9 Best AI SDR Tools in 2026: 11x, Artisan, Regie, AiSDR, and Alternatives Compared

The short answer

AI SDR is the noisiest category in go-to-market tooling, and the gap between marketing claims and reported outcomes is wider here than anywhere else in the stack.

The products are real and some of them work. What is also real is that the category has a documented retention problem, that several vendors will not publish a price, and that at least one prominent player was found to be counting three-month trials as annual contracts. Any comparison that skips those facts is not useful to someone about to sign a contract.

So this article covers what each tool does and what it costs, and then spends equal time on the evidence about whether the category delivers. That second part is the part that should decide your purchase.

Pricing compared

1. Landbase

Best for: Teams that want autonomous campaign execution across a very large contact estate and are comfortable with a quote-based purchase.

Landbase runs a proprietary model branded GTM-1 Omni across specialised agents that plan and execute campaigns end to end, from account selection through enrichment, copy, and sending. The company reports 3B+ contact records on its data side and 220M+ contacts with 24M accounts in the campaign product, trained on a reported 40M+ B2B campaigns.

Pricing: Not published. Quote-based, contact sales. Third-party sites cite low-thousands-per-month figures, but these are unconfirmed estimates rather than a stated price, and cost varies with contact volume, agent count, and seats.

Where it falls short: The absence of published pricing is a genuine obstacle for a mid-market buyer trying to build a shortlist. The company's own published claims, including 4 to 7x higher conversions and up to 80% cost savings, are vendor-reported without a disclosed methodology, so they should not carry weight in a business case. Landbase also publishes a large volume of competitor pricing content, which is effective marketing but means its comparative material should be read as such.

Verdict: The strongest fit where campaign autonomy across a wide contact estate is the requirement. Insist on a pilot with defined success criteria before an annual commitment.

2. Artisan

Best for: Teams that want one AI BDR covering the full outbound motion, with a real entry price and the ability to test before committing.

Artisan's Ava handles lead sourcing, signal monitoring for events like funding rounds and hires, multichannel personalised campaigns, autonomous replies, and meeting booking. It draws on a reported 250M+ verified B2B contacts and syncs with Salesforce and HubSpot. Website visitor tracking at company and decision-maker level feeds directly into campaigns, which is a genuinely useful integration that most competitors charge separately for.

Pricing: This is where sources diverge, and the divergence is instructive. Artisan's own pricing page now shows quote-scoped tiers: Team at approximately 2,500 leads contacted monthly, Scale at approximately 6,000, and Enterprise custom. Third-party sources report a published $280 per month Intern plan and a $600 to $660 Employee plan, plus a free tier with 300 monthly credits. Other estimates put realistic spend at $2,000 to $5,000+ per month. Verify current packaging directly.

Where it falls short: The move away from published self-serve pricing toward quote-scoped plans is a step backwards for buyer transparency, and it happened recently enough that most comparison content is now wrong. There is no self-serve trial on the current packaging. Annual contracts are standard.

Verdict: The strongest fit for a team wanting a single agent across the whole motion. The lower published tiers, where still available, are the most accessible genuine entry point in this category.

3. Regie.ai

Best for: Teams that want AI agents and human reps working in one queue rather than running parallel outbound programmes.

Regie's positioning is the most defensible in the category, because it does not require you to believe that software replaces a rep. RegieOne puts AI agent tasks and human rep tasks in a single workflow, which means the AI handles coverage of accounts a rep would never reach while the rep keeps the accounts worth their time.

Pricing: Published, which is rare here. AI SEP at $180 per user per month on an annual contract with a 10-seat minimum, so $21,600 annually at the floor. Force Multiplier Rep at $499 per user per month with a 5-seat minimum, so $2,495 monthly or $29,940 annually, including 1,000 accounts and 4,000 contacts of data credits monthly, a parallel dialer with up to 9 lines, and 10 mailboxes with domain provisioning and two months of warming. Reply.io reports Regie quoting from $35,000 per year, which is consistent with these minimums.

Where it falls short: The seat minimums are the real barrier. A five-person team cannot buy AI SEP at all, and Force Multiplier at five seats is a $30,000 annual commitment. Per-user pricing also scales badly for larger teams compared with the volume-based models here.

