Cognlay vs Regie.ai (2026)
The decision is whether you need proof that it works or proof of what it does, because these two have opposite kinds. Regie.ai carries five years of history, more than fifty million dollars raised and hundreds of public reviews at a strong average, and it names no customer, publishes no metric and carries no case study on its current product pages, because the agentic workspace it now sells is days old and its evidence record effectively restarts with the repositioning. Cognlay has no customers at all, no reviews, no funding record and one named founder, and it publishes the clearest allocation of outreach responsibility in this index, four regimes addressed separately, alongside four real prices, two meters defined in plain language and a named model provider family. Both send from the operator's own mailbox and both refuse the vendor provisioned sending domain. One can show you that it worked. The other can show you what it will do.
- You need to know exactly where the sender's duty starts. Cognlay addresses four regimes separately, states in writing that the sender remains responsible for a lawfully obtained list, says outright that consent is required before commercial email reaches a Canadian recipient, and suppresses opted out leads architecturally rather than advising it.
- You want to model cost per prospect before signing up. Four plans carry real numbers from free to two hundred and ninety nine dollars a month, and both meters are defined in plain language, a managed lead and an AI email credit each spelled out, which almost no metered vendor in this index supplies.
- Oversight should not be an enterprise upgrade. Review first workflow controls and pre send quality guardrails ship on every plan including the free one, the platform does not send from sequences the operator has not explicitly activated, and revoking mailbox credentials at your own provider stops all sending even if the vendor's systems are unreachable.
- You need a vendor that has already been used by somebody. Regie.ai carries five years of history, more than fifty million dollars raised through a thirty million dollar round in early 2025, a technical founder with a doctorate and hundreds of public reviews at a strong average on the major directory, where the counterpart has no customer, review or funding record at all.
- You need contacts and calls as well as email. A seven provider contact waterfall supplies prospects with mobile numbers, billed only when a lookup returns data, calls land in a built in dialer with one click provisioned local numbers, and account monitoring watches for job changes, funding rounds and leadership hires.
- Procurement will ask for an attestation. Regie.ai's footer claims a completed service organisation control type two audit and names the continuous monitoring vendor behind it, which asserts live monitoring rather than a point in time report, where the counterpart holds no certification and says so plainly.
Plain facts
| Cognlay | Regie.ai | |
|---|---|---|
| Primary category | AI SDR & Outbound Agents | AI SDR & Outbound Agents |
| Founded | Not published | 2020 |
| Headquarters | Not published | San Francisco, California, United States |
| Website | cognlay.com | regie.ai |
Side by Side
| Axis | C Cognlay |
R Regie.ai |
|---|---|---|
|
AI Capability
|
||
| AI Centrality | ||
| Autonomy and Oversight Model | ||
| AI Disclosure and Model Transparency | ||
| Operational and Outcome Evidence | ||
|
Compliance and Risk
|
||
| Outreach Compliance Posture | ||
| Data Privacy Posture | ||
| Data Licensing and Provenance | ||
| Platform Terms Exposure | ||
| AI Safety and Data Stewardship | ||
| Recipient Disclosure and Authenticity | ||
|
Integration and Deployment
|
||
| Ecosystem and Integration Depth | ||
| Deployment Model and Data Residency | ||
| Security Certifications and Trust Center | ||
|
Commercial and Operational
|
||
| Commercial Transparency | ||
| Exit and Data Portability | ||
| Deliverability and Sending Discipline | ||
| Segment and Market Coverage | ||
The short version of each
Cognlay
Cognlay is a governed sales development platform built around the argument that most outbound tools stop thinking at the moment of send, watching what each lead did and rewriting, pausing, routing or stopping before the next touch rather than pushing everyone through one fixed cadence. The GTM Tech Index grades it A on outreach compliance posture, the clearest allocation of responsibility between platform and sender anywhere in the index, addressing four regimes separately, stating in writing that the sender remains responsible for a lawfully obtained list, and suppressing opted out leads architecturally rather than advisorily. It also grades Cognlay A on commercial transparency for four real prices with both meters defined in plain language, and D on operational and outcome evidence, recorded as a stage fact for a beta product with one named founder and no customers.
Source: GTM Tech Index, 2026
Regie.ai
Regie.ai is a five year old venture backed vendor that has repositioned from an enterprise sales engagement platform into an agentic workspace for individual sellers, where agents source prospects through a seven provider contact waterfall, monitor accounts for signals, draft outreach trained on the seller's own sent mail and send from the seller's connected mailbox. The GTM Tech Index grades it C on operational and outcome evidence, a striking position for a five year old company with more than fifty million dollars raised: the checkable evidence lives off site in hundreds of public reviews and in dated press describing the enterprise product it has since repositioned away from, so the current product's evidence record effectively restarts. The index grades it B on platform terms exposure, deliverability discipline and commercial transparency.
