Ethora: The Drift Alternative for an AI Agent That Knows Your Product
An AI agent on your website that answers buyer questions from your own pages and documents, any time of day, and lets someone from your sales team join the same conversation. Choose the model, run it on our cloud or your own servers, and start on a free plan with no credit card.
The honest short answer
Ethora vs Drift: the honest short answer
Drift is conversational marketing chat for B2B websites: it engages visitors, qualifies them and routes the good ones to sales. Today drift.com redirects to Salesloft, whose Drift page says it has transitioned from Drift to 1mind, an AI chat agent that feeds buyer signals into Salesloft’s sales platform. Ethora is a different kind of tool: an AI agent you add to your website with one line, trained on your own pages and documents, where a person from your team can join the same conversation. It does not book meetings, identify companies or score intent on its own.
Stay with Drift and Salesloft if
- Your sales team works in Salesloft and you want chat signals to trigger seller actions and feed the forecast
- You need account identification, intent data and ABM-style personalisation for each visitor
- You want meetings booked and routed to the right rep automatically from the chat
Choose Ethora if
- The main job is answering buyer questions accurately from your docs, pricing and product pages
- You want published prices and a free plan rather than a sales-led contract
- You want your own model or self-hosting, or the same chat inside your product later
Best for: Drift and Salesloft for revenue teams that run on Salesloft and want chat tied into cadences and forecasting; Ethora for an AI agent that answers from your content, with sales one click away in the same chat.
Side by side
Ethora vs Drift: capabilities at a glance
The ten questions B2B teams ask most when replacing a website sales chat. Drift facts come from the Salesloft pages that drift.com now points to.
Ethora
How to read this table
Drift facts are taken from salesloft.com/platform/drift (where drift.com redirects) and salesloft.com/pricing, checked 16 October 2026. If you are an existing Drift customer, ask Salesloft what applies to your contract. If something here is out of date, tell us and we will correct it.
Why teams switch
Why teams look past Drift for their website chat
If you bought Drift mainly to answer visitors and get the good ones to sales, these are the reasons to pick Ethora for that job.
Drift and Salesloft
Sales platform with chat agents
Ethora
Open-source chat and AI platform
An honest view
When Drift and Salesloft are the better choice
We would rather you pick the right tool. Ethora is not a sales engagement platform, so these jobs belong elsewhere.
Meetings booked from the chat
Ethora has no built-in meeting scheduler or rep routing. If booking meetings straight into reps’ calendars is the point of your chat, use a tool built for that.
Account identification and intent
Ethora does not tell you which company a visitor works for, score intent or run ABM playbooks. Sales platforms such as Salesloft are built around those signals.
Chat inside your sales cadences
If your reps live in Salesloft and you want every chat to trigger a next step and feed the forecast, keeping chat on that platform is simpler.
Build it on Ethora
Everything you need to replace Drift’s website chat
The pieces B2B teams use when they put an AI agent on their website with Ethora.
AI chat widget for your website
One script tag adds a floating AI chat widget to any site. It loads asynchronously and keeps its styles isolated from your page.
See the AI chat widgetRAG chatbot on your own content
Crawl your product pages, docs and pricing, upload sales collateral, and check which sources each answer used.
How the RAG chatbot worksNo-code AI agent builder
Set up the agent, its instructions, greeting and look in the admin with a live preview, no developers needed.
Build an agent without codePricing
Free plan with 1,000 monthly active users and no credit card, then Small Business at $149/mo and Enterprise from $599/mo.
Compare plansAlso comparing Intercom?
If you are looking at a customer service platform with an AI agent, see how Ethora compares with Intercom and Fin.
Ethora vs IntercomOnly need the AI chatbot?
If you are also looking at AI chatbot builders trained on your content, see how Ethora compares with Chatbase.
Ethora vs ChatbaseAI agents running on Ethora today
Healthcare: HIPAA-compliant AI assistant (RAG) over a medical video library
Dr. Talks is one of the most prominent organizers of online healthcare conferences and summits.
Ethora enabled them to create a context-aware AI-powered chatbot to help users navigate thousands of pages of medical content, correctly referencing pages, authors, videos and timestamps. 100% secure and HIPAA-compliant.
This assistant enhances user experience by simplifying interaction with the platform and reducing search time.
- 1000+ summits indexed by AI bot
- Instant user engagement
- Vector embeddings enable intelligent domain expert AI responses
Communities: fan chat app with second-screen rooms and digital collectibles
A cross-platform social app uniting the automotive community around racing events.
