Drift reviews

Pluspunten

Drift is a robust, clean platform that is relatively simple to work. The caveat to that is that you have to get the hang of it first! The previous chat builder was tough to work with - not very intuitive and lots of scrolling up and down, back and forth (think vertical, with everything jumbled together). They've just introduced a new version that is easier to work with, but still complex.

When implemented on the website, it looks clean. You can also modify your icon, which is a fun and creative aspect. The "playbook" you build can also be as simple or complex as you want - due to the complex nature of our products, we use ours as more of a "reach out to us, we can help" chatbot. But you can go much, much further.

Minpunten

The main thing I dislike about Drift isn't actually the platform - it's the onboarding process.

The onboarding process at Drift is a bit aggressive. The onboarding teams have a very set mindset in what will make Drift work for you - no matter what your business is, or how many times you let them know your business' unique needs. They are almost 100% focused on getting live chat involved, which at the start isn't always the best option. I'd recommend that they start listening more closely to their clients, rather than bopping them over the head with their "this will be best for you" mindset.

Pluspunten

With Drift, you can create customized chat experiences for users based on all sorts of criteria - the page they're on, the number of times they've visited, the channel they used to get to your site - and to target specific businesses with targeted messaging. Building the chat flows (Drift calls them "Playbooks") is generally quite easy, allowing you to quickly build out new bots once you get a hang of the platform. Drift also includes support chat built right into the product, meaning every time I get stuck, I'm able to reach out and get a hand from one of their product experts right away.

Minpunten

We haven't been using Drift for that long, and there have already been a number of instances where I or one of the other users in the company have attempted to do something that seems obvious, only to find out the tool doesn't allow us to do so. We're always told that a feature request has been submitted, but there's no way to know how long it will take before we get whatever little tweak we're looking for in order to provide a smoother, more pleasant chat experience on our site.

Pluspunten

- The design of the chat widget is gorgeous. It works on any browser and every mobile phone, I've tried, like a charm. With other chat widgets, I had lots of issues that it hasn't been displayed always correctly.
- Advanced bot and automation capabilities based on tags and other attributes
- Live view of prospects on your website with direct contact via web chat functionality
- Outbound marketing (sending sequences and tracking of emails) with their drift Gmail extension.

Minpunten

- Drift is quite expensive for what they offer. I'm one of the happy customers, which has gotten a startup license of the pro plan for a fraction of the normal price. Even with the pro plan, you have unnecessary restrictions like customization of the chat widget with CSS and using the smaller version. Most of the enterprise features as account-based marketing are great for any startup. Why isn't just the support by Drift and the quantity of usage restricted? Why do I have to see the restrictions within your account always and cannot just hide them if I cannot afford? Are they in need of that kind of marketing?
- The calendar cannot be completely translated into the language of your choice and you can't use a custom domain.
- Help center is branded with drift, even if your plan support branding free chat widget.
- I've received lots of emails from Drift about their Hypergrowth Conference (at least 10 in the last few months), which is quite annoying, no matter how personal and funny they have been written.
- I receive quite some emails regarding extensions of the core product like Drift Signature and Drift Help Center, but I've never gotten an update what has changed in the core product. After a while looking into the bot creation section, I've been flabbergasted that the whole design of the visual builder has changed, without me receiving any message about the advantages the new design and process brings with it.

Pluspunten

We love the way how Drift chat helps our customers to get in touch instantly within our product. When customers get into issue or questions to be answered, they don't have to wait for email support, all the questions can be answered instantly within the chat. Additionally, it's easy for our teams to use mobile app to instantly attend customer chat from anywhere. We usually get lot of questions and leads from landing page and drift helped us to automate leads and push into our CRM systems. Integrating the chat widget within the application is also easy and simple.

Minpunten

The web app ( dashboard ) is too slow to load initially but the chat is super fast and reliable. I wish they had android sdk to initiate conversation within the application.

Pluspunten

I'm a very early Drift user and a conversational marketing advocate. After setting up Drift, with their lead qualification and book meetings feature, our sales team has a decent pipeline with high-quality leads.

Minpunten

Waiting for Drift chat embed on the website feature. That could help me start a conversation with a customer from any section of my website pages.

Pluspunten

started using drift for our startup after moving away from HubSpot. It has been a great learning curve for us. Some aspects I love about drift is the lead tracking and bot performance.

Also leveraging drift for email and phone converation as a CRM is a big plus.

Also scheduling and calendar invites make is better than calendly

Minpunten

Would love if drift can be an email server as well so that we can skip email server costs. It does most of the things already just needs a sync from gmail.

