Drift AI vs Chatbase vs Helply: Features and Pricing Compared

Key Takeaways:

• Drift AI is being sunset by Clari and Salesloft, with the wind-down announced in March 2026 and 1mind named as the successor.
• Chatbase now markets itself as a customer support platform, but its credit model bills you for every message, including the ones the bot gets wrong.
• Helply's helpdesk is free forever with unlimited seats, and the AI is billed per outcome, starting at $0.25 per drafted reply and $0.50 per resolution.
• Total cost separates fast at B2B volume: Drift starts near $2,500 per month, Chatbase credits and add-ons stack quickly, and Helply's base platform is $0.
• The right pick depends on the job: Drift was built for sales, Chatbase for quick self-serve bots, and Helply for B2B customer support.

Drift vs Chatbase vs Helply: Comparison Table

Here is the short version before the detail. Drift is a conversational marketing tool built for sales, and it is winding down.

Chatbase is a flexible AI bot that deploys fast but bills by the message. Helply is a B2B support platform with a free helpdesk and pricing tied to outcomes.

If you already know you need support automation built for B2B, you can read how Helply's outcome pricing works before going further. The detail below backs up every row.

Drift AI: A Sales Tool That Is Being Sunset

Drift built its reputation on conversational marketing. It greeted website visitors, qualified them, and routed hot leads to sales reps so pipeline moved faster. For that one job, it worked.

The context changed in 2026. Salesloft acquired Drift in February 2024 and folded it into its revenue platform.

After Salesloft merged with Clari in December 2025, the combined company announced Drift's gradual sunset in March 2026. It named 1mind as the successor for existing customers. The product pages are still live, but active investment has ended.

That matters before any feature gets weighed. Starting a new support deployment on a tool that is winding down means betting on a short runway. And support was never Drift's job to begin with.

Drift Features

• Conversational playbooks. Rule-based chat flows greet visitors and qualify them against preset paths, which suits lead capture but not ticket handling.
• Live chat handoff. When the bot spots a high-value visitor, a human rep can step in, which assumes the team staffs reps for chat.
• Meeting scheduler. Prospects book a sales call straight from the chat window at the moment of interest.
• Drift Engage. Reverse IP lookup identifies the companies behind anonymous traffic for account-based outreach.

Routing is the tell. Drift routes by sales rules like account owner or round robin. It does not route by SLA priority, ticket severity, or sentiment, which is exactly what a support queue needs.

Drift Pricing

Drift is priced for the enterprise. The only public tier, Premium, starts at $2,500 per month billed annually.

Advanced and Enterprise are quote-only, and Salesloft's pricing page no longer lists Drift on its own.

With the product in sunset, new pricing conversations point toward successor tools.

Pros:

• Strong at converting website visitors into qualified sales pipeline.
• Clean syncing with Salesforce and other sales and marketing tools.
• Well reviewed for sales use, with a 4.4 out of 5 average on G2.

Cons:

• Pricing starts near $2,500 a month and stays opaque above that.
• Reviewers report support quality dropping after the Salesloft acquisition.
• Routing can misfire, sending irrelevant chats to reps.
• The sunset adds migration risk to any new deployment.

Who Drift AI Is For

Drift fits sales and marketing teams chasing pipeline, though even they should weigh the sunset before signing. It is not built for customer support.

Need a tool that routes by ticket priority instead of sales rules? That is the line where a support platform like Helply starts and Drift stops.

Chatbase: A Flexible AI Bot on Credit Pricing

Chatbase has grown up. It started as a fast way to turn a PDF into a chatbot, and it now markets itself as an AI customer support platform with a helpdesk, voice, and integrations to Zendesk, Freshdesk, Help Scout, and Intercom. Treating it as a toy would be a mistake.

The honest read is that Chatbase is flexible and quick to deploy. Point it at your docs, a URL, or a Notion page, and it builds a bot that answers in minutes. The open questions for a B2B team are accuracy, depth, and how the bill behaves as volume grows.

Chatbase Features

• Train on your content. Upload documents, sync a URL, or connect Notion, and the bot learns your material quickly.
• Multichannel deployment. Run the bot on a website or connect Slack, WhatsApp, Instagram, and Messenger from one place.
• AI Actions. Teach the bot to look up an order or run a simple task, though users note the setup can be fiddly.
• Helpdesk and integrations. Higher tiers add a helpdesk, voice, and connections to Zendesk, Salesforce, HubSpot, and more.

Chatbase Pricing and the Add-On Math

Chatbase runs on message credits, and every reply spends one whether the answer was right or not. The public plans on annual billing are Free at $0 with 50 credits, Hobby at $32 per month with 500 credits, Standard at $120 per month with 4,000 credits, and Pro at $400 per month with 15,000 credits. Enterprise is custom.

