Outreach vs Salesloft in 2026: Which Sales Engagement Platform Fits Your Team?

On December 3, 2025, Salesloft closed its merger with Clari, and on September 2, 2026 it retired the "Clari + Salesloft" name for good. That makes the Outreach vs Salesloft decision a different question from the one most comparison pages still answer.

Both vendors now sell the same three layers: sequences, call intelligence and forecasting. Outreach meters its AI by credits on top of seats, across four packages. Salesloft sells named modules by quote, and its forecasting module is the product it gained in the merger. For a revenue operations lead renewing a contract in the next two quarters, the deciding facts are the billing model, the CRM connector and who owns the forecast.

The short verdict: pick by the job you are buying it for

Here is the call, stated plainly.

• Pick Salesloft if forecasting is the reason you are buying. Clari Forecast kept its old name because of its standing in enterprise forecasting, and it now ships inside the platform rather than as a second contract.
• Pick Salesloft if you run a Microsoft CRM and want activity logging plus automation rules from the engagement tool itself.
• Pick Outreach if you want AI agents and call coaching billed by usage, with an MCP server in every package and a cheaper way in through a coaching-only tier.
• Pick Outreach if your reps live in a single CRM and you want one vendor for sequences, deal management and forecasting without a module-by-module quote.

Neither is the budget option. Teams that need a published price list should look at the revenue platforms in our directory or at the lighter tools covered further down. If your stack makes the answer unclear, Smart Match asks about your CRM, team size and budget and returns a shortlist.

Salesloft is now one company with Clari inside it

The merger is the single fact most of these comparison pages miss. The two companies first announced an agreement to merge in 2025. The deal closed on December 3, 2025, and the combined company named Steve Cox chief executive, according to its own release. That release also said the company would double its R&D investment.

Ten months later the brands collapsed into one. A September 2, 2026 announcement says Salesloft is now the company and platform brand. Only the forecasting product keeps the old name. The acquired revenue intelligence, deal management and call analysis technology continues inside the platform.

So is it part of Salesforce? No. It is an independent company backed by a private equity firm that made a strategic growth investment in December 2021, at what the investor's release called a multi-billion dollar valuation. The platform integrates with Salesforce; it is not owned by it.

Its rival is also independent. Four founders started it in early 2014, and its About page reports $489 million in funding and a $4.4 billion valuation after its Series G. Abhijit Mitra is chief executive.

What the merger means for a buyer:

1. Forecasting is no longer a partner integration on the merged side. It is a native module.
2. Former forecasting-only customers are being pulled toward the engagement layer, and engagement customers toward the forecast. Expect bundle offers.
3. Outreach built its forecasting in-house and sells it only in its top package.

What each one costs when neither publishes a price

Neither vendor shows a number. The Outreach pricing page says "Request pricing" on every package, and the Salesloft pricing address leads to a sales contact form. Any figure you see is either a quote or third-party buyer data.

The best public benchmark is Vendr, a software buying platform that aggregates real contracts. Its figures are below, read on October 19, 2026.

Read those medians with care. They describe whatever bundle each buyer signed, so a contract that includes forecasting may be compared with one that does not. The Salesloft benchmark page also notes a minimum of roughly 10 to 15 seats, while the Outreach benchmark page still uses older plan names that predate the current packages.

The contract terms matter as much as the median. Vendr reports that both vendors commonly quote onboarding and training separately, and that terms of two to three years lower the effective annual price.

Seats plus credits, or modules by quote

The billing model is where the two really split. Outreach combines a per-user seat with consumption-based AI credits, and states there are "no platform fees" and that support is included. Each package carries a credit allowance:

A credit, per the vendor's FAQ, is spent on a discrete action such as generating a personalized message or completing a search, each with a "predictable credit cost". The page does not say what one action costs in credits, so you cannot forecast your burn from the website. Extra credit packs can be bought at any time.

The merged company quotes by seats, modules and term. Its platform page lists seven modules for account teams and revenue leaders, from cadences and call analysis to the forecast, pipeline inspection and analytics, so ask for each line priced in writing. Vendr's per-seat estimates use three tier names that appear nowhere on the vendor's current site.

AI agents: a usage meter against a catalogue

Both vendors now lead their marketing with agents. They package them very differently.

