |
| Live chat | ✅ Yes (all plans) | ✅ Yes (all plans) |
| AI chatbot | Fin AI ($0.99/resolution) | Bionic Chatbots (Premium+) |
| Help desk / ticketing | ✅ Built-in | ❌ Not a focus |
| Knowledge base | ✅ Built-in | ❌ Not included |
| Meeting scheduling | Basic | ✅ Core feature |
| Lead qualification bots | Basic | ✅ Core feature |
| Product tours | ✅ Add-on ($99/mo) | ❌ No |
| Conversational landing pages | ❌ No | ✅ Yes (Premium+) |
| CRM integrations | HubSpot, Salesforce, 300+ | Salesforce, HubSpot, ~50 |
| Best for | Post-sale support teams | B2B sales & marketing teams |
Both are powerful tools in their lane. The problem isn’t what they can do—it’s what they cost, and who they’re designed for.
Intercom vs Drift: The Real Cost
This is where the comparison gets uncomfortable for small businesses.
Drift Pricing
Drift doesn’t publish transparent pricing anymore. You have to book a sales call to get a quote—which tells you a lot about who they’re targeting. Based on multiple independent pricing analyses, here’s what to expect:
- Free plan: Basic live chat only. One agent. 100 contacts. No chatbots. Drift-branded widget. It exists mainly as a lead generation tool for Drift’s own sales team.
- Premium: Starts around $2,500/month (billed annually). This is where you get custom chatbots, meeting scheduling, conversational landing pages, and real-time notifications.
- Advanced & Enterprise: Custom pricing. Reports suggest $5,000–$10,000+/month depending on seats and features.
For a small business, Drift’s Premium plan alone costs $30,000 per year. Even if you negotiate a startup discount, you’re looking at thousands per year for a chat tool.
Intercom Pricing
Intercom is more transparent but equally complex:
- Essential: $29/seat/month (billed annually). Basic inbox, ticketing, help center.
- Advanced: $85/seat/month. Automation workflows, multiple inboxes, AI chatbot.
- Expert: $132/seat/month. SSO, HIPAA compliance, multi-brand messenger.
On top of the seat fees, Intercom charges:
- $0.99 per Fin AI resolution – 100 resolutions/month = $1,188/year in AI fees alone
- Per-message fees for SMS, WhatsApp, and outbound email campaigns
- $99/month for Proactive Support Plus add-on
A 2-person team on the Essential plan with moderate AI usage can easily hit $2,000–$2,500/year. On Advanced? You’re looking at $3,000–$5,000/year before channel fees.
The Pricing Reality for Small Businesses
| Drift (Premium) | Intercom (Essential, 2 seats) | PushEngage | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Base annual cost | ~$30,000 | $696 | $49 |
| AI/usage fees | Included (but $30K base) | ~$1,200–$1,800/year | $0 |
| Per-seat charges | Included in plan | $29/seat/month | None |
| Hidden add-ons | Custom quote | $99/mo for proactive support, SMS fees, etc. | None |
| Realistic annual total | $30,000+ | $2,000–$3,500 | $49 |
Read that last row again. Then ask yourself: does your small business need a $30,000/year sales acceleration platform or a $2,000/year support suite? Or do you just need customers to be able to message you—and for those messages to actually reach you?
Enter PushEngage: The Third Option Nobody’s Talking About
Here’s the uncomfortable truth that most “Intercom vs Drift” articles skip: most small businesses don’t need either tool.
You don’t need AI lead qualification bots. You don’t need a ticketing system with SLA compliance. You don’t need conversational landing pages or product tour builders. You need a chat widget on your website that sends messages to your phone so you can answer customer questions and close sales.
That’s exactly what PushEngage’s chat widget does—for $49/year.
How PushEngage Works
PushEngage takes a fundamentally different approach from both Intercom and Drift. Instead of building another dashboard you have to monitor, PushEngage is inbox-free.
When a visitor sends a message through your chat widget, it routes instantly to the channel you already use:
- Email – reply from your inbox
- WhatsApp – reply from your phone
- SMS – reply from your messages
- Slack – reply from your workspace
- Telegram – reply from the app
No new dashboard. No new app to download. No new login to remember. Customer messages arrive where you already are, and you reply from where you already are.
