TL;DR
- We sorted ten AI SDR tools by the job they actually do.
- Autopilot outbound: Artisan's Ava, AiSDR ($250 to $2,500 per month published), Salesforge's Agent Frank (from $499), Alta's Katie.
- Copilots with approval controls: Reply.io's Jason AI (from $500) and Regie.ai ($180 to $499 per seat).
- Inbound: Qualified's Piper.
- Clay's Claygent is a research agent, the layer under an SDR.
- We list only vendor-published pricing, flag the TechCrunch investigation into 11x, and cite Gartner: agents will outnumber sellers 10 to 1 by 2028, yet under 40% of sellers say they help.
The best AI SDR tool depends on which of three jobs you are hiring for: full autopilot outbound, a copilot that drafts while humans approve, or inbound response. This guide covers ten tools across those jobs with a dedicated review and screenshot for each, lists only pricing the vendors actually publish, and includes the failure stories the category would rather you not read.
The money says this category is real. Fortune Business Insights values the AI SDR market at $4.27 billion in 2025, projected to reach $24.32 billion by 2034. Gartner predicts that 95% of sellers’ research workflows will begin with AI by 2027, up from under 20% in 2024. Your buyers already research this way, a shift we mapped in our look at how B2B buying changed once research moved into AI chats. The open question is whether an AI can run the selling side too, and the honest answer in 2026 is: for parts of it, yes, with supervision.
What counts as an AI SDR
Vendors stretch the label, so we sorted every tool into one of three modes before ranking anything. Autopilot agents prospect, write, send, and book meetings with minimal human review. Copilots draft and prioritize while a human approves every send. Inbound agents sit on your website and turn visitors into booked meetings. A fourth group, sales engagement platforms with AI features bolted on, augments human reps rather than replacing the role.
The comparison table
| Tool | Mode | Published pricing | Best for |
|---|---|---|---|
| Artisan (Ava) | Autopilot outbound | Not public | Teams that want a managed, full-service agent |
| AiSDR | Autopilot outbound | $250 to $2,500 per month | Transparent pricing, signal-based outbound |
| Salesforge (Agent Frank) | Autopilot or copilot | From $499 per month | Budget autopilot with a copilot fallback |
| Alta (Katie) | Autopilot outbound | Not public | Signal-heavy CRM-connected outbound |
| 11x (Alice) | Autopilot outbound | Not public | Read the caution section first |
| Reply.io (Jason AI) | Copilot or autopilot | From $500 per month | Teams that want approval controls |
| Regie.ai | Copilot + agent | $180 to $499 per user per month | Seat-based teams blending humans and agents |
| Qualified (Piper) | Inbound | Not public | Pipeline from existing website traffic |
| Clay (Claygent) | Research agent | Free to $495 per month | Research and enrichment behind any SDR motion |
| Outreach / Salesloft / Apollo | Platform + AI | Mostly not public | Human-led teams adding AI assistance |
Autopilot agents: the full replacement pitch
Artisan (Ava)
Artisan is the loudest brand in the category, famous for its “stop hiring humans” billboards. Ava handles prospecting, personalized outreach, and meeting booking end to end, with lead handoff into Salesforce or HubSpot, and Artisan raised a $25 million Series A in April 2025 to build it out. The pitch is a managed employee, and the onboarding reflects that: Artisan pairs the agent with human support rather than handing you a dashboard and a manual.
Pricing: quote-only. Third-party estimates range so widely, from a few hundred dollars to tens of thousands per year, that we treat every number as unverified. Expect a sales call before you see a figure. Pick it if you want the most productized full-service agent and can absorb opaque pricing. Watch out for contract terms; the reporting covered in the 11x section below notes break clauses across vendors in this category.
AiSDR
AiSDR earns its spot mostly by publishing real numbers: Solo at $250 per month, Explore at $900, and Scale at $2,500, listed openly on its pricing page. The agent runs signal-based outbound on its own, and the site shows actual sent emails next to the meetings they produced, which is more evidence than most rivals offer.
