Bullhorn vs Loxo Pricing: What Each Platform Costs per Recruiter

Bullhorn publishes $99 per user per month for Starter and $165 for Core. Loxo publishes "starts at" $149 per user per month for Core and $199 for Professional, billed annually and paid up front. On the entry tier Bullhorn is $50 a seat cheaper. Once candidate outreach is in scope the comparison inverts completely, because Loxo publishes a price for a tier that includes outreach and Bullhorn does not publish one for any tier that does.

Both sets of figures were read at bullhorn.com/pricing and loxo.co/pricing on September 6, 2026. That date is doing real work here. Loxo restructured its plans during 2026, and most of the comparison articles currently ranking for this matchup still describe a Loxo free plan, a "Basic" tier and a $119 Starter. None of those three appear on Loxo's pricing page today. If a comparison you are reading contains any of them, it predates the change and its arithmetic is wrong.

Bullhorn vs Loxo: the published prices side by side

Two things in that table are easy to skim past. Loxo's paid tiers both say "starts at", which signals a floor rather than a firm quote. And Bullhorn's published prices still route through a "Get a quote" button rather than a checkout, so the number is a list price you negotiate against, not a card you can put in today.

How much of each platform is actually priced?

This is the difference that decides most evaluations, and it is not visible in a head-to-head of two numbers.

Loxo publishes a price for two of its three plans, and the unpriced one is Enterprise, which is where you would expect a custom agreement. The structure is legible: pick Core or Professional, know your per-seat cost, and the only thing you cannot forecast is the credit meter above the included allowance, where Loxo publishes capacity tiers called Boost 2x and Boost 5x with no price attached to either.

Bullhorn is the other model. Counting the products listed on its pricing page, two of thirteen carry a dollar figure. Bullhorn Pro, Bullhorn Max, Front Office Growth, Front Office Enterprise, Bullhorn One, Amplify Digital Workers, Amplify Search and Match, Recruitment Automation, VMS Automation, Middle Office and Onboarding are all marked "Get a quote". So a firm can price a Loxo deployment from the website and cannot price a Bullhorn deployment from the website, unless what it wants is precisely applicant tracking and nothing else.

Neither approach is wrong. Bullhorn sells into large staffing operations whose requirements genuinely vary, and modular pricing reflects that. But it means "Bullhorn is cheaper" is only true of a configuration most agencies do not end up buying. The full tier-by-tier breakdown is on our Bullhorn pricing page, and the Loxo plans and credit meter are worked through in Loxo pricing.

Which one includes outreach, and what that costs

If sequencing candidates is the reason you are comparing these two, this section is the answer and the rest is context.

Loxo puts outreach in Professional. Core's published bullets cover the ATS, the recruiting CRM, AI search, pipelines, reporting and email sync, with no mention of outreach. Professional adds what Loxo calls the full agent workforce on every seat, and Outreach and Pursuit, its multi-channel sequence agent, is one of those agents. So the number to plan against is $199 per user per month.

Bullhorn does not publish a price for outreach in any form. On its own page the Outreach skill sits inside Amplify Digital Workers, which is quote-only. Omni-channel candidate engagement appears in Bullhorn Max and Front Office Enterprise, both quote-only. SMS messaging appears in Front Office Enterprise, quote-only. Omni-channel engagement automations sit inside Recruitment Automation, quote-only. The two priced tiers contain applicant tracking, resume parsing, client management, job posting, the app marketplace and custom fields, and not one capability that sends a message.

That produces the single cleanest statement in this comparison. The cheapest published price at which either vendor will sell you candidate outreach is Loxo Professional at $199 per user per month, or $2,388 per user per year. Bullhorn publishes no equivalent figure at all.

What each costs a desk in year one

Per-seat pricing compounds quietly, so the number worth writing down is the annual commitment for the desk you actually staff. Loxo states its plans are annual and paid up front, which makes this a first-cheque figure rather than a monthly bill you can stop.