Verdict: The strongest fit for teams of ten or more that want augmentation rather than replacement. The bundled mailbox provisioning and warming is worth more than it appears, since that is otherwise a separate infrastructure purchase.

4. AiSDR

Best for: Teams that want volume-based pricing with unlimited users and no per-seat maths.

AiSDR charges by message volume rather than seats, which suits teams where several people want visibility but only the system is sending. All standard plans include unlimited users and support.

Pricing: Explore at $900 per month for 1,200 AI messages. Grow at $2,500 per month for 4,500 messages. Enterprise custom, adding website visitor tracking, priority feature requests, a dedicated FTE for support, and SOC 2 Type 2. All plans bill quarterly, with no monthly option, though the company states you can cancel at any time and upgrade mid-quarter with prorating. Annual plans carry a 20% discount against quarterly. Note that AiSDR's own site advertises plans from $250 per month, which conflicts with the $900 Explore floor reported by multiple third parties, so confirm current packaging.

Where it falls short: Quarterly billing is a commitment structure dressed as flexibility, and the effective floor is $2,700 per quarter. At $900 for 1,200 messages, the per-message cost of $0.75 is high, and message volume is a poor proxy for value since a bad message costs the same as a good one.

Verdict: The strongest fit where unlimited user access matters and volume is predictable. Model the cost per booked meeting, not the cost per message, before committing.

5. 11x

Best for: Enterprise teams with a five-figure annual budget and the internal capacity to manage a demanding implementation.

11x sells digital workers: Alice for outbound prospecting and Julian for inbound qualification across phone, chat, and SMS. The platform bundles infrastructure that competitors charge separately for, including CRM sync, onboarding, deliverability support, and mailbox setup.

Pricing: The published figures conflict across 11x's own properties, which is worth stating plainly. One 11x page gives Alice at $3,750 per month billed annually, priced on leads rather than sends, with Julian at $5,333 monthly for Voice and $2,417 for Chat. Another 11x page states 11x starts at $36,000 per year. Third parties report a $5,000 per month plan covering 3,000 contacts and 15,000 emails, working out to roughly $1.67 per contact, and Vendr marketplace data showing a $40,125 median contract with a typical range of $38,250 to $65,550. Treat $36,000 to $65,000 annually as the realistic planning range.

Where it falls short: Beyond price opacity, reviewers consistently report shallow personalisation, with messages that insert a name and company but read as templated. There is no dialer. And the company's history, covered below, is directly relevant to a purchase decision.

Verdict: The strongest fit for enterprise buyers who have run a rigorous pilot and validated output quality against their own ICP. The bundled infrastructure has real value. Do not buy on the marketing.

6. Reply.io with Jason AI

Best for: Teams that want an AI SDR layer on a mature, established sequencing platform rather than a standalone agent.

Jason AI sits on Reply.io, which has been running multichannel outreach for years and has 1,448 G2 reviews behind it. That maturity is worth something in a category full of two-year-old companies.

Pricing: AI SDR Starter from $500 per month billed annually for 1,000 active contacts, rising to $800 for 2,000 and $1,000 for 3,000. AI SDR Growth from $1,500 for 5,000 contacts and $3,000 for 10,000. Enterprise custom. Separately, the core Reply.io sequencing product starts at $49 per user monthly, with LinkedIn automation at $69 per account monthly and calls plus SMS at $29. Amplemarket's analysis found the realistic stack runs $56,000 to $103,000 annually at 25 users, which illustrates how the add-ons compound.

Where it falls short: The add-on structure is the issue. The advertised per-user price covers email only, and building genuine multichannel means stacking charges. Jason AI is a separate product on top of that.

Verdict: The strongest fit for teams already on Reply.io. As a new purchase, model the full stack cost including channel add-ons before comparing it to flat-fee competitors.

7. Apollo.io

Best for: Teams that want AI assistance inside a platform they likely already own, without a separate contract.

Apollo is not an AI SDR in the agentic sense, and including it here is a deliberate reality check. For a large share of teams evaluating this category, the honest answer is that Apollo's existing AI features plus a competent human rep will outperform a $36,000 autonomous agent.

Pricing: Free tier available. Basic at $49 per user monthly annually, Professional at $79, Organization at $119 with a three-seat minimum. Credits expire each cycle and phone credits cost roughly 8x email credits.

