Loxo vs LinkedIn Recruiter: Pricing, Cost per Seat, InMail and Credits Compared for 2026

These two end up on the same shortlist because both promise a faster route from an open role to a list of people worth contacting, and because the LinkedIn renewal invoice is what sends most agency owners looking. The comparison is lopsided in a way that is easy to misread. Loxo publishes every number: two prices, a credit allowance, a trial length and migration terms. LinkedIn publishes one price on its entire Talent Solutions site, for Recruiter Lite, and nothing for the Corporate seat that agencies and in-house teams actually buy.

The structural difference is what each product is. Loxo is an applicant tracking system and recruiting CRM that added an 850M+ profile sourcing index and a set of AI agents, so buying it means moving your system of record. LinkedIn Recruiter is a search and messaging seat over the LinkedIn network, so buying it means adding a seat on top of whatever ATS you already run. Nearly every practical difference on this page, including why the prices are five to one apart, follows from that.

The trap sits in the entry tier. Loxo Core at $149 looks like the natural comparison and it is not one: Core contains the ATS and CRM and no sourcing database. Loxo Source begins on Professional at $199 a user a month, billed annually and paid up front. The complete Loxo rate card, including what a credit meters and what Boost costs, is on our Loxo pricing page. The LinkedIn side, including the G-Cloud rate card LinkedIn filed publicly, is on our LinkedIn Recruiter pricing page.

Read this page in two halves. The first is arithmetic you can check against the vendor pages linked at the bottom. The second is procurement judgement: whether your candidates answer email at all, whether you are keeping your ATS, and which questions to put in writing before either contract is signed.

On annual billing a Loxo Professional seat is $2,388 a year and a Loxo Core seat is $1,788. Loxo states that annual plans are paid up front, so a three recruiter firm on Professional writes a $7,164 check at signing and a five recruiter firm writes $11,940. Both published prices are labeled a new customer limited time offer, and Loxo does not state the renewal price on the page.

LinkedIn publishes no US figure for a Recruiter Corporate seat. Buyers report $10,800 to $12,960 per seat a year in 2026, frequently with a three seat minimum, which puts a realistic Corporate entry point above $32,000 a year. The one public rate card LinkedIn has filed is on the UK G-Cloud framework: £8,925 per seat at one to two licences, stepping down to £6,350 at 251 or more. The step-down is the useful part. LinkedIn discounts on seat count, and a three seat firm is at the top of the ladder.

Put side by side, five Loxo Professional seats cost roughly one reported Recruiter seat, and that is before the ATS you would still need under Recruiter. Recruiter Lite is the exception on the LinkedIn side at $170 a month or $1,680 a year, cheaper than a Loxo Professional seat, but it searches only your third degree network, carries 30 InMails and includes no ATS, so it is a solo tool rather than an agency platform.

The paid-up-front term is worth a second look for a small firm. Loxo takes the year on day one. LinkedIn bills an annual agreement that auto renews. On cash flow, the cheaper product asks for more money up front; on total cost, it is not close.

A Recruiter seat carries 100 to 150 InMails a month, read from LinkedIn on 21 September 2026, and Recruiter Lite carries 30. An InMail lands inside LinkedIn, in front of a candidate who did not give you an email address, and LinkedIn credits the InMail back when the candidate replies. That is the product: the inbox, not the search.

Loxo Professional includes 2,500 credits per seat a month, pooled across the team and refreshed in full every cycle. Loxo describes credits as the meter for its agentic workforce: they are spent when the agents screen, evaluate, reach out or complete a search, and contact details arrive with the shortlist when available. Loxo does not publish how many credits a search consumes and calls its capacity figures figurative, so the 2,500 cannot be converted into a number of contacts from public information.

The message on Loxo then goes out as an email from a mailbox you connect. That gives you volume InMail cannot match and a deliverability problem InMail does not have. A three recruiter firm has a 7,500 credit pool on Loxo against 450 InMails on Recruiter, and the pool is drawable by one person while InMail is ring-fenced per seat. Whether that is worth anything depends entirely on whether your candidates answer email. Engineers, accountants, nurses and sales reps generally do. Sitting executives often do not.

