11x.ai Review worth the hype? For context: I tested the major AISDR platforms including 11x, Artisan, AISDR and Salestools.io are they the future of outbound sales?
Background in my past job I managed 14 SDR’s and I had to be on my toes daily to ensure they hit their KPI’s such as research, LinkedIn messages, emails and once a week cold calls. It was hard and they made many mistakes, which is normal for humans. I recently joined a venture backed company to build a new SDR organization but based on my experience and the advancements in AI I decided to enter the AI SDR rabbit hole, and ran test on the 4 leading companies out there, 3 of them venture backed with a high promise and 1 bootstrapped, to compare and roll out our new AI SDR team which I am bullish on.
TL;DR: 11x is the biggest disappointment they promised endless results but delivered non, they don’t personalize as they promise, don’t handle replies either and locked us into an annual contract which they refuse to break, so be aware of their hype, are really overselling everything maybe they did the same to their VCs? Fast forward our CEO was referred to check out Salestools.io, from another founder scaling heavily their SDR team. Haven’t heard of them before but seen they have been around for a long time and have taken the approach of knowing the market, how it operated and their vast data to train and they come out as clear winners on instant replies, handling objections, personalization, quality, ease of use and price!
Results:
Background:
AI Sales Development Representatives (AI SDRs) have become one of the hottest spaces in the sales technology space. Promising to automate repetitive and time-consuming tasks like prospecting, personalized email outreach, and follow-up, these AI-powered systems are designed to free up sales teams to focus on closing deals and nurturing relationships. The promise is clear: with AI SDRs, companies can scale their outreach efforts exponentially, respond faster to leads, and potentially cut costs associated with large sales teams. What I’ve found in my test is only two companies actually handle replies which is a must as reply rate can increase by 40% if we reply back in 2–4 min. AISDR can handle replies but too often had issues with formatting like bold lines came in as **Title** and so on, that looked automated so had low chance to be implemented. Salestools.io AI SDR could reply in real time with a clear message, explaining even to objects and perhaps only 10% of my human SDR in the past company could reply so well with the little information we feeded the system about our services and products. Surprisingly both Artisan and 11x cannot handle replies at all, which is a part of the AI SDR scalability.
Now, when you look at the heavily venture-funded companies, they often struggle to live up to the hype. It’s easy to get caught up in big promises, but when you’re trying to cut through the noise, you realize how critical it is to find tools that actually deliver. In our experience, both 11x and Artisan didn’t quite meet the expectations we had for automation, personalization, and reply handling. It’s more about recognizing that when the market is flooded with ambitious claims, it’s crucial to evaluate what truly works for your business needs.
The Allure of AI SDRs and the Reality of Performance
The draw of AI SDRs is undeniable. For sales teams constantly stretched thin by the demands of outbound prospecting, these tools seem like the perfect solution offering automation at scale, personalized messaging, and instant responses all sound like the keys to unlocking higher revenue but only Salestools and AISDR could offer all these features. On paper, AI SDRs seems poised to revolutionize the sales process and only one solution could deliver on its promises.
Now let’s look, the results can vary widely from vendor to vendor. While some solutions offer real value, others have turned out to be more about buzzwords and fundraising than about tangible results. After spending almost 4 months deep into this market and researching various tools, I settled for four to test 11x, Artisan, AISDR and Salestools.io. The results and pricing is really shocking!
11x.ai: The VC-Funded Hype Train with Massive Churn
We tested 11x heavily VC backed but overpromises and doesn’t deliver at all. At first glance, 11x.ai looks like a success story. With millions in venture capital pouring in from high profile firms like A16Z (said to invest 50M series b weeks after their 24M series a), they’ve captured the headlines and the attention of the industry. But when you start talking to customers on the surface, the reality is far less glamorous.
Despite the big names backing them, 11x.ai has been plagued by high customer churn rates. After speaking with industry insiders and conducting extensive research, it became clear that 11x.ai is more of a sales machine than a sales solution, early sales reps already left them (make you wonder 2–3 months tenure). The company’s primary focus seems to be aggressive customer acquisition rather than delivering consistent value to its clients. Multiple sources confirmed that clients often feel burned after using the platform, experiencing a huge gap between what was promised and what was actually delivered.
Their pitch? Bold claims of transforming outbound sales and helping companies scale faster than ever before. The reality? 11x.ai has failed to claim its G2 profile, also make you wonder afraid of honest reviews? It’s a red flag that a company boasting of its tech deliverability to clients and hasn’t even claimed this basic online footprint, signaling a deeper issue they might not want their performance or customer experiences to be so easily accessible to the public.
One ex-customer said, “They promise you the Empire State Building, but what you actually get is nothing other than getting forced to pay $3K/month for a year.” This kind of approach might sound dramatic, but it’s the sentiment shared by a few customers I managed to speak with who signed up with high expectations, only to find themselves disappointed, as I was in the same shoes forced to pay for a year for a solution providing 2 leads a month for 5K USD. The core problem? 11x.ai’s tool simply doesn’t live up to the massive promises they make during the sales pitch.
Churn Issues and Broken Promises
High churn rates at 11x.ai are more than just an isolated problem they speak to the fundamental misalignment between the company’s marketing and its actual product. Churn the percentage of customers that leave after trying a product — can be a death knell for a SaaS company. And yet, despite these obvious signs of trouble, A16Z recently poured an additional $50 million into 11x.ai’s Series B funding round. What’s even more perplexing is how quickly this happened after their Series A. Many in the industry are scratching their heads, wondering why a company that seems to be bleeding customers would receive such a rapid influx of cash.
