Loxo vs Crelate: Pricing, Cost per Seat and Where Each One Puts the AI in 2026

This is the finding that changes the comparison, and it takes thirty seconds to check yourself. Crelate's pricing page shows four plan cards. Essentials carries $85 per user a month paid annually with the line "Up to 2 users and 20k contacts". Business carries $119 with an annual and monthly toggle. Business Plus says "Custom", and Crelate labels it "Our most popular". Platform Pricing says "Custom".

Now read the schema.org SoftwareApplication block Crelate publishes in the same page. It declares an AggregateOffer with a low price of $85, a high price of $299 and four offers. Essentials is $85, described as "Per user, per month, billed annually. 5-seat minimum." Business is $119. Business Plus carries a UnitPriceSpecification with a minimum of $149 and the description "Starting at $149 per user, per month, billed annually." Enterprise carries a minimum of $299 and the description "Starting at $299 per user, per month, billed annually. Custom platform and usage-based pricing, with Enterprise security and compliance." The Business price element itself carries two attributes, a monthly figure of $149 and an annual figure of $119, and only the annual one is ever rendered as text.

So there are three numbers a buyer cannot see on the page that are published in it: Business Plus from $149, Enterprise from $299, and Business at $149 a month if you pay monthly. There is also one direct contradiction. The Essentials card says a maximum of two users. The structured data for the same offer says a five-seat minimum. Those cannot both be true, and the difference between them is $2,040 a year against $5,100 a year for the same plan.

None of this is sinister. Structured data drifts out of sync with a redesign more often than anyone admits, and Crelate deserves credit for publishing starting figures at all when most of this category publishes none. But it explains why every Crelate roundup online carries a different number, and it means the comparison people actually run, Crelate Business at $119 against Loxo Professional at $199, is the wrong pair. The full breakdown of all four tiers is in our Crelate pricing guide.

Yes, but by less than the headline suggests once you compare tiers that do the same job. The pair most articles run is Crelate Business at $119 against Loxo Professional at $199, a 40% gap. That pair is wrong, because Crelate Business has no automation and no sequences, so it cannot run the outbound a Loxo Professional seat is bought for.

The like-for-like pair is Crelate Business Plus, the cheapest Crelate tier with automation, sequences and full API access, starting at $149, against Loxo Professional at $199. That is a $50 gap on the seat, or $3,000 a year across five recruiters. Loxo is still the more expensive seat, and it is carrying the 850M+ profile talent graph, the full agent workforce and 2,500 credits a month inside that $50.

Two lines tilt it further. Crelate marks native contact data enrichment as carrying an additional fee, so the phone numbers and emails behind outbound are metered on top. Loxo delivers contact information with shortlists when available, out of the credits already in the seat. And Crelate's Insights and Data Quality agents live on the Enterprise or Platform tier that starts at $299, above the Loxo Professional seat that includes its equivalents. If your desk is outbound-heavy, model both of those before the seat price decides anything.

Where Crelate stays genuinely cheaper is cash flow. Loxo annual plans are paid up front, so five Professional seats is $11,940 at signing. Crelate Business offers a monthly option at $149 a seat. For a firm managing working capital, paying $745 a month beats writing a $11,940 check, even though the annual totals are closer than that comparison makes them look.

Both vendors sell an AI-native recruiting platform in 2026. They shelve the AI at different heights, and the heights are now knowable on both sides.

On Loxo the entire agent workforce is inside the $199 Professional seat: every agent on every seat, Agentic Mode, the Agent Impact Center, three Data Agents working under every record, Loxo AI Chat grounded in your own database, API access, and Loxo Source across a proprietary graph of 850M+ professionals. The meter is 2,500 credits per seat a month, pooled across the team and refreshed in full each cycle. Loxo also publishes MCP as included on Core, so you can wire the platform into your own AI tools today.

On Crelate the AI climbs four steps. Essentials at $85 has resume parsing, sourcing and Self Service AI Support. The AI Assistant, which is Crelate's Co-Pilot, starts on Business at $119. The Advanced AI Assistant and automation and sequences are on Business Plus, from $149. The Insights Agents and Data Quality Agents are a la carte on the Enterprise and Platform tier, from $299. Crelate's Discovery Agent, the one that looks beyond your own data across more than a billion profiles for phone and email, is marketed on the platform pages but does not appear as an included line on any of the four offers.

