Four tools that put software on sales work. Two live on your domain and route hot visitors. Two run outreach and book meetings you were not getting. The buying decision is a lane decision first and a demo decision second.
Qualified is the on-site pipe. It lives on your pricing and demo pages, qualifies visitors who already have intent, and hands them to an SDR or books a meeting. If your funnel has high-intent traffic that dies at the booking step, Qualified is the tool for the gap.
Drift (Salesloft) is the older conversational-routing play. Chat on your site, route to the right rep, start the conversation with context. It is the right fit when you already run a Salesloft stack and just need the front door answered.
11x (Julian, Alice) is the autonomous SDR. It runs outbound and inbound: email, chat, phone, scheduling. Third-party reporting says funding is a16z and Benchmark backed. Published pricing starts at $5,333/mo for the voice agent and $2,417/mo for the chat agent, billed annually, on the Growth plan. This is the tool for a team with little or no SDR coverage.
Artisan (Ava) is the AI BDR. It identifies leads, enriches them, writes and sends sequences, queues calls, and books meetings. Plans are custom-quoted after a demo. It is the tighter outbound-specific pick when the job is cold pipeline, not inbound chat.
Last verified 2026-08-16. Vendor plans move; confirm current rates before you sign.
These four tools do not compete head to head. They split cleanly into two lanes that only appear to overlap on a slide deck. Choose the lane your funnel actually needs, then pick a vendor inside it.
| Lane | Tool | What it does | Who it is for |
|---|---|---|---|
| On-site routing | Qualified, Drift | Answers visitors on your domain, qualifies intent, routes to a human or books a meeting | Teams with existing high-intent traffic that needs a faster, cleaner handoff to sales |
| Outbound + inbound SDR | 11x, Artisan | Identifies prospects, writes and sends sequences, runs phone, books meetings without a human in the loop | Teams with little SDR coverage that need pipeline built rather than traffic merely answered |
| Tool | Lane | Published price | Primary mechanism | Buy if | Skip if |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 11x (Julian / Alice) | Outbound + inbound SDR | From $5,333/mo voice, $2,417/mo chat (Growth, annual) | Autonomous email, chat, phone, scheduling | No SDR desk, need inbound and outbound covered | You have a strong SDR team and only need chat routing |
| Artisan (Ava) | Outbound SDR | Custom, quoted | Lead research, enrichment, autonomous sequences, calls | Outbound is the job and you want research automated | Your inbound traffic is the bottleneck |
| Qualified | On-site conversation | Custom, quoted | High-intent chat, qualification, meeting booking | Pricing-page visitors should reach a human fast | You have little high-intent traffic |
| Drift (Salesloft) | On-site conversation | Custom, quoted | Conversational routing to SDRs | Existing SDR desk needs the front door answered | You want an autonomous digital worker, not a router |
If visitors reach pricing but never book, that is routing. If the pipeline is empty and no one calls anyone, that is outbound. Do not let a demo mistake one for the other.
With reps, buy routing (Qualified or Drift). Without reps, buy an SDR (11x or Artisan). An AI SDR under a human SDR is a coordination problem, not a force multiplier.
Inbound intent is best served on your domain with Qualified or Drift. Outbound requires enrichment and sequencing, which is 11x or Artisan territory.
Below ~5K qualified visitors a month, any of these is overkill. A custom GPT on Zapier can answer the door. Above that, the routing tools earn their keep.
Drift slots into a Salesloft stack. Qualified pushes tour context into the CRM cleanly. 11x and Artisan are more stack-agnostic but each does CRM sync differently, so verify the connector for your platform.
None of these work if the rep ignores the meeting the agent books. The tool is only as good as the follow-up your team actually does.
Outbound + inboundVoice + chatPublished pricing
11x sells a small suite of digital workers with distinct jobs. Alice is the outbound digital worker that runs cold email and outreach. Julian is the inbound conversation agent that answers chat and phone calls and books meetings. The two together cover the funnel a human SDR team would, minus the headcount.
Julian starts at $5,333/mo for the voice agent or $2,417/mo for the chat agent, billed annually, on the Growth plan. Pro and Enterprise are custom-quoted. Funding is reported as a16z and Benchmark backed. A single inbound call-center seat is often quoted at $4,000-8,000/mo, which makes the published floor roughly comparable to one loaded seat with more hours.
Teams with no SDR coverage, a real inbound and outbound volume, and budget for a digital worker rather than a second human hire.
OutboundCustom quoted
Artisan sells an AI sales-development representative named Ava. Its positioning is outbound: finding the next wave of prospects so your human AEs only talk to people worth talking to.
