Loxo vs Recruiterflow: pricing, AI tiers, sourcing credits and seat costs compared for 2026

These two land on the same shortlist because they are trying to be the same thing: the single system a search firm runs on. Applicant tracking, the client and candidate database, business development, outreach sequences, reporting, and now an AI layer stacked on top of all of it. Both pitch themselves as the tool that replaces four or five separate subscriptions, and both are credible at it.

What makes the pair worth writing about in September 2026 is that both publish a real per user price, which most of this category refuses to do, and both stop publishing at the same moment. Recruiterflow prints $149 a user a month and $119 billed annually for Platform, then writes custom pricing against AIRA. Loxo prints $149 for Core and $199 for Professional, then writes custom against Enterprise. The difference is that the Loxo published ceiling sits above its AI and the Recruiterflow published ceiling sits below it.

That is the whole comparison in one sentence, and almost every practical difference below follows from it. It is also why the two headline numbers, both $149, mislead so badly. They are not the same billing term, they are not the same product, and neither of them can do the thing most firms are shopping for when they compare recruiting platforms.

Read this page in two halves. The first half is seat arithmetic you can check against both vendor pages, which are linked at the bottom. The second half is procurement judgement: what to ask for in writing, which questions have no public answer, and which of the two you should be paying for given how your desk actually runs.

Recruiterflow Platform includes applicant tracking and a recruiting CRM, multichannel sequences, recruitment automation, sales automation, client and team access control, bulk sourcing through its Chrome extension, reports and API access. That is a complete agency system in most respects, and the sales automation and client portals are genuinely good at the job an agency needs them for. On the communication row of its own comparison table, Platform covers email, calls and text, with LinkedIn reserved for AIRA. Analytics on Platform are marked basic.

Recruiterflow AIRA adds the Notetaker, the Matchmaker, job change alerts, the Field Updates Agent, the Submission Agent, the Task Agent, omnichannel sync including LinkedIn, custom BI dashboards, and the phone and email finder. On the four rows the comparison table breaks out under the heading AIRA, your AI twin, the Platform column carries a cross every time. AIRA Source, which Recruiterflow describes as sourcing across 850M plus profiles without leaving the product, is part of that AI layer rather than part of the priced plan.

Loxo Core includes the full applicant tracking system and recruiting CRM, AI natural language search, unlimited jobs and candidates, pipelines and activity reporting, email and calendar sync, a Chrome extension and MCP so you can point your own AI tools at it. What it does not include is Loxo Source, any credits, or contact information. Free migration is included at three seats and up.

Loxo Professional adds Loxo Source across the 850M plus talent graph searched in one motion with your own database, every agent on every seat, Agentic Mode and the Agent Impact Center, three Data Agents keeping records current, Loxo AI Chat grounded in your own data, contact information with every shortlist, API access, and 2,500 credits per seat per month pooled across the team and refreshed in full each cycle.

Line those four lists up and one row decides most of it. On Recruiterflow the phone and email finder is AIRA only. On Loxo the sourcing index and contact information are Professional only. The cheapest published seat on this page, Recruiterflow Platform at $119 annually, is also the only one of the four that cannot tell you how to reach a candidate at all, and that is documented in Recruiterflow own feature table rather than inferred.

Search for either of these vendors and you will find comparisons that line $149 up against $149 and declare a tie. Both numbers are real and the comparison is still wrong twice over.

The first problem is the billing term. Recruiterflow $149 is the month to month price. Its annual price is $119, a saving of about twenty percent, and the currency map behind the billing toggle carries the same structure in euros at €149 and €119 and in pounds at £115 and £89. Loxo $149 is already the annual price, paid up front, and Loxo publishes no monthly figure at all. Compared on the same term, annual against annual, Recruiterflow Platform is $30 a seat a month cheaper than Loxo Core, not equal to it. Compared month to month, one of the two prices does not exist.

The second problem is that the two $149 tiers are not the same product. Loxo Core has intelligent search over a database you have to fill yourself. Recruiterflow Platform has a way to fill the database and no way to contact what you put in it. A firm that reads the tie and buys either one on that basis will discover the gap in week two, when someone asks for the email address of a candidate the system just surfaced.

The honest version of the comparison is this. At the annual published price, Recruiterflow Platform at $119 is the cheapest complete agency system on this page and a good one. Loxo Core at $149 costs $30 more for a comparable system without the Chrome sourcing or the API. Loxo Professional at $199 is the only published tier that closes the loop from search to contact to outreach. And Recruiterflow AIRA, the tier that would close the same loop on the other side, has no price you can read.

