Drift vs. Marketo Chatbots: Which is Better?

Adobe Marketo Engage is a centralized marketing hub that enables you to create, execute, and analyze campaigns. In February 2022, Adobe released “Dynamic Chat,” a new conversation channel for designing and delivering contextual conversations to web visitors. 

Drift chatbots work a little differently. They’re part of a conversational marketing platform that uses advanced AI to engage website visitors, prompting them to ask questions and interact in real time.

The main difference is that Dynamic Chat focuses on integrating conversations within a greater marketing strategy, and Drift focuses specifically on engaging website visitors.

There are more differences to cover, so let’s dive in:

Key Integrations

When comparing Drift to Marketo Engage’s Dynamic Chat, one of the critical factors is integration capabilities. Dynamic Chat is built to seamlessly integrate into Marketo’s environment, syncing effortlessly with key marketing data to enhance conversational relevancy.

Drift offers broad compatibility by supporting over 50 different sales and marketing tools, including Marketo itself. Drift boasts a native Salesforce integration—so if you’re a current Salesforce user, that’s worth considering!

With Drift, you can ensure comprehensive tracking across your tech stack and maintain optimized sales and marketing funnels.

Price

Now, let’s talk about price—which is the determining factor for many businesses that invest in new software!

Dynamic Chat has two plans available: Select and Prime. The Select plan comes with Marketo for free, whereas the Prime plan is a paid upgrade.

The pricing for the Prime plan is based on the number of engaged conversations. You can speak to an Adobe rep to get more info on the exact price.

On the other hand, Drift offers an unlimited number of conversations—but it comes with a hefty price tag! At $30,000 per year, Drift is designed for larger organizations that are ready to upgrade to the advanced capabilities the platform offers. (More on that in a bit!)

Live Chat Capabilities

While Marketo’s Dynamic Chat is a great value-add for existing Marketo users, it’s still a free feature. Free features often come with limitations.

As a tool within a broader marketing platform, Dynamic Chat may not be as finely tuned for conversational marketing as some would prefer. 

For example, Drift has more options for custom lead routing, and it offers an unlimited number of conversations. 

It also has a (really cool) Drift Intel feature that leverages data from reverse IP address lookups and external providers to offer you key info, like employee count, revenue, and location of your website visitors during live interactions—even anonymous visitors who have never given you their info before. This will empower your organization to personalize every interaction to create memorable experiences for your visitors.

Dynamic Chat also offers live agent routing, but in a more limited capacity. The Select plan limits live agent routing to 100 conversations and up to 5 live chat seats. The usage is shared with the Conversational Forms and Conversational Flows SDK. After you reach this limit, you might consider an upgrade.

Drift is designed with a laser focus on conversational marketing. The platform’s commitment to conversational marketing translates into more advanced AI capabilities and personalization that can make each interaction with your brand feel uniquely tailored to the individual customer.

Drift chatbots exceed simple Q&A interactions by ushering visitors through an engaging, agent-like conversational experience.

And of course, the prompts are 100% customizable—so you can make your chatbot actually sound like a real person on your team!

Chatbot Design

Creating polished chatbot conversations is a breeze with both Marketo’s Dynamic Chat and Drift. 

Marketo offers a straightforward builder with drag-and-drop components and templates for quick campaign creation. It aligns with marketing strategies, effortlessly addressing audience demands.

Aiming for simplicity, Drift’s Bot Builder allows for rapid, no-code customization of chatbots, providing both ease and effectiveness. 

Real-Time Data and Audience Identification

Both Dynamic Chat and Drift offer cutting-edge solutions for audience identification through the use of real-time data.

Marketo’s Dynamic Chat taps into a deep pool of customer interaction histories and current activities, enabling sales teams to segment their audience and customize follow-ups with precision. Again, this is powered by a seamless integration with Marketo’s other tools.

Drift utilizes AI and NLP to interpret and react to the context and intent behind user interactions, personalizing each conversation to enhance customer engagement and drive conversions.

Cross-Channel Engagement Strategies

Cross-channel engagement is no longer optional—it’s a necessity in the digital age. 

Fortunately, Dynamic Chat is engineered to enhance these strategies. Using sophisticated lead and account targeting information, it bridges communication across various platforms, ensuring that your message is cohesive and consistent wherever your audience might be.

Whether it’s through email marketing, social media, or your website, Dynamic Chat aligns your efforts to provide a unified brand experience that resonates with your audience and amplifies your outreach.

Drift’s host of integrations can achieve similar results—although there can be more silos because they do not exist within the same platform.

AI and Automation Capabilities

Dynamic Chat harnesses the power of artificial intelligence with Adobe Sensei GenAI, offering responsive interaction for free-form questions. You can leverage this to launch AI-powered chat campaigns with ease and sophistication. 

However, the catch is that the advanced AI capabilities are only available on the Dynamic Chat Prime plan—which is not free.

Drift’s AI capabilities are equally robust, featuring a system that can learn and simulate a brand’s unique tone. These capabilities result in interactions that are not only intelligent but remarkably human-like, streamlining the communication channel between visitors and the brand.

Scheduling and Meeting Integration

Your meeting scheduling flow will directly impact sales productivity. 

Dynamic Chat users benefit from seamless calendar integration with Gmail and Outlook, including a feature that provides conversation summaries to help sales reps prepare with minimal effort.

Drift echoes this functionality, simplifying meeting scheduling for sales teams. It also enhances the sales pipeline by qualifying prospects before they even make it to the meeting stage. With Drift, you’ll only spend time on the most promising leads!

Personalization through Account-Based Marketing (ABM)

Both Dynamic Chat and Drift leverage the power of ABM to create highly personalized experiences. They utilize account data to tailor conversations specifically for named accounts, ensuring communication is relevant and impactful.

This level of personalization ensures that key accounts receive attention that is tuned to their specific needs and interests, fostering better engagement and boosting the potential for conversion.

Lead Routing and Management

Dynamic Chat’s round-robin lead distribution ensures that leads are allocated evenly among sales agents or teams, streamlining the lead management process.

Drift’s chatbot technology follows suit—but it also offers enhanced customization potential. 

Drift’s conditional routing rules (based on a prospect’s number of employees, company revenue, industry, etc.) are second to none. It allows you to route leads based on specific organizational requirements and strategies, optimizing the distribution for maximum efficiency and response times.

On Dynamic Chat, custom rules routing based on multiple criteria is only available on the Prime plan. Once again, this is not part of the “free value add” included with Marketo plans.

Analytics and Reporting

In-depth analytics are imperative for evaluating the success of chatbots. 

Dynamic Chat comes with the ability to deliver insightful reports. The reports highlight the effectiveness of automated conversations, tracking meeting bookings, and monitoring the initiation of live chats. This data is crucial for understanding user engagement and optimizing future interactions.

Drift’s Playbook Analytics shine a spotlight on the health and performance of your bot playbooks. By serving up bite-sized, easy-to-digest metrics, Drift illuminates how each playbook is working its magic. The analytics dashboard can help you pinpoint specific areas of engagement, including where leads drop off from the conversation.