The Quick Take

Both Warmly and Cursive help B2B companies identify and engage with potential buyers showingintent data. But they take fundamentally different approaches:

• Warmly focuses on real-time engagement with visitors actively on your website
• Cursive identifies companies researching your space across the web (not just your site) and automates outreach

Think of it this way: Warmly is like having a greeter at your store entrance, while Cursive is like having a sales team canvassing the entire neighborhood looking for people who need what you sell.

Platform Overview

What is Warmly?

Warmly is a website visitor identification and engagement platform. It shows you which companies are visiting your website in real-time and provides tools to engage them through live chat, automated email sequences, and personalized outreach.

Best for: Companies with significant website traffic who want to convert warm visitors into meetings.

What is Cursive?

Cursive is a B2B intent intelligence platform that identifies companies actively researching specific topics across the web. It goes beyond website tracking to find prospects showing buying intent anywhere online, then automates personalized outreach via AI SDR agents.

Best for: Companies looking to scale outbound prospecting without hiring large SDR teams. Learn more about our AI-powered intent system and explore our integrations.

Feature Comparison

Pricing Comparison

Use Case Analysis

When to Choose Warmly

Warmly excels when you have strong inbound traffic and want to convert warm visitors. It's ideal if:

• You get 10,000+ monthly website visitors
• Your sales team can respond to alerts within minutes
• Your ICP actively visits your website during their buying journey
• You want real-time chat engagement with prospects
• Your marketing generates significant inbound demand

The classic Warmly use case is a mid-market SaaS company with a strong content marketing engine driving 20,000-50,000 monthly visits. Their sales team is online during business hours and can pick up a live chat within minutes. In this scenario, Warmly acts like a virtual lobby attendant, surfacing which companies are on the website right now and enabling reps to jump into conversations before the visitor leaves. If your marketing team is already generating strong inbound traffic but you are frustrated that only 2-3% of visitors fill out a form, Warmly helps you engage the other 97%.

However, this model has a ceiling. If your website traffic is under 5,000 visits per month, the 15-20% identification rate means you are only seeing 750-1,000 companies—and many of those will not match your ICP. Warmly also requires consistent staffing. If your sales team is in meetings or it is outside business hours, those real-time visitors go unengaged. Companies with global audiences across multiple time zones often find this particularly challenging.

When to Choose Cursive

Cursive is best when you need to proactively find and engage buyers before they find you. Choose Cursive if:

• You need to scale outbound without hiring more SDRs
• Your prospects don't consistently visit your website
• You want to identify companies researching your category (not just your brand)
• You need automated, personalized outreach at scale
• You want predictable, flat-rate pricing

The typical Cursive customer is a growth-stage B2B company that knows their ICP but does not have the budget to hire a team of SDRs. They might be getting 2,000-5,000 website visitors per month—not enough for Warmly to be cost-effective—but they know there are thousands of companies in their market actively researching solutions. Cursive finds these companies by monitoring intent signals across the web, then automatically identifies the right contacts, crafts personalized outreach, and books meetings without human intervention.

A practical example: imagine you sell compliance software for fintech startups. With Warmly, you would wait for fintech companies to find and visit your website. With Cursive, you would define "fintech compliance" as an intent topic, and the platform would identify companies reading articles about SOC 2 compliance, searching for audit tools, or visiting competitor review pages—then reach out to the VP of Engineering or Head of Compliance at those companies with a personalized message referencing their specific situation.

Use our audience builder to create targeted segments and launch campaigns at scale.

Team Structure and Workflow Impact

How Warmly Changes Your Sales Workflow

Implementing Warmly fundamentally changes how your sales team operates day to day. Instead of outbound prospecting or waiting for inbound form fills, reps shift to a reactive engagement model. They need to be monitoring their dashboard or Slack alerts throughout the workday, ready to jump into a live chat or fire off a quick email when a target account lands on the website.

This has implications for team structure. You need dedicated "on-call" reps during business hours. Many Warmly customers set up rotation schedules where SDRs take turns monitoring the dashboard in 2-hour blocks. Response time is critical—Warmly's own data shows that engaging a visitor within 2 minutes yields 3x higher conversion rates than waiting even 10 minutes. For teams with fewer than 3 SDRs, maintaining this always-on coverage can be difficult.