For any tool meant to turn a search into someone you can actually email, cost per revealed contact is a better comparison than cost per seat, because the reveal is what caps how many people you can put a message in front of in a month. Seats cap how many people can log in, which is rarely the constraint on a small desk.

Loxo publishes both halves of that division. Professional is $199 a seat for 2,500 credits a seat a month, which is 7.96 cents per revealed contact. That is the cheapest published unit price in this category, roughly a third of what a Juicebox Starter reveal costs and a small fraction of a LinkedIn InMail. The credits pool across the team and refresh in full every cycle, which matters more than the headline allowance on any desk where one person does most of the outbound.

Recruiterflow publishes no allowance anywhere. The phone and email finder is on AIRA, AIRA has no list price, and no reveal quota appears on the pricing page or in the feature comparison. So there is no public numerator and no public denominator, and Recruiterflow cost per contact cannot be calculated from public information at any tier. This page records that as a gap rather than filling it with an estimate, which is what most comparison articles do at this point and what makes most of them useless for budgeting.

One caveat applies to the Loxo figure. 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 without their prices. So 7.96 cents holds up to 2,500 reveals a seat and cannot be assumed past it. If your desk runs heavier than that, ask for the boost price in writing rather than assuming the unit cost stays flat as volume grows, because at most vendors in this category it does not.

Both vendors bill per user with no published seat minimum and no published cap below the custom tier, so the arithmetic is linear and easy to run. At two recruiters, Recruiterflow Platform billed annually is $238 a month, two Loxo Core seats are $298 and two Loxo Professional seats are $398. The spread between the cheapest and the most expensive published option is $160 a month, and what that $160 buys is the ability to find and contact people who are not in your system yet.

At five recruiters the annual figures are $595 for Recruiterflow Platform, $745 for Loxo Core and $995 for Loxo Professional. Over twelve months that is $7,140, $8,940 and $11,940. The Loxo Professional premium over Recruiterflow Platform is $400 a month, and it buys 12,500 pooled credits plus the agents, which prices those reveals at 3.2 cents each before you count the agent workforce at all. Whether that is worth $400 depends entirely on whether your five recruiters are working inbound applicants or hunting passive candidates.

At ten recruiters, Recruiterflow Platform is $1,190 a month, Loxo Core is $1,490 and Loxo Professional is $1,990 with 25,000 pooled credits. Neither vendor publishes a seat cap on these tiers, so a ten person firm can still budget both from public information, which is unusual in this category. Gem, for comparison, caps its published firms tiers at three and ten users. SeekOut bundles three seats into one account price. Loxo and Recruiterflow both just keep multiplying, which makes them the two easiest platforms here to forecast.

The number that does not appear in any of those rows is AIRA. Whatever your seat count, the Recruiterflow tier with the AI, the LinkedIn sync, the BI dashboards and the contact finder has no published price, so every comparison above is Platform against Loxo. If AIRA is what you are actually shopping for, treat the arithmetic here as the floor of the Recruiterflow side and get the quote before you use any of it.

Buy Recruiterflow if you want the cheapest complete published agency system, at $119 a seat billed annually, and you already have sourcing solved somewhere else. Buy it if you need API access on the entry tier rather than $80 a seat higher up. Buy it if you want a month to month option, which Loxo does not publish at all. Buy it if the client side of an agency desk, submittals, client portals and sales automation, is where you spend your day. Recruiterflow is well regarded by search firms for good reasons and none of this page argues otherwise.

Buy Loxo if you need to reach people who are not in your database yet and you want that on a price you can read before you talk to anyone. Buy it if cost per revealed contact is a number you want to compute rather than be told. Buy it if you want to trial the full platform for seven days without a sales call. Buy it if you are an in-house talent team rather than an agency, because Recruiterflow does not really sell to you. And buy it if a twelve month software budget has to be defended to someone who will ask what the AI costs.

Send both vendors the same five questions in writing before either contract is signed. What does the AI tier cost at our exact seat count, since that is the number neither published page answers for Recruiterflow. What contact or reveal allowance comes with it, and what is the overage rate once it runs out, which Loxo answers publicly and Recruiterflow does not. What does a monthly or six month term cost as an uplift over annual. What does a full historical migration cost, as opposed to the free self serve import. And what is the year two renewal uplift, which neither vendor publishes and both apply.

A last note that applies to both. Loxo and Recruiterflow are platforms a recruiter drives. The software finds the record faster, keeps the history straight and sends the sequence on time, 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 search desk, and neither of these rate cards prices it.