Clari and Salesloft announced the gradual sunset of Drift in March 2026. No hard end-of-life date, no confirmed migration runway. If you're waiting for a firm deadline before you act, that deadline may arrive with less lead time than your data volume requires.
This is what to prioritize before your access disappears.
The data that's hardest to recover once it's gone
Not everything in Drift carries equal weight. Contacts and lead records are relatively portable — CSV exports handle most of it. What's harder to reconstruct is conversation history: transcripts, timestamps, assignees, thread structure, tags, and the metadata that makes historical conversations searchable and useful.
Drift enforces a 600 requests/minute API rate limit. That's the hard ceiling on extraction speed regardless of which method you use. If conversation transcripts matter to your team — for training, compliance, context, or handoffs — budget 2–3 weeks for the extraction alone. That's not a migration timeline. That's just the pull.
Before you cancel your Drift contract, confirm you have:
- Full conversation history with thread structure and metadata intact
- Contact and lead records, including custom attributes
- Bot and playbook configurations documented for rebuild
Pull first. Cancel after.
Why most teams land on Intercom
The overlap in use cases is the main reason. Intercom combines live chat, ticketing, and Fin AI in a single workspace — so if your Drift setup handled both inbound leads and post-sale support, Intercom covers both natively without stitching tools together.
A few practical comparisons worth knowing:
Drift's minimum entry was $2,500/month. Intercom's Essential plan starts at $29/seat/month and includes a shared inbox, Fin AI, and a help center out of the box.
Intercom offers 400+ integrations. Drift's integration depth has narrowed considerably toward the Salesloft ecosystem post-acquisition.
Drift was never built for post-sale support — no ticketing, no SLA management, no knowledge base. Intercom covers all three natively.
One honest caveat: if ABM targeting and outbound sales orchestration were core to how your team used Drift, Intercom doesn't replicate that one-to-one. Know the tradeoff before you commit.
Choosing how to move the data
Three realistic options, each with a different tradeoff:
CSV export works for contacts. It's fast, requires no setup, and is worth doing immediately as a backup regardless of which method you choose for the actual migration. The limitation is conversation data — CSV loses thread structure, metadata, and assignee history. It's a safety net, not a migration.
Intercom's native import handles contacts and companies with clean field mapping. It's the right tool if your priority is getting people's records into Intercom quickly. It doesn't reconstruct conversation history.
Automated migration tool — options like Help Desk Migration move the full object graph: conversations, contacts, users, notes, attachments, and tags, all mapped to Intercom's data model. The tradeoff is setup time and cost versus maintaining custom API scripts for weeks. If conversation history is business-critical, the math usually favors the tool.
Before you touch anything
Map your custom fields before you start. Drift and Intercom use different schemas, and fixing field mismatches after a migration has run is significantly more painful than catching them in planning. Run a test on 50–100 conversations before the full migration. And document every playbook and routing rule your team relies on — none of it transfers automatically, and rebuilding from memory is slower than rebuilding from documentation.
Sunsetting announcements rarely come with a migration runway that matches the complexity of the workflows being retired. The teams that start now are the ones with options when the timeline tightens.
Already mid-migration or planning one? What's been the trickiest part of pulling data out of Drift? It would be useful to compare notes.