Fan rooms for teams and drivers, second-screen events, and collectibles handed out and traded through chat bots.
- Cross-platform iOS and Android app
- Fan rooms and second-screen events
- Collectibles distributed in chat
Energy: dedicated chat server, AI-agent rooms and a React Native app for a procurement platform
Preshent is a US platform for energy-project procurement with AI-driven decision support.
Ethora provides the conversation layer: a chat room per project workspace shared by people and the AI agent, a dedicated chat server in Preshent’s own cloud, push notifications and a React Native app.
- 1,130 chat rooms, one per workspace
- AI agent as a participant in every room
- Dedicated chat server, 99.99%+ uptime
Professional services: a private, self-hosted AI assistant for a corporate intelligence firm
A London corporate intelligence and investigations firm whose analysts could not use public AI assistants on confidential client work.
Ethora designed a private AI assistant: a single-tenant server with AI agents, document search and an open-weight model on the firm’s own GPU, managed by Ethora in a London cloud region or installed on a workstation in the office.
- Local open-weight LLM, no public AI services
- Single-tenant server, UK hosting
- Cloud GPU or on-premise workstation
Virtual worlds: a 3D multiplayer world built from a book, with AI characters, in one weekend
An internal R&D showcase by Ethora’s founder: Alice in Wonderland, The Tempest and A Christmas Carol as 3D worlds you walk through in first person.
Each room is an Ethora chat, each character an Ethora AI agent with the book as its knowledge; a generator and the hosted MCP server build a new world from any book in about four minutes.
- Built in a weekend on the public SDK, API and MCP
- Characters answer in character from the text
- Daily AI budget keeps a public world affordable
AI agents on customer websites: support, intake and teaching assistants
Clinics, schools and small businesses build AI agents on Ethora themselves and put them on their own websites, often on the day they sign up.
3 examples, from a US mental health provider and a wellness brand to a university pharmacology course.
- WordPress plugin or one script tag
- Answers from the customer’s own pages and documents
- Self-serve, no developer needed
Migration
Moving your website chat from Drift to Ethora
Your playbooks and past conversations already tell you what buyers ask. Turn them into knowledge and instructions, then switch the script. A US mental health provider went live on Ethora the same day it signed up; see the AI website agent case studies.
Pull the real questions
Export recent chat transcripts and your playbook questions, and list the twenty questions buyers ask most.
Crawl your site in Ethora
Sign up free, create an app and an AI agent, crawl your product, pricing and docs pages, and upload sales collateral such as one-pagers and security notes.
Write the instructions
In the agent’s system prompt, say what to answer, which qualifying questions to ask, and where to send buyers who want to talk, for example your booking page link.
Swap the embed script
Replace the old chat snippet with
<script src="https://widget.chat.ethora.com/assistant.js" data-app-id="YOUR_APP_ID"></script>before</body>, or install the WordPress plugin.Test the top twenty questions
Run them in the Try it chat. It shows which sources each answer used, so you can fix wrong or missing answers before buyers see them.
Let sales join live chats
Read widget conversations in the admin each day, join the ones where a person should take over, and add the knowledge that was missing.
Drift alternative FAQ
Is there a free Drift alternative?
Yes. Ethora has a free plan at $0 per month with 1,000 monthly active users and no credit card, so you can put an AI agent trained on your website live before talking to anyone. The core is also open source, so you can self-host it.
Can Ethora book meetings?
Not on its own. Ethora has no built-in meeting scheduler or rep routing. You can add your booking page link to the agent’s instructions so it shares it when a visitor wants to talk to sales, and someone from your team can join the conversation directly.
Can a salesperson take over the chat?
Yes. A person from your team can join the same conversation the visitor is having with the AI agent, and admins can read every widget conversation with its message history.
Does Ethora identify which company is visiting?
No. Ethora does not do account identification, intent scoring or ABM personalisation. It focuses on answering visitor questions accurately from your own content and putting a person in the conversation when needed.
Can I use my own model, for example with Ollama?
Yes. Each agent can use a cloud model API such as OpenAI or a model you host through an OpenAI-compatible endpoint such as Ollama or vLLM, so prompts and answers can stay on your own servers.
Answer every buyer question from your own content
Crawl your site, set the instructions, paste one line. Free to start, with sales able to join any conversation.
