Comparison
AEQI vs Artisan
Artisan's Ava is an AI BDR that books meetings inside a sales team you already run. AEQI builds the whole company around that seat: roles, a ledger, a website, and memory.
July 18, 2026 · Luca Eich

Choose Artisan if you already run a sales team with a pipeline and reps to take meetings, and want an AI BDR adding outbound volume — leads found, sequences sent, meetings booked — without another hire.
Choose AEQI if there is no sales org yet to plug that seat into, and what you need first is the company itself: a staffed team across functions, a live website, and a running record of the work.
What Artisan is
Artisan is a sales software company whose product is Ava, marketed as “the autonomous AI BDR” (as of September 2026). Ava finds leads from a database Artisan describes as 250M+ verified B2B contacts, watches signals like funding rounds and leadership changes, runs multi-channel outreach, handles replies, and books meetings, syncing to Salesforce and HubSpot. The unit of the product is the seat: one role, filled deeply. Artisan briefly made Ava self-serve from $250 a month after a May 2026 relaunch; by September 2026 that had reverted to a sales-quoted model, with Team, Scale, and Enterprise plans priced after a call, scoped to lead volume, mailboxes, and dialer seats.
Side by side
| Question | Artisan | AEQI |
|---|---|---|
| Who it's for | Sales teams already running outbound, adding AI BDR capacity | Founders who need the business built and staffed, not one seat filled |
| Where it lives | Inside your existing stack: Salesforce, HubSpot, email, phone, social | A hosted Company with its own live website |
| Agents and roles | One agent, one role: Ava, the AI BDR | Ten officer agents in named roles — CEO, CTO, COO, CFO, CMO, CRO, CPO, Chief of Staff, General Counsel, Founder’s Associate |
| Memory | Not published; Ava improves within campaigns (messaging, timing, replies) | A shared memory across the Company; mail, decisions, and quests are linked |
| Channels | Email, social, and phone (dialer add-on), with CRM sync | One inbox across Email, Slack, Teams, Telegram, and WhatsApp |
| Hosting and data | SOC 2 Type II certified; hosting location not published | One hosted Company per customer, on its own server in Germany (EU data residency) |
| Pricing | Custom, scoped to lead volume and seats; no self-serve price published | €50, €200, or €800 a month for 1, 4, or 16 seats; annual is 2 months free |
| Trial | Not published; plans are quoted after a sales call | 3-day free trial; 33% off Personal for 3 months through 31 October 2026 |
| Best for | Scaling outbound volume inside a sales org that already exists | Standing up the whole company around that sales seat |
Artisan is the better choice when
- You already have a pipeline and reps ready to take meetings, and the gap is outbound capacity rather than go-to-market strategy. Ava adds volume to a motion that already converts, without adding headcount.
- Your bottleneck is volume: leads found, sequences run, replies handled, meetings booked. Ava draws on a database Artisan describes as 250M+ verified B2B contacts and watches signals like funding rounds and leadership changes to time outreach, then syncs bi-directionally with Salesforce and HubSpot.
- You want a specialist that plugs into tools you already run, rather than a new system to operate, and you value the deliverability, dialer, and support infrastructure that come from years in one lane — Scale and Enterprise tiers add a dedicated CSM and, at the top, a forward-deployed strategist.
AEQI is the better choice when
- There is no sales org yet for an AI BDR to plug into — the company around that function, the product, the pitch, and the pipeline to feed it, has to exist before any single seat can be filled.
- You want one team across functions — building, marketing, sales, operations — working from a shared ledger of quests and a memory that belongs to the Company, not to one seat's own optimization, with agents reaching across 314 tools in 31 services rather than a single CRM integration.
- You want the price fixed before you commit: AEQI publishes flat monthly plans rather than a quote scoped to your lead volume, mailbox count, and dialer seats, with a 3-day free trial to see the Company before you pay for it.
- You want a booked meeting to land in the same record as the website update and the follow-through that came before it, reachable from the same inbox that already covers Email, Slack, Teams, Telegram, and WhatsApp, with nothing sent or published without passing your Decisions pane first.
The difference in one sentence
Artisan is a specialist you hire into a sales team that already exists, optimizing one role deeply; AEQI is the company that team works inside — the roles, the ledger, and the compounding memory that turn one booked meeting into part of a larger, running record.
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Last verified 14 September 2026. Competitor facts are quoted from their public pages on that date.