12 Best AI SDR Tools in 2026: Inbound and Outbound, Compared

Pick an AI SDR by where your leads come from. If you need conversations with people who have not found you yet, you want an outbound agent: 11x if you want AI workers bought through a demo, Artisan if you want an AI BDR with approval controls, AiSDR for a full agent at a published monthly price, Regie.ai for a small team on a budget, and Amplemarket or Apollo if your reps run the campaigns and want AI help inside the tool.

If people already visit your website and leave without talking to anyone, you want an inbound agent. Enterprises on Salesforce usually start with Qualified. Darwin is the closest match you can set up yourself and pay for per booked meeting. Warmly suits teams that want to know which companies are visiting, Breakout and Docket handle forms and chat in one agent, and HubSpot's chat is worth switching on first if HubSpot is already your CRM. 11x sells a separate agent for each job: Alice for outbound and Julian for inbound.

The two jobs share a label and little else, and most lists of AI SDR tools cover only the outbound kind. This one keeps them in separate groups so you can skip the half you do not need.

A disclosure before the list: we make Darwin, an inbound AI SDR that lives in your website chat, so we are not neutral. The outbound group comes first because that is what most people mean by an AI SDR. Among the inbound tools, Darwin comes second, after Qualified, because for answering a visitor and booking the meeting it is the closest match you can install yourself; its section also lists what it cannot do. Prices and plan details are taken from each vendor's own website and carry the date we last confirmed them.

An outbound AI SDR works the top of the cold-outreach funnel. It pulls a list from a contact database, researches each person, writes a message, sends it by email, phone or LinkedIn, handles the first reply and passes anything warm to a rep. You judge it on reply rates and meetings per thousand contacts, and you usually pay per seat, per contact or in credits.

An inbound AI SDR replaces the contact form and the wait for a reply. Someone is on your pricing page with a question right now. The agent answers it from your content, asks a qualifying question and offers a time on a rep's calendar. You judge it on conversations per hundred visits and meetings per page, and you pay per seat, per conversation, on an annual contract or, in Darwin's case, per booked meeting.

The difference that matters most is intent. An outbound agent is only as good as its list and its offer, and it competes with every other AI sending cold email. An inbound agent talks to people who chose to visit you. If the problem is that too few of the right people find you, start outbound. If they find you and leave without a conversation, start inbound.

• Outbound: finds people, writes and sends, handles replies. Judged on replies and meetings per contact.
• Inbound: answers visitors, qualifies, books. Judged on meetings per page.
• Both: qualify, book, hand off to a person and write to your CRM.

A tool made the list if an AI agent does the first part of a sales development rep's job, starting the conversation, qualifying and getting a meeting booked, either with prospects it finds or with visitors on your website. Apollo and Amplemarket are platforms where the AI helps a rep rather than working alone; they are here because many teams weigh them against the agents for the same budget. We left out contact databases with no agent and live chat inboxes that do not qualify.

• Sources. We read each vendor's own pricing, product and help pages in September 2026, then read them again on 5 October 2026. Each price, plan and capability in this guide is stored as a fact with its source and the date we last confirmed it, and a table cell shows both when you hover over it.
• One question to a chat. Qualified publishes no prices, so on 2 October 2026 we asked Piper, the chat on Qualified's own website, what it costs. We gave no contact details and booked nothing.SourcesQualified ↗
• Limits. We did not buy or trial every tool, and we do not repeat vendors' own outcome claims. Not documented in a cell means the vendor's public pages did not confirm the capability, which is different from a no.
• Our own product. Darwin's facts are checked on the same schedule as everyone else's, and its section lists what it does not do.

Each tool's pros and cons come from one review of that product that we keep up to date and reuse wherever the product appears on our blog. The summaries and verdicts were written for this guide, for a buyer deciding between AI SDRs.

Six tools that find people and start conversations with them. They run from full agents that work the whole loop (11x, Artisan, AiSDR), through an agent workspace where a rep approves the output (Regie.ai), to sales platforms with AI built in (Amplemarket, Apollo). We do not build outbound software, so these sections stick to what each vendor publishes.