It is very expensive especially since you have to pay upfront for the startup plan

Pluspunten

Drift is an amazing tool that helps you communicate directly and seamlessly with your website visitors. It tracks a lot of information about any given person on your site so you can understand who they are before you even have a conversation with them. It also makes it easy to schedule meetings which automatically flow to your calendar.

Minpunten

Sometimes Drift can be too automated and frustrate people on your website who are trying to obtain quick answers to questions and wish to speak to a human.

Pluspunten

The team and the development of the tool. The people are incredible. They are helpful, involved, and genuinely enthusiastic.

Minpunten

Being an early adopter, the best practices weren’t written well into our first few years and the software itself has gone through impressive, but drastic change.

Pluspunten

Software is reliable in that the system does not crash at all. They are consistently making updates, and branching in to more areas of communication outside of just chat. The support team is very nice and willing to help.

Minpunten

Reporting functionality is very lacking. Unable to see how long each conversation is taking for each of my agents to work through. Have had multiple complaints on lag in the chat service loading within our software. Have contacted support on this multiple times without resolution.

Pluspunten

I like that i can access new conversations not only form my desktop but smartphones so i can communicate a much a possible with website visitors. And also the option for someone to put in the email and name without asking

Minpunten

I do not like that the free version is limited as it pertains to automated messages. I guess thats similar for other chat apps.

Pluspunten

Drift is an easy way to bring chat to your site - especially when people are less and less willing to browse your site for answers and don't trust you'll ever respond to your "contact us" form. We've enjoyed using Drift and really like how seamlessly it integrates in with HubSpot.

Minpunten

The only complaint I have about drift is some of the functionality that's behind a paywall. I understand they need to make money, but some functionality that seems like a basic requirement to me is behind a paywall and eliminates itself from the conversation of some smaller businesses that don't always have someone able to answer immediately at all times. That being said, even Drift's paywall is easily justifiable for the benefit it provides.

Pluspunten

Drift is easy to use and pretty straightforward. Installing it on your website is super easy and they provide good support. The support team is very responsive. Couple things I like :

- Send chat by email when the visitor closed the window/website
- Notification settings
- Chat window is simple but yet effective
- Support team is friendly and responsive
- Pricing (we started with the free version for a year)
- Auto-responder

Minpunten

When you have high traffic websites like we do, it's absolutely crucial to keep your chat logs organized. Would have liked to have more flexibility on this end (different folders, important chats, etc.).

Pluspunten

I have been using Drift for more than 2 years and there is nothing I don't love about this product but I am here to talk about Playbooks today. It's amazing how you can set up custom messages to the web page visitors knowing their intent as per the content of this website. Great work!

Minpunten

None so far but while writing this review I realized that when I chat with my drift visitors while I type the Grammarly auto-correction does not work. It will show the error but it won't auto-correct.

Pluspunten

Their support team is phenomena and quick. The tool itself does indeed work well and integrated pretty well into Salesforce. The automated bot system is very powerful (and our company is continuing to work it out and develop further). Chatting is a simple affair. Software is always getting updated.

Minpunten

This is more on how my company is using it, but a little bit more cleanup in how we have it connected to Salesforce may be in order (i.e. we need to ensure we are getting names and whatnot before meetings are set). Lots and lots of notification emails (in my very specific case, I get duplicates for each).

Pluspunten

Easy to set up and inject directly into your homepage. Can set up routes and automated conversations (albeit this process can be streamlined/cleaned up a bit)

Minpunten

Software can get a little clunky - leading to significant amount of resources rendering and setting up the chat button/bubble upon website load.

Pluspunten

I implemented Drift in my website. The reason is not just I want to connect with my customers. but to show them that behind that e-commerce store there is a real person.
Nowadays, people loves connecting by others by typing what they need or what questions they have.
I use Drift app on my smartphone so I can answer fast to my customers.

Minpunten

My suggestion is to offer an option to choice louder or another sound notification when there is a user on the other side. Very often I can't hear that someone has just sent me a question. And then I miss the opportunity to answer.

Pluspunten

First and foremost, Drift was incredibly easy to setup and integrate into our existing website using just a small snippet of code. Once it was setup, Drift has successfully engaged with countless visitors to our website who may not have otherwise remained on our site or found what they were looking for. It's scheduling features are a great way to organize and rotate "on-call" teammates.

Minpunten

We were excited about testing the conversational bot feature that Drift has rolled out to supplement the standard chat window. We are somewhat disappointed with the current capabilities of that feature to personalize a landing page to our branding. As a result, users experience a somewhat jarring shift to a landing page that looks nothing like your own on a completely different URL.

