Clay vs 11x vs Artisan vs Qualified vs Rox: How to Choose an AI Sales Agent
All 5 sales-and-marketing agents in our index compared side by side — a GTM data/enrichment engine, two autonomous outbound AI SDRs, an inbound AI SDR now owned by Salesforce, and a per-account CRM-monitoring agent swarm are five different tools solving five different problems, not five competing chatbots.
By The Agents Index Editorial, Research desk · 2026-07-21
Five names keep coming up whenever a revenue team starts evaluating "AI sales agents": Clay, 11x, Artisan, Qualified and Rox. Read their own researched listings side by side and the real split isn't "which AI SDR is best" — it's that these are five different tools solving five different problems. Clay isn't an AI SDR at all; it's the GTM data and enrichment layer teams build their OWN outbound on top of, with an AI research agent (Claygent) bolted on. 11x and Artisan are the real head-to-head: both sell a fully autonomous outbound AI SDR/BDR that researches, writes and sends on its own. Qualified runs the opposite direction — an inbound AI SDR that engages the traffic already on your website, wired natively into Salesforce (which now owns the company outright). Rox takes a fifth angle entirely: instead of automating one sales motion, it assigns a persistent AI agent to every account already in your CRM, continuously researching and monitoring the whole relationship rather than running a single campaign. Which of those five jobs you actually need almost always settles the shortlist before a single feature comparison matters.
The five, at a glance
Every figure below is pulled from each tool's own researched listing, last verified 13–22 July 2026; Clay's, 11x's and Rox's pricing/positioning were re-checked live against clay.com/pricing, 11x.ai and rox.com/pricing before publishing.
| Agent | What it actually is | Pricing | Self-serve? | Known for |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Clay | GTM data/enrichment platform + AI research agent (Claygent) | Free tier, then $167/mo (Launch) → $446/mo (Growth) → custom Enterprise; usage-based on two credit meters | Yes — instant signup, genuine free plan | Best-in-class waterfall data enrichment; steep learning curve, unpredictable credit spend |
| 11x | Autonomous outbound AI SDR (Alice) + AI voice agent (Julian) | Growth tier published: Alice from $3,750/mo, Julian from $2,417–5,333/mo; Pro/Enterprise custom — no free plan | No — even Growth requires a sales call | Full-stack autonomous outbound across text and voice; a March 2025 TechCrunch report on fabricated customer logos |
| Artisan | Autonomous outbound AI BDR (Ava) | Custom (Team/Scale/Enterprise), sales-led — no published dollar figures | No — talk to sales | End-to-end outbound with published customer results (SumUp case study); a 2025–26 LinkedIn ban and a since-settled IP dispute |
| Qualified | Inbound AI SDR (Piper), Salesforce-native | Custom, sales-led; independent procurement data (Vendr) puts the median contract at $61,000/year | No — requires a sales demo and a separate Salesforce subscription | Named enterprise case studies (Asana, Box, Greenhouse); acquired outright by Salesforce for ~$1.2B, April 2026 |
| Rox | Per-account "agent swarm" that researches, monitors and updates your existing CRM across the whole deal lifecycle | Free (Starter, 2,000 agent actions/mo) → $50/mo (Core, 5,000 agent actions/mo) → custom Enterprise | Yes — genuine free self-serve signup, no sales call required | Continuous per-account intelligence layered on Salesforce/HubSpot; named results at Ramp, New Relic, MongoDB; young company (founded 2024), no confirmed public API |
The decision: which job do you actually need done?
All five carry a full researched verdict on their own listing, including who each one is explicitly not for. Read together, the honest decision tree runs on the job, not the feature list:
- You want to build and own your outbound data/research pipeline yourself, and you want to start free → Clay. Its waterfall enrichment beats any single-source data vendor on match rate, and Claygent extends that to bespoke, AI-scraped research points no provider packages — all inside a genuinely usable free plan with unlimited seats. Watch out for: the dual credit-meter pricing is hard to predict (failed lookups still burn credits, and Claygent-heavy workflows can cost far more at scale), and it really pays off with a dedicated GTM engineer, not a casual user.
