Head to head · Sales & Revenue · v2026.Q3 · verified 2026-08-06

Artisan (Ava) vs Unify: the honest comparison

The short answer

Edition v2026.Q3 · pricing and status verified 2026-08-06.

Choose Artisan (Ava) for founders who want outbound fully run for them — Ava researches, writes, sends, and books against a 250M+-contact database with a human CSM watching. Choose Unify for teams with real intent to work — website visitors, product usage, hiring signals — who want agents running warm outbound instead of cold spray.

On the elems table, Artisan (Ava) holds seat #1 of the AI SDR element and Unify holds #2 — this is the closest call in the category, and the honest answer depends on which trade-off you can live with.

The case for each

  1. 1Artisan (Ava)Artisan AI

    Custom-scoped: Team ~2,500 leads/mo · Scale ~6,000 leads/mo + CSM · Enterprise custom; AI dialer per-seat add-on

    Best for Founders who want outbound fully run for them — Ava researches, writes, sends, and books against a 250M+-contact database with a human CSM watching.

    Watch Marketing runs hotter than the product: the 'Stop Hiring Humans' billboards, a LinkedIn ban (Dec 2025, resolved Jan 2026 after it dropped scraped-data vendors), and a settled art-theft complaint from the 'This is fine' artist (May 2026). Pricing is quote-only. No public ARR since Apr 2025 — assume mid-eight figures at most, not the category-king numbers the billboards imply.

    $25M Series A (Glade Brook), $5M ARR, 250 customers (Apr 9, 2025) [src] · LinkedIn banned Artisan Dec 19, 2025 over scraped-data vendors; reinstated after ~2 weeks of remediation [src]
  2. 2UnifyUnify (unifygtm.com)

    Free tier · Base $20/seat/mo (800 credits) · Pro $60/seat (2,400 credits) · Business custom, annual

    Best for Teams with real intent to work — website visitors, product usage, hiring signals — who want agents running warm outbound instead of cold spray.

    Watch Credit-metered pricing gets opaque at volume, and the best signals (website intent) are gated to the custom Business tier. It's a prospecting system you operate, not a turnkey rep — thin team = thin results.

    $40M Series B led by Battery Ventures, with OpenAI Startup Fund, Thrive, Emergence (2025) [src] · 9.1% positive reply rate on product-usage-signal campaigns (Unify, first-party) [src]

Artisan (Ava) vs Unify: side by side

Edition v2026.Q3 · verified 2026-08-06.

Artisan (Ava) vs Unify — verified 2026-08-06.
Artisan (Ava)Unify
ModelManaged autonomous SDRSignal-driven agent workspace
Entry priceCustom (quote)$20/seat/mo
ChannelsEmail · LinkedIn · dialerEmail · social · phone
Data included250M+ contacts1.1B people, 40+ sources
Human in loopCSM-supervisedYou operate it
Pricing public?NoYes
Status Aug 2026Active, drama-proneActive, well-funded

What each side won't tell you

Artisan (Ava): Marketing runs hotter than the product: the 'Stop Hiring Humans' billboards, a LinkedIn ban (Dec 2025, resolved Jan 2026 after it dropped scraped-data vendors), and a settled art-theft complaint from the 'This is fine' artist (May 2026). Pricing is quote-only. No public ARR since Apr 2025 — assume mid-eight figures at most, not the category-king numbers the billboards imply.

Unify: Credit-metered pricing gets opaque at volume, and the best signals (website intent) are gated to the custom Business tier. It's a prospecting system you operate, not a turnkey rep — thin team = thin results.

If it's neither

The rest of the top five: Regie.ai (RegieOne) (agents multiply human sdrs) · AiSDR (self-serve, honest pricing) · Instantly (own the machine yourself). The complete field — 19 more tools including the graveyard — is on the element page.

This analysis is drawn from the AI SDR element dossier — the ranked top 5, the comparison matrix, and the complete field of 19 more tools live there, with every source. Data: sd.json (CC BY 4.0).

Every claim above is dated and sourced from the elems dossiers — 1,421 tools tracked across 58 categories, verified 2026-08-06, including the 276 we found dead, renamed, acquired, or sunsetting. Rankings are editorial, never paid — the charter.

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