Now let me talk about my experience I was sold the Empire State Building like another customer of endless results, turns out 11x is simply an Apollo.io/Peopledatalabs wrapper for data and poor prompts from Chatgpt for emails and nothing that stands out and more important they don’t handle replies meaning we need a full time hire to handle them. At 5K a month or roughly 1 USD per interaction they do the pricing can be less than a human SDR if they did personalize every email but they don’t and that’s the issue as the performance drops. Secondly they set up domains for us they own, so if we leave them we are locked in for those so a lot of vendor locking to ensure you don’t churn and the onboarding, the person who onboarded us has no clue about things, like a block list of domains or people didn’t exist or sync existing customers from our CRM was not possible. This is shocking when they have raised such a significant amount, they didn’t offer the bare minimum what you would expect!
The end result is clear they are not worth their price and I would steer away from them, imagine every positive reply we got with 11x cost us USD 2,500!
Artisan.co: The VC-Funded AI SDR from YC
Artisan is like 11x a company with hidden prices, so at first you need to have a meeting to get sense of it and they doubled their pricing over the last 6 months, they used to have public pricing. We had a sales rep again promising the rainbow but a bit less pushy than 11x. We made a contract as the only way we could get to a Proof on Concept with them and find the right solution for us. Now their pricing was around $1650/USD/month as I got a heavy discount that will go full price if we were happy, and 6 months minimum with increase after 6 months.
Their platform surprisingly could not handle replies either, but only “auto” prospect and send emails that where not truly personalized again over promising, and you may wonder how they have raised almost $20M over 3 rounds this year to not offering a full solution either. Like 11x they are also an Apollo/Peopledatalabs wrapper with no data layer and also no proper training from customers as they came as an agency prior to funding Artisan meaning they know how to send a lot of unsolicited not highly target emails at scale, which agencies do. The result was bad and cost us USD 550 per positive reply we got.
Artisan looks fresh and good but doesn’t deliver at all, clearly build for mass cannon shooting, but price is off, and results are off.
AISDR.com: The VC-Funded AI SDR from YC (second one, guess they are funding multiple teams)
AISDR.com is the first VC backed company I stumbled upon in the category with public pricing and that actually offers reply handling, but no LinkedIn automation which is a problem. For me AISDR is better suited to follow-up with inbound leads vs going outbound, but they are VC funded with around 3M in backing and failing to deliver basic things such as proper formatting of email replies or just outbound, which shows the prospect it is AI and that’s an issue. They charge 750 USD for 1000 emails meaning if you do 5 emails per person that’s not a lot of prospects you can do only 200 at 750 USD so they are quite expensive, they do discounts for larger batches. The end result was they did a bit better as they could handle replies compared to 11x and Artisan but again failed. They are also a wrapper for data and AI and have no significant infrastructure in place and lack true personalization being merely a random template sender, which again was a shocker.
The bootstrapped company SalesTools.io Shines in the test and a clear winner.
At first, I’ve never heard of Salestools a company based in San Francisco and Switzerland that is deeply focused on its customers vs noise and I felt the Swiss quality when I got started. Salestools from my research is the true pioneer, they invented this category in 2018 by inventing the Auto prospector, which is basically the AI SDR that 11x, Artisan and AISDR offers today, they did that in 2018 and killed it quickly according to my meeting with them. The reason was that personalization was lacking and by their design it is a must to drive results. They rebuilt their AI SDR / Sales agent over the last years while remaining bootstrapped and they took me by suprise didn’t expect a bootstrapped company to lead the pack here!
They actually personalize every single email with a personalization waterfall and unlike the competitors they offer flexibility to adapt and change the personalization style with custom prompts editing and personalization waterfalls as no one has perfect data. This has proven to drive more positive replies. They also focus on account based sales and normal sales. Another thing I’ve found out is in 2018 they invented the people level identification to track a person on a website, and they build this into the AI SDR’s to adapt and change messages on the fly based on website visits, which they call Adaptive intelligence, and this has proven to lift the positive replies. They have been the leader in LinkedIn automation early on since they started the category in 2014, so they are robust. Secondly, they told me they trained all email and LinkedIn prompts on over 25M emails and 19M LinkedIn messages to write more humanized and handle replies 10X, and the messaging is actually better than my past SDR team would do!
Salestools is different, they don’t oversell or push you, they are focused on delivering value and has a public pricing which in the end drove positive reply cost down to USD 12.5 and had 20x more replies than 11x, Artisan and AISDR.
So for me we ended up rolling out Salestools.io vs the venture funded companies, they own the data and show a new way to prospect soon adding the ability to turn prospecting upside down and increase personalization and targeting. For disclaimer I was onboarded by their founder, vs the others I was oversold by an AE. The founder of Salestools.io took me by surprise with his knowledge depth in the industry, and I saw a quick demo of the cold calling voice model coming, which we will implement to fill the gap with cold calling when it is live.
Conclusion: The Difference Between Hype and Substance
In a space crowded with lofty promises and buzzwords, it can be difficult to separate the real innovators from the hype machines. 11x may have made waves with its aggressive sales pitches and high-profile VC backing, but when it comes to performance, the cracks in the foundation are hard to ignore. Their high churn rate and failure to deliver on their promises have left many customers disillusioned, making it all the more puzzling that they continue to attract investment.
On the other hand, Salestools.io stands out for us as the market leader of reliability in the AI SDR market, delivering results and innovating ahead of the curve. Their focus on personalization, customer satisfaction, and delivering real value has allowed them to outshine competitors that rely more on fundraising than on results. In the end, it’s companies like Salestools.io quiet and effective that consistently deliver and shape the future of outbound sales, not the hype-driven fundraising machines. The question is will Salestools join the VC backed wagon or they keep to their DNA?
