6 best AI tools for lead generation in 2025

Artificial intelligence (AI) is transforming lead generation — from being able to identify good leads, find and filter customer data, and even craft the perfect personalized outreach email. But while going totally hands-off probably isn’t a good idea, introducing some AI lead generation tools can massively reduce the amount of manual effort and time that you (or your sales team) spend prospecting.

The best AI lead generation tools make identifying and converting leads both easier and more efficient. Not only can these apps find, filter, and rank countless potential leads, but they can generate an outreach campaign, write personalized messages, follow up, schedule a call, and reassess the whole strategy to make sure it’s as effective as possible. In this blog post, I’ll take a look at six of the top AI lead generation tools available in 2025.

How AI is changing the game for lead generation

The big thing about AI-based lead generation tools is that they are now a lot smarter. Advances in AI, like ChatGPT and Google Gemini, mean that AI-powered lead generation tools can pull data points from large complex data sets, write convincing personalized messages, optimize conversion rates, and identify intent signals in real time. The kinds of tasks that once couldn’t be automated can now be put on autopilot with the right lead generation AI tools.

If you want to keep up with your competitors, you need to explore modern lead generation tools that use AI. As a freelancer, I rely on this kind of lead generation software to find and identify new clients, as well as automate my outreach. Using AI to find leads means I can spend more time writing and less time sending emails.

Why should businesses use AI for lead generation?

AI enhances lead generation by automating outreach, scoring leads more accurately, and personalizing customer interactions, leading to higher conversion rates. Here is a quick overview of the top six AI lead generation tools:

Comparison table: Best AI lead generation tools (2025)

Top 6 AI lead generation tools for 2025

1. Jotform Lead Generation AI Agents

Best for: AI-powered lead capture, customer engagement, and sales automation

Developer: Jotform

Key features:

• Conversational AI for lead capture: Lead Generation AI Agents engage potential clients in real-time interactions, collecting key details like contact information and meeting preferences.
• Customizable AI responses: You can train the AI to align with their branding and refine its responses based on past interactions.
• Seamless customer relationship management (CRM) and workflow integration: Works effortlessly with existing systems for better lead management.

Pros: Enhances lead quality, automates collection, and reduces manual input

Cons: Requires initial setup to optimize AI-driven interactions

Plans/pricing: Free plan available; paid plans vary based on usage limits

G2 rating: 4.7/5

2. Smartlead

Best for: AI-powered cold email outreach

Developer: Smartlead

Key features:

• AI warmups: Smartlead gradually and dynamically increases the sending frequency of new email accounts so they appear human and don’t get caught by spam filters.
• Auto-mailbox rotation: Quickly and automatically rotate email addresses between campaigns to prevent individual email addresses from being spam-listed.
• AI mail composition and segmentation: You can use GPT-4 to customize your cold emails so they can beat automation and spam filters, as well as segment customers based on their sentiment, and can even trigger subsequences based on their responses.

Pros: Automates cold email outreach at scale so you can focus on converting qualified leads to customers rather than managing email accounts

Cons: You have to use your own OpenAI application programming interface key so AI usage will cost extra

Plans/pricing: No free plan available; paid plans start at $32.5 per month for 2,000 active leads and 6,000 emails per month

G2 Rating: 4.6/5

3. Instantly

Best for: Identifying warm leads and AI-powered email outreach

Developer: Instantly

Key features:

• AI-powered warm lead identification: Instantly can quickly identify potential leads using AI filters based on technologies, headcount, revenue, and more. 
• AI sequence writer: Use AI to create templates or whole sequences to better suit each potential lead, and automatically follow up to common responses and auto-responders. 
• Automated optimization and A/B testing: Instantly can automatically conduct A/B tests and optimize your sequences based on the results. 