- You want a fully autonomous outbound motion — research, multi-channel sequencing and even phone calls — and you're willing to run a rigorous paid pilot → 11x. Alice runs the whole SDR motion end to end and Julian adds an AI voice agent for calls, both backed by a16z and Benchmark. Watch out for: even the published Growth-tier price (from $2,417/month) still requires a sales call rather than self-serve checkout, Pro/Enterprise stays fully custom, and there's no free plan; in March 2025 TechCrunch reported 11x had displayed logos of companies (including ZoomInfo and Airtable) that said they weren't customers, alongside former-staff accounts of high early churn — founder Hasan Sukkar stepped down as CEO two months later, replaced by then-CTO Prabhav Jain, but evaluate on your own measured results, not the marketing.
- You want the same kind of fully autonomous outbound AI BDR, backed by real published customer numbers → Artisan. Since its May 2026 "Ava 2.0" rebuild, Ava sources, enriches, personalises, handles replies and objections, and books meetings without a human touching each step, and Artisan publishes specific results (SumUp's $52-per-lead case study) rather than vague testimonials. Watch out for: pricing is even more opaque than 11x's (three "talk to sales" tiers with no published starting figure at all, despite an announced $250/mo tier that isn't live on the site today), plus a real, dated compliance incident (a ~3-week LinkedIn company-page ban, Dec 2025–Jan 2026, over a data vendor's ToS violation) and a May 2026 dispute over unauthorised use of a cartoonist's artwork that the two sides settled within the month, with Artisan pulling the ads.
- Your bottleneck is inbound — converting the traffic already hitting your website — not outbound prospecting, and you already run Salesforce → Qualified. Piper engages visitors in real time, qualifies them against CRM data and books the meeting, with named results at Asana, Box and Greenhouse, and now the backing of Salesforce's own balance sheet after its April 2026 acquisition. Watch out for: Salesforce is a hard requirement (billed separately), there's no self-serve tier, and — now that it's Salesforce-owned — expect the roadmap to bend toward Agentforce bundling rather than independent evolution.
- Your bottleneck isn't running a sales motion at all — it's that reps and the CRM can't keep up with what's actually happening inside each account → Rox. Its agent swarm assigns one persistent agent per account that researches deal risk, drafts call prep and keeps Salesforce/HubSpot updated automatically, answered through plain-English questions instead of a new dashboard to learn. Watch out for: no confirmed public API, only a two-year production track record since its 2024 founding, and the free/Core tiers cap out at 2,000–5,000 agent actions/month before a real book of accounts needs the custom Enterprise tier.
11x vs Artisan: the closest real head-to-head
Of the five, 11x and Artisan are the actual rivals — both sell a fully autonomous outbound AI SDR/BDR that researches, writes and books meetings without a human working each step, both remain sales-led at every tier, and both have drawn real, TechCrunch-reported controversy within the past 18 months. The difference is less about capability than about what each is proving right now. 11x pairs its outbound AI SDR (Alice) with a dedicated AI voice agent (Julian) for phone conversations — a genuine second channel Artisan doesn't offer. Artisan counters with a more mature evidence trail post-relaunch: a named, numbers-backed case study (SumUp), SOC 2 Type II certification with SSO/SAML, and a native dialer that at least queues human-placed calls with an AI-written brief, versus fully autonomous voice. 11x is the more transparent of the two on price — its Growth tier publishes a starting figure even though a sales call is still required to buy it — while Artisan publishes no dollar figure at all; and both have had a real, reported governance lapse (11x's fabricated customer logos; Artisan's LinkedIn ban and IP dispute) that's worth raising directly in a vendor call before signing an annual contract.
Rox: a fifth job entirely, not a rival to the other four
Rox doesn't compete head-to-head with any of the other four the way 11x and Artisan compete with each other — it solves a different problem and could reasonably run alongside any of them. Where Clay enriches data, 11x and Artisan run autonomous outbound sequences, and Qualified engages inbound traffic, Rox assigns a persistent "agent swarm" to every account already in Salesforce or HubSpot, continuously researching deal risk, drafting call prep and keeping the CRM itself current — explicitly positioned to sit on top of the CRM rather than replace it or run the outbound/inbound motion. That makes it the right fit for a revenue team whose real bottleneck is that reps and the CRM can't keep up with what's happening inside an account, not for a team still building or running the outbound/inbound motion itself. It's also, oddly, the one enterprise-shaped tool here with a real self-serve price: a free Starter tier (2,000 agent actions/month) and a $50/month Core tier, no sales call required to start — a genuine outlier against Artisan's and Qualified's fully sales-led pricing.
