Monaco vs MarketBetter: AI SDR Features Compared
The AI SDR category is heating up fast. With Monaco's splashy $35M launch in February 2026, there's a new player at the table — and sales teams are wondering how it stacks up against established platforms like MarketBetter.
This guide goes deep on the AI SDR features of both platforms. Not the funding headlines or founder pedigrees — the actual capabilities your team will use every day.
What Makes a Great AI SDR Platform in 2026?
Before comparing features, let's set the bar. The best AI SDR platforms in 2026 need to:
- Identify demand — who's already interested in your product?
- Enrich contacts — get accurate emails, phones, and context
- Automate outreach — personalized email, phone, and social at scale
- Capture inbound — don't let website visitors bounce without engaging them
- Prioritize actions — tell reps what to do first each day
- Integrate with your CRM — sync everything bidirectionally
- Keep humans in the loop — AI suggests, humans decide
Let's see how Monaco and MarketBetter measure up.
Feature Comparison: The Full Breakdown
Prospecting & Database
Monaco built its own proprietary prospect database from scratch — a ZoomInfo-like contact repository that's native to the platform. This means you don't need a separate data provider. The AI automatically builds and stack-ranks your Total Addressable Market (TAM), creating a prioritized list of target accounts. According to Monaco's press release, it incorporates signals like "existing connections, job changes, and custom web-based signals" to identify recommended buyers.
Beta user Amy Yan (Co-Founder, Nowadays) shared: "We had our TAM built on day 2 and we're running outbound sequences that same day." That's impressively fast onboarding for a data product.
MarketBetter takes a different approach: enrichment-first. Rather than maintaining a proprietary database, MarketBetter enriches contacts from your existing sources with verified emails, phone numbers, and firmographic data. Combined with website visitor identification, you're working with leads who have already shown interest.
Verdict: Different philosophies. Monaco gives you a cold contact database with buying signals. MarketBetter gives you warm, intent-enriched contacts. For most teams, warm beats cold — but Monaco's speed of TAM-building is genuinely impressive.
Email Outreach & Automation
Monaco deploys AI agents that create and execute email outreach campaigns based on embedded GTM best practices. As Sam Blond told TechCrunch: "We can replace full workflows with agents. Monaco builds a database of prospects, identifies the exact people at a target company to pitch, and the sequence in which to target them. We orchestrate and execute that sequence. We schedule a meeting."
The key differentiator is their "forward deployed AE" model — experienced human salespeople monitor and guide the AI. As Blond emphasized: "Monaco does not have an agent pretending to be a sales rep trying to sell to the customer." Actual customer meetings are always done by humans, not AI avatars.
MarketBetter offers AI-powered email sequences with personalization, smart send-time optimization, and A/B testing built in. Your SDRs stay in control of messaging while the AI handles the heavy lifting.
Verdict: Both platforms handle email well. Monaco leans more autonomous with human oversight from their embedded experts; MarketBetter keeps your own reps more directly involved. The right choice depends on whether you want Monaco's team managing your outbound or your own people driving it.
Phone & Calling
MarketBetter wins clearly. The Smart Dialer is a core feature — AI-powered call scripts, call recording, and intelligence. Phone outreach is built into the daily workflow.
Monaco is primarily email-focused. There's no mention of a built-in dialer or phone capabilities. For teams where phone is part of the outreach mix (and it should be), this is a significant gap.
Verdict: MarketBetter. If your sales process involves any phone outreach, Monaco leaves you looking for a third-party dialer.
Website Visitor Identification
MarketBetter wins clearly. Person-level and company-level identification of anonymous website visitors is a core differentiator. When a prospect visits your website, MarketBetter tells you who they are — often before they fill out a form.
Monaco doesn't mention website visitor identification. The platform focuses on outbound prospecting, not inbound demand capture.
Verdict: MarketBetter. This is arguably the highest-ROI feature in modern sales — you're reaching out to people who are already researching your product.
AI Chatbot & Inbound
MarketBetter wins. FloBot is a Qualified-style conversational AI that engages website visitors in real time, qualifies leads, answers questions, and books meetings — 24/7, even when your team is offline.
Monaco doesn't offer a chatbot or any on-site engagement tool.
Verdict: MarketBetter. Inbound leads convert at 5-10x the rate of cold outbound. Not capturing them is leaving revenue on the table.
Daily SDR Playbook
MarketBetter wins. Each morning, SDRs get a prioritized action list: who to call first, which emails to send, which leads need follow-up. It's like having an AI sales manager that preps the day's work.
Monaco doesn't offer an equivalent daily task prioritization feature.
Verdict: MarketBetter. SDR productivity lives and dies by daily prioritization. Without it, reps waste time figuring out what to do instead of doing it.
