Comparison
Lead Scorer vs Artisan
Ava is the best-known AI SDR on the market. As of 2026-08-09 Artisan publishes no price at all, and its own blog post explains why. That is the comparison.
Verdict
Pick Artisan if you have a sales org, a budget line and a procurement process — the product is built for that, and the demo will tell you the number. Pick Lead Scorer if you want to see the price before you book a call, and start the same evening.
What Artisan really costs one person
500 new prospects a month, one person, a 3-touch email sequence (1,500 emails).
Advertised
None. All three tiers on artisan.co/pricing say 'Pricing scoped on your plan'.
Real month, one person
Not calculable.
Lead Scorer, same month
€0 free CRM, €49 Solo, €99 Pro, €199 Scale — on the pricing page, no call required. For the 500-prospect month we priced: ≈$251 (Scale plus your own mailboxes).
Billed monthly, cancel anytime. Yearly billing takes 20% off Solo, Pro and Scale: €468, €948 and €1,908 a year (€39, €79 and €159 a month). Optional — monthly still cancels anytime.
We verified the absence on Artisan's own pricing page on 2026-08-09 rather than repeating a third-party number. The estimates that circulate span 4× and none of them come from Artisan.
artisan.coWhat the advertised price leaves out
- Artisan's own post announcing Ava 2.0 (26 May 2026) confirms the move to 'a new credit-based pricing model' with 'pricing custom to your team'. The numbered tiers that used to be public are gone. The source is the vendor itself.
- Third-party estimates exist and they contradict each other: one set gives $250–$280/month (Intern) and $600–$660 (Employee); another gives $1,000–$2,500/month as typical. That is a factor of 4, and we will not average two guesses into one number.
- Vendr, which publishes real transaction data for 11x and Qualified, has no Artisan page at all.
- No free trial and no self-serve entry: a demo is the only way in.
- LinkedIn is ambiguous — the site says 'social' and never names the channel.
How we priced this
- Scenario
- 500 new prospects a month, one person, a 3-touch email sequence (1,500 emails).
- Infrastructure counted in every total
- 3 mailboxes at 30 emails/day (Google Workspace Business Starter, ≈$21/month) and 2 secondary domains (≈$1.74/month) are counted in every stack, because every vendor leaves them out.
- Billing
- Annual commitment wherever one exists — the assumption most favourable to the vendor.
- LinkedIn cap
- LinkedIn's ~100 invitations/week soft cap means a single account cannot physically work 500 new prospects a month. The totals model 500 by email and ~400 on LinkedIn.
- Exchange rate
- €1 = $1.155 (US Federal Reserve H.10, 2026-08-06). Conversions are marked ≈.
- Limits
- No purchase was made. Every official figure comes from a vendor page read on 2026-08-09; third-party figures are labelled as such and never used as prices.
Side by side
| Feature | Lead Scorer | Artisan |
|---|---|---|
| Published price | Yes — all four plans, on the page | None — 'Pricing scoped on your plan' |
| Free tier | Full CRM, forever | None — demo-gated |
| Free trial | No trial needed — free plan | None |
| Self-serve signup | Yes | No — demo required |
| Third-party price estimates | n/a — ours is published | $280–$2,500/month, a 4× spread (reported) |
| LinkedIn channel | Included from €99 (Pro) | Ambiguous — 'social', never named |
| Published overage rate | Yes — €0.049/credit | Not published |
| Agent access | MCP server, 104 tools, OAuth 2.1 | Closed product |
Where Artisan beats Lead Scorer
Written by us, about our own product.
- Ava is a more complete autonomous BDR than we are: broader data coverage, a longer track record, and a team that has been shipping this since before the category had a name.
- The managed onboarding is built for organisations that want it handled, and by every account it handles it.
- Credit-based custom pricing is not automatically bad. For a company with a procurement process, a negotiated number is often below any published list price.
- They serve a market we do not: multi-rep sales orgs with a defined budget line, not founders paying by card.
Where Lead Scorer wins
Same standard of evidence, opposite direction.
- Our price is on the page. Yours is a calendar invite.
- You can sign up and have drafts to approve tonight; Artisan has no free trial and no self-serve entry.
- €49/month is a card payment, not a contract — no minimum term anywhere in our plans.
- MCP-native: 104 tools your own agent can call, instead of a closed autonomous product you configure through a CSM.
- We publish our overage rate. Artisan publishes neither price nor overage.
Which one is for you
Pick Artisan if…
Sales organisations that want a managed autonomous BDR, have someone to run the procurement cycle, and measure cost against SDR headcount.
Pick Lead Scorer if…
One person who wants to know the price, sign up, and have messages to approve the same day.
Frequently asked questions
How much does Artisan cost?
Artisan does not say. On 2026-08-09 all three tiers on artisan.co/pricing carried the line 'Pricing scoped on your plan'. The numbers you will find elsewhere — $250–$280, $600–$660, $1,000–$2,500 a month — come from comparison blogs, disagree with each other by a factor of 4, and none of them originate with Artisan. We are not going to repeat one of them as if it were a price.
Did Artisan used to publish prices?
Yes. Artisan's own blog post launching Ava 2.0, dated 26 May 2026, announces 'a new credit-based pricing model' and pricing 'custom to your team'. The previously published tiers are gone from the site. That is a documented change, sourced to the vendor.
Is Lead Scorer an Artisan alternative?
For a solo founder, yes: same shape of product — the agent sources, qualifies, writes and queues — at a published €49–€199/month with a free tier under it. For a sales organisation that wants a managed BDR with an assigned CSM, no. We are not built for that and we would rather say so.
Why does a missing price matter?
Because you cannot compare what you cannot see, and because three of the four pure-play AI SDRs we surveyed do the same thing. It is not evidence the tool is bad. It is evidence the category's default buyer is a procurement process, not a founder with a card.
Other comparisons
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