Loxo vs Bullhorn: pricing, AI tiers, seat costs and recruiting CRM compared for 2026

These two land on the same shortlist because both are the system of record for a staffing firm: the applicant tracking system, the client and candidate database, and increasingly the sourcing and AI layer bolted onto the same login. Bullhorn is the incumbent, built out over two decades and deep into contract staffing, pay and bill and back office. Loxo is the newer all in one that added an 850M profile sourcing index and an agent layer to a modern ATS and CRM.

What makes the pair worth writing about in 2026 is that both now publish a per user price, which most of this category still refuses to do. Bullhorn prints $99 for Starter and $165 for Core. Loxo prints $149 for Core and $199 for Professional. Four real numbers on one page is unusual, and it means most of this comparison can be checked rather than taken on trust.

The structural difference is where each vendor draws the line for AI. Loxo puts AI natural language search on its cheapest published tier and the full agentic workforce plus the sourcing index on its most expensive published tier, at $199. Bullhorn publishes prices only for the two tiers that contain no AI whatsoever, and moves every Amplify capability to Pro and Max, which carry no list price. Almost every practical difference below follows from that one decision.

Read this page in two halves. The first half is seat arithmetic you can verify against the two vendor pages, both linked at the bottom of this page. The second half is procurement judgement: whether the sales pipeline needs to live in the same system, whether contract staffing is in your future, and which questions to put in writing before either contract is signed.

Bullhorn publishes four small agency tiers. Starter at $99 a user a month includes applicant tracking, resume parsing, client management, job posting with a career portal, expert support and free implementation. Core at $165 adds the app marketplace of 300 plus partners, custom fields and workflows, LinkedIn integrations and the email sidebar. Neither list contains an AI feature.

Everything Bullhorn sells as AI lives on Pro and Max. Pro adds the recruitment CRM sales pipeline, AI search and match, Amplify Chat, AI data enrichment, process automation, AI resume formatting, AI call transcription and real time analytics. Max adds the agentic layer: agentic screening, agentic matching, agentic data enrichment, multi step AI outreach, omni channel engagement, a website chatbot and interview scheduling. Both say Talk to us where the price would be. Bullhorn labels Pro its most popular plan and still publishes nothing about what it costs.

Loxo splits its card differently. Core at $149 includes the applicant tracking system, the recruiting CRM and AI natural language search over records you already own. Professional at $199 adds Loxo Source across an 850M plus profile talent graph, the agents on every seat, API access and 2,500 credits per seat per month pooled across the team. Enterprise is custom, but Loxo publishes a per user price with no stated seat cap below it, so most firms never need the quote.

Put the top published tier of each side by side and the gap is $34 a user a month. Bullhorn Core at $165 buys a customizable ATS with a partner marketplace. Loxo Professional at $199 buys an ATS, a recruiting CRM, a sourcing index, an API and an agent workforce. That is the arithmetic. The honest counterweight is that a Bullhorn Pro quote might come in under $199, and nobody outside Bullhorn can check that, which is exactly the problem with a rate card that stops before the product you want.

For any tool that turns a search into someone you can actually email, cost per revealed contact is a better comparison than cost per seat, because the reveal is the step that caps how many people you can put a message in front of. Loxo publishes both halves needed to compute it. Professional is $199 for 2,500 credits per seat per month, which is 7.96 cents per revealed contact, the cheapest published unit price in this category and roughly a third of what a Juicebox Starter reveal costs.

Bullhorn publishes no contact or enrichment allowance at any tier. AI data enrichment appears on Pro, which has no list price, so there is no public number to divide and no public price to divide it by. Bullhorn cost per contact is therefore uncomputable from public information at every tier it sells. That is recorded here as a gap in the published record rather than filled with a plausible estimate, which is what most comparison articles do at this point.

The practical version of that gap: if your bottleneck is finding and reaching passive candidates, you can price the Loxo answer today and you cannot price the Bullhorn answer without a sales conversation. If your bottleneck is managing candidates you already have and clients you already sell to, the reveal cost is close to irrelevant and this whole section can be skipped.

One caveat applies to Loxo. Credit Boosts raise the allowance to 5,000 credits a user a month at 2x and 12,500 at 5x, and Loxo publishes those allowances but not their prices. So the 7.96 cent figure holds up to 2,500 reveals a seat and cannot be assumed past it. Ask for the boost price in writing rather than assuming the unit cost stays flat.