Six tools that talk to the people already on your site. Qualified comes first as the enterprise option most teams look at, then Darwin, which is ours, as the one you can set up yourself. The rest run from account identification (Warmly) to forms and chat in one agent (Breakout, Docket) to the chat you may already own (HubSpot). 11x's inbound worker, Julian, also answers website chat; it is covered in the 11x section above. The same tools, compared as chat platforms, are in our guide to conversational marketing platforms.

Six questions to ask on every demo. The first one tells you which half of this guide to read.

1. Where do the leads come from? From your website or from a contact database. That is inbound versus outbound, and it decides the rest.
2. How does it qualify? By conversation, by form, by enrichment data, or by a person reading the replies.
3. Does it book the meeting itself? On whose calendar, and does the prospect have to leave the conversation to do it?
4. What does it learn from? Your website, your documents, your CRM or a prospect database. Ask what happens when your pricing page changes.
5. What improves without a person changing it? Ask what the tool tests by itself, if anything, and what it needs from you to get better.
6. What is the unit on the invoice? Seats charge for people, contacts and credits charge for activity, contracts charge for the platform, and per-meeting pricing charges for the result. Match the unit to the thing you want more of.

The honest version of this section is short. AI SDRs are excellent at the parts of the job that are repetitive and fast: answering the same question for the hundredth time at 2 a.m., following up within a minute, offering a time slot, writing the first draft. They are poor at the parts that need judgment about a specific company: knowing that this prospect is a bad fit despite ticking every box, or that a champion just changed jobs.

So the pattern that works is sequencing, not replacement. Let the AI own the first conversation, the qualifying question and the calendar, and let a person own the meeting and everything after it. On a website that split comes naturally, because the agent's job ends when the meeting is booked. In outbound it takes more care, because a badly aimed agent sending at scale can do damage a single rep never could.

Prices in this guide run from free to a quote, and the unit on the invoice tells you more than the number.

Per seat. Apollo's paid plans start at $49/seat/mo on annual billing, and HubSpot's Sales Hub Starter at $20/seat/mo; both add credits for heavier use. Amplemarket sells annual plans with users included, from $600/mo. Seats are predictable, but they charge for people rather than results.SourcesApollo ↗HubSpot ↗Amplemarket ↗

Per contact or credit. AiSDR's Solo plan costs $250/mo for a monthly contact allowance, and Regie's Pro plan $49/mo with a pool of credits. Artisan's startup plans also run on monthly credits. This model works when the size of your list is what limits you.SourcesAiSDR ↗Regie.ai ↗

Per contract. 11x and Qualified quote after a demo, as does Artisan for business and enterprise plans. Qualified's own chat would not give us a starting price or a range. Warmly's Inbound Chat starts at $20,000/yr, Docket's Core plan at $4,000/mo billed annually, and Breakout's Growth tier at $2,000/mo. These are budgets that need a business case.SourcesQualified ↗Warmly ↗Docket +1 ↗Breakout +1 ↗

Per booked meeting. Darwin's Free plan costs $0/mo and includes 5 free credits once, then charges $30/credit; paid plans start at $299/mo with credits included. You are not charged per conversation, so a busy month costs more only if it books more meetings or takes more requests. The pricing page shows every plan and what an extra booking costs.SourcesDarwin ↗

Twelve tools and two jobs is a lot to hold in your head, so here is the same list sorted by situation.

• You want an agent to run outbound for you. Compare 11x, bought through a demo, and Artisan, which lists startup plans and lets you approve what goes out.
• You want a full outbound agent at a published price. AiSDR.
• A small team trying an outbound agent on a budget. Regie.ai.
• Your reps run the campaigns and want AI help in the tool. Amplemarket, or Apollo if you also need the contact data and a free plan.
• An enterprise on Salesforce that wants an inbound agent. Qualified.
• You want website visitors answered and booked, set up yourself and paid per meeting. Darwin.
• Knowing which companies visit matters as much as the chat. Warmly.
• One agent for forms and chat. Breakout, or Docket for heavy traffic and a deep content library.
• HubSpot is already your CRM. Switch on its chat and customer agent before buying anything.
• One vendor for both outbound and inbound agents. 11x, with Alice and Julian.

Many B2B teams end up with one tool from each group. Start with the gap that costs you more today: too few of the right people finding you, or too many leaving your site without a conversation.