Drift vs Hotjar vs Explore (2026): Where Revenue Gets Tested
Drift was a B2B conversational marketing platform for website chat; Salesloft sunset it in March 2026 and named 1mind as the successor. Hotjar is a behavior analytics tool for heatmaps, recordings, and surveys, with no A/B testing. Omniconvert Explore is a Shopify-native eCommerce CRO platform that runs experiments on product pages, cart, and checkout, measured in revenue per visitor.
- Drift defined B2B conversational marketing, but Salesloft announced its sunset in March 2026 and named 1mind the successor for existing customers. [Salesloft, 2026]
- Hotjar is a behavior analytics tool for heatmaps, recordings, and surveys, with a 4.3 out of 5 G2 rating across 342 reviews, and no built-in A/B testing. [G2, 2026]
- The two sit on opposite sides of the same gap: one captures the conversation, the other captures the behavior, and neither runs a controlled experiment on the store funnel.
- Neither runs multivariate or checkout experiments, and neither measures the outcome in revenue per visitor, the metric that decides store margin.
- Omniconvert Explore pairs heatmaps, recordings, and surveys with a full experimentation engine on product, cart, and checkout, measured in revenue per visitor: pick it for Shopify revenue surfaces.
Teams comparing Drift vs Hotjar are usually looking at two very different visitor tools: a B2B chat and lead-capture platform on one side, a behavior analytics suite on the other. Drift once defined conversational marketing for pipeline teams, but Salesloft announced its sunset in March 2026 and now redirects every drift.com URL to Salesloft Chat Agents. Hotjar leads with heatmaps, session recordings, and on-site surveys, popular with marketing and UX teams. Neither is built around the surfaces where a Shopify store actually wins revenue, which is where Omniconvert Explore fits.
What is Drift, and what is it actually good at?
Drift defined the B2B conversational marketing category: website chat and chatbots paired with routing, so inbound traffic became qualified pipeline for sales. Salesloft acquired it in 2024 and announced the sunset in March 2026, naming 1mind as the successor for existing customers. [Salesloft, 2026]
Drift was a pipeline tool first and a marketing tool second. At its peak it was the reference platform for B2B teams who wanted an engaged visitor turned into a booked meeting on the spot, with chat playbooks routing qualified leads to a sales rep.
That era has closed. Salesloft and Clari announced the sunset in March 2026 and named 1mind the migration path. Active development has stopped, and drift.com, pricing page included, now redirects to Salesloft Chat Agents. Any evaluation that starts with Drift today is effectively an evaluation of its successor, not Drift itself.
Conversational marketing uses website chat, chatbots, and routing to turn inbound traffic into qualified conversations and booked meetings, usually for B2B sales teams. Drift defined this category. It is a lead-capture and routing layer, distinct from running a controlled revenue experiment on product, cart, and checkout pages.
Where Drift was genuinely strong (at its peak)
- Defined B2B conversational marketing: chat and chatbots tied directly to sales qualification and pipeline.
- Meeting booking and routing: inbound traffic turned into booked meetings for the right rep in real time.
- Playbook A/B tests on higher tiers: light experimentation inside chat playbooks for the biggest customers.
- Deep CRM and sales-stack integrations: fit cleanly into the B2B revenue stack for Salesforce and HubSpot teams.
Where Drift hits its ceiling for an eCommerce store
- The product is being sunset: no new sales, no roadmap, migration path to Salesloft Chat Agents or 1mind. [Salesloft, 2026]
- Built for B2B pipeline, not DTC: designed around conversation routing and meeting booking, not store-side conversion.
- No real experimentation: playbook A/B tests only on higher tiers, no page-level, multivariate, or server-side testing.
- No native Shopify integration: no checkout experimentation, no concept of revenue per visitor as a tested outcome.
What is Hotjar, and what is it actually good at?
Hotjar is a behavior analytics tool. It shows how visitors actually use a page through heatmaps, session recordings, funnels, on-site surveys, and feedback widgets. It installs on almost any site with a script or app and is approachable for non-technical marketing and UX teams.
Hotjar is a diagnostics tool with a mature feedback layer. It holds a 4.3 out of 5 rating on G2 across 342 reviews. [G2, 2026] Its strength is answering where and why: where visitors struggle, and what they say when a survey asks them directly.
