What Happened to Drift? The Sunset, Explained

Drift is being sunset. In early March 2026, Clari + Salesloft announced the gradual sunset of its Drift conversational marketing solution, along with an exclusive agreement to refer existing Drift clients to 1mind as the successor product. Drift had been acquired by Salesloft on February 13, 2024, and Salesloft itself merged with Clari in a deal that closed on December 3, 2025. Today drift.com redirects to salesloft.com, and the replacement is branded "Salesloft Chat Agents (powered by 1mind)". No public end-of-life date has been announced, and app.drift.com still resolves, so existing tenants are still being served during the wind-down.

If you run Drift, nothing has broken yet. But the product you bought is on a path to retirement, the company that sold it to you no longer exists under that name, and the officially blessed successor is a different company's product. That is a lot of moving parts, so here is the whole story in order, along with what it actually means for your renewal.

Last updated July 2026.

What happened to Drift?

Drift was acquired by Salesloft on February 13, 2024. Salesloft then merged with Clari in a deal announced August 7, 2025 and closed December 3, 2025, producing the combined brand "Clari + Salesloft". In early March 2026, that combined company announced it would gradually sunset Drift and refer existing Drift customers to 1mind instead.

So Drift changed hands twice in about two years without the customer doing anything. The first move made sense on paper: Salesloft sold sales engagement, Drift sold conversational marketing, and the pitch was one revenue workflow from first website visit to booked meeting. The Clari merger then put Drift inside a much larger platform where forecasting and pipeline analytics are the center of gravity. Chat widgets are a long way from that center.

The March 2026 announcement resolved the ambiguity. Rather than keep investing in Drift or fold its technology into the Clari + Salesloft stack, the company signed an exclusive referral agreement with 1mind, founded by Amanda Kahlow, who previously founded 6sense.

Is Drift being discontinued?

Yes, gradually. Clari + Salesloft used the words "gradual sunset" in its early March 2026 announcement. But no public end-of-life date has been published, and app.drift.com still resolves for existing tenants, so this is a wind-down rather than a switch being flipped.

Be careful with the timelines circulating online. Some vendor blogs have quoted specific shutdown windows for Drift, and those numbers are not from any published Clari + Salesloft statement that we can find. If your account team has given you a date in writing, that date governs your account. If you have seen a date on someone else's blog, treat it as unverified.

What is not ambiguous: drift.com now redirects to salesloft.com, and the Salesloft page for the replacement product states plainly, "We've transitioned from Drift to 1mind." A vendor that intended to keep selling Drift would not have retired the domain or written that sentence. The direction of travel is clear even without a date on it.

What is replacing Drift?

The official successor is "Salesloft Chat Agents (powered by 1mind)". It is not a rebadged Drift and it is not built from Drift's codebase. It is 1mind's product, sold under a Salesloft brand, with an exclusive referral arrangement pointing existing Drift accounts toward it.

That distinction matters more than it sounds. When a vendor moves you to its own next-generation product, your playbooks, routing rules, and integration wiring often carry across in some form. A referral to a different company's product means a real migration: rebuilding conversation logic, re-authorizing CRM connections, retraining your team, signing with a new counterparty. It is a soft landing, not a lift and shift.

So the honest framing for anyone running Drift today is that you are not choosing between staying on Drift and moving to the successor. You are choosing between two migrations: the one the vendor suggests, and any other one. Given that you are doing the work either way, this is the right moment to look at where to migrate off Drift with fresh eyes rather than accept the referral because it arrived in your inbox.

What did Drift actually do well?

Drift defined B2B conversational marketing. Before Drift, chat on a B2B site was a support widget. Drift made it a pipeline channel: qualify the visitor, route them to the right rep, and book the meeting before they leave the page. That idea is now industry standard, and Drift is why.

The depth was real. Fastlane handled speed-to-lead properly, qualifying a form-filler and booking them into a calendar in the same motion rather than dumping them into a follow-up queue. ABM was a first-class citizen: Sliders, Proactive ABM messages, and Audiences let you treat a visitor from a target account differently from anonymous traffic. Routing was genuinely sophisticated, with Team Round Robin, Firmographic Routing, and Salesforce Multi-Owner and Flex Routing for the messy reality of enterprise account ownership. Playbooks let marketers build conversation logic without engineering, Conversational Landing Pages and Meetings closed the loop from message to booked time, and chat-to-Zoom and chat-to-call closed it to a live human. Intel, Prospector, and the AI Engagement Score layered intent and enrichment on top. The Salesforce integration plus pipeline attribution meant demand gen teams could defend the spend in a QBR, which is not a small thing.

