Artisan AI alternative with Artisan AI pricing, what Ava the AI SDR does, and the flat-price option compared.

What Artisan AI actually is

Artisan sells Ava, marketed as an AI BDR or AI SDR that handles outbound prospecting end to end: finding accounts that match your ideal customer profile, enriching contacts from its own B2B data layer, writing personalized first-touch emails, and running the follow-up sequence. The company brands these as "AI employees," which is where a lot of the search interest comes from. It is a serious, well-funded product aimed squarely at sales teams, and on pure outbound it does more than we do.

Until recently the price was not public. On October 1, 2026 the Startups tab of artisan.co/pricing carried three self-serve plans with real numbers: Free at $0 with 300 credits a month, Intern at $250 a month billed annually or $280 monthly with 10,000 credits, and Employee at $600 annually or $660 monthly with 25,000 credits. The Businesses and Enterprises tab still lists Team at about 2,500 leads a month, Scale at about 6,000 and a custom Enterprise plan, each "pricing scoped on your plan". We take the credit arithmetic apart in full on Artisan AI pricing.

What Artisan AI costs, honestly

Mostly you can now, at least for a small team. Artisan prices its startup plans in credits and publishes what a credit buys: 2 credits for an email enrichment, 10 for a phone number, 2 for an autonomous reply, and about 20 for a complete email campaign on one person. So Intern's 10,000 credits cover about 500 contacted leads, roughly $0.50 each at $250 a month, and Employee's 25,000 cover about 1,250 at about $0.48 each.

Two structural details are worth planning around. First, the annual plans hand over a year of credits up front, which saves 10% and commits $3,000 or $7,200 before you know whether outbound works for you; monthly billing at $280 and $660 is the hedge. Second, phone numbers change the math: at about 30 credits a person with phone enrichment, Intern covers about 333 leads, and the human power dialer for your reps is $67 a seat a month on top. Our answer is the opposite structure: $149 a month, published, month to month, no credit meter.

What Artisan does not publish is the price for larger teams. The Businesses tab still routes Team, Scale and Enterprise to sales, and Artisan says those quotes are sized on lead volume, mailboxes and dialer seats. For contrast, the two large platform vendors we have priced in full both publish complete rate cards: Copilot Studio pricing works out to $0.008 a Copilot Credit, and Agentforce pricing to $0.005 a Flex Credit. Published rates are not the same as cheap, but you can model them on a spreadsheet in an afternoon.

One thing to discount when you read older guides: many still say Artisan publishes no price and quote third-party ranges from about $600 to over $7,000 a month. Those figures describe negotiated team deals from before the startup plans appeared. If you are a team of one to five, start from the published card.

Artisan is not unusual in hiding the number, but it is at the far end of the spectrum. For contrast, the two large platform vendors we have priced in full both publish complete rate cards you can compute against before talking to anyone: Copilot Studio pricing works out to $0.008 a Copilot Credit, and Agentforce pricing to $0.005 a Flex Credit. Published rates are not the same as cheap, and both of those stacks can run well past a quote-only tool once you add licensing and the platform underneath. But you can model them on a spreadsheet in an afternoon, which you cannot do here.

AI SDR versus a general-purpose agent

This is the real decision, and it matters more than price. An AI SDR is a specialist. It does one job, outbound prospecting, and it is built deep rather than wide: its own data layer, deliverability infrastructure, sequence logic and reporting all aimed at booking meetings. If outbound is the growth motion your business runs on, that depth is worth paying for.

A general-purpose agent is the other shape. You brief it in plain English and it finishes whole jobs across the business: "find 50 dental clinics in Texas hiring an office manager and draft outreach to each," but also "research how our top 20 competitors price," "triage the inbox and draft replies," "pull the weekly numbers and write the update." Outbound is one of the jobs rather than the only job. For a founder or a small team where nobody is a full-time SDR, that breadth usually beats depth, because the bottleneck moves week to week. If you want the wider view of that market with verified pricing, the AI SDR page lays it out, and AI sales assistant software separates the four different products sold under that one label.

The other Artisan AI alternatives worth knowing about

We are not the only option and pretending otherwise would make this page useless. If you want a dedicated AI SDR and Artisan is not the fit, 11x sells a comparable seat-based product at the high end, and Regie.ai and Apollo cover the same ground from different angles, Regie as a prospecting workspace with a dialer and Apollo as a data platform with sequencing attached, and Clay sits alongside them for deep enrichment. All of them are specialists, and all of them will do more pure outbound than a general agent.

If your actual problem is that you want to hand off work rather than run a sales motion, the comparison set changes. Lindy AI and Relevance AI are builders, where you assemble the agent yourself, and we compare against both honestly. For the wider category without us ranking ourselves first, the best AI agents for small business roundup covers it end to end, and AI agent pricing has a verified price table for eight vendors.