Drift Is Being Retired: A Migration Checklist for Website Chat

Salesloft is retiring Drift. In March 2026 it named 1mind as Drift's successor and stopped selling Drift to new customers (checked October 2026). If Drift runs the chat on your website, you need to move three things before it goes: the answers your playbooks give visitors, the way leads reach the right person, and the script itself, everywhere it loads.

This checklist walks through each one. It is written for a business that used Drift mainly to talk to website visitors, which is where most of the migration work sits.

First, confirm your own timeline

Dates for the retirement have been reported differently in different places, so do not plan around a date read in a blog post, including this one. Check Salesloft's help centre and pricing page, or ask your account team, for the date and terms that apply to your contract. Then work backwards: aim to have the replacement live and tested at least two weeks before that date.

Decide what you are actually replacing

Drift was built as a conversational marketing platform for B2B sales teams. Some companies used all of it: account-based targeting, routing visitors to named reps, meeting booking for a sales development team. Others used a fraction of it: a chat bubble that answered questions and collected email addresses.

Be honest about which group you are in, because the replacement differs.

• If the sales engine is the point, look at Salesloft's named successor and at sales platforms built for rep routing and meeting scheduling.
• If answering visitors and capturing leads is the point, a website chatbot trained on your own content covers it for far less money and setup.

Our SpideyChat vs Drift comparison sets out where each fits. The rest of this checklist assumes you are in the second group or somewhere close to it.

Step 1: Inventory what Drift does today

Before touching anything, write down what is running. Open your Drift account and your website side by side and list:

1. Every page or URL rule that triggers a playbook, and how long each waits before showing a message.
2. The questions each playbook asks and the answers or branches it offers.
3. Who gets notified when a lead comes in, and by what route (email, a team channel, the CRM).
4. Any meeting links or routing rules that send visitors to specific people.
5. Every place the Drift script is installed: theme files, a tag manager, a plugin, landing page builders, and any subdomains such as a help centre or shop.
6. Integrations that read from or write to Drift.

Item five is the one people miss, and it is the one that leaves a dead chat bubble on a forgotten landing page six months later.

Step 2: Export before you lose access

Export or copy whatever your account allows: playbook text, conversation transcripts and lead or contact records. Transcripts are the most valuable item here. They tell you what visitors actually asked, which is better training material than anything you would write from memory. Store the exports somewhere your team can find them after the Drift login stops working.

Step 3: Move the playbook answers

A Drift playbook is a script: visitor lands, bot asks, visitor clicks, bot replies. A trained AI chatbot works differently. It answers from your content, so most scripted replies become knowledge rather than branches.

In SpideyChat that means:

• Train on your website. The crawler reads up to 150 pages per run on Starter and above, so your service, pricing and policy pages become the bot's source.
• Turn playbook answers into Q&A pairs. Any answer that is not on your site, such as how you handle a particular objection, goes in as a question and answer.
• Mine the transcripts. Take the 20 questions visitors asked most often and check the bot answers each one well.
• Rebuild only the scripts that need to be scripts. Where you want a fixed sequence, such as three qualifying questions with buttons, the visual flow builder supports buttons, questions and branching.
• Recreate the proactive greeting. You can show a greeting bubble after a delay, only on chosen page paths such as /pricing, and optionally when a visitor moves to leave. Our guide on when to nudge a visitor covers timing.

Step 4: Rebuild lead routing

This is where a Drift setup and a simpler chatbot differ most, so map it carefully.

What SpideyChat does: on Starter and above it captures leads, asking for an email or phone number at the moments a visitor welcomes it, such as when they want a quote or a callback, or when the bot cannot answer. Each lead is saved in the dashboard with the full transcript attached and emailed to the address you set for that assistant. When someone on your team is online, visitors can ask for a person and you take over from the live inbox. Visitors can also open numbered support tickets, with a ticket inbox on Pro.

What it does not do: book meetings into reps' calendars, or sync contacts straight into a CRM. If your Drift setup depended on those, the Pro plan's webhook can send each lead to a tool you already use for routing, which can then create the contact or assign it. The guide to sending chat leads to your CRM with webhooks shows the usual setups.

Write the new route down next to the old one from your inventory, so nobody on the sales side is surprised.

Step 5: Swap the snippet

Remove the Drift script from every location on your list, then add the new one. SpideyChat installs with one script tag before the closing body tag, or through the free WordPress plugin with a license key.

Each chatbot has a license with a list of websites. The first site it loads on registers automatically, subdomains are included, and other domains are added in the dashboard or by activating the key in the WordPress plugin. Do not run both chat widgets on the same page during the changeover. Two bubbles confuse visitors and split your leads. Our troubleshooting checklist for a chat widget that is not showing covers caching and template checks that apply here too.

Step 6: Test, then watch the first two weeks

Run your 20 transcript questions through the new bot. Submit a test lead and confirm the email arrives where your team expects it. Ask for a person while someone is on duty and check the handover works. Then check the knowledge gaps list daily for the first fortnight: it records questions the bot could not answer well, which tells you exactly what to add.

Step 7: Switch Drift off on purpose

Once the new chat has handled real traffic for a week, cancel or disable Drift deliberately rather than letting it lapse. Tell your team where leads now arrive, update any internal documentation that mentions Drift, and remove old integrations that expect Drift data.

SpideyChat costs $0 on Free, $9.99 a month on Starter and $29.99 a month on Pro, flat. If you want to see how it answers from your own site before committing, create a free account and let it build a first bot from 10 of your pages. If you are still weighing several vendors, our list of Intercom Fin alternatives compares other options with prices checked in October 2026.