Drift's buyer was enterprise and mid-market B2B SaaS: demand gen, ABM, and RevOps teams, not SMB support teams. If you are replacing Drift, price your shortlist against that depth honestly. A basic chat widget with an FAQ bot is not a replacement for firmographic routing into a multi-owner Salesforce org.

Did Drift support WhatsApp or SMS?

No. Drift's channels were the web chat widget, Conversational Landing Pages, Drift Email, video messaging, meeting scheduling, and a mobile app. There was no native support for WhatsApp, SMS, Instagram DM, or Facebook Messenger, and no native voice or phone.

This was a deliberate product shape, not an oversight. Drift's thesis was that the highest-value B2B conversation happens on your website at the moment a buyer is researching, and the job is to catch that moment. For that thesis, a web widget plus email plus a scheduler is a coherent stack. It just means that if your buyers now expect to text you or message you on WhatsApp, any successor you pick should be assessed on whether it covers that.

What did Drift cost?

Salesloft pricing today is contact-sales only, with no public figures. Drift's last published list pricing, archived in 2024 and no longer on any live page, showed Premium "Starting at $2,500/month billed annually", Advanced with no price shown, and Enterprise as "Custom".

Those 2024 numbers are historical, and they were a starting point rather than a typical contract value even then. You will also see much larger figures attributed to Drift around the web. Some are arithmetic someone did on the $2,500 starting price; others have no traceable source at all. Do not budget against numbers from blog posts, including this one. Get a quote.

What was the August 2025 Drift security incident?

A threat actor tracked as UNC6395 used compromised Drift OAuth tokens to exfiltrate data from connected Salesforce tenants, roughly between August 8 and 18, 2025. Several hundred organizations were affected, with 700 or more reported. Named victims include Cloudflare, Palo Alto Networks, Zscaler, Proofpoint, and Tenable.

Mandiant was engaged on August 26, 2025. The Drift app was taken offline around September 5 for remediation and restored around September 16. Salesloft reported that its own platform was segmented from the exfiltration.

The mechanism is the part worth understanding, because it is not specific to Drift. The attacker did not break into Salesforce. It used tokens customers had legitimately granted to a connected app, and those tokens carried the access those customers had approved. Any integration you authorize against your CRM inherits a slice of your CRM, which is why locking down what your connected AI agents and integrations can reach has become its own discipline rather than a checkbox during onboarding. That advice would have been the same in 2024, and it applies to whatever you migrate to next.

What should I replace Drift with?

Start by writing down what Drift was actually doing for you, then shortlist against that rather than against Drift's brochure. Most teams find their real usage is narrower than they assumed: qualify inbound, route to the right owner, book the meeting, push it all to Salesforce. If that is your list, the market is wide.

Score candidates on four things. Routing depth, because if you have a multi-owner Salesforce org with firmographic rules, that logic is the hardest part to rebuild and the easiest to underestimate in a demo. Speed to booked meeting, since Fastlane set the bar and losing it is a measurable pipeline hit. Channel coverage, because Drift's web-plus-email shape may no longer match where your buyers are. And pricing model, since you are renegotiating anyway.

The referral to 1mind is a reasonable default. It is not an evaluation. Any migration off Drift costs you the same rebuild whether you take the default or not, so the default deserves no discount on scrutiny.

MessageAgent is worth a look if your list skews toward inbound qualification and booking. The lead qualification chatbot covers qualify-and-route, the appointment booking bot covers the Fastlane-style motion of qualifying and booking in one conversation, and the web chat widget is the on-site surface. The difference in shape from Drift is channels: the same agent works over SMS, WhatsApp, Instagram, and Facebook DM as well as the site, which matters if your buyers stopped living exclusively on your homepage.

We will not pretend that is a like-for-like swap for every Drift deployment. If your Drift value was concentrated in Proactive ABM against a named account list wired into a heavily customized Salesforce org, that is deep enterprise machinery and you should evaluate accordingly, with 1mind on the list. Be honest about which team you are.

What to do this quarter

Do not panic, and do not wait either. Nothing is switching off tomorrow, but contracts renew on their own schedule, and the worst version of this is a renewal that quietly auto-extends you into a product with a sunset attached. Ask your account team, in writing, for the EOL date and what happens at renewal. Export your data while the app is live: conversation history, playbook logic, routing rules, meeting links. Audit which OAuth tokens Drift still holds against your Salesforce org and revoke what is not in use. Then run a real shortlist, with 1mind on it alongside two or three others, and set yourself a decision date.

Drift earned its place. It invented a category and a lot of teams built real pipeline on it. That does not obligate you to follow it wherever it goes next.