AI SDR Alternatives in 2026: 11x, Artisan, AiSDR, Alta, Amplemarket, Unify, and Building Your Own

An AI SDR does five jobs: decide who to contact, research them, write the message, send it, and handle the reply. Every product below does all five. They differ in which of the five you can see, change and keep. Buy one and you rent the coworker: the targeting, the judgment and the history accumulate in the vendor’s system, and when you leave, the part that stays portable is the contact list, at best.

That is a fine trade for a lot of teams. It is a bad one when outbound is a core motion, the ICP keeps moving, or the people who own GTM write code. This page compares six AI SDRs on what they send, what they publish about price and who they fit, then covers the seventh option: building the SDR on infrastructure you own.

Quick answer #

• You want meetings next month and nobody on the team writes code: buy one. AiSDR publishes its prices, Amplemarket keeps a rep in front of every send, 11x and Artisan sell the most complete hands-off worker.
• You want reps to stay in charge and the AI to make them faster: Unify or Amplemarket.
• Outbound is a core motion and you want the targeting, scoring and copy as code you can review, test and keep: build it on Cargo, and send through Cargo mailboxes or the sequencer you already run.

AI SDR comparison #

Prices are the vendors’ published figures on 2026-10-07. Where a vendor publishes none, the cell says so.

1. Cargo: build the AI SDR yourself #

Cargo is not an AI SDR. It is the infrastructure underneath one: the data model, the enrichment, the scoring, the agents and the plays that decide who gets contacted, with what, and when. You build the SDR out of those pieces, declared in TypeScript and deployed the way you deploy any other code, and a coding agent can do most of the building.

What it covers: All five jobs. Sourcing and enrichment run on maintained connectors across data providers. Scoring is a model you write and version. Research and copy are agents that read your company context (ICP, personas, objections, proof) from a git repository rather than from a prompt somebody pasted. Sending runs either through Cargo mailboxes, inboxes the workspace owns, warmed from 5 to 40 sends a day over 45 days with one-click unsubscribe and a suppression list checked on every send, or through the sequencer you already use: lemlist, Instantly, Smartlead, HeyReach, Outreach, Salesloft, Email Bison, La Growth Machine and Amplemarket all have Cargo connectors. Replies can wake an agent on the same thread, which reads the history and answers or closes the conversation.

The operating model: Start from published cookbooks rather than a blank file. A working outbound engine is three of them:

npm install -g @cargo-ai/cli
cargo-ai login --email you@company.com
cargo-ai project init my-gtm --cookbook account-scoring
cd my-gtm
cargo-ai project add cookbook/new-hire-detection
cargo-ai project add cookbook/agentic-engagement
npm install              # the cookbooks' dependencies
cargo-ai project plan

Account scoring tiers every company in your market A, B, C or disqualified with an agent that reads your ICP rubric, a signal cookbook such as new hire detection or visitor identification decides when, and agentic engagement sends and handles replies. project plan prints the diff before anything deploys, so a change to who gets emailed is a pull request someone reviews, not a setting someone toggled.

Built for: Technical GTM teams, GTM engineers and founders who already run Claude Code, Cursor or Codex, and who want outbound to behave like the rest of their software: versioned, tested, observable, and theirs.

Where it breaks: You build it. There is no finished AI SDR to switch on, and the first useful version is days of work, not minutes. Cargo mailboxes live on a sending domain registered through Cargo, support Google, shared and private inboxes but not Outlook, and cannot yet sit on a domain you connect yourself. If nobody on the team writes code or directs an agent that does, one of the products below fits better.

Pick it when: Outbound is a core motion, the targeting changes every quarter, and you want the logic that decides who hears from you in a repository you own. Upfluence runs this shape on Cargo: product usage scores users, and the ones worth a touch go into Instantly sequences with an icebreaker written from that usage.

2. 11x #

11x sells AI digital workers. Alice runs outbound and Julian handles inbound, and the pitch is a hire rather than a tool: the worker prospects, writes and follows up across email, phone and multi-channel sequences.

What it covers: All five jobs, with 11x’s own mailbox management and deliverability infrastructure underneath the sends.

Built for: Sales and growth teams who want an outbound worker running without building anything, and who are comfortable committing to one vendor for data, copy and sending.

Where it breaks: Pricing is not published, so cost is a sales conversation. The targeting and the copy logic live in 11x, so what the worker learned about your market stays there.

Pick it when: You want the most complete hands-off outbound worker you can buy, and buying beats building for your team.