Read the row that matches your desk, then read it again with the outreach question applied. A five-recruiter firm on Bullhorn Starter commits $5,940 and has no way to contact a candidate from the platform. The same firm on Loxo Professional commits $11,940 and does. The genuine gap between the two is not $50 a seat, it is roughly $6,000 a year on a five-person desk, and it buys the sourcing graph and the agent workforce alongside the sequencing.

Which platform fits which agency

Both are credible products and the choice is mostly structural rather than a question of quality.

Bullhorn is the incumbent system of record for a large share of US staffing firms, and its case is strongest where scale and operations dominate: heavy VMS integration, timesheets and pay-and-bill through Bullhorn One and Middle Office, a large app marketplace, and the reporting a firm with many consultants and contract placements needs. If your business runs on contractor volume and back-office throughput, that is a real advantage and the modular pricing is the price of it.

Loxo's case is strongest for firms that want sourcing, the ATS, the CRM and outreach to be one purchase with one legible number, particularly smaller and mid-sized search and recruiting firms that do not need a middle office. Its published pricing is more complete, and the free 7-day trial of full Professional with no credit card is a fair way to test it on a live job order, though a week is short if your search cycles run longer.

The honest caveat on both: an ATS decision is a multi-year one, and migration cost, consultant retraining and reporting continuity usually outweigh a $50 per seat difference. Do not switch systems of record to solve an outreach problem.

The meter neither vendor charges you for

There is a structural point underneath both price lists that catches recruiting firms repeatedly.

A per-seat platform fee and your ability to actually reach candidates are unrelated meters. Adding a consultant to Loxo Professional adds $2,388 a year and adds zero sending reach. Adding one to Bullhorn Core adds $1,980 and the same zero. Reach is set by warmed mailboxes and the domains behind them: a warmed mailbox sustains roughly 30 to 50 sends a day, ramping mailboxes should stay near 10 to 20, and the working ratio is about one domain per three to four mailboxes. Mailboxes cost $2 to $4 a month at a reseller and domains $10 to $15 a year.

So contacting 250 candidates a week costs about $5 to $9 a month in infrastructure. 500 a week is $7 to $13, 1,000 a week is $12 to $22, and 5,000 a week is $56 to $106. The platform fee buys an ATS, a CRM and a candidate database, which may be entirely worth paying for. It does not buy reach, and no number of extra licences will change that.

This matters commercially because recruiting economics are unforgiving at the top of the funnel and generous at the bottom. A mid-level placement on a $75,000 salary at a 22 percent fee is $16,500 in revenue, and direct-hire fees generally run 15 to 18 percent for junior roles, 20 to 22 percent for mid-level and 25 to 30 percent for senior search. Those are revenue figures, not profit, but they explain why a few extra conversations a month dwarf the licence line. They also explain why the salary number itself deserves care: the fee tracks first-year compensation, so a client posting an unrealistic band costs you the placement, and with US pay-transparency rules now requiring published ranges in many states it is worth being able to benchmark a defensible salary range before you advise on one.

If the ATS is not the problem

Plenty of firms comparing these two are not really shopping for a system of record. They already have one, their consultants live in it, and their placement reporting depends on it. What they are missing is outreach that gets answered, and on Bullhorn that is exactly the part with no published price.

That gap can be filled without touching the ATS. A standalone outreach layer runs a flat $39 a month rather than a per-seat licence, researches each candidate or client contact before writing instead of merging a first name into a template, sends from your own warmed domains with shared suppression across every consultant, and leaves Bullhorn or Loxo exactly where they are. On a five-recruiter desk that is $468 a year against a $6,000 tier difference, and nobody has to migrate anything.

It does not replace an ATS and does not try to. If you need applicant tracking, buy applicant tracking. But if the bottleneck is that candidates do not reply, the product side of that sits on our recruitment outreach tool page, the wider vendor shortlist is compared on our best outreach tool for recruiting agencies guide, and the client-side BD equivalent is on prospecting tools for recruitment agencies. The prior question, whether you need the ATS at all, is worked through in do you need an ATS for candidate outreach.