Outreach names six agents and gates them by package: an Omni chat agent over your revenue data, plus research, revenue, personalization, deal and meeting prep agents. Agent Studio chains them together. The entry package gets four of the six. Plus and Pro get all of them.

The rival's AI agents page lists a longer catalogue sorted by sales stage. Pipeline creation gets account research, person research and a buyer identification agent that integrates with ZoomInfo. Deal work gets summaries, an agent that maps calls to frameworks such as MEDDPICC, and a stalled-deals alert. Rhythm turns buyer signals into a ranked daily task list.

Both ship an MCP server, which lets outside assistants read pipeline data. The merged vendor says its server works with any MCP app, naming Claude among them. Outreach lists an MCP server and client in every package, and has announced an app inside ChatGPT. If your reps already work in Microsoft Copilot, test which server answers your real questions before you sign.

The practical difference is cost exposure. Credits drain as agents run, so heavy use raises one bill. The catalogue vendor does not describe a credit meter on its agents page; agent access is part of what you negotiate.

Forecasting and call intelligence, and where Gong fits

Forecasting is where the merger changed the most. The merged company owns its forecasting product outright, plus pipeline inspection and structured forecast calls. Its September 24 vision release lists "agentic forecasting" as roadmap work, not a shipped feature.

Outreach keeps forecasting in its top package only: AI forecast projection, a scenario planner, rollups, territory management and multi-currency. The vendor claims those customers "spend half the time preparing forecasts" and see forecast errors fall 15%. Those are vendor figures with no published method.

Call intelligence is closer to a tie. A new call analysis product launched on July 14, 2026, built to feed call signals into cadences and the forecast. Its rival includes real-time transcription, sentiment analysis and coaching cards in three of its four packages, with connectors for the major video meeting apps. One tier claims it can "predict deal outcomes with 81% accuracy"; treat that as marketing until you see it on your own pipeline.

"Outreach vs Salesloft vs Gong" is a real search, so it deserves a straight answer. Gong leads with conversation analysis and now sells its own engagement product, Gong Engage, which runs outreach flows from call data. Its pricing page says licenses are priced per user and adds a platform fee based on user count, which neither of the other two describes. Buy it when call analysis is the core purchase. For the lighter end of note-takers and call recorders, our meeting assistant guide covers the field.

CRM sync is what decides most rollouts

This is the section that saves a quarter of pain. The Outreach CRM connection overview describes a two-way sync with Salesforce and Dynamics 365 Sales. It covers leads, contacts, accounts, opportunities and tasks, pulls changes every 10 minutes by default and batches pushes for 60 seconds.

Three limits sit in that same article and rarely make it into comparisons:

• Opportunities sync down from the CRM, but edits made in the engagement tool are not pushed back up.
• Tasks push up to the CRM, but tasks created in the CRM do not come down.
• The Professional edition of Salesforce needs a web API package and purchased call bundles first.

HubSpot is a separate story. A support FAQ says the CRM vendor's own engineers manage that integration and handle its sync issues. Emails sync one way, into the CRM, and there is no on-demand single-record sync.

The merged vendor's CRM integration page describes two-way sync with Salesforce, logging more than 30 activity properties such as call duration, disposition and sentiment. It offers the same two-way sync plus automation rules for the Microsoft CRM. For HubSpot it describes a sync that transfers every sales touchpoint into the CRM. That page was last updated in November 2023, so confirm the current object list in your demo.

Teams that are mainly on HubSpot should read our breakdown of what its Breeze AI covers, because the native tools may be enough. A newer CRM such as Attio is not on either main connector list. Pipedrive is missing too, though its own MCP server lets assistants work its deals directly, according to the Pipedrive feature page.

Where Outreach wins

The usage-billed platform is the better buy in four specific cases.

1. You want to start small on AI. The entry package gives a team call coaching, transcription and four agents with 10,000 credits, without paying for sequencing it may already have.
2. You want usage, not headcount, to drive AI cost. A 40-seat team with five heavy AI users is not paying agent prices for 35 light users.
3. You want one ladder up to forecasting. Moving from the third package to the fourth adds forecasting inside the same contract and data model.
4. You build on MCP. Every package lists both a server and a client, so external agents can act in the platform, not just read from it.

It also announced in October 2026 that it was named a Leader in Gartner's Magic Quadrant for Revenue Action Orchestration for a second year, and ranked first in the "acquire new customers" use case of the companion report.