Pros: Identifying warm leads can massively increase your conversion rate, AI and automation features make Instantly very easy to use

Cons: Instantly has a premium price tag with features split between different packages, and if your usage falls between two plans it can be expensive

Plans/pricing: No free plan available; paid plans start at $30 per month for Growth email features, $37.9 per month for Growth Leads lead identification features, and $37.9 per month for Growth CRM features

G2 Rating: 4.8/5

4. Klenty

Best for: AI-powered multichannel sales outreach

Developer: Klenty

Key features:

• AI-powered multichannel outreach: You can use Klenty to automate email, LinkedIn messages, WhatsApp messages, SMS, and phone calls to create the perfect outreach strategy for your business.
• Klenty AI assistant: Klenty’s AI assistant can help you set up most features, including creating an outreach strategy and writing the outreach scripts. 
• AI-assisted sales calls: Klenty can automatically call your next lead at the right time, record and take notes on your calls, log them to your CRM, and even leave a voicemail if no one picks up.

Pros: Klenty makes it easy to create and automate multichannel lead outreach campaigns so you can follow up a call with an email, a LinkedIn message with a WhatsApp text, or anything else

Cons: Klenty AI is free while it’s in beta, but may not be available on all plans in the future

Plans/pricing: 14-day free trial; paid plans start at $50 per month when billed annually and increase with usage and features

G2 Rating: 4.6/5

5. Clay

Best for: AI research agents and AI-powered data enrichment

Developer: Clay

Key features:

• AI-powered data aggregation: Clay can search and aggregate data from more than 100 data providers and use AI to filter, clean, and normalize it all. 
• AI-data enrichment: You can use AI agents to automate manual searches and enrich the data on your potential leads. These AI agents can browse websites, search the web, pull information from documents, and much more to get data from previously hard-to-automate sources.
• Automatic tracking: Clay can automatically track changes so you can time your outreach to correspond to important intent signals like funding rounds or product releases.

Pros: You can combine data from dozens of sources, clean and filter it, and use AI to automatically pull data that would otherwise have to be entered manually

Cons: Clay can be expensive, and the credit system limits the amount of automated actions you can take; there’s a bit of a learning curve to making the most of AI agents

Plans/pricing: Free plan with 100 credits per month; paid plans start at $134 per month with 24,000 credits per year and increase with usage and features

G2 Rating: 4.9/5

6. Seamless.AI

Best for: AI-powered lead identification

Developer: Seamless.AI

Key features:

• Find anyone’s contact details: Seamless.AI has more than a billion business contacts from more than 120 million companies, so there is a very high chance it can help you reach your target leads.
• AI contact finding: Uses AI to automatically test contact details and find additional methods of contact.
• AI-powered automation: Autopilot uses AI to identify and create new lists of leads, while AI Writer can create customized scripts or cold emails.

Pros: Massive number of contacts updated in real time, so you have a constant source of new leads with AI tools to make finding and identifying them easier

Cons: Free plan limits you to 50 new leads and paid plans require a sales call

Plans/pricing: Free plan with 50 credits; contact sales for paid plans with daily credits

G2 Rating: 4.4/5

Which AI lead generation tool is right for your business?

Finding the AI lead generation application that’s right for you and your business depends on a few factors:

• What size business do you operate? 
• How many seats do you need? 
• What’s your average deal size? 
• What part of the lead generation pipeline do you most need to automate? 

If you need to create a list of potential leads, try a tool like Seamless.AI. On the other hand, if you want to automate your outreach to an existing list of leads, something like Smartlead, Klenty, or Instantly is more likely the tool for you. Other tools, like Clay, are best for pulling in all the additional information you need to truly assess leads. Jotform AI Agents can cover all these use cases and more.

Choosing the right AI lead generation tool

As a freelancer, I’ve used an AI lead generation tool to reach out to dozens of potential clients in just a couple of minutes each week. If I was to find and contact each potential lead using Google, it would take me days.

AI lead generation tools can make finding new leads faster and easier and, most importantly, make converting them to customers more efficient. For example, by automating time-consuming manual tasks, a sales lead generation AI agent can make it possible for one sales rep to contact hundreds or even thousands of potential leads each month. Similarly, a customer information AI agent can respond to customer queries, instantly taking pressure off your support staff. And those are just two scenarios — there are plenty more examples of how to use AI agents to maximize efficiency.

Whatever your needs, after testing them all, I’m confident that one of the six apps above can meet them.

Photo by Rodeo Project Management Software on Unsplash