AI prospecting tools, sorted by the job they do

Every listicle on this search is published by a vendor that ranks itself first: ZoomInfo's list starts with ZoomInfo, Amplemarket's with Amplemarket. This one is published by Tulina, which appears on it, in the last row, and is described as plainly as the others. The tools are sorted by the job they do rather than ranked, because they are not substitutes for one another, and most teams use two or three. For the method these tools serve, read the AI prospecting guide; for the autonomous end of the list, what an AI SDR really does.

What is the best AI prospecting tool?

The one that does the job you are missing, on data that covers your market. Sorted by job, as of 29 October 2026:

Apollo's prices are from its pages read on 27 October 2026 for our Apollo alternatives comparison; its pricing page, read again on 29 October, renders the figures in the browser only. Clay's are from 26 October for the same reason. Every other price was read on 29 October 2026.

Contact databases with AI on top

Apollo is where most small teams start, and for good reason: one seat holds a database of 240M contacts and 30M companies (Apollo's figures), an email and phone finder, and a sequencer, with a free plan. Its AI layer now runs agents in the background and connects to Claude and ChatGPT through Apollo's own MCP server. Credits are pooled across the team and, per Apollo's pricing page, "do not roll over if unused".

ZoomInfo is the enterprise default, with the broadest firmographic and intent data of the group. Its AI products are Copilot, which it calls an AI sales agent, and GTM Studio. It publishes no prices; the pricing page is a request form.

Choose a database for coverage of your market, not for its AI. The AI features of the two converge every quarter; their coverage of a 200-person company in Lyon does not.

Research and enrichment layers

Clay sits on top of databases rather than replacing one: a table where each column can call one of 200+ providers or a research agent (Claygent) that reads the web for each row. It is the most flexible tool on this list and the one that takes the most building. Its own blog's guide to AI prospecting describes the method in three steps: build a list from your ideal customer profile, enrich it with company and buying-signal data, then personalise. Our Clay alternative page breaks down its credits in detail.

Sequencers with agents

lemlist started as a cold email sequencer and now bundles a lead database, email and phone finders, and agents (lemAgent, signal agents, enrichment agents). Its credits, unlike Apollo's, "roll over for as long as your subscription remains active", per its pricing FAQ.

Amplemarket is an all-in-one: database, multichannel sequences, dialer and the Duo copilot, sold on an annual term from $600 a month for two users.

Agents inside the CRM

HubSpot's prospecting agent watches the companies in segments you pick for signals (funding, product launches, research activity), finds contacts through connected providers such as ZoomInfo and Apollo, and drafts outreach for reps to send. It bills HubSpot Credits for each lead it writes to, whether the agent found the lead or a rep enrolled it, per HubSpot's knowledge base updated 21 October 2026.

Salesforce Agentforce meters every agent action at 20 Flex Credits, $0.10 at the published $500 per 100,000 credits, and sells per-user add-ons for unmetered employee use. Its Engagement agent, which Salesforce's help center files under SDR, handles initial outreach, follow-up, answering questions and meeting booking for leads in Salesforce.

Both make sense when the CRM is already the system everyone works in. Both see your CRM better than any outside tool, and the outside world only through the providers they connect to.

Autonomous AI SDRs

11x, Artisan and AiSDR sell the whole outbound job: list, research, writing, sending from mailboxes they set up, replies and booking. They differ most in price shape: 11x publishes an annual plan from $3,750 a month for 2,000 new prospects, AiSDR meters $1.50 per person with no contract, and Artisan quotes on a call. What an AI SDR really does goes through what they cover and what stays with people.

How fresh is the data behind AI prospecting tools?

Fresher than its reputation, and not uniformly. On 29 October 2026 we read the first 60 of the 130 profiles Apollo holds for one US software company of about 165 people, through Tulina's Apollo connector, and looked at Apollo's own last_refreshed_at field on each:

A refresh date is Apollo saying when it last re-read the record, not proof that the person still holds the role. It does show that the age of records varies within one company, so a tool that shows the date and source of every value lets you choose what to trust; one that shows a bare email does not. One company on one day, read through one provider: a reason to check your own accounts, not a measure of Apollo's accuracy.

How do you choose an AI prospecting tool?

Test it on accounts you already know. A demo on the vendor's own sample tells you how the product looks, not how it covers your market.

