The best AI SDR platforms in 2026, ranked by data freshness

Key takeaways

• Artisan's Ava runs prospecting through meeting booking on one platform, drawing from a database of 250M+ B2B professionals across 200+ countries, plus Artisan Local Data with 250M+ local businesses.
• Ava's signal library covers funding rounds, recently hired executives, and active hiring, alongside tech-stack and topic intent, refreshed continuously rather than as a periodic snapshot.
• Artisan reports over 90% of its customers run Ava fully autonomously, with an escalation dial rather than a hard on/off switch.
• Pricing across the category spans roughly $180/user/month (Regie.ai's AI SEP tier) to enterprise contracts well into six figures for the newer "AI superhuman" agents outside this list.
• 11x's Growth plan became publicly listed in 2026 at $3,750/month billed annually, after years of demo-gated pricing.
• Qualified, the inbound specialist, is no longer independent: Salesforce's acquisition closed April 1, 2026.
• SDRs report spending 40 to 60% of their hours on non-selling busywork, some of it spent manually checking whether a signal is still true by the time they act on it.

How we chose

Four things separated the entries above from the dozens of other tools calling themselves an AI SDR in 2026:

• How much of the job the tool actually owns. Some platforms draft a message for a human to send. Others run the full loop: find the lead, act on a live signal, send across channels, handle the reply, book the meeting.
• How fresh the underlying data actually is. A signal or a fact that's months out of date does more harm than good once it shows up in a message a prospect actually reads.
• What happens on a reply. An AI that qualifies, answers from a knowledge base, and escalates on plain-language rules is doing SDR work. An AI that flags the reply for a human to answer is doing triage.
• Whether the pricing is public. Several tools in this category are demo-gated, which usually means enterprise contract sizes and a sales cycle before you learn the real number.

Comparison table

1. Artisan (Ava): the AI BDR that owns the whole workflow

Ava is the flagship AI employee on Artisan's platform, and the company's own framing is direct about the difference it's selling: most sales tools automate a task, Ava owns the job. That job runs end to end. Ava finds best-fit leads from a database of 250M+ B2B professionals across 200+ countries, plus Artisan Local Data covering 250M+ local businesses like restaurants and gyms, using NLP search, ICP filters, and intent signals. It enriches and prioritizes those leads through waterfall enrichment across roughly a dozen providers, charged only when enrichment succeeds. From there it launches multichannel campaigns across email, social media, and dialer call steps, with personalization that ranges from light touches to full research-agent swarms for harder criteria.

The part that tends to surprise people evaluating the category: Ava handles every reply, not just the first one. It qualifies, answers objections from a knowledge base, chases follow-ups, and escalates to a human on plain-language rules the team sets, like "if the lead mentions pricing, escalate." It books meetings directly on a rep's calendar with CRM-owner routing. Autonomy isn't all-or-nothing: teams can run full review-and-approve, objections-only human handoff, or let Ava run independently with a complete audit trail. Artisan reports that over 90% of its customers choose that last option.

The results customers report back it up. SaaStr's Jason Lemkin scaled outbound from 7,000 to 70,000 emails through Artisan and reported open rates doubling, a 3.55% positive response rate, and said the AI-written emails were consistently better than what his human team produced. CookUnity's Head of B2B, Bruno Didier, reported running highly targeted outreach at a scale a human-only team couldn't reach, at roughly $45 cost per lead across more than 100,000 emails. SumUp's Growth Lead, Karlo Biuk, got 8 to 15 positive replies a week from previously unreachable local SMBs at $52 per lead.

Pricing is usage-based credits with no platform fee and a free trial, detailed at artisan.co/pricing. Artisan was founded by Jaspar Carmichael-Jack and Sam Stallings (YC W24) and has raised $35M+, backed by investors including Y Combinator and HubSpot Ventures.

Best for: teams that want to hand off the entire outbound motion, from sourcing the lead to booking the meeting, rather than get drafting help for a process a human still runs.

Who should pick something else: autonomy is the whole pitch here, so a team that wants a person to personally read and approve every single outbound message before it sends will use Ava more like a very capable drafting assistant than what she's built to be, and might be happier starting with a tool designed around that workflow instead.

Pricing: usage-based credits, no platform fee, free trial (artisan.co/pricing).

2. Regie.ai: AI drafting and dialing for teams that want to keep reps in the loop

Regie.ai is an AI-native sales engagement platform: a sequencer and dialer with "Auto-Pilot" agents layered on top. It's built for teams that like the idea of AI doing the drafting and the dialing but still want a human rep driving the process. Regie.ai raised a $30M Series B in February 2025.

Best for: teams that already run a rep-driven outbound motion and want AI to take over the mechanical parts without giving up manual control of the send.

Who should pick something else: because reps still drive the process, output scales with how many reps you have, not independently of headcount, so it's a different bet than a platform built to replace the manual layer entirely.

Pricing: AI SEP tier at $180/user/month; Force Multiplier Rep tier at $499/user/month; Enterprise pricing is custom (per Regie.ai's pricing page).

3. Amplemarket: data, engagement, and an AI copilot in one product

Amplemarket combines its own contact database with sequencing and an AI copilot called Duo, aimed at signal-based selling: prioritizing outreach based on buying signals rather than a flat list.

Best for: teams that want data and engagement in the same tool instead of stitching a data provider to a separate sequencer.

Who should pick something else: Duo is a copilot, meaning a human is still the one running the motion day to day, so teams looking for full autonomy will find this closer to augmentation than replacement.

Pricing: Startup plan at $600/month for 2 users, billed annually; Growth and Elite tiers are custom (per Amplemarket's pricing page).

