Kortix is the open-source AI Operating System. When an AI SDR tool has a message ready, who presses send, and can you read the rule that decides it? The eight tools here answer three ways: a switch in a vendor dashboard, a set of guards in a script you run, or a person reading the draft.
A person approves every send · Allow, ask or block per tool call · Every action is written down
The agent researches and drafts freely, but nothing goes out on its own: every follow-up stops at a human approval gate as a draft for a person to review and send. No message reaches a lead without a person reviewing the draft and sending it. Only the drafts it produces are written back out.
Hand a sales agent the research, the pre-call brief, the CRM write-back and the follow-up draft. Nothing sends until you approve it, and every action it took is written down.
Most of the top results Google returns for the query “ai sdr tools” are pages published by companies that sell an AI SDR or an outreach tool, and several of those are the publisher’s own “best AI SDR” list. That says more about who writes these lists than about the tools on them. So the ranking is the least useful part of each page, and the price line the most useful.
A vendor can quote a rival’s rate correctly and still leave out the line the purchase turns on. When the agent has a message ready, who presses send? In most of these products the answer sits inside the vendor’s own dashboard as a switch: outbound on, or outbound paused. A switch says nothing about a single message or the research behind it. It also does not move with you.
In the tools that run all four steps, the work is the same: research the lead, write the first touch, follow up, book the meeting. The definition stops there, with discovery calls and demos still handled by people, as the AI SDR page sets out. What changes is where the software’s authority ends. The tools split three ways: a platform that sends for you, a script you run that sends on its own under guards, and software that stops at a person.
One design sends for you. You build a campaign, the platform writes and queues the messages, and it keeps going while replies come back. AiSDR bills $1.50 per person contacted, and its pricing page describes the plan as built for teams contacting 1,000 or more people a month (AiSDR). The same page says Ami builds the campaign, runs it, and sharpens it as replies come in.
Two of the subscription tools sell a seat and then meter the work. Outreach prices a seat plus consumption-based AI credits, and its pricing page lists Amplify Essentials (10K credits), Amplify Core (25K credits), Amplify Plus and Amplify Pro with no published rate: the page says “Request pricing” (Outreach). Outreach describes an action as “generating a personalized message or completing an individual search”, and says “Credits are then deducted according to the predefined amount associated with each action”. Extra credit packs can be bought at any time.
Regie.ai prices the same actions in a smaller unit. Regie’s Pro plan is $49/mo for one person ($41 on annual billing) with 5,000 credits a month, its Team plan is $150 per seat a month ($125 annual) with 15,000 credits per seat, and Free is $0 with 250 one-time credits (Regie.ai). Those credits pay for researching accounts, drafting messages, enriching contacts and dialing. They also stop the work, because running out pauses all four.
Amplemarket sells a B2B contact database, AI intent signals, multichannel sequences and a dialer in one platform it calls Duo, and its pricing page says all plans include a free trial. Its cheapest published plan is Startup at $600/mo on an annual term. The dialer, Duo Voice, is not in that plan: it appears from the Growth plan up, which is quoted per team (Amplemarket). Salesloft publishes no rate: its pricing page is a Talk to Sales page, and the platform it sells there is Cadence, conversation intelligence, Deals and its AI agents (Salesloft). Reply.io’s AI SDR is Jason, and its pricing page describes Jason as handling “everything from finding prospects to sending personalized messages and managing responses” (Reply.io).
So the money arrives in three shapes: per person contacted, per credit of work, and per seat under a contact allowance. None of the three prices the thing that decides the buy, which is who presses send.
AgentSDR and OpenOutreach are the pair you run yourself, and they disagree about the send. OpenOutreach is a GPL-3.0, self-hosted command-line tool: you describe your product and target market, it finds matching people from a licensed data provider, judges each against the profile it learned, writes each opener from that description, and sends it from your mailbox; its send guards, a sending window, a daily cap and pacing, decide when a message actually leaves (OpenOutreach). The README sets the size of a run in one command, openoutreach run 5, described there as “find five leads carrying an address, then send”. It describes no follow-up and no meeting booking, and no person approves a send, so it does two of the four steps the full job needs. That is a third design, and the guards that decide the send are configuration you own, readable before you run it.
AgentSDR is self-hosted with a screen on it, an MIT-licensed app for email, LinkedIn and WhatsApp outreach whose README says every reply is read, classified and given a drafted answer, and “You approve what goes out” (AgentSDR). The self-hosted setup is the other place to put the send under your own control.