Pluspunten

Drift is easy to implement and a extremely powerful tool for increasing conversion on your website by directly engaging visitors.

Minpunten

If you're looking to engage your entire Salesforce in using this tool, it can be quite expensive to purchase the seats. Also, it's not all that flexible if you're not trying to use it in a relatively specific way.

Pluspunten

Drift is really great for qualifying and chatting with clients that are browsing your website. The ability to create bots that capture data and qualify a prospect our SDR team a lot of time and allows them to only spend time on folks that are really ready to have a conversation. Their meeting scheduler tool is also really great.

Minpunten

The backend admin panel can be a bit confusing at times. I'd also like them to work on their SalesForce integration more so custom fields can be captured in Drift and sent to SFDC.

Pluspunten

The advanced features are interesting but they lack some of the basics

Minpunten

The main issue is not the software, but the way drift does business. I am taking the time to write this review because there should be consequences to a firm reputation when they are misleading people.

1. Drift refused any free trial and only accepted to provide a tech demo where we were told everything would be fine

2. After sign up, we got ZERO access to the implementation team, which service was included in the price, and support did not answer emails, refused to do anything but chat, could not provide any clear tech guidance. Really poor.

3. We were overcharged and had to send emails all over the organization to get that point resolved after weeks. I got other things to do.

4. During the implementation, it turned out that the critical feature we had been told was included (routing).... was only available if we agreed to pay 3x more than the cost we had been quoted. And Drift is expensive in the first place when compared to pretty much any other chat solution.

5. So after losing a month+ in the process, Drift accepted to cancel the subscription BUT still charged us and refused to refund the initial month

6. We are talking about small money here (1k or something), and Drift can keep the change if their team feels they need to.

Pluspunten

The pros over at Drift get IT! They have provided a great chat tool that is super clean, easy to use, and it just works. I run an e-commerce website and there's no doubt that having Drift in place has boosted my sales. It is a great way to capture new email addresses as well, which I have used in follow up marketing sequences, thus resulting in additional sales. Can't say enough about this software, I really enjoy it.

Minpunten

Everything isn't free! But, I get it. The additional features are worth paying for, and I will be at that point on my site soon. Looking forward to it!

Pluspunten

Drift is the world's first and only conversational marketing platform. You can talk to your best leads real time on your page and create super personalized messages to get in contact with them.

Minpunten

Its features mostly are created for the US market and some parts of the software can't be used in my Hungarian language. But honestly, I can't really mention anything bad. The team shifts monthly new features. They are super fast!

Pluspunten

Overall the concept of this platform is great and I had high hopes because of all the good reviews. The bot got more engagement than a just a basic chat box I had before that. Having the ability to use other popups etc was good too but pretty limited flexibility around the design of those.

Minpunten

I think some things may have changed since all the positive reviews regarding the software. I think this happens sometimes when companies go into growth mode. The support wasn't good, they tried but seemed too busy, often didn't take the time to read the detailed steps to reproduce I included in all my support tickets. Before anything was actioned we had to bounce a bunch of emails back and forth answering questions with info I already included in my original tickets which meant days past before we even started to get some actual help. Then often the problems were just bugs with their platform. There seemed to be quite a few things that just didn't work as described.

Seems quite expensive compared to something like Intercom that has a much broader feature set. I'm a Solo founder though with a niche platform, so pricing won't be an issue if you are a bigger business I suppose.

Also just a tip, they have a 30 day notice period and no trial so if you don't like it within the first month you'll still need to pay for a full two months of the software so make sure you budget for that. I didn't. My fault for not reading the terms.

Even when they break the news to you that you'll be charged another amount for something you don't want to use. At least they still end their emails by saying "have a fantastic day" even when breaking bad news. I'll try!

Pluspunten

Drift is intuitive and adds value to almost any site. The application is currently running on several of my clients' sites (under my management) with great success. Case in point. A Realtor client began an interaction with a site visitor browsing for information on his market in general. Via Drift several conversations led to the sale of a home. No email contact form can match that!

Minpunten

The iPhone app is not always as responsive as I'd like - better notifications would help - but on the whole, my experience with Drift so far has been overwhelmingly positive.

Pluspunten

Drift is easy to use, customize and integrate into our Slack channels. We have a paid subscription with lots of benefits that fit our budget.

Minpunten

Not all features in Drift are customizable but working with the Drift team has been a breeze. I once made a request to implement a specific setting and 3 weeks later it was set-up and ready for us to utilize. My only wish is that the alerts would be more timely. Sometimes there is an up to 10 min. delay. For now, we have been refreshing the page/app more consistently throughout the day.