Where it falls short: It does not do autonomous end-to-end execution. Data quality is the recurring complaint, with reported accuracy around 65 to 70% and bounce rates of 15 to 25%, which means verification is a necessary additional step.

Verdict: The strongest fit as the baseline you should beat. If a $36,000 agent cannot outperform Apollo plus a rep in a controlled pilot, that is your answer.

8. Topo

Best for: Teams evaluating newer agentic entrants alongside the established names.

Topo appears consistently in AI SDR shortlists and is worth including on a longlist, but public evidence is thin. Pricing is not published, independent reviews are limited, and there is no disclosed benchmark data.

Pricing: Not published. Quote-based.

Where it falls short: The evidence base is too thin to make a confident recommendation. In a category with 50 to 70% annual churn, vendor longevity is a legitimate purchase criterion, and newer entrants carry more of that risk.

Verdict: Worth a demo if your shortlist is already built. Not a safe anchor purchase on current public evidence.

9. Valley

Best for: Teams that want a leaner agentic tool and value a vendor publishing honest category research.

Valley publishes some of the more useful pricing analysis in this category, including a breakdown placing AI SDR tools in a $200 to $2,000 monthly band depending on seats and features, against a broader category range of $100 to $5,000. A vendor publishing a range that includes prices below its own is a mild positive signal.

Pricing: Not published directly. Its own research places tools of its type in the $200 to $2,000 monthly range.

Where it falls short: Same evidence problem as Topo. Limited independent review coverage and no published benchmark.

Verdict: Reasonable longlist inclusion for smaller teams. Verify pricing and run a pilot.

The churn number that should govern this decision

AI SDR tools are reported to churn at 50 to 70% annually. That figure appears in UserGems research, in Autobound's buyer guide, in Leadriver's comparison, and in 11x's own content, which is notable given the incentive not to publish it.

For context, that is roughly double the turnover rate of the human SDRs these tools are pitched as replacing. Gartner separately predicts that more than 40% of agentic AI projects will be cancelled by the end of 2027.

The reported causes are consistent across sources: slower ramp than expected, disappointing reply rates, and the discovery that the tool amplifies input quality rather than substituting for strategic thinking. Teams deploying without a clear ICP, a strong offer, or working deliverability infrastructure typically churn within nine months.

That last point is the operationally useful one. An AI SDR is a multiplier on your existing go-to-market clarity. If your ICP is fuzzy and your offer is weak, the tool will send more mediocre messages faster. It will not fix the underlying problem, and the cost of discovering that is a year of contract plus the opportunity cost of the pipeline you did not build.

The practical implication for a buyer: treat the first three months as the real evaluation, negotiate a break clause, and do not sign multi-year terms in a category with this retention profile.

What happened at 11x, and why it still matters

In March 2025, TechCrunch reported that 11x, backed by Benchmark and a16z, had been listing companies as customers that were not customers. Some named logos, including ZoomInfo and Airtable, had run short pilots and left. Some were reported to be considering legal action over unauthorised use of their branding.

The revenue picture was similarly reported as overstated. Against a claimed figure near $10M ARR, revenue retained beyond short-term trials was reported closer to $3M, with three-month trials counted as full-year contracts. Engineers were reported as saying the products barely worked.

This is included because it is directly material to a purchase decision, not to relitigate a story that is over a year old. Three things follow from it.

First, it is the clearest documented instance of the gap between AI SDR marketing and delivered results, and it validates treating vendor-reported outcome claims across this category with scepticism.

Second, the specific mechanism, counting trials as contracts, is the same mechanism that produces the category's 50 to 70% churn rate. Vendors that convert trials at low rates have an incentive to report the trials.

Third, 11x continues to operate, has since shipped substantially, and reports enterprise traction. Companies recover from reporting like this. The point is not that 11x should be excluded from a shortlist. The point is that if a well-funded vendor with sophisticated investors could sustain claims of that kind for as long as it did, your own pilot data is the only evidence worth acting on.

Why AI SDR pricing is so hard to compare

Four incompatible pricing models operate in this category simultaneously, which is why the comparison table above cannot produce a clean ranking.

Flat subscription pricing, used by AiSDR and 11x, charges for capacity whether or not you use it. Per-seat pricing, used by Regie and Reply.io, scales with team size rather than output. Volume pricing charges per message, contact, or lead. Usage and credit models charge per action, with different actions consuming different amounts.