Kortix cells come from its docs and the flow it publishes; each rival cell comes from that vendor’s own page, checked October 2026.
| Product | What it is | Open source | Who presses send | How it is priced |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Kortix | Open-source AI Operating System that runs a sales agent you own | Yes | A person; every follow-up stops at an approval gate as a draft | The paid plan is credits, from $50 a month |
| AiSDR | Managed AI SDR running email and LinkedIn sequences from one inbox | No | Ami builds the campaign, runs it, and sharpens it as replies come in | $1.50 per person contacted; built for 1,000 or more a month |
| Regie.ai | RegieGO builds your list, drafts and dials, with a free built-in CRM | No | RegieGO drafts and dials; running out of credits pauses it | Pro $49/mo with 5,000 credits; Team $150 per seat, 15,000 credits |
| AgentSDR | Self-hosted app for email, LinkedIn and WhatsApp outreach | Yes | You approve what goes out | Self-hosted and MIT-licensed; you pay your server and your providers |
Rival cells come from each vendor’s own page, checked October 2026: AiSDR’s pricing page, Regie’s pricing page and AgentSDR’s README. Kortix cells come from its docs and the lead follow-up flow it publishes. Amplemarket, Outreach, Salesloft, Reply.io and OpenOutreach each sell a different pricing shape, and their own pages are linked where they are quoted.
The first cost, on any AI SDR tool, is the send. It has two halves: what decides that a message goes out, and whether you can read that decision. AgentSDR answers in one line, “You approve what goes out”, and OpenOutreach answers in a list of guards. Regie publishes a third kind of control, a credit balance whose exhaustion pauses “research, drafting, enrichment and dialing”. The first two stop a message. The credit balance stops the machine.
The second cost is credits, which meter the work rather than the seat. A credit is a unit of the work you are buying. The bill grows with the number of messages written and searches run, which is the number the team is trying to raise. Outreach sells extra packs on top of the plan and charges by the action, so that number is worth modeling before the first campaign. It is harder to model after it.
The third cost is the exit, and it is the one buyers leave for last. Ask what stays with you when the contract ends: the list, the rules that governed the agent, and the record of what it did. OpenOutreach and AgentSDR settle it before the contract, because you run them on your own machine. For a managed tool the answer is a contract term. That is the part of the deal worth reading before it is signed.
Kortix keeps the rule that governs its sales agent as a file in the repo: “The agent’s persona, skills and permissions are files in the repo, versioned and changed through a reviewed change request, not a dashboard setting” (Kortix). Every member can read the rule before the next send, and the version that shaped last month’s sends is still in the history. The AI SDR page walks the lead follow-up flow that rule runs under, from the HubSpot sweep to the draft a person sends.
A tool call is ruled on the arguments it was given, and an agent’s shell access is ruled down to the command.
Rule each tool call allow, ask or block — down to the arguments it was givenSay allow, ask or deny per tool — down to a single shell commandSource: https://kortix.com
A managed AI SDR sells a campaign, and a switch in the vendor’s dashboard decides whether the campaign runs. Kortix is the platform a team runs its own sales agent on, so the account, the drafts and the approvals stay yours when a campaign ends. For a team that wants outbound to move at machine speed and still meet a person at the send, Kortix is the one to run it on.
Start with one job, new-lead follow-up, and one rule on the send step. The approval controls show where that rule is set, and the CRM write-back shows what the agent leaves on the record before the send.
Short answers on the lineup, the money, and whether the work gets done.
The ones that publish a price and a send policy, which is a shorter list than the rankings suggest. AiSDR publishes $1.50 per person contacted and Amplemarket publishes a $600/mo Startup plan on an annual term; Outreach answers pricing with “Request pricing” and Salesloft with “Talk to Sales”.
They work on the part of the job the vendors define, and stop where the definition stops. AiSDR’s own scope is account research, first-touch outreach, follow-up and meeting booking, with discovery calls, demos and closing left to people (AiSDR). What a buyer can check before signing is the list, the mailboxes, and who reads the copy.
Judge them on the send, since research and drafting look alike in a demo. AgentSDR’s README says “You approve what goes out”, and AiSDR’s page answers “Can I pause outbound?” with yes, at any time (AiSDR). One control is per message and the other stops the whole motion.
Most AI SDR platforms cost $200 to $5,000 a month and can go live within days, by AiSDR’s own comparison, which puts a human SDR at $7,500 to $10,000 a month (AiSDR). AiSDR’s own product bills $1.50 per person contacted, and its pricing page describes the plan as built for teams contacting 1,000 or more people a month.
Start with one new-lead job, one rule on the send step, and a person reading the draft.