Put plainly: you can now price most of Crelate's AI, and the step that matters lands at $149, $50 under the Loxo seat. What you still cannot price is the part that competes most directly with Loxo Source, which is outbound discovery across a billion profiles. That is the one capability on either rate card with no number attached to it anywhere, and it happens to be the reason most agencies shop this category in the first place. The wider field is priced the same way in our survey of AI recruiting software pricing.

It depends on whether you place permanent or contract, and the answer flips hard at that line. For contract and temp staffing, Crelate. For direct-hire and search desks that live or die on finding passive candidates, Loxo.

Crelate sells the things a contract desk cannot run without and Loxo does not offer at all: Crelate Hire for onboarding and compliance with advanced checklists, state and local tax forms, WOTC integration and per-client and per-job templates, priced per hire; the Crelate Data Sync Service for one-way and two-way integration into back office, HCM and payroll providers, priced on volume and frequency; and VMS integration on the platform. Crelate also names its recruiting scenarios openly, including direct hire agencies, executive search firms, in-house executive search, consulting and staffing firms, corporate recruiting, legal search and nonprofit. If you run timesheets and pay and bill, this is not a close comparison, and the wider set of options is priced out in contract staffing software.

Loxo sells the thing a direct-hire desk cannot run without: the addressable market. Loxo Source searches a proprietary graph of 850M+ professionals in one motion with your own private database, and the agents screen up to 10,000 candidates from it, rank a shortlist across seven dimensions with evidence, and launch outreach. That is a different purchase from a configurable CRM. Crelate's answer is the Discovery Agent over a billion profiles, which is a real product, but it is not an included line on any of the four published offers, so you cannot budget it from the website.

The honest middle case is a firm doing both, which plenty of US agencies are. There the seat count usually settles it. Under about five recruiters the Loxo bill is manageable and the sourcing advantage is worth more than the back office gap, particularly if you outsource pay and bill anyway. Over ten, the back office integration Crelate sells starts to be worth more than the graph, and most firms that size already own a sourcing tool. For how each side handles ranking and evidence, see candidate screening software.

First, on Crelate, which seat rule applies to Essentials. The card says up to two users and the structured data says a five-seat minimum. One of those is stale and only Crelate knows which. The answer is worth $3,060 a year.

Second, on Crelate, whether Business Plus at your seat count actually starts at $149. The markup says "starting at", which means the quote can land above it. Ask for the number at your exact headcount, and ask what moves it.

Third, on Loxo, what a Credit Boost costs. Loxo publishes that 2x is 5,000 credits a seat and 5x is 12,500, and prices neither. If one recruiter will run full-market searches weekly, that quote is part of your rate, not an optional extra.

Fourth, the renewal price on both. Loxo labels Core and Professional a new customer limited time offer and does not publish what they become. Crelate publishes no renewal terms at all. Ask both for year two as a number.

Fifth, exit terms on both. Both are your system of record, which means both hold the candidate history your desk runs on. Loxo publishes free migration in for teams of three or more seats; ask what a full export looks like on the way out. Ask Crelate the same, including whether the export carries activity history and custom fields or only the records.

Both of these platforms end at the same place: a list of names and a way to message them. Everything after that is still a person. Someone opens each profile and judges it against what the client actually meant rather than what the job order says. Someone writes the first message so it does not read like the nine others that landed that week. Someone chases the follow-up on day four and day nine, and rewrites the search when the first twenty replies say the seniority is wrong.

That work is the real constraint on how many roles one recruiter can carry, and no seat price, credit pool or agent tier on this page touches it. It explains why two firms buying identical software get very different results from it, and why a bigger allowance can be a trap: 12,500 credits a month only helps if somebody has the hours to use them well.

It is the reason HireAgent plans scale with seats, open roles and sourcing volume rather than seats alone. Seat pricing bills you for how many people are logged in. Sizing on open roles bills you for how much hiring you are actually doing. When hiring is lumpy, which for most agencies it is, those two numbers diverge fast, and only one of them matches the value you got that month. If you want the same head-to-head treatment on other pairs, Loxo vs Recruiterflow and Loxo vs Bullhorn price the two rivals agencies most often shortlist alongside Crelate.