Most vendors blend two of these, and the blend is where cost overruns live. A published per-seat price with separate data credits, as at Regie, is a different commitment from a flat message allowance, as at AiSDR, even when the headline monthly numbers match.

Two further factors distort comparison. The advertised price usually excludes data, since email finding, verification, and enrichment credits are frequently billed separately. And sending infrastructure, meaning domains, mailboxes, and warming, is bundled by some vendors and not others. Regie including 10 provisioned and warmed mailboxes is a real cost difference against a vendor that does not, and it will not appear in any comparison table.

The only reliable comparison is cost per booked meeting from a pilot on your own ICP. Every other metric in this category is a proxy that vendors have optimised for.

The augmentation finding

The most consistent finding across independent analysis is that augmentation outperforms replacement, and it is worth stating because it contradicts how most of these products are marketed.

Companies using AI to augment human SDRs rather than replace them are reported to see 2.8x more pipeline than those attempting full replacement. In head-to-head testing reported by Dashly, human SDRs generated $147,000 against $56,000 for AI, a 2.6x difference, with meeting show rates of 71% against 52%. UserGems reports 45% of sales teams now run a hybrid model.

These are third-party figures with limited methodological disclosure, and each has an interested party somewhere behind it. But the direction is consistent across independent sources, and it aligns with the churn data: teams that expect replacement are the teams that churn.

The operational reading is that AI SDR tools are strongest at coverage, meaning the long tail of accounts a human rep would never work, and weakest at conversion, meaning the accounts where a real conversation closes the deal. Buying for coverage and staffing for conversion is the configuration the evidence supports.

This is also why Regie's positioning, agents and humans in one queue, is the most defensible in the category on current evidence, whatever you conclude about its pricing.

Which tool fits which team

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FAQ: AI SDR tools

How much do AI SDR tools cost in 2026?

The category spans roughly $200 to $5,000+ per month, clustering in three tiers: light automation at $50 to $500, full agentic SDRs at $1,000 to $3,000, and enterprise platforms at custom pricing often above $5,000 monthly. Published entry points range from Artisan's $280 monthly plan to Regie's $21,600 annual floor and 11x's $36,000 to $65,000 range.

Do AI SDRs actually replace human reps?

The evidence says no, at least not in 2026. Reported head-to-head testing found human SDRs generating 2.6x more revenue with meeting show rates of 71% against 52%. Teams using AI to augment rather than replace are reported to see 2.8x more pipeline. The category's 50 to 70% annual churn rate is consistent with buyers expecting replacement and getting coverage.

Why do AI SDR tools churn so much?

Reported causes are slower ramp than expected, disappointing reply rates, and the realisation that the tool amplifies input quality rather than substituting for a clear ICP and a strong offer. Teams deploying without those fundamentals, or without working deliverability infrastructure, typically churn within nine months.

Which AI SDR tool has the most transparent pricing?

Regie.ai publishes per-seat pricing with stated seat minimums, and AiSDR publishes tier prices with message volumes. Artisan historically published the lowest entry price in the category, though its current packaging has moved to quote-scoped tiers. Landbase, Topo, and Valley do not publish pricing at all, and 11x publishes conflicting figures across its own properties.

Should I build my own instead of buying one?

Often, yes. A stack combining a sequencer, a data provider, and a waterfall enrichment layer is reported to undercut a packaged AI SDR by 60 to 80% if you already have an SDR or RevOps owner to run it. The trade-off is your own time. Buying makes sense when you lack the internal owner, not when you lack the clarity, since no tool supplies clarity.

What should I insist on before signing?

A pilot with success criteria you define, measured in booked meetings rather than messages sent, on your own ICP. A break clause. No multi-year term. Written confirmation of what is included, specifically whether data credits and sending infrastructure are bundled or billed separately, since that is where quoted prices and real costs diverge most.

#outbound-sales

Yananai A. Chiwuta

Author

Yananai Chiwuta is a Go-To-Market Architect and founder of Forma Nôrden. He builds Go-To-Market growth systems for B2B companies selling into enterprise and mid-market accounts.

Celine Sky

Reviewer

Celine ensures technical accuracy and strategic alignment across all Forma Nôrden playbooks and resources.

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