Introduction to Backend APIs

Contacts API

Contacts in Drift are the main storage object for data associated with people external to your organization. A contact is created as soon as Drift is able to captured identifying information about the individual. The source of a contact will vary from organization to organization, but they generally come from Drift conversations, a sync between an external integration, or by direct creation. You can find out more information about our Contacts API Here.

Users API

The Users API currently enables read access to information on users/agents in Drift for your org. This includes things like current availability, the user's name, the user's email, if the user that posted a reply was a bot, and more.

Conversation & Messaging API

Conversations are the core object in Drift. They represent a series of messages exchanged between a single contact and a group of participants. Participants are generally employees of the organization or a bot.

Messages make up the meat of a conversation. They will contain information regarding the text sent and metadata on the sender. You can find more information on our conversation & messaging API here

Accounts API

Accounts in Drift are usually those either manually created in Drift, synced from another third party, or created via our API here. These accounts can be used for both personal account tracking and ABM (account-based marketing) purposes in the context of playbooks for custom targeting when a contact recognized from a particular account visits your website.

Drift is not a full CRM system, but can be used to connect/provide convenience with account information with other tools such as Salesforce.

Playbooks API

Playbooks are automated message workflows and campaigns that proactively reach out to site visitors and connect leads to your team.

The Playbooks API allows you to retrieve active and enabled playbooks, as well as conversational landing pages. While you can only edit the playbooks in the Drift UI, this API can be used for auditing, record keeping, and mapping to interaction IDs for external systems.

App Admin API

With the Admin API, admins can trigger a remote app uninstall on behalf of a client, as well as retrieve token information and metadata. Additionally, not only can you get the Drift org that the token was created for, but also the scopes and app for the token as well.

GDPR & Data Privacy API

Drift admins can manually request data retrieval and deletion via the Data Privacy section of their settings, but this can be tedious for larger organizations with many requests.

The Data Privacy API provides a way to trigger GDPR requests programatically. Find out more information here

SCIM API

IT admins can provision and manage user accounts with the Drift SCIM2.0 API. SCIM is used by Single Sign-On (SSO) services and identity providers to manage people across a variety of tools, including Drift. It's also possible to write your own apps and scripts using the SCIM API to programmatically manage the members of your workspace.

Drift API SDK's that might be of Interest

You can invoke the APIs directly via a direct web/https call, and we also have some community libraries to help you (if you happen to use python or nodejs). We'd love to see what you build, and we welcome contributions to these libraries as well!

Share with us on our Developer Community channel if you have anything that could be open sourced!