Plans are custom and quoted after a demo. That is normal for outbound tooling, but it means there is no published floor to compare against on a spreadsheet. The honest note: no number here is as good as one you get from their sales team, because the price tracks headcount and volume.
Teams with outbound as the job, no SDR desk, and a cold-pipeline problem rather than an inbound-leak problem.
On-site routingCustom quoted
Qualified is a conversation platform that sits on your pricing and demo pages and treats every high-intent visitor as a hand-off, not a chat log. Its whole job is to figure out who is ready and get them into the pipeline fast.
Custom and quoted by sales. Qualified does not publish a public rate card, so the plan price depends on volume and your CRM and workflows. Do not let a "from" number in a deck override what your rep actually quotes.
Teams with existing traffic that reaches pricing and demo pages and dies at the booking step.
On-site routingCustom quoted
Drift is the established conversational-marketing brand. Now inside Salesloft, it answers visitors on your site, triages intent, and hands them to the right rep with the context already loaded.
Custom, quoted after sales, and now bundled inside Salesloft. There is no public Drift price card on the standalone page. The practical question is whether you already pay for Salesloft, in which case Drift is often an activation cost rather than a new line item.
Existing Salesloft users with an SDR desk that just needs the front door answered consistently.
Both route on-site visitors. Qualified is newer, pipeline-oriented, and pushes clean context into your deal. Drift is the established name and slots into Salesloft. Pick by stack: already on Salesloft, Drift. Want the leanest handoff into your CRM and a pipeline-first posture, Qualified.
Both are AI SDRs for teams without coverage. 11x publishes its price floor and pushes phone work, which raises cost and reach. Artisan is email-and-social BDR shaped and tends to be the lighter, cheaper entry. Pick by whether phone matters: it does, 11x. It does not, compare both on quoted volume.
Many teams run Qualified or Drift on the site and 11x or Artisan for outbound. The lanes do not fight. What they share is a dependency: if no human reads the handoff, neither pays for itself.
| Situation | Recommended | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Pricing-page traffic that never books | Qualified or Drift | The leak is a routing gap; a conversation tool + handoff fixes it |
| Empty pipeline, no one cold-calling | 11x or Artisan | The gap is pipeline generation, which needs outbound, not chat |
| Volume outreach across many industries | 11x | Phone + email + chat covers the widest motion in one seat |
| Cold outbound, email and social only | Artisan | Focused BDR scope at a lighter entry than 11x |
| Already on Salesloft | Drift | Front door answered inside the stack you already own |
| HubSpot-heavy, want clean context push | Qualified | Pipeline-first handoff into the CRM |
| Under ~5K qualified visitors, small team | Custom GPT on Zapier | None of the four is worth it at this volume |
Below about 5,000 qualified visitors a month, an on-site tool is overkill and outbound is a distraction. A custom GPT on Zapier can answer the front door for $50-100/mo, and a spreadsheet of accounts plus a rep who calls them beats any AI SDR at low volume.
Separately: if the problem is that ChatGPT and Perplexity describe your brand wrong or do not cite you, none of these four fix that. That is visibility work, not sales-chat work. Wrong label, wrong tool.
An AI SDR (11x, Artisan) builds pipeline: it finds prospects, writes to them, and books meetings. A chat tool (Qualified, Drift) answers people already on your site and routes them. Different jobs, different lanes.
11x comes closest, covering chat, email, and phone on both sides. The others pick a lane. Asking one tool to do both thoroughly is rare and usually means you are paying for two products in one licence.
Julian starts at $5,333/mo for voice or $2,417/mo for chat, billed annually, Growth plan. Pro and Enterprise are custom. That is the only published floor of the four.
No, Artisan quotes after a demo. Treat any "from" figure as provisional and get the real number in writing.
Qualified is strong at pushing pipeline context into the CRM and is commonly paired with HubSpot. Drift slots into Salesloft. 11x and Artisan sync to a CRM you already have; verify the connector before committing.
No. None of them affect how answer engines describe you. That is visibility work, a different problem with different tools.
Below ~5K qualified visitors a month, or when the real bottleneck is positioning, not handoff. A GPT on Zapier covers the small-volume case.
Published pricing and product positioning were read from each vendor's site on 16 August 2026: 11x Julian pricing, Artisan pricing, Qualified pricing, and Salesloft / Drift pricing. Figures marked custom are quoted after a demo; we did not invent them. Product capabilities reflect current public documentation and positioning. No vendor paid for placement. Related: AI Visibility Tools Compared, the Profound bake-off, and the SaaS AI Citation Index.