Alternatives
A Drift alternative, written by the people who built the alternative
Which is exactly why you should read the section about staying on Drift first. It is the part we had no commercial reason to write.
Last checked 1 September 2026
Alternatives/Drift
The short answer
Is TGLiveChat a good Drift alternative?
For a small team that wants live chat on a website and does not need a helpdesk, yes. TGLiveChat is $19 a month flat with no per seat charge, the widget is about 26KB against 464KB for Drift, and every message arrives in your Telegram, so nobody has to keep a dashboard open all day.
For a company running tickets, macros and a knowledge base, no. Drift does things this product does not attempt, and the honest version of that is further down the page.
What Drift actually is
Conversational marketing chat aimed at B2B sales teams.
This product is being wound down
Salesloft took the Drift application offline on 5 September 2025 after an OAuth breach affecting more than 700 organisations, and Clari and Salesloft announced the sunset on 6 March 2026. drift.com now redirects to Salesloft Chat Agents.
When leaving makes sense
You have no choice left. Salesloft took the Drift application offline on 5 September 2025 after an OAuth breach affecting more than 700 organisations, and Clari and Salesloft announced the sunset on 6 March 2026.
When you should stay on Drift
There is nothing to stay for. The only real question is where you go, and that turns on whether you were using Drift for conversational marketing or as a very expensive chat bubble.
This section is on every one of these pages on purpose. A comparison page that cannot name a single reason to stay with the other product is an advert, and most people spot that within two paragraphs. If the paragraph above describes your situation, close the tab. It will cost you a lot less than a migration you regret in March.
Side by side
| Drift | TGLiveChat | |
|---|---|---|
| Entry price | Enterprise, on request | $19/mo flat |
| Three people replying | Enterprise | $19/mo |
| Free plan | No | Yes, 100 conversations a month |
| Remove the branding | Bundled into a higher tier | Included from $19/mo |
| Widget weight | 464KB | About 26KB |
| Where you reply | Their dashboard, plus a mobile app | Telegram, on a device you already carry |
| AI billing | Varies by plan | Included, no per resolution charge |
| Ticketing and helpdesk | Yes | No |
Prices read from Drift's own pricing page on 2026-09-01. Weight figures are DebugBear's measurements, not ours.
The widget weight question
DebugBear tested the major chat widgets and measured Drift at 464KB. Ours is about 26KB across three requests, which makes it roughly 18 times lighter.
Whether that matters depends on who visits you. On a desktop connection nobody notices either number. On a mid range phone on a patchy connection, a third of a megabyte of chat widget competes with your own page for bandwidth and main thread time, and it lands in your Largest Contentful Paint. That is the case where this is a real argument rather than a talking point.
What moving actually involves
Nobody writes this part honestly, so here it is. There is no import. Chat history does not move between vendors in this category, from anyone to anyone, and any page implying otherwise is selling you something.
| Step | What you do | Time |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Export your Drift transcripts while the account is still open. Do this first, because it becomes impossible the moment you cancel. | 15 min |
| 2 | Create the TGLiveChat widget, connect Telegram, pick a theme, and build the AI knowledge base out of your existing canned responses. | 30 min |
| 3 | Install the script on staging or one low traffic page and send yourself three test messages, including one from a phone on mobile data. | 15 min |
| 4 | Run both widgets on the live site for a week. Yes, both. You want real traffic hitting the new one before Drift goes away. | 1 week |
| 5 | Remove the Drift script, then cancel the subscription. In that order, so a billing hiccup can never take your chat offline. | 5 min |
The step people skip is four, and it is the one that catches the problem nobody thought of.
What you give up
No ticket queue. No macro library beyond the AI knowledge base. No help centre. No CRM, no lead scoring, no reporting suite, no shift routing, no call centre. If two people reply to the same Telegram message at the same moment, they will both have replied, because Telegram is a group chat and not an assignment system.
That list is a product decision rather than an oversight. The bet is that most websites running live chat get a handful of messages a day and need none of it. If your site is not one of those, Drift is the better tool, and this page just saved you a migration.
The bottom line
Leave Drift if you are paying for a support platform and using a chat bubble. Stay if you are using the helpdesk, because we do not have one and no amount of price difference fixes that.
The free plan takes about five minutes and does not ask for a card, which answers this question faster than any comparison table, including ours.
Frequently asked questions
What is the best Drift alternative?
Is TGLiveChat cheaper than Drift?
Can I move my Drift chat history across?
Do my visitors need Telegram to chat with me?
How heavy is the TGLiveChat widget compared with Drift?
What does TGLiveChat not do that Drift does?
Does the AI agent cost extra?
How long does it take to set up?
Sources and references
- Drift pricing page Read on 2026-09-01. Prices in this category change often, so check before you buy.
- DebugBear: How Do Different Chat Widgets Impact Site Performance? Published 14 July 2019, updated 10 November 2025. The source of every competitor weight figure on this page.
- How we measure and what we refuse to estimate Our own method, in full, including the numbers we corrected after getting them wrong.
We run no affiliate programme with any vendor named here, and none of these links pay us anything.