Reachkit vs Artisan

Pick Artisan if you want an AI to run outbound for you, and Reachkit if you want AI to draft the campaign while you decide what sends. Ava is built to do the whole job, from finding leads to booking the meeting. Reachkit’s AI writes the campaign and finds verified leads, Reachkit can set up the inboxes for you, and then you launch it and answer the replies.

I checked both products’ pricing, docs and terms in October 2026.

Pick Artisan if:

• You want replies answered and meetings booked for you, not just sorted.
• You want contact data, buying signals and a dialer for your reps from one vendor.
• You’re a larger team that needs SOC 2 and SSO, and annual contracts are how you buy software anyway.

Pick Reachkit if:

• You want to read the campaign and launch it yourself, in the app or from Claude or ChatGPT.
• You want monthly plans from $39, with verified-lead credits included and inbox prices published.
• You want cold email kept off your main domain by default, on inboxes set up for you, with sending that starts low and ramps slowly.

Artisan’s Ava is built to do a business development rep’s whole job. Once a campaign is live, Ava:

• picks and ranks leads from Artisan’s contact data and buying signals, such as funding news, new hires and Bombora topic intent
• researches each person and writes every message
• sends, follows up and, if you switch it on, goes back to people who never answered
• answers replies and books meetings

Calls are the exception. Artisan says “Ava cannot legally make calls…,” so she lines up leads with talking points for your reps to dial.

The tradeoff is control, and Artisan gives you a lot of it: locks on tone, CTA and length, budget caps per campaign, lead routing rules, and an approval queue where you approve or regenerate each message. Artisan also says “most teams start with approvals enabled, then go fully autonomous once they trust Ava’s judgment.” To me, that second step is what you’re paying for, and once you take it, messages go out without anyone approving them.

That’s why I’d test it month to month first. I don’t judge any cold email setup on less than eight weeks, about four of warmup and four of real sends, and Artisan’s Startups plans can be billed monthly.

The real difference between Artisan and Reachkit is who signs off before an email goes out. In Artisan that’s a per-campaign switch called “Require approval before sending.” Leave it off and “…Ava sends messages on her own once a campaign is live.”

Reachkit is built so a person makes the last call. You describe the campaign in a sentence, the AI drafts a sequence with subjects and delays and sizes an audience from Lead Finder, and you edit any of it. You see the credit cost before leads are added, and the campaign stays a draft until you launch it.

That’s on purpose. AI is good at first drafts, but in my experience output nobody understood rarely converts.

Both tools also work from AI assistants through MCP, a standard way for assistants like Claude and ChatGPT to use other apps:

• Artisan’s Claude connector has 30 tools on every plan. Claude can search and enrich leads, build lists, draft and edit campaigns, and pause them, but “Claude can’t launch or publish a campaign for you.” Artisan calls it an early feature.
• Reachkit’s MCP server works in Claude, ChatGPT and other MCP apps, trial included. Your assistant can find verified leads, build the campaign and launch it, and it’s built to show you every email and ask for your go before launching.

For builders, Reachkit adds a REST API and webhooks on its Scale plan. Artisan offers inbound webhooks from its Employee plan.

Artisan sends from your own company mailbox first and adds separate domains for volume, while Reachkit’s done-for-you route puts you on separate domains from the start. Ava starts with your primary Google or Microsoft mailbox, the one she watches for replies. Artisan caps it at 100 emails a day, recommends 50 or fewer, and says you can start sending from it on day one.

For more volume, Artisan adds secondary mailboxes on “…a separate domain, kept apart from your main one,” which take about two weeks to warm up. You can buy those domains and mailboxes inside Artisan from the Intern plan, but the prices aren’t published. Artisan also tracks deliverability health, spam rates and inbox placement.

Reachkit’s done-for-you inboxes never sit on your main domain. Pick Google Workspace or Microsoft 365 and how many you want, and Reachkit registers new lookalike domains ($15 a year), sets up SPF, DKIM and DMARC, creates the inboxes ($5 a month each) with your name and photo, and starts AI warmup. Give them three weeks. After that, the defaults stay careful:

• each inbox starts at 3 campaign emails a day and adds 3 a day up to 20
• open tracking is off, and links aren’t tracked
• imported lists are verified, and a campaign pauses if bounces pass 5%

Artisan’s route gets you sending sooner. I’d still wait three weeks rather than point cold email at the domain my customers and invoices rely on, for the reasons in my cold email infrastructure guide.

Artisan answers replies for you, and Reachkit sorts them so you can answer. With Autopilot replies on, Ava can book a meeting, send a link you’ve set up, or just answer questions, and you can have her book only once a lead meets up to five conditions you set. Your instructions tell her when to hand a conversation to a person, and meetings go to the sender’s calendar or a round-robin pool through your Calendly, Google Calendar or Cal.com link.

That loop is new. Ava 2.0, announced in May 2026, closed it; in the first version, by Artisan’s own account, “…a human still reviewed every reply, booked every meeting…”

Reachkit puts replies from every inbox into one Unibox, each tagged with one of 12 AI labels, like Interested, Not Now or Wrong Person, which you can change. While a campaign runs, its inboxes are checked for new replies about every minute. The AI stops at the label, and you write the answer.