The add-ons are where the bill grows. Extra credits cost $40 per 1,000. Extra agents cost $300 each per year. Removing the “Powered by Chatbase” badge costs $1,188 per year. On the Free plan, inactive agents are deleted after 14 days.

Pros:

• Live in minutes, with a setup that takes one upload.
• Flexible customization and strong control over the bot's personality.
• A real integration list and more than 10,000 customers.

Cons:

• Reviewers report confident, wrong answers on questions outside the trained content.
• Some users describe the bot failing to grasp its own knowledge base, and training data disappearing.
• Support replies can take days, per user reviews.
• Credit pricing climbs fast at support volume, and core extras cost more.

Who Chatbase Is For

Chatbase suits teams that want a quick self-serve bot and can manage tighter guardrails. It is a harder fit for B2B teams that cannot risk a confidently wrong answer to a technical or account question.

Helply: A Free B2B Support Platform With Outcome Pricing

Helply approaches the problem from the support side, not the sales or DIY side. The helpdesk is free forever, with unlimited seats and every channel included.

The AI sits on top, and you pay only when it produces a result. That model is the structural difference from both Drift and Chatbase.

For B2B support, the most-used capability is the AI assistant that makes human agents faster. It drafts every reply with sources and full account context, so an agent answers a technical question with the customer's plan, usage, and history already loaded. B2B tickets are complex, and a human usually stays in the loop. Helply makes that human sharper rather than replacing them.

The platform also turns support into more than deflection. Support Intelligence answers plain-language questions across tickets, accounts, and billing.

Revenue Signals scan every ticket for churn risk, upsell intent, and competitor mentions, then route each to the right owner.

Autonomous resolution handles high-confidence tickets on its own, as one outcome among several rather than the whole pitch.

Helply Features

• AI assistant for agents. Every reply is drafted with sources and full account context, so agents move faster without losing accuracy.
• Support Intelligence. Ask questions in natural language across tickets, accounts, billing, and product data, and get an answer instead of a search.
• Resolutions. High-confidence tickets are resolved autonomously across chat and email, with everything else handed to an agent.
• Article Creation. Helply spots knowledge gaps and drafts help-center articles from recurring tickets, keeping documentation current.
• Revenue Signals. Churn risk, upsell intent, competitor mentions, and feature requests are detected and routed to the CSM, AE, or product team.
• Omnichannel by default. Slack Connect, Microsoft Teams, Discord, email, in-app chat, SMS, WhatsApp, a customer portal, and an API all feed one context layer.

Helply Pricing

The helpdesk is free forever, with unlimited seats and all channels. AI is billed per outcome: $0.50 per resolution, $0.25 per drafted reply, $2.99 each for churn, upsell, and competitor signals, $2.99 per feature flag, $0.50 per knowledge-base gap, and $2.99 per article.

Enterprise is custom. You can model your own numbers with the usage-based cost calculator.

Pros:

• A free helpdesk with unlimited seats takes per-seat cost out of the equation.
• Outcome pricing ties spend to results, not message volume.
• Account context from your CRM, Stripe, and product usage loads on every ticket.
• Revenue Signals turn support into a source of expansion and retention.

Cons:

• Helply is built for B2B teams with a real support operation, not a hobby widget on a personal site.
• The AI performs best once it is trained on your tickets and connected to your context layer, so there is a short ramp before it hits full stride.

Who Helply Is For

Helply fits technical B2B companies that sell software, from upper-end SMB through mid-market, with the sweet spot around $1M to $50M in ARR. See how it is built for B2B support if your team treats support as a revenue engine.

How to Choose the Right AI Support Tool for Your B2B Team

The decision gets simple once you name the job. Match the tool to the work, not the marketing.

For a closer look at the AI-native bots in this space, our Chatbase vs Intercom Fin vs Helply comparison goes deeper on accuracy and resolution.

What Is the Best AI Support Tool for a B2B SaaS Team in 2026?

For a B2B SaaS team that cares about accuracy, account context, and cost that scales with value, Helply is the fit.

Drift is built for sales and is winding down, and Chatbase carries hallucination risk and per-message costs that grow with the queue.

Is Drift Worth Buying If It Is Being Sunset?

For a new support deployment, no. Drift was a sales tool, and with a sunset underway, a new contract means a migration you can already see coming.

If you are a current Drift customer who actually needs support automation, do not move sideways to another sales bot. Move to a platform built for support.

Get Started With Helply Today!

A Drift AI vs Chatbase vs Helply decision in 2026 comes down to one question: what is the tool for? Drift is a capable sales tool that is being sunset, so it is a poor place to start a support project.

Chatbase is flexible and fast, but it bills per message and can answer confidently wrong, a real risk for B2B accounts.

Helply is the only one of the three built for B2B support. It pairs a free helpdesk with account context on every ticket and pricing tied to outcomes.