If you're still on Drift, you've probably heard: Clari + Salesloft announced the gradual sunset of Drift in March 2026, with no hard end-of-life date confirmed.
A vague timeline isn't a safety net — it's a risk. Post-acquisition, releases slowed, CSM support was eliminated for most accounts, and a 2025 data breach took the platform offline for ten days with limited communication. That's what you're migrating away from.
Why Intercom?
The use case overlap is real. Intercom has evolved into a full AI-first platform that combines live chat, ticketing, and Fin AI in a unified workspace — so if your Drift setup handled both inbound leads and post-sale support, Intercom handles both natively.
A few things that matter when you're comparing:
- Pricing: 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.
- Integrations: Intercom offers 400+ integrations across support, analytics, and marketing. Drift's deepest integrations are now within the Salesloft ecosystem.
- Support infrastructure: Drift was never designed for post-sale support — no ticketing, no SLA management, no knowledge base. Intercom covers all three.
One honest caveat: if your primary use case was ABM targeting and outbound sales orchestration, Intercom doesn't replicate that one-to-one. Know the tradeoff going in.
The migration bottleneck most people miss
Drift enforces a 600 requests/minute API rate limit. That's the hard ceiling on extraction speed, and historical conversation data is the slow part. Budget 2–3 weeks if transcripts matter to you.
Pull this before you cancel:
- Conversation history — transcripts, timestamps, assignees, tags
- Contact and lead records — including custom attributes
- Bot and playbook configurations to rebuild in Intercom
Pull first. Cancel after.
Three ways to move the data
CSV export — fast, good for contacts, weak on conversation depth. Loses thread structure and metadata. Backup, not migration.
Intercom native import — solid for contacts and companies, straightforward field mapping. Doesn't reconstruct conversation history.
Automated tool (e.g., Help Desk Migration) — handles the full object graph: conversations, contacts, users, notes, attachments, tags, all mapped to Intercom's data model. Worth it if history is business-critical and you'd rather not maintain custom API scripts for weeks.
Before you touch anything
Map your custom fields first — Drift and Intercom use different schemas, and fixing this after the fact is painful. Test on 50–100 conversations before running the full migration. And document every playbook and routing rule you'll need to rebuild; none of it transfers automatically.
These sunsetting announcements rarely come with a migration runway that matches the complexity of the workflows being retired. Start now.