For a small business owner who’s running marketing, handling sales, packing orders, and answering support questions. This is the difference between catching every customer inquiry and missing half of them because you forgot to check another tab.
What PushEngage Does That Intercom and Drift Don’t
| Capability | Intercom | Drift | PushEngage |
|---|---|---|---|
| Inbox-free (no dashboard needed) | ❌ | ❌ | ✅ |
| Routes to your existing DMs | ❌ | ❌ | ✅ |
| No per-seat pricing | ❌ | ❌ | ✅ |
| No usage or AI fees | ❌ | ❌ | ✅ |
| Multi-agent across channels | ✅ (paid) | ✅ (paid) | ✅ (included) |
| Setup in under 5 minutes | ~10–30 min | Requires sales call | ✅ (5 min) |
| Works on WordPress | ✅ | ✅ | ✅ |
| Annual cost (small business) | $2,000–$3,500+ | $30,000+ | $49 |
PushEngage doesn’t try to compete with Intercom’s help desk or Drift’s lead qualification engine. It does one thing exceptionally well: it gets customer messages to you, wherever you are, instantly. And for the vast majority of small businesses, that’s the only thing that actually matters.
When to Choose Intercom
Intercom is the right choice if:
- You have a dedicated customer support team (3+ agents) handling high ticket volumes
- You need a help desk with ticketing, SLA tracking, and a knowledge base
- You want AI to auto-resolve common support questions and can absorb the $0.99/resolution cost
- You’re a SaaS company that needs in-app messaging, product tours, and onboarding flows
- Your annual software budget comfortably accommodates $2,000–$5,000+/year for customer support tooling
Intercom is genuinely excellent at what it does. The problem is that what it does is far more than most small businesses need, and you can’t buy just the parts you want without paying for the whole platform.
When to Choose Drift
Drift (now part of Salesloft) is the right choice if:
- You’re a B2B company with a sales team that needs to book demos from website traffic
- You want AI chatbots to qualify leads and route them to sales reps in real time
- You run account-based marketing and need to personalize chat experiences by company
- You use Salesforce or a similar enterprise CRM and need deep integration
- Your budget supports $30,000+/year for a conversational marketing platform
Drift is a genuine revenue engine for enterprise B2B sales teams. But it’s overkill for a small business, and the pricing makes that clear. When the cheapest paid plan costs more than most small businesses spend on their entire tech stack, it’s not your tool.
When to Choose PushEngage
PushEngage is the right choice if:
- You’re a small business, solopreneur, or lean team (1–10 people)
- You need live chat on your website to answer customer questions and close sales
- You don’t want another dashboard to check—you want messages in your existing tools
- You want predictable pricing with no per-seat fees, no usage charges, and no surprises
- You value simplicity—5-minute setup, no coding, no onboarding calls, no sales demos required
- You’d rather spend $49/year than $2,000–$30,000/year on chat
If even one of those resonates, PushEngage is worth a serious look.
The Bottom Line: Intercom vs Drift vs PushEngage
Here’s the honest summary:
Intercom is a powerful customer support platform for companies with dedicated support teams and real budgets. If you need a help desk, knowledge base, and AI-powered support at scale, it delivers. Just be ready for a complex pricing model that makes your monthly bill hard to predict.
Drift is a sales acceleration platform for B2B enterprise teams. If you need AI chatbots that qualify leads and book meetings for your sales reps, and you have $30K/year to invest, it’s purpose-built for that job. But since its acquisition by Salesloft, it’s moving further upmarket—not toward small businesses.
PushEngage is for everyone else. The small business owner who needs customer messages on their phone. The solopreneur who can’t afford another $200/month subscription. The 3-person team that’s already drowning in dashboards and doesn’t need one more.
$49/year. Inbox-free. Messages go to your DMs. One sale covers the cost. That’s PushEngage.
Intercom and Drift are both excellent products for the companies they were built for. But if you’re a small business comparing the two, the answer might not be either of them. It might be the $49/year chat widget that does the one thing that actually drives revenue: making sure you never miss a customer message again.
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Intercom is a fantastic product for companies with $50K+ software budgets and dedicated support teams. But if you’re a small business trying to answer customer questions and close more sales? You don’t need a $2,000/year customer engagement platform. You need a $49/year chat widget that sends messages to your phone.
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