Pricing: $250 to $2,500 per month, published, quarterly or annual billing, no free trial. Pick it if you want autonomous outbound with pricing you can budget before a sales call. Watch out for the ramp-up: reviewers consistently flag a three to four week learning curve while it tunes to your ICP, so plan a real evaluation window.
Salesforge (Agent Frank)
Salesforge’s Agent Frank is the budget entry, starting at $499 per month billed quarterly for 1,000 active contacts, with additional contacts at $0.25 each. Frank runs in Auto-Pilot or Co-Pilot mode, works in more than 20 languages, and comes with a dedicated account manager even at the entry tier.
Pricing: from $499 per month, published. Pick it if you want a low-risk way to test whether autonomous outbound fits your motion before committing enterprise money; the Co-Pilot fallback means a bad first month costs you review time instead of your domain reputation. Watch out for the site quoting two different entry prices in different places, a small sloppiness worth confirming on the sales call, and no free trial.
Alta (Katie)
Alta’s Katie connects to your CRM and more than 50 external signal sources, then runs multi-channel outreach across email, LinkedIn, and text. The signal-first framing is the differentiator: Katie is pitched as reacting to funding rounds, hiring spikes, and product launches rather than blasting static lists.
Pricing: not public; the one third-party estimate we found is a single unverified source, so treat it as unknown. Pick it if your outbound thesis is trigger-based and your CRM is clean enough to feed it. Watch out for the thin trail of independent reviews compared to rivals; ask for reference customers in your segment before signing.
The 11x caution
11x raised $50 million from a16z at a reported $350 million valuation and became the category’s poster child, selling Alice for outbound and Julian for calls as “digital workers.” Then a TechCrunch investigation found 11x had been claiming customers it did not have, with ZoomInfo threatening legal action over unauthorized logo use and ex-employees describing revenue counted from customers who had already exited. The product itself reviews reasonably on G2 at 4.4 out of 5, and the reported Growth plan runs around $3,750 per month billed annually.
We include it because you will hear the name in every evaluation. Do the reference checks yourself. The same reporting surfaced a category-wide detail worth knowing: contracts at multiple AI SDR vendors include break clauses that let customers exit early. Vendors offer those when churn risk is real. Ask any vendor what percentage of customers use theirs.
Copilots: drafts on autopilot, sends with approval
Reply.io (Jason AI)
Reply.io’s Jason AI is the strongest bridge option because you choose the mode. Jason finds prospects from a built-in database, drafts multichannel sequences across email and LinkedIn, handles replies, and books meetings, and you decide whether it sends autonomously or waits for approval on every message.
Pricing: published, starting at $500 per month for 1,000 active contacts on annual billing, scaling by contact volume to enterprise tiers. Pick it if you are nervous about an AI writing to your market unsupervised; this is the sane on-ramp, and the approval mode doubles as training data for the day you loosen the leash. Watch out for contact-volume pricing: active contacts get consumed faster than teams expect.
Regie.ai
Regie.ai prices like software instead of headcount: the AI Sales Engagement Platform runs $180 per user per month with a 10-seat minimum, and the Force Multiplier Rep agent runs $499 per user per month with a 5-seat minimum, AI credits included. The seat-based model fits teams where human SDRs stay in the loop and the agent multiplies their output, the same augment-first logic we recommend across the five layers of an AI-first marketing stack.
Pricing: $180 to $499 per user per month, published. Pick it if you run a real SDR team and want agents woven into their sequences rather than a separate robot working a separate list. Watch out for the seat minimums: 5 to 10 seats means the real entry cost is four figures monthly.
Inbound: the AI SDR for traffic you already have
Qualified (Piper)
Qualified’s Piper works the other direction. Piper watches your website visitors, engages them in chat, nurtures the ones who are not ready, and books meetings for the ones who are; the screenshot above is Piper doing exactly that to us, unprompted, while we researched this guide. If most of your pipeline already arrives through the site, an inbound agent converts spend you have already made, which usually beats paying to interrupt cold strangers. It also pairs naturally with work on being visible in AI answers, since buyers who found you through ChatGPT still land on your site to evaluate.