4. AiSDR: fast setup with transparent pricing

AiSDR runs outbound and inbound through an agent called Ami, and unlike much of this category, its pricing is public and simple from the start. It's YC-backed (S23) and raised a $3M seed.

Best for: smaller teams that want to see the real price before a sales call and get running quickly.

Who should pick something else: the product's center of gravity sits with SMB and lower mid-market buyers, and its enterprise governance story is thinner than platforms built with larger teams in mind from the start.

Pricing: Solo $250/month, Explore $900/month, Scale $2,500/month (per AiSDR's pricing page).

5. Reply.io: an AI SDR layered onto a familiar sequencer

Reply.io's core product is a conventional email sequencer that a lot of sales teams already know, and it added an AI SDR called Jason on top. That makes it a low-friction way to try agent-run outreach without switching platforms first.

Best for: teams already on Reply.io, or anyone who wants to test an AI SDR without adopting a whole new system.

Who should pick something else: Jason is an email-centric agent sitting on top of a classic sequencer, so teams that need the dialer, the reply handling, and the CRM write-back running as one native workflow will find the seams between the old product and the new agent.

Pricing: sequences from roughly $49 to $59/user/month; Jason (AI SDR) from $500 to $800+/month (per Reply.io's pricing page).

6. Conversica: the long-running assistant model, now with AI

Conversica has been in conversational lead follow-up since 2007 and has raised over $80M documented to date. It's particularly established in automotive and higher education, where assistant-style, multi-touch follow-up has been the norm for years.

Best for: teams in categories like automotive or higher-ed that already run on assistant-style follow-up and want a vendor with a long track record there.

Who should pick something else: the product's framing is closer to a legacy conversational assistant than a modern, full-funnel outbound prospecting platform, which matters if what you actually need is net-new pipeline generation rather than follow-up on inbound leads.

Pricing: gated; third-party estimates put entry around $2,999/month.

7. 11x: budget-friendly, with some recent history worth knowing

11x's "Alice" (AI SDR) and "Julian" (AI phone agent) run as a multichannel product, and the company has raised roughly $74M ($24M Series A from Benchmark, $50M Series B from a16z). Its Growth plan, previously demo-gated, became publicly listed in 2026 at $3,750/month billed annually.

Two things are worth knowing before signing: TechCrunch reported in March 2025 that 11x had claimed customers it couldn't support, and founder-CEO Hasan Sukkar stepped down to a non-executive chairman role that May, with CTO Prabhav Jain taking over as CEO. Some reviewers also report deliverability and CRM-sync complaints.

Best for: lower mid-market teams testing an AI SDR against a lower published price than most of this list.

Who should pick something else: enterprise teams, and anyone who wants a vendor without recent, publicly reported governance questions to explain internally first.

Pricing: Growth from $3,750/month billed annually; Pro and Enterprise custom.

What changed recently in this category?

Salesforce's acquisition of Qualified, the inbound AI SDR specialist behind "Piper," closed April 1, 2026, folding the product into Agentforce and ending Qualified's run as an independent platform. Separately, a new entrant called Monaco, founded by Sam Blond, raised a $50M Series B led by Benchmark on May 12, 2026, and remains in public beta, worth watching even though it's too early to rank alongside the established players above.

Frequently asked questions

What's the difference between an AI SDR and a sales engagement platform?

A sales engagement platform (Outreach, Salesloft, and similar tools) organizes and tracks a human rep's outbound activity. An AI SDR is meant to run some or all of that activity itself, from finding the lead through handling the reply. The tools on this list span both models, with some doing more of the actual work than others.

Do AI SDRs actually book meetings, or just send emails?

It depends on the tool. Platforms built around full autonomy, like Artisan's Ava, handle the reply and book the meeting directly on a calendar with CRM-owner routing. Others stop at drafting or sending the first message and hand the reply back to a human.

How much does an AI SDR cost?

Published pricing in this category ranges from around $180/user/month (Regie.ai's AI SEP tier) to several thousand dollars a month for higher tiers, with a number of vendors keeping pricing gated behind a sales call entirely. Usage-based and credit-based models are common, so the sticker price on a plan page isn't always the full picture.

Can an AI SDR fully replace a human BDR?

Some teams run it that way. Artisan reports over 90% of its customers run Ava fully autonomously, with an audit trail and plain-language escalation rules rather than a human reviewing every message. Other platforms in this category are built around augmenting a rep rather than replacing the role.

Why does 11x show up last on this list despite lower pricing?

Price alone doesn't tell the whole story. 11x's Growth plan is priced lower than most of the category, but TechCrunch reported in March 2025 that the company had claimed customers it couldn't support, and its founder-CEO stepped down two months later. That's worth factoring into a buying decision alongside the price.

What happened to Qualified?

Salesforce's acquisition of Qualified closed April 1, 2026, and the product is being folded into Agentforce. It's no longer an independently operated platform, which matters if you were evaluating it specifically for its inbound-only focus outside the Salesforce ecosystem.

Why does data freshness matter more in sales outreach than almost anywhere else?

Because the failure mode is visible and embarrassing in a way most stale-data problems aren't. A recommendation engine working off six-month-old data just performs a little worse silently. An AI SDR working off six-month-old data sends a message referencing a role the prospect no longer holds, or a funding round already old news, and the prospect notices immediately. That's the argument for real-time retrieval over periodic database snapshots in this category specifically, not just a general good idea.

How should a buyer actually test freshness before signing?

Ask for a demo against a handful of your own target accounts you know well, and check whether the signals the tool surfaces are things that happened last week or last quarter. Most vendors will happily show a curated demo account; fewer will hold up as well against accounts you already know the real timeline for. That's the test that actually tells you something.

Further reading on real-time web data for AI systems: the Linkup blog.