3 Cost-Effective Alternatives to Drift

Drift is a leading platform in the conversational marketing space. It offers chatbots, live chat capabilities, email sequences and more. At $50 per month for the standard version or $500 per month for the pro version, however, it may be a bit too pricey for some companies.

Luckily, there are some alternatives out there that can also help you grow your customer base and keep current customers happy — but without the high price.

HelpCrunch

HelpCrunch is one great option. It offers live chat, automated messaging, ticketing, email automation and more. You can use it to get leads, drive sales and provide customer support. It also makes it easy to switch between multiple channels and enables you to manage your communication across those channels in one window.

Premium is $40 per month for two agents, which is the same number of agent “seats” that Drift’s standard version comes with. However, you can use the basic version of HelpCrunch for $12 per month per agent. You can even unlock 23 percent savings by choosing to be billed annually rather than monthly. If you’d like to test it out, start a 14-day free trial.

ManyChat

ManyChat is a platform that helps you create a bot for Facebook Messenger. While you’re constrained to the Facebook platform, ManyChart is affordable. With more than 2 billion monthly active users, Facebook isn’t the worst platform to have to use anyway.

Using ManyChat, you can easily drag and drop features to create your own chatbot for marketing, customer support or other purposes. It also has a live chat option and will notify you if a human agent is needed.

Perhaps the best part about ManyChat is that you can get started for free. The company offers a free plan that gives you unlimited broadcasts — which are messages you can send out to your whole audience — as well as the ability to set up two chat sequences that can run as many times as needed. It also comes with four growth tools to help you get more users for your chatbot.

You can also choose the pro option, which offers unlimited broadcasts, sequences and growth tools. The pricing depends on how many people you want to chat with. You can talk with 500 subscribers for $10 per month, 1,000 for $15, 2,500 for $25 and so on.

Chatterbot

Chatterbot is another popular Drift alternative. You can use the Chatterbot platform to design your own bot to help you streamline customer experience tasks, assist your customers in finding products and fulfill a number of other needs. The company’s templates include bots for lead generation, onboarding, customer support and Instagram contests.

You can use the lite version of chatterbot for $14 per month if billed monthly or $9 if billed annually. Unfortunately, you can have only one agent with this subscription. Chatterbot Pro is $35 per month if billed monthly or $29 if billed annually. That comes with one agent, and each additional agent is $8, so the price for two agents is $43 or $37 per month.

Chatterbot also limits the number of bot chats you can have to 3,000 and the number of human chats you can have to 600 per month for Pro.

Get Started With Your Best Solution

If you want to get started with conversational marketing with chatbots and live chat capabilities, you have numerous options regarding platforms. Drift offers a comprehensive solution with a bit of a higher price tag.

The options listed above are more affordable, but they each have their own limitations. If you run a larger company and want to make conversational marketing a core part of what you do, you’ll likely need to shell out some cash.

If your business is still relatively small or you just want to start experimenting with chatbots, these alternatives may work well for you. Whichever option you choose, getting started with conversational marketing is a smart business move, as customers are going to come to expect it in the future.