Artisan alternatives in 2026: AI BDRs and AI SDRs compared

Teams leaving Artisan usually ask two things: will a person see each message before it goes, and can the next tool start on a small team’s budget? The table answers both before it gets to research.

Artisan sells Ava, which it calls the AI BDR that runs in your stack, alongside your team. Ava finds leads, enriches them, sends personalized messages and books meetings for your reps. Artisan says it is trusted by 6,000+ sales teams. You can run Ava next to your current tools, with two-way CRM sync and sending as your reps, or as your whole outbound stack, with end-to-end autopilot when you are ready.

• Data and research: Ava searches 250M+ verified B2B contacts or imports from your CRM, enriches prospects from 22+ data sources, and ranks them with intent signals such as funding rounds and leadership hires, plus website visitors and product data. Every plan, including Free, lists agent swarm research; paid plans add agentic personalization research.
• Channels: multichannel outreach across email and social. Call steps queue in a native dialer for reps to click and dial, and Ava handles replies, qualifies, answers objections and books meetings. Ava runs dozens of message variations per campaign and shifts volume to the ones that work.
• Approval: an approval mode has Ava draft every reply and wait for your click, or send on its own. You can lock tone and calls to action, ban phrases and set escalation rules. The pricing FAQ calls Ava autonomous by default, adjustable by design.
• Pricing (as of October 2026): Free with 300 credits a month and no campaigns; Intern $250 a month and Employee $600 a month, billed annually with credits upfront, for about 500 and 1,250 leads contacted a month. New accounts get 10,000 credits for 30 days, no card. Mailboxes and phone numbers are billed separately. Team (about 2,500 leads a month), Scale (about 6,000) and Enterprise are priced on request.

Artisan now publishes startup prices and offers a free plan. The reasons below come from its own pricing FAQ and from G2 reviews: who sees each message, and which accounts get contacted.

• Autonomous by default. Artisan’s own pricing FAQ says Ava is autonomous by default and approval is a setting. Teams that want a person to see every message must configure it, and keep it configured.
• Lead fit and message accuracy. On G2, read October 18, 2026, Artisan has 66 reviews, and G2’s AI summary notes that its AI messages are sometimes off in tone or accuracy. Recurring complaints from G2 reviewers include early leads that were a poor fit, keyword filters that are too loose, needing to check emails before they send, a basic dialer and mailbox reconnects. Some reviews on the page are labeled incentivized or as coming from a seller invite.
• A volume model. Plans are counted in credits and leads contacted a month, from about 500 to about 6,000, and campaigns improve by testing many variants. Teams that want fewer, researched accounts may want a different unit.
• Larger plans priced on request. Team, Scale and Enterprise are not published, and the Salesforce integration and SSO sit on Enterprise.

Each tool was judged on what matters when you leave Artisan: whether a person sees each message by default or only after a setting changes, how the tool decides which leads fit, and what a small team pays to start. The facts come from each vendor’s product, pricing and help pages, read on October 18, 2026. Review themes come from G2 the same day; ratings there move daily.

We ran no hands-on test, and we left out vendor case-study results because we could not check them. Where a page is silent on something, the table says so. The list is unranked. It opens with 11x, the agent most like Ava, moves to tools with a smaller or more flexible start, and ends with tools that research and hand the sending to your team.

Best for: teams ready for an annual contract that want outbound with cited research, and inbound agents from the same vendor.

11x sells revenue agents across voice, chat, email, social and SMS. Alice, its outbound SDR, researches each prospect and company from news, job postings, announcements, 10-K filings and your CRM, and returns a report with citations and a messaging strategy. Leads come from your CRM or its 400M-contact database, and Alice writes in 105+ languages on Pro and above. Its help center lists three approval modes: review every message, a named approver, or autopilot. Pricing (as of October 2026): Alice Growth from $3,750 a month, billed annually, which 11x’s FAQ puts at $36,000 a year; Pro and Enterprise are custom. That is a larger and longer commitment than Artisan’s Intern plan, in exchange for cited research and inbound agents.

Best for: small teams that find an annual startup plan too big a step, or that want someone else to run the campaigns.

Artisan bills Intern and Employee annually, with credits upfront. AiSDR charges $1.50 per person prospected, billed daily, and a campaign can start at $7.50 (as of October 2026); Team plans are priced on volume, on quarterly contracts. Its agent builds each contact’s message from 2B+ profiles, live signals and enrichment across 20 providers, with email, social and call steps. On approval it sits close to Artisan: you sign off on sample messages before launch, and its help center says each outgoing message needs no manual approval. The managed service works differently. At $149 a campaign you review and approve before anything sends, and the fully managed option is $2,500 a month.

Best for: teams that tried autonomous sending and want their reps back in charge of each message, with software doing the signal search.

Ava sends on its own unless approval is switched on. Amplemarket’s Duo starts from the other end: it calls itself human in the loop by design, and each suggestion waits for a rep to review, edit, regenerate or send it with one click. Its agents scan the market every day for buying signals, and research agents pull the context behind each signal from Amplemarket’s own B2B database. Sequences cover email, social and phone, and Duo Voice comes with Growth and above. The entry price is higher than Artisan’s Intern plan: Startup is $600 a month on an annual term, for 2 users and 27,000 contacts (as of October 2026). Growth and Elite are custom, and a free trial is listed on every plan.

Best for: a handful of reps who would rather pay per seat each month than buy a year of credits.

Where Artisan’s startup plans are an annual credit bundle, Unify sells seats month to month: Base is $20 and Pro $60 per seat a month, with 800 and 2,400 credits, and the free plan covers up to 3 seats with limited credits (as of October 2026). Business is custom and billed annually. Its outbound agents check account fit and qualify lists against 1.1B+ people, 65M+ companies and 40+ data sources, using signals such as hiring, funding, news and tech stack, then run email, call and social steps in one sequence. Unify says reps should spend their time reviewing drafts instead of writing them, although automated plays on Business can run on autopilot.

