Every “Artisan vs 11x vs Regie.ai” comparison you’ll read online was written by a vendor, by a tool that sells against them, or by an affiliate who never sent a single email through any of them. I don’t sell any of these. I bought all three, pointed them at the same kind of prospects, and let them run my outbound unsupervised for 30 days.
Same ICP, same daily send cap, three separate sending domains, zero hand-holding.
One booked the most meetings. One wrote the best emails. One, on day three, hallucinated an entire funding round for a company that hadn’t raised one.
Here’s which was which — and whether any of these AI SDR tools in 2026 are actually worth what they cost.
The 30-Day Setup: Same Test, Three Platforms
Before the numbers, the methodology — because nobody else publishes theirs.
Three separate sending domains, each warmed for 14 days before the test started. Same ICP across all three: Series A and B SaaS companies, US-based, 50-200 employees. Each platform got 500 prospects and a daily cap of 50 sends. LinkedIn outreach turned on where supported — Artisan and 11x.
I tracked five things: time from signup to first live email, positive reply rate, meetings booked, hallucinated facts per 500 sends, and total dollars spent.
Honest caveat: the prospect lists weren’t identical. Each platform sourced its own contacts from its own database, so I couldn’t enforce perfect overlap. That’s a real variable. I’ll call it out again when it changes the conclusions.
Fair enough — but who actually got out of the gate first?
Setup Reality: Time From Signup to First Real Email
All three required a demo call. None offered a self-serve trial. From there, the timelines diverged sharply.
Artisan Ava was fastest: about 3 days from demo to first live send. ICP setup and tone calibration ate most of the time, but Ava was running real campaigns by day four. Pricing landed at roughly $1,500/month.
11x Alice took 5 days. The enterprise sales cycle is longer, and the persona setup is deeper — Alice asks for more context up front about the buying committee you’re targeting. Pricing settled at $5,000/month on an annual commit.
Regie.ai took 7 days. RegieOne has the largest surface area of the three — agents, signals, sequences, and a parallel dialer — and onboarding reflects it. Pricing started at $2,917/month, billed as the $35K/year floor.
Faster setup is nice. But none of it matters if the emails are bad.
Email Quality: Same Prospect, Three Very Different Emails
I picked one real prospect — a Series B fintech that had just hired a new VP of Sales — and triggered all three platforms on the same contact.
Artisan Ava wrote the cleanest prose. It referenced the VP’s recent LinkedIn post about pipeline coverage, then asked a single, specific question. No obvious AI tells. If a junior SDR had sent it, I would not have flinched.
11x Alice was tighter and more confident. It opened with a question about quota attainment in the first 90 days, named the company’s most recent product launch, and closed with a calendar link. Slightly more “salesy” in tone, but every line was load-bearing.
Regie.ai wrote the longest email. It packed in signal-driven openers — funding stage, recent hire, a competitor reference — and read more templated. Strong on signal density, weaker on feeling like a person wrote it. That templated feel is why most AI cold emails still read like spam — signal stuffed in, humanity stripped out.
Verdict on quality: Artisan won on tone, 11x won on brevity, Regie won on signal density. If you optimize for “sounds human,” Ava is the pick.
Good emails are one thing. Did any of them get actual replies?
Results: Meetings Booked, Reply Rates, and Cost Per Meeting
Thirty days, 1,500 prospects, three platforms. Here’s what landed.
| Meetings | Positive Reply Rate | Cost/Meeting | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Artisan Ava | 9 | 2.8% | $167 |
| 11x Alice | 14 | 3.2% | $357 |
| Regie.ai | 11 | 2.4% | $265 |
11x Alice booked the most: 14 meetings at a 3.2% positive reply rate. Alice was the most aggressive sender — more follow-up touches, faster cadence.
Artisan Ava booked 9 meetings at 2.8%. Lower volume, but every meeting felt qualified. Zero no-shows over the 30 days. Two of 11x’s 14 meetings were no-shows.
Regie.ai booked 11 meetings at 2.4%. The multi-channel angle — email plus dialer attempts — helped close the gap on Alice’s volume.
The cost-per-meeting math reorders the leaderboard. Artisan at $167 per booked meeting. Regie at $265. 11x at $357 — more than double Artisan. And once those meetings land on the calendar, you’ll want sales call analysis tools to make sense of what the AI actually booked for you.
11x books more, Artisan books cheaper. But there’s a trust problem nobody talks about.
The Hallucination Report: What Each AI Got Wrong
Across 1,500 sends, six emails contained fabricated facts. The breakdown matters more than the count.
Artisan Ava invented a Series C funding round for a company that had only raised a Series B. One hallucination across 500 sends.
11x Alice racked up three. It addressed a prospect by the previous CEO’s name (a six-month-old LinkedIn lag), mislabeled a company’s headcount by an order of magnitude, and referenced a competitor’s product as if it were the prospect’s.
Regie.ai generated two — both fabricated customer quotes attributed to real executives, dropped into the email body as social proof.
The patterns tell the story. 11x’s errors came from stale enrichment data. Regie’s came from over-aggressive personalization templates that filled slots with content the AI wasn’t sure about. Artisan’s was a one-off data mismatch.
All three got cleaner when I added a human “verify before send” step. That defeats the whole point of an autonomous SDR — but it might be the only safe way to run one right now.
So which one actually fits your team, and at what cost?
The Honest Verdict: Pick Based on Team Size, Not Hype
There is no universal winner. The vendor comparisons that crown one are selling you something.
Solo founder or 1-2 person sales team: Artisan Ava. Best email quality, lowest cost per meeting, fewest hallucinations.
Scaling SaaS team with a real RevOps function: 11x Alice. The volume justifies the price if you can absorb the spend and the data clean-up.
Mid-market team replacing an Outreach or Salesloft stack: Regie.ai. The full-stack consolidation argument is real if you’d buy four tools anyway — and if you’re also re-evaluating the CRM underneath, see which AI CRM actually pays for itself.
The cold truth: every AI sales development representative will embarrass you at least once a month. In any Artisan vs 11x vs Regie.ai decision, pick the one whose specific failure mode you can live with — and if you’re still framework-shopping for the agent side of your stack, our LangChain vs CrewAI vs AutoGen breakdown is the next read.