Source: GTM Tech Index, 2026
Common questions
Is Cognlay better than Regie.ai for outbound?
They carry opposite kinds of proof, so it depends what you need to be sure of. Regie.ai has five years, more than fifty million dollars raised and hundreds of public reviews, and its current product pages name no customer and publish no metric, because the agentic workspace it now sells is days old and its evidence record effectively restarts with the repositioning. Cognlay has no customers, reviews or funding record at all, and publishes the clearest allocation of outreach responsibility in this index alongside four real prices with both meters defined. One can show you that it worked. The other can show you what it will do.
Do Cognlay and Regie.ai send from my own mailbox?
Both, and both refuse the vendor provisioned sending domain, which is unusual in this category. Cognlay is not sending infrastructure, holds no address pools, runs no shared warmup accounts and sends through the operator's mailbox over standard mail protocols. Regie.ai sends from the seller's connected Gmail or Outlook rather than a burner domain, with verification before every send and throttled sending. Cognlay goes one step further by declining inbox warmup outright and telling buyers to use a dedicated tool for it, which is a refusal to claim a capability rather than a gap.
Which one discloses what AI it runs on?
Cognlay, and it is the smallest vendor in this index making the disclosure. It names the provider family rather than gesturing at it, stating it uses large language models from leading providers including Google's Gemini family, enumerates exactly what the model receives for an outbound action, and states plainly that it is not given unrelated inbox threads for general analysis. Regie.ai makes one model disclosure, that the drafting model learns the seller's voice from their own sent mail, and names no provider, family or method anywhere.
How much do Cognlay and Regie.ai cost?
Cognlay publishes four plans from free to two hundred and ninety nine dollars a month against a twelve row comparison matrix, and defines both meters in plain words, so a buyer can model cost per prospect before signing up. Regie.ai publishes a free tier with two hundred and fifty credits and a professional tier at forty nine dollars monthly with five thousand credits, and no credit schedule, so a buyer cannot learn what a lookup or a drafted message costs and five thousand credits is an uninterpretable quantity. The GTM Tech Index grades Cognlay A and Regie.ai B on that axis.
Does either address outreach compliance law?
Cognlay, comprehensively, and the GTM Tech Index grades it A on that axis, which is the clearest allocation of responsibility between platform and sender in the index. Four regimes are addressed separately with their own detail rather than named in a list, unsubscribe handling is built in with opted out leads suppressed from all future sequences architecturally, and the vendor states in writing that the sender remains responsible for a lawfully obtained list. Regie.ai names real machinery in passing, do not call handling, automatic unsubscribes, verification before send and throttling, without stating a legal position behind any of it.
How does the GTM Tech Index grade Cognlay and Regie.ai?
Both are graded on the same seventeen capability and compliance axes from public sources, at documented depths of sixteen and seventeen. The GTM Tech Index grades Cognlay A on outreach compliance posture and commercial transparency, and B on AI disclosure, autonomy, data privacy, platform terms, safety and stewardship, exit and deliverability. Regie.ai takes A on AI centrality and B on autonomy, platform terms, ecosystem, security certifications, commercial transparency, deliverability and segment coverage. Cognlay carries the pair's only D, on operational and outcome evidence, recorded as a stage fact for a beta product with one founder. The index publishes no composite score and declares no winner.
Related comparisons
Other published head to head assessments involving these vendors or their closest peers. The full set for this category is on the Sales Engagement & Outreach page.
Both products are sold on the proposition that the recipient cannot tell, and both are unusually clean about who the sender is, which is a distinction worth holding separately because they are different kinds of concealment. Cognlay publishes the first explicit anti spoofing commitment recorded on this axis, stating that it does not spoof sender identities or forge message headers, and there is no agent persona, no invented human name and no area code matched to the prospect anywhere in the product.
Regie.ai sends from the seller's real address with replies landing where the seller reads them, only ever has a human send professional network messages, and its own marketing names the problem of buyers buried in machine written slop. Credit both of those before reading the rest. The synthetic element in each case is the authorship rather than the identity. Cognlay writes and rewrites every message and adapts it to what the recipient did.
Regie.ai's drafting model is trained on the seller's own sent mail expressly so the output reads as though they wrote it. Neither tells the recipient. Article 50 of the EU AI Act has applied since 2 August 2026 and places the marking duty principally on the provider of the system rather than on the customer sending through it, and neither vendor addresses it anywhere.
One asymmetry belongs on the record: Regie.ai's dialer ships local presence, so the caller identity is chosen to appear nearby, which is an identity choice rather than an authorship one and the only place either product shapes who the recipient thinks is contacting them. This index records what is published and asserts nothing about whether either company is compliant.