How Cursive Changes Your Sales Workflow

Cursive takes a fundamentally different approach to workflow. Because the AI SDR handles prospecting, message writing, and initial outreach autonomously, your human reps shift from "doing the work" to "managing the machine." In practice, this means:

• Weekly ICP reviews: Your team spends 30-60 minutes per week reviewing which intent topics are generating the best leads and adjusting targeting accordingly
• Response handling: When prospects reply to the AI SDR's outreach, human reps take over the conversation. This is where their expertise matters most—handling objections, running demos, and closing deals
• Campaign optimization: Review AI-generated messaging monthly to ensure it aligns with your latest positioning and case studies
• Pipeline management: Because Cursive generates a steady flow of qualified meetings, reps spend more time in active deals and less time prospecting

The net effect is that a team of 2-3 account executives using Cursive can generate the same pipeline as a team with 2-3 AEs plus 4-6 SDRs using traditional outbound methods. That represents $300,000-$500,000 in annual headcount savings for most companies.

Data & Intent Signals

Warmly's Approach

Warmly uses first-party intent data from your website. When someone visits your site, Warmly identifies the company (15-20% success rate) and shows you:

• Which pages they viewed
• How long they stayed
• What content they engaged with
• Return visitor patterns

This gives you strong signal that someone is interested right now, but you're limited to only seeing people who already know about you. Warmly's data is inherently narrow—it only captures activity on your own website. If a prospect visits three competitor sites and reads five G2 reviews before landing on your pricing page, Warmly only sees that final pricing page visit. You miss the entire research journey that led them there.

That said, Warmly's first-party data has one major advantage: recency and certainty. When Warmly tells you someone is on your pricing page right now, that signal is unambiguous. There is no inference or modeling involved—someone from that company is literally looking at your product. For teams that can act on that information within minutes, it is an extremely valuable data point.

Cursive's Approach

Cursive monitors intent signals across the entire web, including:

• Companies researching specific topics on review sites like G2, Capterra, and TrustRadius
• LinkedIn activity and engagement patterns (posts, comments, job changes)
• Funding announcements and growth signals from Crunchbase, PitchBook, and news sources
• Technology adoption and stack changes detected through technographic monitoring
• Job postings indicating needs (e.g., hiring for roles that would use your product)
• Content consumption patterns across 30,000+ B2B websites and publications

This broader approach finds prospects early in their buying journey, often before they've heard of your solution. For example, if a company posts a job listing for a "Head of Demand Generation" while simultaneously reading articles about ABM strategies, Cursive recognizes that this company is likely building out their marketing function and could benefit from a lead generation platform. The AI SDR then reaches out to the hiring manager with a message that acknowledges their growth phase.

Combine this with direct mail for a truly omnichannel approach.

Data Volume and Coverage Compared

Integration & Workflow

Warmly Integrations

Warmly integrates with popular tools including:

• CRMs: Salesforce, HubSpot, Pipedrive
• Communication: Slack, Microsoft Teams
• Email: Gmail, Outlook
• Marketing: Marketo, Pardot

The workflow is reactive: you install the tracking script, wait for visitors, and respond when they arrive.

Cursive Integrations

Cursive offers similar integrations plus deeper automation:

• CRMs: Salesforce, HubSpot, Pipedrive with bi-directional sync
• Data enrichment: Built-in 270M+ contact database
• Email infrastructure: Automated sending and deliverability optimization
• Calendaring: Automated meeting booking

The workflow is proactive: you define your ICP and intent topics, and Cursive's AI SDR automatically finds and reaches out to matching prospects. Use our audience builder to get started.

ROI & Performance Metrics

Cost Per Meeting Analysis

Based on typical customer data:

• Warmly: $250-$500 per meeting (assuming 1,000 identified visitors/month and 8-12% conversion)
• Cursive: $83-$150 per meeting (based on flat $50/month pricing and typical AI SDR performance)

Cursive typically delivers lower cost-per-meeting due to higher volume and automation, but Warmly meetings may be higher quality since they come from warm, inbound traffic.

Pros and Cons

Warmly Pros

• Real-time visibility into website visitors
• Immediate engagement with warm prospects
• Strong for companies with existing inbound traffic
• Live chat creates instant conversations
• Higher intent signals (they're on your site right now)

Warmly Cons

• Requires significant website traffic to be effective
• Team must respond quickly to capitalize on visitors
• Pricing scales with traffic (can get expensive)
• Limited to prospects who already know about you
• Low identification rates (only 15-20% of visitors)

Cursive Pros

• Identifies prospects before they visit your site
• AI SDR automation scales without hiring
• Flat-rate, predictable pricing
• Works for companies with low website traffic
• Broader intent signal coverage across the web
• 270M+ contact database built-in

Cursive Cons

• No live chat functionality
• Takes 2-4 weeks to see initial results
• Intent signals are earlier stage (less immediate)
• Requires defining clear ICP and intent topics

Which Platform is Right for Your Team?