So the comparison is not 2,500 against 150. It is: how many of last quarter's placements came from an InMail that an email would not have reached? If the answer is most of them, the Recruiter seat is earning its price. If it is a handful, you are paying five figures for the handful.

Both vendors now sell agentic sourcing. Loxo includes it: Professional bundles the full agentic workforce, Full Agentic Mode, Loxo AI Chat and the Agent Impact Center into every $199 seat, with the 2,500 credits as the meter. LinkedIn sells Hiring Assistant as an add-on to a Recruiter seat. It is quoted in the US, and LinkedIn's G-Cloud filing lists it at £2,079 to £1,575 per licence a year on top of the seat.

That makes the agent comparison a $199 seat with agents in it against a reported five figure seat plus a four figure licence. If agentic sourcing is why you are shopping, this line is the widest gap on the page, and it is also the one most third-party comparisons leave out because they were written before either vendor shipped agents.

The caveat runs the other way. Hiring Assistant works inside the LinkedIn network with InMail as its outreach channel, so it inherits the inbox advantage. Loxo's agents work the open web and your own records and send email. Which agent is better for you is the same question as which channel your candidates answer, just moved up a level.

Neither vendor's agent hands you a hire. Both stop at a shortlist and a first message, and someone on your desk still reviews the profiles, runs the conversation and books the interview. HireAgent is built around that whole loop rather than the search step, and its plans are published on the pricing page rather than quoted.

Strip out the money and this pair splits on one question: do you already run an applicant tracking system you intend to keep?

If you do, Loxo is the wrong shape regardless of price. Loxo Core and Professional are the ATS. Buying a Professional seat to sit next to Bullhorn or Greenhouse means paying for a second system of record you will not use and moving candidate data between two of them. In that setup the LinkedIn question is simply how many of your recruiters send InMail, and the sourcing add-on that makes sense is one that connects to your ATS rather than replaces it.

If you do not, or you have been meaning to replace what you have, the calculation reverses hard. Loxo Professional at $199 bundles the ATS, the CRM, an 850M+ profile index, the agents and pooled credits into one line, and Loxo publishes free migration into Core for teams of three or more seats. Buying an ATS and a Recruiter seat separately costs many times more and leaves you copying records between them.

There is a middle case worth naming. Plenty of firms keep one Recruiter seat for the roles that only answer InMail and move the rest of the desk onto a published-price platform. That is not a compromise, it is usually the correct answer for a three to ten person contingency firm, and it is the scenario the table above prices.

First, the renewal price. Loxo labels both published prices a new customer limited time offer and does not state what they become at renewal. LinkedIn buyers report double digit uplifts at renewal on an auto renewing agreement. Ask both for year two in writing.

Second, on Loxo, what a Credit Boost costs. Loxo publishes that 2x is 5,000 credits and 5x is 12,500 and prices both with sales. If your heavy sourcer will drain the pool, that price is part of your real rate.

Third, on LinkedIn, the seat minimum and the per-seat price at your exact count. The G-Cloud filing shows the price stepping down with volume, so a three seat firm is paying the top band and should ask what band it is in and what the next one costs.

Fourth, exit terms. Loxo is your system of record and publishes migration in; ask what a full export looks like on the way out. LinkedIn Recruiter projects, notes and InMail history do not export to a competing platform, so ask what you keep when the seat lapses, because the honest answer is your memory.

Fifth, the agent licence on both sides. Loxo includes it; ask whether that holds at renewal. LinkedIn quotes Hiring Assistant separately; ask for the per-licence price and whether it is tied to the seat term.

Both of these tools 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, InMail allowance or credit pool on this page touches it. It is 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 firms it is, those numbers diverge quickly, and only one of them matches the value you got that month.