A staffing agency runs two pipelines, not one. There is the candidate pipeline, which every applicant tracking system handles, and there is the client pipeline: which companies owe you a job order, who has gone quiet, which account is up for renewal, who a consultant last spoke to in March. In agency software that second pipeline is the recruiting CRM, and it is usually the thing that separates a staffing platform from a plain ATS.

Bullhorn lists client management on Starter and Core, which is contact and company records. It lists the recruitment CRM with a sales pipeline as a Pro feature. Those are not the same thing, and the difference is the stage tracking, the activity history and the sequences that make business development a managed process rather than a memory exercise. Loxo includes the full recruiting CRM on Core at $149, its cheaper published tier.

So a firm that wants business development and delivery in one system can buy that from Loxo for a price printed on a public page, and cannot buy it from Bullhorn at any published price. That is a genuinely surprising thing to find at the market leader, and it is the second strongest argument on this page after the AI tiering.

The counterweight, stated honestly: Bullhorn BD tooling is deeper than Loxo once you are paying for it, and Bullhorn has two decades of staffing specific workflow behind it. The criticism here is about what is on the published rate card, not about what the product does. Get the Pro quote before you conclude anything, and ask specifically what the sales pipeline costs as a delta over Core.

Both bill per user, so the seat maths is linear and easy to run. At one recruiter, Bullhorn Starter is $99 a month, Loxo Core is $149, Bullhorn Core is $165 and Loxo Professional is $199. The cheapest and most expensive published options are $100 apart, and that $100 is roughly the difference between a bare ATS and an ATS with a sourcing index and agents in it.

At five recruiters the numbers separate. Five Bullhorn Starter seats are $495 a month, five Loxo Core seats are $745, five Bullhorn Core seats are $825 and five Loxo Professional seats are $995. The two most interesting comparisons are the outer ones. Bullhorn Starter against Loxo Core is a $250 a month gap for a firm that only needs tracking. Bullhorn Core against Loxo Professional is a $170 a month gap, and the Loxo side of that gap includes 12,500 pooled credits and the agents, which prices those reveals at about 1.4 cents each before the agents are counted at all.

At ten recruiters, Loxo publishes $1,490 a month on Core and $1,990 on Professional with no stated seat cap, so a ten person firm can still budget from public information. Bullhorn publishes $990 on Starter and $1,650 on Core, but firms at that size are typically being sold Pro, Max or a Front Office plan, and none of those carry a number. The published Bullhorn card gets less useful as the firm gets bigger, while the Loxo card keeps working.

One warning on all of this. Bullhorn prints its prices with no billing term, while Loxo states annual billing explicitly. Until you know whether $99 and $165 are annual commitment prices or month to month, the four numbers are not strictly comparable. Every figure above assumes they are like for like, which is the assumption to test first in an email rather than the assumption to sign a contract on.

Buy Bullhorn if sourcing already happens somewhere else and you need a proven applicant tracking system on the cheapest published seat, if free implementation matters because your data migration is messy, if the 300 plus partner marketplace is how you intend to build the stack, or if contract and temporary staffing means pay and bill and back office have to live in the same system. That last one is not a close call: Loxo does not compete there.

Buy Loxo if you want AI sourcing and agents at a price you can read before you talk to anyone, if business development runs through the same system as delivery and you want the sales pipeline included rather than quoted, if you want to compute cost per contact rather than be told it, or if you need to defend a twelve month software budget without a sales cycle first.

Send both vendors the same five questions in writing. What is the billing term behind the published price, and what is the month to month equivalent. What does the tier above the last published price actually cost at our seat count. What contact or enrichment allowance comes with it, and what is the overage rate once it runs out. What does implementation and historical data migration cost, and what is included free. What is the year two renewal uplift, which neither vendor publishes and both apply.

A last note that applies to both. Loxo and Bullhorn are platforms a recruiter drives. The software finds the record faster and keeps the history straight, and then a person still reads the profile, judges it against the real brief rather than the job ad, writes the message that earns a reply and chases on day four and day nine. That work is most of the week on a staffing desk, and neither of these rate cards prices it.