Choose Warmly if:

• Your website gets 10,000+ visitors per month
• You have a responsive sales team available during business hours
• Your buyers typically visit your website during their evaluation
• You want to maximize conversion from existing inbound traffic
• You need real-time chat engagement

Choose Cursive if:

• You need to scale outbound without hiring SDRs
• Your website traffic is low or inconsistent
• You want to identify prospects early in their buying journey
• You prefer automated, always-on prospecting
• You need predictable, flat-rate pricing
• You want to find prospects researching your category (not just your brand)

Use Both if:

Many sophisticated B2B teams use both platforms in tandem:

• Cursive for proactive outbound to prospects showing early intent
• Warmly for immediate engagement with warm website visitors

This creates a full-funnel approach: Cursive fills the top of funnel with new prospects, while Warmly converts warm traffic at the bottom.

Implementation & Support

Warmly Implementation

Warmly's setup is straightforward:

1. Install JavaScript tracking pixel (30 minutes)
2. Connect CRM and communication tools (1 hour)
3. Configure playbooks and routing rules (2-3 hours)
4. Train team on responding to alerts (1-2 hours)

Most teams are fully operational within 1 week. Warmly provides implementation support and onboarding calls.

Cursive Implementation

Cursive setup involves more strategic configuration:

1. Define ICP and intent topics (1-2 days)
2. Connect CRM and configure sync (1 hour)
3. Set up email domains and warming (1 week)
4. AI SDR builds initial campaigns (3-5 days)
5. Review and launch first campaigns (2-3 days)

Full implementation takes about 2 weeks. Cursive provides dedicated onboarding, campaign strategy sessions, and ongoing optimization. Book a strategy call to discuss your setup.

Customer Success Stories

Warmly Success: SaaS Company

A mid-market SaaS company with 50,000 monthly website visitors implemented Warmly:

• Identified 8,000 companies per month (16% ID rate)
• Booked 320 meetings per quarter
• Generated $2.4M in pipeline
• 4% conversion rate from identified visitor to meeting

The key factor in their success was team responsiveness. They had 6 SDRs operating in 2-hour rotations to monitor the Warmly dashboard during business hours. When a target account appeared, the on-call rep would jump into a live chat or send a personalized email within 90 seconds. This rapid engagement was essential—when they tested slower response times (5+ minutes), their conversion rate dropped by more than half.

Cursive Success: B2B Services Firm

A B2B consulting firm with limited website traffic used Cursive:

• Identified 1,200+ companies showing intent per month
• Booked 48 meetings per month via AI SDR
• Generated $1.8M in pipeline in first 90 days
• 14% reply rate on automated outreach

The key difference: the Cursive customer had minimal website traffic (under 3,000 visits per month), so Warmly would not have been effective for them. Instead, they defined three intent topics related to their consulting specialties and let Cursive identify companies actively researching those topics. The AI SDR sent personalized outreach referencing each company's specific situation—a recent funding round, a new VP hire, or a published case study about their industry challenge.

Within 90 days, their two account executives had a fuller pipeline than they had ever achieved with a team that previously included 3 SDRs doing manual outbound. They redirected the SDR budget toward closing capacity and customer success.

Hybrid Success: Tech Company Using Both Platforms

A Series B developer tools company with 30,000 monthly visitors deployed both platforms:

• Warmly covered their website, identifying 4,800 companies per month and enabling live chat engagement during US business hours
• Cursive monitored intent signals for "developer productivity tools" and "CI/CD optimization" across the web, finding 900+ companies per month that had never visited their site
• Combined pipeline increased 3.2x compared to using either platform alone
• Warmly handled the "bottom of funnel" visitors who were ready to buy; Cursive handled the "top of funnel" prospects who were still researching

Their VP of Sales described it as having "both a fisherman on the dock and a fleet of boats on the ocean." The dock fisherman (Warmly) catches fish that swim right up to you. The fleet (Cursive) goes out and finds fish wherever they are swimming.

Final Recommendations

Both Warmly and Cursive are excellent platforms, but they solve different problems:

Ultimately, your choice depends on your traffic levels, team capacity, and whether you need to focus on converting warm visitors or proactively finding new prospects.

Frequently Asked Questions

About the Author

Adam Wolfe is the founder of Cursive. He's spent the last decade building and scaling B2B sales teams and has deep expertise in intent data, AI SDRs, and sales automation. He created Cursive to help B2B companies scale outbound without the typical headcount costs.