Best for: individual reps and small teams who want one workspace for research, email and dialing.

Regie.ai’s RegieGO is an agentic sales workspace with built-in enrichment, email, dialing and workflows, run from one chat. It tracks why-now signals for each account, such as a funding round, new leaders or a hiring push, and its credits pay for researching accounts. Channels are email, a power dialer and social. How people approve messages is not clearly stated on its homepage or pricing page, where plays are shown as run by Regie, so ask in a demo. Pricing (as of October 2026): Free with 250 one-time credits; Pro $49 a month ($41 billed annually); Team $150 per seat a month ($125 billed annually), two seats minimum; Enterprise custom.

Best for: teams whose Artisan leads were a poor fit, and who want to read sourced research on each lead before their own people send.

Lead fit is a recurring theme in Artisan’s G2 reviews. Twain puts research and a check in front of every send. It researches each account and contact on the web in real time, with dates and source links, and a qualification agent flags problems before you send. You set the depth per lead: Base runs 1 search, High up to 5 and Ultra up to 10. It then writes one-to-one sequences for email, social and calls, which your team sends through its own tools on every plan below Enterprise. Pricing (as of October 2026): Starter $49 a month for 500 credits or $99 for 1,000; Pro from $198 a month for 2,000 credits up to $1,260 for 14,000; 500 free credits for 30 days.

Best for: account executives with a set territory who want briefs and drafts on the accounts they already own.

Artisan finds and contacts leads at volume. Salesmotion starts from accounts you already track: its Deep Research Agent writes briefs from earnings calls, filings and news, and its Signal Agent watches those accounts for changes. It also offers verified contacts and drafts email and social messages for the rep to send; its pages do not describe sending. The Individual plan is $85 a month, billed monthly, for 100 monitored accounts (as of October 2026), and team plans are custom.

Best for: smaller teams that would rather contact fewer accounts each month and know why each one qualifies, with a person approving every message.

SalesOne works from the other end of Artisan’s volume model. Its S1 deep research agents start from your company and a structured ideal customer profile and check each company against it. Across our runs, they turned down about three of every four companies they checked, and for each account delivered they ran about 30 searches and opened the pages that matter. A company that is turned down keeps the rule it failed and the evidence, so a poor fit shows up before anyone is contacted. Every buying trigger carries its source and the date it happened.

• Who gets contacted: S1 maps each account’s buying committee, about four people per account, each backed by a dated public source, mostly filings, company pages and press releases rather than a profile alone.
• How it differs from Artisan: Ava is autonomous by default, and Artisan prices by leads contacted. SalesOne has no autopilot, and its price follows the plan and the qualified accounts you need, with no seats or credits.
• Approval: nothing goes out until a person on your team approves it, and a reply pauses the account until a person answers. See how outreach works.
• Pricing: SalesOne does not publish prices. Each plan is priced on a call, with a written price within two business days. The self-serve Platform plan is in early access; Managed and Custom start with 90 days against agreed success criteria, then, if you choose to continue, a 6- or 12-month term. See pricing.

Mostly in name. Artisan calls Ava an AI BDR and 11x calls Alice an AI SDR, and both find prospects, write and send outreach, handle replies and book meetings. In human teams the titles can mark a split between inbound and outbound work, or simply follow company habit; see SDR vs BDR. For software, compare what the tool researches, who approves each message and how it is billed. The title tells you little. For how the whole motion fits together, see outbound sales and what an AI SDR is.

Managed AI SDR plans, outsourced SDR agencies and the optional SalesOne SDR seat are compared on our 11x alternatives page.

Artisan is built to contact many leads each month. SalesOne is built for fewer accounts, each with a recorded reason. Pick something else if any of these matter more to you:

• You want outreach to go out without a person’s click, now or later. Artisan and 11x offer that; SalesOne always waits for an approval.
• You want AI to handle replies and objections, as Ava does. In SalesOne a reply pauses the account and a person answers.
• You want to search and export a large contact database. Artisan lists 250M+ contacts; SalesOne finds contact details only for the people your team picks.
• You want a free plan or a published startup price. Artisan, Unify, Regie.ai, Twain and AiSDR publish one. SalesOne prices each plan on a call, and its self-serve Platform plan is in early access.
• You want CRM sync in both directions. Artisan lists two-way CRM sync; SalesOne logs each sent email to your CRM by BCC.
• You want inbound voice or chat agents. 11x sells them; SalesOne does not.
• Your buyers are mostly outside the US. SalesOne serves US B2B sales teams and follows US outreach rules.

Stay with Artisan if its volume model and autonomy suit how you sell. It is a strong fit when:

• You want outbound run for you at volume, with replies and objections handled by Ava.
• You want to start small: the Free plan and the 30-day credit trial let you test before paying.
• You want contact search, enrichment, sequencing and a dialer in one tool, in place of several.
• You are comfortable setting approval mode, banned phrases and escalation rules yourself.
• Ava’s lead fit is already tuned to your market.

1. Decide who approves each message, then rule out tools that cannot do it. The options run from every message, to samples only, to autonomous by default.
2. Decide the unit you want to pay for: leads contacted, credits, seats, people prospected or qualified accounts. Convert each quote to a cost per qualified account. See AI SDR pricing.
3. Check lead fit before message quality. Ask each vendor for three real accounts from your market, researched, with sources and dates.
4. Check the commitment and what sits on which plan: annual billing, credits that expire, and integrations reserved for Enterprise.
5. Test on accounts you already know well. If the research is wrong on accounts you know, it will be wrong on the ones you do not.

For the wider field, see the best AI SDR tools.