Drift vs Qualified

Overview

Drift and Qualified both operate in the conversational marketing space, but they serve fundamentally different buyer personas and organizational maturity levels. Drift positions itself as a conversational platform for sales acceleration and customer engagement across the entire funnel, while Qualified is purpose-built as a B2B pipeline generation engine that integrates tightly with your existing sales tech stack. The choice between them hinges on whether your organization prioritizes broad conversational experiences or surgical, intent-driven lead qualification.

Drift is the better fit for marketing teams that want to own the conversation layer across their entire digital presence. It excels at creating human-like chat experiences that guide prospects through discovery, answer common questions, and route conversations to sales at the right moment. Drift's strength lies in its flexibility—you can deploy it for customer support, lead qualification, and sales engagement without switching platforms. The platform appeals to mid-market B2B companies and some enterprise organizations that have mature marketing operations and want to reduce friction in early-stage conversations. Drift's pricing model and feature set assume you'll be running high-volume conversations and want marketing to maintain significant control over the experience.

Qualified takes a different approach: it's built specifically for B2B SaaS companies that want to identify and route high-intent visitors to sales immediately. Rather than trying to be everything, Qualified focuses on one job exceptionally well—matching your website visitors against your CRM and intent data, then routing qualified leads to sales in real-time. It's the choice for organizations with sophisticated sales development teams, strong product-market fit, and a need to maximize pipeline velocity. Qualified assumes your sales team is your primary customer and that marketing's role is to feed them qualified conversations, not to own the entire experience. This positioning makes it ideal for growth-stage SaaS companies and enterprises with established sales processes.