Summary and recommendation
Drift user management can be run manually, but complexity usually increases with role models, licensing gates, and offboarding dependencies. This guide gives the exact mechanics and where automation has the biggest impact.
Drift is a conversational marketing platform, now part of Salesloft, used to manage live chat, chatbots, and meeting scheduling. Admin access lives at Settings → Organization → Team (https://app.drift.com/settings/team). Only Admins can invite users, configure integrations, or manage billing - there is no separate billing-only role.
Quick facts
| Admin console path | Settings → Organization → Team |
| Admin console URL | Official docs |
| SCIM available | Yes |
| SCIM tier required | Enterprise |
| SSO prerequisite | Yes |
User types and roles
| Role | Permissions | Cannot do | Plan required | Seat cost | Watch out for |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Admin | Full access to all settings including billing, integrations, playbooks, team management, and reporting. Can invite, edit, and remove users. Can assign roles. | All paid plans | Counts as a paid seat | Only Admins can manage billing and configure SSO/SCIM; there is no separate billing-only role. | |
| Manager | Can view and manage team performance reports, reassign conversations, and manage playbooks. Cannot access billing or organization-level settings. | Cannot manage billing, cannot invite or remove users, cannot configure integrations. | All paid plans | Counts as a paid seat | Manager role availability and exact permission scope may vary by plan tier; verify against current Drift/Salesloft documentation. |
| Agent | Can handle live chat conversations, use the inbox, set availability, and access assigned playbooks. Cannot access admin or reporting settings. | Cannot access Settings, billing, team management, or reporting dashboards. | All paid plans | Counts as a paid seat | Each Agent occupies a named seat; seat count is capped by plan. Adding agents beyond the plan limit requires a plan upgrade or seat expansion. |
Permission model
- Model type: role-based
- Description: Drift uses a fixed set of predefined roles (Admin, Manager, Agent). Permissions are assigned at the role level and are not individually configurable per user. No custom role builder is available.
- Custom roles: No
- Custom roles plan: Not documented
- Granularity: Role-level only; no per-user or per-feature permission overrides documented.
How to add users
- Log in as an Admin and navigate to Settings → Organization → Team.
- Click 'Invite Teammates' or the equivalent invite button.
- Enter the invitee's email address.
- Select the role to assign (Admin, Manager, or Agent).
- Click 'Send Invite'. The invitee receives an email to accept and set up their account.
Required fields: Email address, Role selection
Watch out for:
- Only Admins can send invitations; Managers and Agents cannot invite new users.
- Invitations consume a seat allocation upon acceptance; verify available seats before inviting.
- If the organization has SSO enforced, invited users must authenticate via the configured IdP on first login.
- Drift is now part of Salesloft; some settings UI may reflect Salesloft branding depending on account migration status.
| Bulk option | Availability | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| CSV import | No | Not documented |
| Domain whitelisting | No | Automatic domain-based user add |
| IdP provisioning | Yes | Enterprise |
How to remove or deactivate users
- Can delete users: No
- Delete/deactivate behavior: Drift does not permanently delete user accounts from the admin UI. Admins can deactivate (remove) a user, which revokes access and frees the seat, but historical conversation data and attribution associated with that user is retained in the system.
- Log in as an Admin and navigate to Settings → Organization → Team.
- Locate the user to be removed.
- Click the options menu (ellipsis or gear icon) next to the user's name.
- Select 'Remove' or 'Deactivate' to revoke their access.
- Confirm the action when prompted.
| Data impact | Behavior |
|---|---|
| Owned records | Conversations and contacts previously owned or handled by the removed user remain in the system and are accessible to Admins and other team members. |
| Shared content | Playbooks and shared assets created by the removed user remain active and accessible to the team. |
| Integrations | Any personal integration tokens or calendar connections (e.g., for meeting booking) tied to the removed user's account will stop functioning for that user; connected calendar slots become unavailable. |
| License freed | Seat is freed upon deactivation and becomes available for reassignment to a new user. |
Watch out for:
- If SCIM provisioning is active, deprovisioning should be performed in the IdP to ensure the Drift account is deactivated automatically; manual removal in Drift may conflict with SCIM sync.
- Removing a user who owns active playbook routing rules may cause those rules to fail or route incorrectly; reassign routing before removal.
- Meeting booking links associated with the removed user will break; update or redirect any published links before deactivating.
License and seat management
| Seat type | Includes | Cost |
|---|---|---|
| Full Seat (named user) | Access for one named user regardless of role (Admin, Manager, or Agent). All roles consume one seat. | Included in plan seat allotment; additional seats require plan upgrade or seat add-on purchase. |
- Where to check usage: Settings → Organization → Team (shows current active users and seat count)
- How to identify unused seats: Review the Team list for users with no recent conversation activity; Drift does not provide a built-in 'last active' or seat utilization report in standard plans. Admins must manually audit the team list.
- Billing notes: Drift (now part of Salesloft) is sold on annual contracts starting at $2,500/month for Premium. Seat counts and overages are governed by the contract terms. Mid-contract seat additions may be prorated; reductions typically take effect at renewal. Contact Salesloft account management for seat adjustments.
The cost of manual management
Every app with a fixed role model and no built-in activity reporting creates recurring audit overhead, and Drift is no exception. There is no last-login or seat utilization report in standard plans, so identifying inactive seats means manually reviewing the full team list.
Removing a user who owns routing rules or meeting booking links requires manual reassignment first - Drift does not prompt for this during deactivation, and broken links or misdirected conversations are the result if the step is skipped.
What IT admins are saying
Practitioners consistently flag the three-role model as too coarse for teams that need granular access control. The absence of a last-active report is a recurring complaint, with admins noting they must manually audit the team list to find unused seats.
Deprovisioning friction is also commonly reported: removing a user who owns routing rules or meeting links can silently break those assets.
A subset of users on Okta-based SCIM setups report that deprovisioning changes do not always reflect immediately in the Drift UI, requiring manual verification after IdP-side changes.
Common complaints:
- Users report that there is no granular permission system - the three fixed roles are too coarse for organizations that need to restrict specific features (e.g., preventing Managers from editing certain playbooks).
- Admins note that there is no built-in last-login or seat utilization report, making it difficult to identify inactive seats without manually auditing the team list.
- Users report friction when removing users who own routing rules or meeting links, as Drift does not prompt admins to reassign ownership before deactivation.
- Community members have noted that the Salesloft acquisition has introduced UI inconsistencies and uncertainty about which help documentation is current.
- Some users report that SCIM deprovisioning via Okta does not always immediately reflect in the Drift UI, requiring manual verification.
The decision
Drift's permission model is fixed at three roles - Admin, Manager, and Agent - with no per-user or per-feature overrides available. If your team needs to restrict specific capabilities within a role (for example, preventing Managers from editing certain playbooks), the current model cannot accommodate that.
SCIM provisioning is gated behind the Enterprise plan and requires SSO to be fully configured first; organizations on Premium or Advanced tiers must manage every app user manually through the admin UI.
The Salesloft acquisition has introduced UI inconsistencies, and some help documentation may not reflect the current product state - verify steps against live settings before building any process around them.
Bottom line
Drift covers the basics of team access management through a straightforward three-role system, but it offers little tooling to support ongoing governance at scale.
No seat utilization reporting, no granular permissions, and no ownership-reassignment prompts on deactivation mean that keeping every app user correctly provisioned is an active, manual effort.
Organizations on Enterprise with SSO in place can offset this through SCIM, but everyone else is working entirely by hand.
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