Drift

- The design of the chat widget is gorgeous. It works on any browser and every mobile phone, I've tried, like a charm. With other chat widgets, I had lots of issues that it hasn't been displayed always correctly.
- Advanced bot and automation capabilities based on tags and other attributes
- Live view of prospects on your website with direct contact via web chat functionality
- Outbound marketing (sending sequences and tracking of emails) with their drift Gmail extension.

- Drift is quite expensive for what they offer. I'm one of the happy customers, which has gotten a startup license of the pro plan for a fraction of the normal price. Even with the pro plan, you have unnecessary restrictions like customization of the chat widget with CSS and using the smaller version. Most of the enterprise features as account-based marketing are great for any startup. Why isn't just the support by Drift and the quantity of usage restricted? Why do I have to see the restrictions within your account always and cannot just hide them if I cannot afford? Are they in need of that kind of marketing?
- The calendar cannot be completely translated into the language of your choice and you can't use a custom domain.
- Help center is branded with drift, even if your plan support branding free chat widget.
- I've received lots of emails from Drift about their Hypergrowth Conference (at least 10 in the last few months), which is quite annoying, no matter how personal and funny they have been written.
- I receive quite some emails regarding extensions of the core product like Drift Signature and Drift Help Center, but I've never gotten an update what has changed in the core product. After a while looking into the bot creation section, I've been flabbergasted that the whole design of the visual builder has changed, without me receiving any message about the advantages the new design and process brings with it.

I inherited drift from my predecessor, and immediately found it to be a very powerful and useful platform. It offered simple chat solutions, sent follow-up emails to people who didn't see your chat automatically, and provided numerous other useful features. It had a simple chat window that caught people's attention and generated chats, all of which we found very useful for our needs

Drift has a couple key problems - one being the overly simplistic and confusing backend UI. For users, there were just so many options on the admin side of things, and using it, I immediately felt lost and confused. This likely would have been different if I'd been part of the team that set it up, but starting to use the platform required quite a learning curve to customize it to our needs.

Perhaps more significantly, I used Drift for a period of time while updating my companies website - and upon switching to Wordpress and using Drift, I started to notice a significant increase in load time - with lighthouse & gtmetrix revealing a significant load time (I believe it was over 1.3 seconds of load time) caused by Drift's code. Needless to say, load time is key in website conversions, so I switched away from the platform pretty quick after that.