This is where my bias shows. I think most interested replies get lost to a calendar link sent too early, so I want a person writing them. If you’d rather hand that off, Artisan is built for it and Reachkit isn’t.

Artisan’s pricing page opens on quote-only plans: Team (about 2,500 leads contacted a month), Scale (about 6,000) and Enterprise. A second tab, Startups, lists Intern at $280 a month for 10,000 credits and Employee at $660 for 25,000, or $250 and $600 billed annually, plus a free plan with 300 credits a month. A campaign uses about 20 credits per prospect, so roughly 50 cents each.

Mailboxes and domains come on top: “Sending infrastructure like mailboxes and phone numbers is billed separately in dollars,” at prices Artisan doesn’t publish. Credits also shrank this year. On May 27, 2026, the same annual prices bought 12,000 and 30,000 credits, at about 22 per prospect.

Here’s the same outbound priced in each, from each vendor’s public pricing page in October 2026, billed monthly. Artisan’s side uses its own estimator, and Reachkit’s assumes every prospect comes from Lead Finder.

A founder starting out: 1,500 new prospects and about 4,000 emails a month, on 10 inboxes across 5 domains.

An agency or growing team: 3 users, 10,000 new prospects and about 25,000 emails a month, on 60 inboxes across 20 domains.

This isn’t like-for-like. Artisan’s price pays for Ava to research, write, follow up, answer replies and book meetings, while Reachkit’s assumes a person on your team handles the replies. Reachkit’s plans also cap stored contacts (5,000 on Growth, 25,000 on Scale’s first tier), so at these paces you’d clear out finished campaigns every few months or move up a tier: Scale’s $239 tier, with 12,500 credits a month, puts the agency case at about $564.

Artisan scores 4.1 out of 5 on Trustpilot from 42 reviews (October 2026), with 81% five-star and 9% one-star. A lot of the praise is for people rather than features. “Alan was super enthusiastic, helpful and knowledgeable…,” one reviewer wrote, and another said “My account manager Robert has been fantastic.”

The critical reviews are mostly about results:

• One Trustpilot reviewer reported “…only about a 0.07% positive response rate…”
• Another was told 40,000 credits would reach about 2,000 new prospects, and says they reached about 1,200.
• In an r/sales thread, the person who started it said that after about six weeks on the first version, “…anything that wasn’t a straight yes got a garbage follow-up.”

That’s some users’ experience, not everyone’s. The 0.07% review and the Reddit post also predate Ava 2.0, the rebuild Artisan announced in May 2026, so they may describe the older product.

There are teams I’d point straight to Artisan:

• You want replies handled, not just labeled. Ava answers, qualifies leads against conditions you set, hands off to a person when your rules say so, and books the meeting. If nobody on your team has time to work replies, that matters more than anything else on this page, and Reachkit won’t do it for you.
• You want one vendor for data, signals and calls. Artisan bundles contact data, buying signals such as funding news, new hires and Bombora intent, website visitor identification, and a power dialer for your reps at $67 to $75 a seat. Reachkit is email only.
• You’re a larger company with a procurement process. Artisan is SOC 2 Type II certified, offers SSO and audit logs, syncs both ways with HubSpot and Salesforce, and reviewers single out their account managers by name. If annual contracts are how you buy software anyway, its terms won’t surprise you. Reachkit isn’t SOC 2 certified and doesn’t connect to Salesforce.

If none of those fit, you probably want help running outbound more than you want it run for you, and that’s the job I built Reachkit for.

If you’re on an Artisan contract, your order form sets the exit, so read it first. Then:

1. Mark the renewal date. Artisan’s terms renew automatically unless you send written notice of non-renewal at least 30 days before the term ends. On annual plans, unused credits don’t roll over, so spend them before the end.
2. Export what you need. Artisan lets you export any data as CSV on every plan, and it logs outreach back to HubSpot or Salesforce if you’ve connected one. Once your term ends, its terms say Artisan will return or delete your data within 30 days of a written request.
3. Check what you own. Your primary mailbox is yours, and its reputation stays with it, because reputation lives with the mailbox and domain, not the tool. Artisan doesn’t say whether domains and mailboxes bought through it can move, so ask before you cancel.
4. Overlap the two. Start Reachkit on new done-for-you inboxes while your Artisan term runs out, and add the companies Ava is already working to Reachkit’s blocklist so nobody hears from both.

Expect about three weeks before new inboxes are ready to send, or a day if you’re connecting warm inboxes you already own.

Artisan built Ava for teams that want outbound to happen without them, and the reply handling is the strongest reason to buy it. If that’s what you need, and the budget and the terms work for you, it’s a fair choice. I built Reachkit for people who want the drafting done by AI and the inboxes set up for them, but still read what goes out and answer their own replies. You can try that for 30 days without a card.

Weighing other options? See Reachkit vs Reply.io, which sells its own AI SDR, Reachkit vs Instantly, or Reachkit vs Clay if research and enrichment are the main job.