3. Artisan #

Artisan sells Ava, an AI BDR. Ava finds leads in Artisan’s own contact database, which Artisan puts at more than 250 million contacts, writes and sends from your domains, handles replies and books meetings. Ava 2.0 launched on 2026-05-26.

What it covers: All five jobs, with the data bundled. That is the main difference from 11x: the contact database is part of the product.

Built for: Startups and sales teams that want data, copy and sending from one vendor with as little setup as possible.

Where it breaks: Pricing is credit-based with plan tiers and no published figures. As with any bundled worker, the data source and the targeting logic are the vendor’s, so swapping either means swapping the product.

Pick it when: You do not have a data provider yet and want one purchase to cover the list and the outreach.

4. AiSDR #

AiSDR is a signal-driven AI SDR with an optional managed service, and it is the clearest on price in this list.

What it covers: All five jobs. Plans bundle sending infrastructure: Solo includes 1 domain, 3 mailboxes and 1 LinkedIn account.

Pricing: Solo is $250 a month, monthly, for 200 AI-researched contacts. Explore is$900 a month and Scale $2,500 a month, both billed quarterly, with 20 percent off for annual payment.

Built for: Founders and small revenue teams who want to start without a sales call and know the cost up front.

Where it breaks: Volume is priced per researched contact, so a wide top of funnel gets expensive faster than a narrow one. The logic that picks contacts is AiSDR’s.

Pick it when: You want to test AI outbound this month with a published price and a plan you can cancel.

5. Alta #

Alta describes itself as an AI GTM system of actions, sold as three agents: Katie for outbound, Alex for inbound by call and chat, and Luna for signals.

What it covers: Outbound, inbound and signal monitoring, across email, LinkedIn, SMS, WhatsApp and phone.

Built for: Growing B2B teams that want outbound, inbound response and signal tracking from one vendor rather than three.

Where it breaks: Pricing is quote only. The breadth that makes it attractive is also the lock-in: three agents and their logic in one system.

Pick it when: Inbound response by phone and chat matters as much as outbound, and you want both from the same team of agents.

6. Amplemarket #

Amplemarket is an all-in-one sales platform rather than an AI worker. Its AI, Duo, is a copilot that does the prep, and Amplemarket’s own description is that it never sends or changes things without visibility.

What it covers: Data, mailboxes with deliverability tooling (warm-up and domain health), LinkedIn, a parallel dialer, and Duo drafting and prioritizing for the rep.

Pricing: Startup is $600 a month on an annual term for 2 users. Growth and Elite are custom.

Built for: Sales teams where reps still own the send and want the platform to make each one faster.

Where it breaks: It is a seat-shaped product for reps, not a worker that runs on its own, and its scoring and targeting are the platform’s.

Pick it when: You want an AI that assists reps rather than replaces the touch. It also works next to Cargo: Cargo can score and enrich, then create the lead in Amplemarket for the rep to work.

7. Unify #

Unify has shifted into a conversational workspace for outbound sellers. A rep describes who to reach, the agent researches accounts and people, builds the audience, drafts the message and prepares the sequence, and the rep decides what runs. Unify’s own framing is AI for SDRs rather than AI SDRs.

Built for: SDRs, AEs and sales leaders who want each rep to prospect with an AI copilot and approve every message.

Where it breaks: It is an outbound system of action, not the shared data and decision layer for the whole customer lifecycle.

Pick it when: Warm outbound is the motion, reps are the mechanism, and one vendor should own signal to send. We compare the two in detail on Cargo vs Unify.

How to choose #

Three questions decide most cases.

Who writes the targeting logic? If the answer is a vendor, buy. If the answer is your team, and it changes every time the ICP does, you want it as code in a repository, which is what Cargo is for.

Who should see each message before it leaves? Amplemarket and Unify keep a rep in the loop by design. 11x, Artisan and AiSDR are built to send without one. On Cargo it is a decision you make per play: a human review step in the workflow, or none.

What do you keep when you leave? With a bundled AI SDR, you keep the contact list. With an engine you built, you keep the scoring model, the research agent, the prompts, the context they read and the history of every run, because all of it is files in your repository.

Frequently asked questions #

Sources #

• Cargo: mailboxes, changelog, cookbooks, pricing, and Upfluence customer story.
• 11x: digital workers and Alice.
• Artisan: Ava, pricing, and Ava 2.0 launch.
• AiSDR: pricing.
• Alta: platform and plans.
• Amplemarket: Duo and pricing.
• Unify: current platform and the shift to a conversational workspace for outbound sellers.