What Hotjar does not do is run any A/B test at all. It cannot create variants, split traffic, or calculate significance, so it observes and describes behavior rather than proving a fix. Many teams pair it with a separate testing tool for that reason.
Behavior analytics captures how visitors interact with a page, through heatmaps, recordings, and surveys, so a team can see friction and hear feedback. Hotjar does this well for general websites. It is a diagnosis layer, distinct from running a controlled revenue experiment on product, cart, and checkout pages.
Where Hotjar is genuinely strong
- Rich recordings and heatmaps: a mature, widely adopted view of on-page behavior.
- On-site surveys and feedback: collect the why directly from visitors on the page.
- Funnels and drop-off views: see where users leave a multi-step flow.
- Easy install, approachable UI: quick to deploy and usable by non-technical teams.
Where Hotjar hits its ceiling for an eCommerce store
- No A/B testing: it cannot create variants, split traffic, or measure statistical significance.
- Diagnosis, not validation: it shows a problem but cannot prove that a change fixed it.
- No native Shopify experimentation: installs via script or app, with no checkout-level testing.
- No revenue experiments: it has no concept of revenue per visitor as a tested outcome.
What Drift and Hotjar cannot do for an eCommerce store
Drift and Hotjar sit on opposite sides of the same gap. One captures the conversation, the other captures the behavior, and neither runs a controlled experiment on the surfaces where a store wins or loses revenue: product pages, cart, and checkout. Neither reports in revenue per visitor or order rate.
Drift is also no longer a product you can buy. Every drift.com URL redirects to Salesloft Chat Agents, and 1mind was named the successor for existing customers. Even at its peak it was a B2B chat tool rather than a CRO platform; it captured and routed conversations instead of testing what the page should say.
Hotjar shows you where visitors hesitate through heatmaps and recordings, but it cannot run the experiment that fixes it. A team can watch a shopper abandon the cart, read a survey complaint about surprise shipping, and still have no way to test the fix inside the tool. The signal arrives; the proof does not.
The two gaps are the same gap at different depths. Both tools are built around a generic web visitor, not around the specific revenue surfaces of a store, and both stop at the point where a store needs to act. Neither is built around the Customer Value Optimization question: whether a result holds for high-value, repeat buyers. For the wider debate behind acting on behavior data, see Has personalization replaced A/B testing?
The deeper issue is that capturing a visitor and proving a fix live in separate tools. A team sees the problem in a chat log or a recording, forms a hunch, then needs a real testing platform to validate it on the surface that matters. Omniconvert Explore collapses that loop: heatmaps, session recordings, and surveys sit next to a full experimentation engine, and the same behavioral and customer data defines the segments you test against. The insight and the test live in one place, on the store's real revenue surfaces, which is the difference between watching a problem and proving the fix moved revenue per visitor.
eCommerce conversion rate optimization (CRO) is the practice of running controlled experiments on the revenue surfaces of an online store, product pages, cart, and checkout, and measuring the result in revenue per visitor and order rate rather than generic conversion rate. Explore is defined as an eCommerce conversion rate optimization platform for product, cart, and checkout experiments, native to Shopify and priced for store traffic.
What neither tool can tell an eCommerce team
- Did the win move revenue and margin. Whether a change raised revenue per visitor and order rate, and held its margin once discounts and returns are counted, not just surfaced a chat question or a drop-off.
- Which surface to test first. Which pages in the funnel (product, cart, checkout) carry the highest revenue impact if tested next.
- How it behaves in checkout. How an experiment interacts with the Shopify catalog, variants, and checkout flow natively, without engineering glue work.
- Whether it holds for valuable customers. Whether the result holds for repeat, high-value customers, the Customer Value Optimization question, not just first-session visitors.
Omniconvert benchmarks more than 7,000 eCommerce websites in its CROBenchmark Report 2026, across 248+ audit criteria. The data shows where stores actually lose orders: 99.6% fail to make guest checkout visible and prominent, and 94.2% never show checkout progress steps. [CROBenchmark Report 2026, Omniconvert]
A chat widget can catch a shopper who asks for help. A heatmap can show one who stalls at the shipping fields. Neither can test the fix. Explore runs the experiment on the store's real revenue surfaces and reports the outcome in revenue per visitor.
