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Chili Piper vs. Drift: Which Inbound Solution Is Right For You?

Andrea Wunderlich

Are you looking for an inbound marketing solution that will help you convert website visitors into paying customers? 

You’ve come to the right place. 

We understand that budgets are finite and sometimes you have to make tough decisions between vendors. So we’ve laid out some things to consider if you’re evaluating Chili Piper against Drift. 

May the best pepper win!

Chili Piper

Chili Piper is an inbound conversion platform that offers solutions for meeting scheduling, web form scheduling, lead distribution, and scheduling meetings at events. 

Drift 

Drift’s positioning differs from Chili Piper’s; they bill themselves as a revenue acceleration platform. They offer chat solutions, meeting scheduling, lead qualification, and most recently, web form scheduling.  

When to use Chili Piper vs. Drift  

Let’s get right down to it — the vendor you select will likely depend on your underlying beliefs about chat vs. forms. 

While chat is a useful tool for engaging with prospects and helping them navigate your website to self-educate, we don’t believe chat is the preferred method (at this point in time) for bottom-of-the-funnel, sales-ready hand-raisers. 

So, if you have an immediate need for chatbot functionality, Drift may be the best option for you. Chili Piper does not support chat (yet 😉).

However, if your goal is to convert inbound leads that are ready to speak with a sales rep, Chili Piper is your best bet. 

Ready to see it in action? Get a demo

Pricing

Generally, Drift customers pay more than Chili Piper customers. 

Drift does not currently publish its pricing publicly, but we know from its legacy pricing that price is affected by two levers: seats and people reached. 

The legacy plan included four tiers, ranging from $59 per month to $999 per month with additional seats costing more as the tiers scaled up (e.g. the “start” plan included one seat with additional seats costing $9/mo/user. While the “scale” plan included 10 seats with additional seats costing $99/mo/user). 

The “people reached” portion of their pricing model included 2,000 people per month on all plans with each additional 1,000 people reached costing an additional $50/mo. 

Drift defines “people reached” as “the number of unique people you’ve reached this past month through email, in-app messages, and notifications as well as people who’ve engaged with one of your website messages or Custom Bots.” 

Chili Piper’s web form scheduling solution, Concierge, starts at $30 a month per user plus a platform fee that ranges from $150-$1,000 per month depending on the plan. The main difference among plans is the volume of inbound leads you need to process on a monthly basis. 

Ready to see Chili Piper for yourself? Get a demo

Chili Piper vs. Drift feature breakdown

Increase your meeting show rate to 92%

Seen enough? Get a Chili Piper demo

Usability comparison

Chili Piper and Drift have similar, modern interfaces typical of what you’d expect in a SaaS marketing solution. 

The end-user experience after form submission differs slightly, with Chili Piper offering a form-based prompt and Drift offering a chat-based prompt. 

Chili Piper’s end-user experience:

Drift’s end-user experience: 

What people are saying in the wild 

At the time of this writing, Chili Piper is ranked better than Drift on G2 Crowd with Chili Piper having 4.7/5 stars and Drift having 4.3/5 stars. 

Below are some reviews of each software. 

Drift review: 

Source: G2 Crowd

Chili Piper review:

Source: G2 Crowd

Ready to speak with a human at Chili Piper? Book a demo now

The bottom line

TLDR; If your business objective is to convert more bottom-of-the-funnel leads on your website, Chili Piper is the best option for you. 

If you have hung your hat on chatbot functionality, it may be better to go with Drift for the time being until Chili Piper supports chat. 

Bias alert: We have our thoughts on who you should choose and thousands of happy customers to back us up, but at the end of the day, you have to make the right decision for your company based on which partner will help you accomplish specific business goals.

About the author
Andrea Wunderlich

Andrea Wunderlich works in market intelligence and strategy. A former SDR, she understands first-hand the problems that Chili Piper solves — and the power of the Inbound Conversion movement. She lives in Atlanta with her husband and fur-kids.

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