Where Salesloft wins

The merged platform is the better buy in four other cases.

1. Forecasting is the headline requirement. A CRO who already trusts the old forecasting product gets it inside the engagement platform, with pipeline inspection alongside.
2. Your buyer lists start in a big data vendor. The buyer identification agent recommends stakeholders and integrates with that provider directly.
3. You run the Microsoft CRM. Automation rules and activity logging are documented there, not just record sync.
4. The median contract matters. Vendr's sample shows a lower median here, $30,740 against $45,600, and a larger average negotiated saving.

It also has the longer list of task-specific agents, which suits teams that prefer narrow, predictable automations to a general chat agent.

The case against picking either one

Here is the strongest objection to this whole comparison: many teams reading it do not need an enterprise engagement platform at all.

Both vendors sell by quote, require a demo before you see a number, and typically land in five figures a year. A 10-person outbound team can run sequences, a contact database and an AI writer on Apollo, which publishes its seat prices. Teams that live in cold email can pick between three senders in our cold email tool comparison. Reply.io and lemlist both list prices openly too.

The answer is scope. Once a team needs call coaching, deal inspection and a forecast that leadership signs off on, lighter tools force three or four contracts and three or four data models. That is when the five-figure platform starts to pay for itself, and when choosing between these two becomes the right question. If you are not there yet, our guide to Apollo alternatives is the better starting point.

Data handling and security: read the Drift record first

Both vendors publish a strong certification list. The Outreach trust page adds ISO 42001 for AI management, HIPAA and CSA STAR on top of SOC 2 Type II, ISO 27001 and ISO 27701. The merged vendor's trust center covers the same SOC 2 report and both ISO standards, plus GDPR.

The merged vendor also carries an incident buyers should read in full. Its trust center publishes a summary of Mandiant's investigation into Drift, a chat product it owns. Mandiant was engaged on August 26, 2025, and traced an intrusion from March 22, 2025 to September 5, 2025 that used company GitHub access tokens and took environment secrets and code.

The summary says the investigation has concluded. Mandiant verified segmentation between the two application environments and found no evidence beyond limited reconnaissance in the main platform. Drift came back online on September 16, 2025.

What to ask either vendor in the security review:

• Which subprocessors handle your data? The merged vendor lists additions dated February, March and May 2026.
• Which OAuth scopes does the CRM connector request, and can they be narrowed?
• Where is your data hosted, and can you pin it to the EU?
• Do AI agents send prompts to a third-party model, and is that data used for training?

Switching cost: what moving between them actually takes

Switching is mostly a calendar problem. Vendr reports that both vendors commonly sign two- to three-year terms, so the first cost is waiting out, or buying out, the current contract. Annual escalators of 3% to 8% also mean the longer you wait, the more the renewal costs.

The rebuild list is predictable:

1. Sequences or cadences, templates and snippets. Neither public documentation set describes a native import of the other's format.
2. CRM mapping. Re-check field mappings and the opportunity sync direction described above.
3. Call recordings and coaching libraries. Plan an export before the old contract ends.
4. Reporting. Dashboards and forecast categories rarely move as-is.
5. Rep habits. Budget onboarding: Vendr puts services at $5,000 to $25,000 or more.

Your contact data is a separate decision. A data provider such as Lusha sits outside the engagement layer, and so does Seamless.AI, so check that yours connects to the new platform before you cancel anything. Our AI SDR guide explains why that data layer matters more than the agent sitting on top.

Who should pick which, by team shape

Teams experimenting with autonomous outbound should know that agent-first vendors are a different category. 11x sells an autonomous SDR, Amplemarket pairs a database with AI sequences, and Unify builds prospect lists from a chat agent. For enrichment workflows, Clay is the usual pick. The AI SDR category lists the rest, and our AI sales assistant guide sorts them by job.

What would flip the recommendation

Three things to watch.

First, if the merged vendor ships agentic forecasting as described in its September roadmap, its forecasting lead widens. Second, if Outreach publishes a credit cost per action, buyers could finally model AI spend before signing, which would strengthen its usage pitch. Third, if either one posts list prices, the Vendr medians stop being the only public yardstick.

Watch the next renewal cycle too. The single brand is about seven weeks old, and bundle pricing for former forecasting-only customers will show whether the merger lowers the total cost of engagement plus forecasting, or just moves it onto one invoice.