1. Pick fifty accounts you know well: twenty customers, ten lost deals, ten you would never sell to, ten in your target segment.
2. Count what the tool finds for each: does it have the company, the right people, a work email?
3. Check ten contacts by hand on LinkedIn: are they still in the role the tool says?
4. Ask it for a reason to write to the target accounts. Is each one true, sourced and dated?
5. See what it does with the customers. A tool that would have emailed a customer as a prospect is missing the CRM check, whatever else it does well.
6. Read the credit rules: what a lookup costs, whether unused credits roll over, and what is billed when nothing is found.

Where does Tulina fit?

At the end of the table, as the thing that runs the others. Tulina is an agentic RevOps workflow builder: AI agents that run sales and GTM processes on a schedule or a webhook, across the tools a team already uses, with every step and its cost visible. For prospecting, that means your database, your enrichment providers, your CRM and your sequencer, called in the order the method sets, by Claude or ChatGPT, or by a hosted agent every morning. It brings no database of its own and does not send on its own.

The cheapest place to start is the enrichment step, which most teams already pay several providers for. Paste this into Claude or ChatGPT once your providers and CRM are connected:

Enrich the contacts in my table "Q4 targets" that have no email yet.

1. Skip the rows that already have an email, and the rows with
   neither a LinkedIn URL nor a name and company domain.
2. Run the email cascade across my connected providers, cheapest
   first, stopping at the first verified email. Show me the plan and
   its cost for one row as a dry run before running the rest.
3. Write the email back to the row with the provider that found it
   and today's date next to it.
4. For the rows still empty after every provider, write "not found"
   and the providers tried. Do not guess an address.
5. Report: rows enriched by provider, not found, and the total cost.

The process behind that prompt, with every step and the tools it uses:

The process in Tulina

Enrich contacts with email and phone

Trigger · Event

List created

A newly assembled batch opens the run, so enrichment starts without anyone submitting it.

Claude runs the rest autonomously

1. 1

   AI gathers every identifiable contact.

   The batch holds every contact with at least one way to identify them — an email, a professional profile, or a name and company.

2. 2

   AI enriches the whole batch at once.

   Dropcontact

   Dropcontact

   The whole list goes out in one request and results are collected as soon as they are ready, with no fixed wait assumed.

3. 3

   AI backfills missing emails.

   Kaspr

   Kaspr

   Anyone still without a usable email gets a second, email-only pass through a profile-based fallback.

4. 4

   AI returns one table, flags every gap.

   One clean table comes back with every real gap flagged instead of dropped, and nothing written to the CRM unless asked for separately.

See the full process

The whole loop, from a sentence to a paused campaign, is Build a target list from a sentence; the version that starts from the day's hiring and technology signals is Outbound from buying signals.

Are there free AI prospecting tools?

Free tiers, enough to learn the method on and not enough to run it weekly for a team. Apollo's Free plan includes database search and a small credit allowance; Clay's Free plan includes Claygent research on a few hundred actions a month; lemlist's 14-day trial includes 200 credits; Salesforce lists a free Foundations tier for building agents. None of the autonomous AI SDRs on this list has a free plan. The free option that scales best is the method itself: a rubric, one signal, and an assistant that reads titles, run by hand on fifty accounts.

What this list cannot tell you

• Coverage of your market. Every figure here is the vendor's own. Run the fifty-account test above before believing any of them for your region, especially outside the US.
• Find rates. We did not measure how often each tool finds a valid email, and no vendor's claimed rate is comparable with another's.
• Next quarter's prices. These were read on the dates given and change often; credit rules change more often than headline prices.
• What is missing. Eleven tools is not the whole market. Seamless, Cognism, Lusha, Outreach, Salesloft, Instantly and many more sell parts of this job; the table covers one or two per kind.

Common questions

Are there free AI prospecting tools?

There are free tiers, and they are enough to learn on. Apollo's Free plan includes a contact database search with a small credit allowance, Clay's Free plan gives a few hundred actions a month with its research agent, and HubSpot's prospecting agent runs on credits that paid HubSpot plans include each month. None of them is enough to run a weekly program for a team, and none of the autonomous AI SDRs has a free plan.

Do AI prospecting tools work outside the US?

Coverage drops outside North America, and it drops most for phone numbers and small companies. Most databases are strongest on US tech companies. For Europe, teams usually add a regional provider and a registry source, and check each tool's coverage on a sample of their own accounts before buying a year of it.

How do I test an AI prospecting tool before buying it?

Give it fifty accounts you already know well: some customers, some lost deals, some you would never sell to. Count how many it finds, how many of the contacts are still in the role, how many of the reasons to write are true and dated, and whether it would have emailed a customer. A vendor demo on its own sample tells you none of that.