CRM Integration
Monaco takes the built-in approach — their AI-native CRM is part of the platform. Zero integration needed if you don't already have a CRM. It captures interactions, manages pipeline, and handles forecasting natively.
MarketBetter offers deep bidirectional integration with HubSpot and Salesforce — the CRMs most teams already use. Every touchpoint syncs automatically.
Verdict: Depends on your situation. New startup with no CRM? Monaco's built-in approach is convenient. Already on HubSpot or Salesforce? MarketBetter integrates seamlessly without disrupting your existing workflow.
Meeting Notes & Intelligence
Monaco includes a built-in meeting notetaker that captures and summarizes sales conversations. One less tool to buy.
MarketBetter offers pre-meeting intelligence — auto-generated briefs with prospect context before every call — but uses third-party tools (Gong, Chorus, etc.) for call recording.
Verdict: Monaco has the edge on meeting notes. MarketBetter has the edge on pre-meeting prep. Both are valuable at different points in the sales cycle.
Human-in-the-Loop Design
Both platforms get this right — but in very different ways.
Monaco's approach is unique in the market: they provide "forward deployed AEs" — experienced salespeople who are actually embedded with your account. As Catheryn Li (Co-Founder, Simple AI) described: "Monaco is more than technology. The forward deployed AE is like having a sales exec on our team." These aren't just AI monitors — they're sales professionals who help train the AI to sell your specific product, ensure outreach quality, and handle real customer meetings in person. Sam Blond's press release calls it "like having a world-class CRO embedded directly into the sales workflow."
However, this model raises scalability questions. With only ~40 employees and a "growing base of customers," how many forward deployed AEs can Monaco provide? This service layer is expensive to scale.
MarketBetter's Daily Playbook keeps the SDR in the driver's seat — the AI recommends, the human acts. Your own team stays in control rather than depending on Monaco's personnel.
Both approaches are smarter than platforms like 11x.ai and Artisan that try to fully replace human SDRs. As Blond told TechCrunch: "Monaco does not have an agent pretending to be a sales rep trying to sell to the customer."
Verdict: Different implementations, same smart philosophy. Monaco gives you their experts; MarketBetter empowers your own team. The right choice depends on whether you want to build in-house sales capability or outsource the expertise.
What Early Monaco Users Say
Monaco's product page features testimonials from beta customers. Here are the unique ones (with real names and companies):
- "Monaco made our legacy CRM feel instantly obsolete." — Alex Berkovic, Co-Founder, Sphinx
- "LOVE LOVE LOVE Monaco, they are awesome and my team and I love the platform." — Fatima Sabar, CEO & Co-Founder, Bluenote
- "Monaco feels like the future of sales. It replaced our CRM, outbound tools, and half the manual work overnight." — Sean McCarthy, Co-Founder, BackOps
- "Monaco lets us punch way above our weight. We're a 3-person team running GTM like a 20-person sales org." — Graham Cummings, CRO, Datawizz
- "We've tried every modern CRM and sales tool. Monaco is the best and it's not even close." — Hari Raghavan, CEO & Co-Founder, Autograph
- "I am DELIGHTED by my experience — what a team and product you have put together." — Alex Shan, CEO & Co-Founder, Judgment Labs
These are enthusiastic but note what's missing: no specific metrics (meetings booked, pipeline generated, revenue closed). Contrast this with MarketBetter's documented results on G2 (4.97/5 rating) with specific ROI data from companies like CallRail, Hologram, and GXC.
The Score Card
| Capability | MarketBetter | Monaco |
|---|---|---|
| Prospecting database | ✅ Enrichment-based | ✅ Built-in database |
| Email automation | ✅ | ✅ |
| Phone/Smart Dialer | ✅ | ❌ |
| Website visitor ID | ✅ | ❌ |
| AI chatbot | ✅ | ❌ |
| Daily SDR playbook | ✅ | ❌ |
| Pre-meeting intel | ✅ | ✅ (notetaker) |
| Built-in CRM | ❌ (integrates) | ✅ |
| Human-in-the-loop | ✅ | ✅ |
| Transparent pricing | ✅ | ❌ |
MarketBetter: 8/10 | Monaco: 5/10
Bottom Line
Monaco is a well-funded, well-designed platform with a strong founding team. Its all-in-one approach and AI-native CRM are genuinely impressive for teams starting from zero.
But on pure AI SDR features, MarketBetter offers significantly more: visitor identification, smart dialer, AI chatbot, and daily playbook — four capabilities that Monaco simply doesn't have.
For sales teams that need a complete AI-powered workflow — not just email outbound — MarketBetter is the more feature-complete choice.
Want to see MarketBetter's AI SDR features in action? Book a demo and we'll walk through visitor identification, the smart dialer, AI chatbot, and daily playbook.