Frequently asked questions

Is Salesloft part of Salesforce?

No. Salesloft is an independent company backed by Vista Equity Partners, which invested in December 2021. It integrates with Salesforce through a two-way sync but is not owned by it. In December 2025 it merged with Clari, and since September 2026 it operates under the single Salesloft brand.

Is Outreach or Salesloft cheaper?

Neither publishes prices. Vendr buyer data puts the median annual contract at $30,740 for Salesloft and $45,600 for Outreach, but those contracts cover different bundles. Ask both for module-level or package-level quotes over the same term before comparing.

Did Salesloft merge with Clari?

Yes. Salesloft and Clari completed their merger on December 3, 2025, with Steve Cox as CEO. On September 2, 2026 the company dropped the Clari + Salesloft name; Salesloft is now the company and platform brand and only Clari Forecast keeps the Clari name.

Where does Gong fit against Outreach and Salesloft?

Gong leads with conversation analysis and also sells an engagement product, Gong Engage. Its pricing page describes per-user licenses plus a platform fee based on user count. Choose Gong when call analysis is the main purchase, and Outreach or Salesloft when sequencing and forecasting matter as much.

Do Outreach and Salesloft work with HubSpot?

Both connect, with limits. Outreach says its HubSpot integration is managed by HubSpot engineers and syncs emails one way, from Outreach to HubSpot. Salesloft offers CRM Sync for HubSpot that transfers sales touchpoints into HubSpot. Both document deeper two-way syncs with Salesforce and Dynamics 365.

Covered in this guide

• Outreach: Revenue platform with multichannel sequences, call coaching, forecasting and 7 AI agents, sold by seat plus AI credits.
• Salesloft: Revenue orchestration platform combining outreach, call analysis and Clari forecasting; vendor reports 4,000+ customers. Pricing is quote-only.
• 11x: Alice runs outbound across 3 channels and Julian qualifies inbound leads by phone and chat, with both logging activity back to your CRM.
• Amplemarket: Outbound platform that combines a B2B database, Duo AI buying signals, multichannel sequences, a dialer and email warmup in 3 plans.
• Apollo: Apollo.io is a sales intelligence platform with a searchable B2B contact database, used by 500,000+ companies for prospecting and outreach.
• Attio: AI-native CRM with a free plan for up to 3 seats, a hosted MCP server and per-user paid plans; Pro adds call recording and sequences.
• ChatGPT: ChatGPT is OpenAI's AI assistant, with 1.2 billion weekly users by OpenAI's count, the GPT-6 model family and plans that run from a free tier to a premium Pro tier.
• Claude: Claude is Anthropic's AI assistant, with a free tier, paid personal plans, and Team and Enterprise seats. Opus access starts at the first paid plan.
• Clay: AI go-to-market platform with waterfall data enrichment and Claygent AI research agents, with plans from free to enterprise.
• Gong: Revenue intelligence platform with conversation AI, call analysis, and AI agents for sales coaching and forecasting for 4,500+ companies.
• lemlist: Multichannel outreach platform covering email, LinkedIn, calls and SMS, with a built-in lead database, lemwarm warmup and a lemAgent campaign builder.
• Lusha: Contact data sold by the credit: 1 for an email, 5 for a phone number, with a free plan, a Chrome extension and an MCP server.
• Microsoft Copilot: Your everyday AI companion powered by GPT-5.6 (preferred model July 2026), GPT-4o, and GPT-5 for productivity, creativity, and intelligent assistance
• MCP server: Official Pipedrive MCP (launched June 30, 2026) links AI agents to deals, contacts and pipelines via OAuth, no API key needed.
• Reply.io: Sales engagement platform for email, LinkedIn, calls and SMS, with a live B2B database, an AI SDR agent and a documented MCP server.
• Seamless.AI: Seamless AI is a real-time B2B lead database with 1.7B+ verified contacts, job change alerts, and buyer intent data. Plans from $147/month for 250 credits.
• Unify: Chat agent with 50+ built-in skills that builds prospect lists, enriches contacts and runs email, call and social outbound sequences.
• ZoomInfo: Go-to-market intelligence platform with B2B contact and company data, intent signals and a GTM.AI API, CLI and MCP server with free starter credits.

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