This is what the title means by where revenue gets tested. A booked meeting or a rage-click can leave the bank balance flat; what moves it is order rate and average order value along the product-to-checkout path, read as revenue per visitor. Explore optimizes for that number directly, and because Customer Value Optimization ties each result back to repeat, high-value buyers, the lift it confirms is margin the store keeps rather than traffic it rents. Explore also reaches Shopify-specific levers most testing tools cannot touch, including price testing; see Explore 3.0: pricing testing on Shopify.
Drift vs Hotjar vs Explore: the capability comparison
Side by side, the three tools sit at different points of the visitor journey. Drift captured the conversation (and no longer sells it). Hotjar captures the behavior. Explore runs native Shopify experiments on product, cart, and checkout with heatmaps, recordings, and surveys beside them, and measures the result in revenue per visitor. See A/B testing with Explore for how those experiments run natively on the Shopify funnel.
| Capability | Drift | Hotjar | Omniconvert Explore |
|---|---|---|---|
| Primary function | B2B chat and sales routing (sunset in March 2026) | Behavior analytics and surveys | eCommerce CRO on product, cart, and checkout |
| A/B testing | Partial playbook A/B on higher tiers only | No analytics only, no variants | Yes visual plus code editor |
| Multivariate testing | No | No | Yes |
| Server-side testing | No | No | Yes |
| Visual editor | No | No | Yes visual plus code |
| On-site surveys and overlays | Partial chat overlays, no surveys or test overlays | Partial surveys yes, no test overlays | Yes surveys and overlays built in |
| Shopify integration | Low no native checkout testing | Medium installs but no experimentation | Yes native |
| eCommerce focus | Low built for B2B pipeline | Low general web diagnostics | High built for store revenue workflows |
| Pricing model | Quote only, no longer sold | Session-based, from $31/mo | Session-based, built for store traffic, free trial |
| Best for | B2B teams historically; successor is Salesloft Chat Agents or 1mind | Marketing and UX teams diagnosing page-level friction | Shopify and eCommerce teams optimizing for revenue |
| User rating | No public G2 rating | 4.3 out of 5 (G2, 342 reviews, as of 2026) | 4.6 out of 5 (G2, 191 reviews, as of 2026) |
AliveCor used Omniconvert Explore to run a structured A/B testing program and achieved +21% conversion rate, +5% revenue per visitor, and 94% statistical relevance across their experiments. [Omniconvert, AliveCor case study]
Competitor ratings, pricing, and plan details reflect publicly listed figures as of 2026 and can change. Drift was sunset in March 2026 and is no longer sold; existing customers are migrating to Salesloft Chat Agents or 1mind. Hotjar is a behavior analytics tool, not an experimentation platform. Explore uses session-based pricing; see the Omniconvert pricing page for current plans.
Get the full CROBenchmark data behind these stats: 7,000+ websites, 15+ industries, 248+ audit criteria, 100+ CRO experts. See exactly where eCommerce growth teams are losing margin in 2026.
Get the CROBenchmark ReportFrequently Asked Questions
Should you choose Explore over Drift or Hotjar?
Decide by what you actually need next. Drift is no longer a product you can buy, so if that was your path, the migration is to Salesloft Chat Agents or 1mind rather than Explore. Hotjar can keep diagnosing where visitors struggle. For a Shopify store, run the next experiment on the product-to-checkout path inside Explore, measured in revenue per visitor. Explore turns observation into a proven, revenue-measured change.
Drift was a strong B2B chat and lead-capture platform at its peak, but Salesloft and Clari announced the sunset in March 2026 and named 1mind the successor for existing customers. Hotjar remains a widely adopted behavior analytics tool for heatmaps, recordings, and surveys across general websites.
The eCommerce question is narrower: once you can see or capture what a visitor does, can you run a controlled experiment on the Shopify product, cart, and checkout and read the result in revenue per visitor. That is the surface Explore is built for.
Stop guessing.
Start testing what moves revenue.
Explore runs A/B, multivariate, and personalization experiments on your product pages, cart, and checkout, then measures the outcome in revenue per visitor, not just clicks.
4.6 out of 5 across 191 reviews, G2 , as of 2026