One pattern the category confirms — and the one tool that breaks it
Of the five, only Clay and Rox publish real self-serve pricing with a genuine, no-sales-call free tier. The three products built and marketed as autonomous sales agents that run a specific motion (11x, Artisan, Qualified) are all sales-led at every tier that matters, with no permanent free plan; 11x is the partial exception, publishing a Growth-tier starting figure (from $2,417/month) even though buying it still requires a sales call, while Artisan has zero public dollar figures and Qualified's only pricing signal comes from third-party procurement data (Vendr), not the vendor. What's notable is that Rox breaks the assumption that "enterprise-shaped" and "no self-serve" go together: it's squarely positioned at the same large revenue teams as Qualified and Artisan, yet ships a real free plan and a published $50/month tier — the only agent in this set doing both at once. It's also worth naming plainly: two of the five listings above (11x, Artisan) carry real, independently reported controversies from the last 18 months. That's not a reason to rule either out on its own — both are backed by serious capital and have shipped genuinely capable products — but it is a reason to verify claims directly with the vendor and, where possible, with a reference customer, rather than buying on a demo alone.
FAQ
Is Clay an AI SDR like the other four?
No. Clay is a GTM data and enrichment platform — its Claygent feature is an AI research agent, not an autonomous SDR that runs full outbound campaigns. Teams often use Clay to build and feed the data layer that a tool like 11x, Artisan or Rox (or their own reps) then works from.
Should I pick 11x or Artisan?
Both are fully autonomous outbound AI SDR/BDR products that are 100% sales-led — see the head-to-head above. 11x publishes a Growth-tier starting price (from $2,417/month) even though buying it still requires a sales call; Artisan has zero public dollar figures at all, but a more mature published evidence trail (a numbers-backed case study, SOC 2 Type II) and a native dialer bridging to human-placed calls. Both have had a real, reported controversy in the past 18 months, so verify current claims directly before committing to an annual contract.
Can I get transparent, self-serve pricing for an AI sales agent?
Yes, from two of these five: Clay and Rox both have a real, always-on free plan and published, if usage-based, pricing tiers. Neither 11x, Artisan nor Qualified offers self-serve checkout; 11x is the partial exception on transparency, publishing a Growth-tier starting figure (from $2,417/month) even though a sales call is still required, while Artisan has no public dollar figure at all and Qualified's only price data point (~$61,000/year median) comes from third-party procurement data (Vendr), not the vendor.
Is Qualified still an independent company?
No. Salesforce completed its acquisition of Qualified on April 1, 2026 for an acquisition-date fair value of roughly $1.2 billion, folding Piper into Agentforce. Qualified also hard-requires a separate Salesforce CRM subscription, so it isn't usable standalone regardless of ownership.
Do any of these five have a free trial?
Clay and Rox are the two with a genuine, always-on free plan — Clay's covers 500 actions/month with unlimited seats, Rox's Starter tier covers 2,000 agent actions/month. 11x, Artisan and Qualified all require a sales demo with no published self-serve or trial tier.
What does Rox do that the other four don't?
Rox assigns a persistent AI agent to every account already in your CRM, continuously researching the relationship, flagging deal risk and keeping Salesforce or HubSpot updated — rather than running an outbound sequence (11x, Artisan), enriching data for one (Clay), or engaging inbound website traffic (Qualified). It's built to sit on top of an existing CRM rather than replace it or automate a single sales motion, so it can reasonably run alongside any of the other four rather than compete with them directly.
Every agent above carries its own full researched listing — pricing tiers, sourced pros and cons, and a committed verdict on who it's for and who it isn't. Start with the sales & marketing agents category for the full set.