Widget performance
How heavy is the Drift chat widget?
DebugBear measured it at 464KB. Here is what that means for your page, how it compares, and how to check your own installation.
Last checked 1 September 2026
Widget size/Drift
The short answer
How big is the Drift chat widget?
DebugBear measured the Drift chat widget at 464KB of download. That places it 3 of 7 among the mainstream widgets they tested, which ranged from 79KB to 749KB. For scale, that is roughly 18 times the 26KB TGLiveChat widget.
What Drift 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.
How it compares
| Widget | Download | JS execution |
|---|---|---|
| Tawk.to | 749 KB | Not published |
| Zendesk Chat | 533 KB | 991 ms |
| Drift | 464 KB | Not published |
| LiveChat | 385 KB | Not published |
| Intercom | 301 KB | Not published |
| Crisp | 155 KB | Not published |
| LiveAgent | 79 KB | Not published |
| TGLiveChat | ~26 KB | not in the test |
Competitor figures are DebugBear's, updated 10 November 2025. The TGLiveChat figure is our own measurement, with the method on the widget size page.
Where Drift is the better choice
Nothing any more. It is being wound down, which is the reason people are reading this at all.
Where we are different
It still exists.
Worth being plain about the trade: TGLiveChat is not a helpdesk. There is no ticketing, no SLA engine, no assignment rules and no reporting suite. If you were using those, a lighter widget is not a saving, it is a downgrade. If you were not, you were carrying the weight of a product you never opened.
Measuring your own installation
Every published figure, including ours, is somebody else's configuration. Open DevTools, go to the Network tab, filter by the vendor domain and hard reload. Read the transfer column, not the resource size column. Then look at the Performance tab for scripting time. Two minutes, and it is the only number that describes your site.
The bottom line
Drift downloads 464KB. Whether that is a problem depends entirely on what you get for it. A heavy widget attached to a helpdesk your team lives in is a fair trade. A heavy widget attached to a chat bubble nobody answers is not.
Defer it before you replace it. That is the cheaper fix and it usually works.
Frequently asked questions
How big is the Drift chat widget?
Does the Drift widget hurt Core Web Vitals?
How do I make Drift load faster?
How do I measure this myself?
Is there a lighter alternative to Drift?
What does Drift do well?
Sources and references
- DebugBear: How Do Different Chat Widgets Impact Site Performance? Published 14 July 2019, updated 10 November 2025. Source of the Drift figures on this page.
- Google: Core Web Vitals What widget weight actually affects, and how.
- Chrome DevTools: Network reference The transfer versus resource size distinction used above.
Measurements of Drift belong to DebugBear and are cited for comparison. We measure our own widget and nobody else's.