Pricing: not public; Premier, Enterprise, and Ultimate tiers all sit behind a demo, and third-party estimates put annual contracts in the tens of thousands. Pick it if real inbound traffic is leaking because follow-up is slow. Watch out for the enterprise motion: this is a committed purchase, not an experiment.
The research layer everyone confuses with an AI SDR
Clay (Claygent)
Clay’s Claygent is on every AI SDR shortlist and does not belong there, in the most useful way. Claygent researches and enriches accounts on command, turning a plain-language prompt into structured data columns; it does not send outreach or book meetings. Think of it as the intelligence layer your human or AI SDR sits on top of. The market has voted: the New York Times reported Clay employees selling shares at a $5 billion valuation in January 2026.
Pricing: published, from a free tier through Launch at $185 and Growth at $495 per month, plus usage credits. Pick it if your outbound problem is actually a data problem; fix research first, then decide who sends. See our breakdown of what AI automation workflows really cost before you stack subscriptions. Watch out for credit burn: complex Claygent runs consume credits fast at scale.
Platforms with AI features: when you stay human-led
Outreach runs agentic features across sequencing and forecasting, Salesloft ships Rhythm as an AI prioritization engine, and Apollo layers an AI assistant and email writer on top of its prospecting database. None of these gives you a named agent that replaces the SDR role, and most keep pricing behind a demo. Choose this route when the bottleneck is rep productivity rather than headcount. It is the least exciting option and, per Gartner’s growth data above, often the highest-probability one.
What the sales pages will not tell you
Gartner expects AI agents to outnumber sellers 10 to 1 by 2028, while fewer than 40% of sellers will say agents improved their productivity. Sit with that pairing for a second: massive deployment, minority satisfaction. The gap is implementation. Agents fail when the ICP is fuzzy, the data underneath is stale, and nobody owns deliverability. They work when a human owns the agent like a manager owns a rep: reviewing output weekly, feeding it wins and losses, and cutting sequences that read like a robot wrote them.
Budget reality: verified entry points run from $250 per month for AiSDR’s Solo tier to $499 per seat for Regie’s agent, while the quote-only vendors tend to land in the tens of thousands per year. Every tool with a ramp-up period needs 60 to 90 days before a fair verdict, which is the same patience window we apply to measuring B2B share of voice. And your prospects have AI on their side of the table too. They vet vendors with tools like Deep Research, browse with agentic browsers, and increasingly let agents transact for them. An AI SDR emailing a buyer whose AI screens email is the 2026 arms race in one sentence.
How to choose
- No SDR team, founder-led sales: start with a copilot mode you can supervise. Reply.io’s Jason or Salesforge’s Frank in Co-Pilot keep you in control at the lowest verified price.
- SDR team of 5+ you want to multiply: Regie.ai’s seat model or Apollo’s AI layer. Humans keep the relationships, agents do the volume.
- Real inbound traffic, slow follow-up: Qualified’s Piper converts what you already earn.
- Committed to autonomous outbound: AiSDR for transparent pricing, Artisan if you want the managed experience and can absorb quote-only pricing. Demand reference customers either way.
- Outbound blocked by bad data: fix research first with Clay, then decide who sends.
Where to start this week
Write down your ICP in one paragraph and your three best-performing messages. If you cannot, no agent can learn from you yet, and that work costs nothing. Then trial the cheapest mode that fits your motion from the list above, give it 60 days, and judge it on booked qualified meetings, nothing softer. Fold the decision into your broader AI-era GTM plan rather than buying it as a standalone toy. And remember the other half of the equation: while your agent hunts buyers, buyers’ agents are hunting vendors, and they find the companies that language models can see. Our guide to how models find, choose, and cite content covers that side, and our free AI visibility tools will show you where you stand today. Want help wiring GTM and AI visibility together? Book a free call.