A recruiting CRM manages candidates, clients, jobs and placements in one database, and in 2026 it costs about $99 to $199 per user per month for the tiers you can price publicly. Loxo, Recruiterflow and Bullhorn all list a starting price, but the features you probably need (AI sourcing, agents, sales pipeline) sit in higher or quote-only tiers. Compare the first-year cost of the tier you will actually use, not the cheapest card.
What is a recruiting CRM, and how is it different from an ATS?
A recruiting CRM (candidate relationship management) keeps long-term relationships with candidates and, for agencies, with client companies. An applicant tracking system (ATS) runs the process for one open job: applications, stages, interviews, offers. Agency tools such as Loxo, Recruiterflow and Bullhorn combine both and add client management, job orders and placements. See the ATS vs CRM comparison and Talent Pool vs ATS vs CRM for the category split.
Five things decide whether a recruiting CRM is worth the money: a single candidate record with full history, pipelines for candidates and clients, outreach (email sequences, LinkedIn), sourcing data inside the tool, and clean export and API access so your data stays yours.
Loxo vs Recruiterflow vs Bullhorn pricing: the short answer
This is a comparison for recruitment agencies, staffing firms, and executive-search businesses. These companies sell a system for the relationship between candidates, client companies, jobs, and placements. That is not the same buying problem as an employer selecting an in-house ATS.
The useful comparison is therefore not “Which tool has the longest feature list?” It is “What does one productive recruiter seat cost in year one, on the plan that supports our operating model?” The published entry price can be misleading. Loxo puts its sourcing data and agentic AI in Professional, Recruiterflow puts AIRA in a custom-priced plan, and Bullhorn places its recruitment CRM sales pipeline and AI in quote-based Pro.
| Product | Published price | Binding shown publicly | What the entry price does not settle |
|---|---|---|---|
| Sprad | CRM, pipeline, talent network: free. Recruiter Lite €79/seat/month, Atlas Recruiter €299 (29 Oct 2026) | Seats billed annually; credits monthly | Talent CRM plus sourcing, outreach and screening. Not a client and placement CRM: that part is in beta |
| Loxo Core | $149/user/month (30 Oct 2026) | Annual plan, paid upfront; labelled new-customer offer | Loxo Source, agents and included credits require Professional |
| Loxo Professional | $199/user/month on 24 Aug; no public price on 30 Oct, demo required | Annual plan, paid upfront | 2,500 pooled credits per seat per month; Boost levels (2×, 5×) are not priced publicly |
| Recruiterflow Platform | $149/user/month; $119 billed annually on 24 Aug (not shown in the 30 Oct re-check) | Monthly or annual option | AIRA has custom pricing; white-glove migration is paid |
| Bullhorn Starter / Core | $99 / $165 per user/month (30 Oct 2026) | Contract term and billing schedule not stated on the public page | Pro, Max, the recruitment CRM sales pipeline, AI and automation need a quote |
All prices are vendor list prices, before tax, checked on 24 August and re-checked on 30 October 2026. “Per month” is a rate unit, not proof of a cancellable monthly contract. Only Loxo explicitly says that its plans are annual and paid upfront. Bullhorn does not publish the commitment behind its monthly rate, so it belongs in the quote checklist.
How we compared. List prices come from each vendor's public price page, as of October 2026; the totals are our own arithmetic on those prices. Sprad is our own product, so its limits are stated in its profile.
The one decision axis: first-year cost per productive recruiter
Agency software earns its keep through placements. That makes a per-employee comparison less useful than two agency metrics:
- First-year cost per productive recruiter: all software and migration costs divided by recruiters who actively run desks.
- Software cost per placement: first-year total cost divided by completed placements.
First-year total = paid seats × seat rate × billed months + implementation + data migration + paid options + overlap with the old system + internal migration time.
Do not put finance, operations, or occasional hiring-manager users into the same seat assumption until the vendor confirms how each role is licensed. Also ask whether a seat can be removed when a recruiter leaves. A five-seat minimum that cannot be reduced during the term behaves very differently from five genuinely flexible subscriptions.
A five-recruiter budget model
| Plan | List-price calculation | Five-seat platform total | Important caveat |
|---|---|---|---|
| Sprad Recruiter Lite | 5 × €79 × 12 | €4,740/year (CRM free; deep search and contact data via credits) | Different scope: sourcing and talent CRM, not a client CRM. Euro price, not directly comparable with the dollar rows |
| Loxo Core | 5 × $149 × 12 | $8,940/year, paid upfront | Labelled a limited-time new-customer offer |
| Loxo Professional | 5 × $199 × 12 | $11,940/year, paid upfront (24 Aug price) | 12,500 pooled credits a month across five seats; the price is no longer public |
| Recruiterflow Platform, annual | 5 × $119 × 12 | $7,140/year (24 Aug price) | Excludes AIRA and paid white-glove migration |
| Recruiterflow Platform, monthly | 5 × $149 × 12 | $8,940 over 12 months | Verify cancellation notice in your order form |
| Bullhorn Starter | 5 × $99 × 12 | $5,940 for 12 rate-months | Arithmetic, not a vendor quote; term not stated |
| Bullhorn Core | 5 × $165 × 12 | $9,900 for 12 rate-months | Sales pipeline and AI are in quote-based Pro |
If a five-recruiter firm makes 30 placements a year, every $3,000 of additional first-year cost adds $100 per placement. That may be trivial for retained executive search and material for lower-fee contingency work.
Worked example: three years, not one
Renewal terms change the picture. Assume five Loxo Core seats at $8,940 and a 5 % annual price increase (an assumption: reviewers on comparison sites mention uplifts of that size, the vendor page does not state a renewal rule). Year two is $9,387, year three $9,856, together $28,183 before migration and extras. A flat three-year price in the order form would have been $26,820. The $1,363 gap is what a renewal cap is worth, so ask for one in writing.
What Loxo actually costs
The Loxo pricing page lists Core from $149 per user per month, billed annually and paid upfront, and labels it a new-customer limited-time offer. Professional was listed from $199 when we first checked on 24 August; on 30 October the page shows no price and asks for a demo. Enterprise uses custom annual agreements. Treat Core as a floor and keep the quoted price and renewal basis in the order form.
Core is the system-of-record tier: ATS, recruiting CRM, AI search, unlimited jobs, candidates and companies, pipelines, reporting, email and calendar sync, a Chrome extension and MCP access. Professional adds Loxo Source, the proprietary talent graph, contact information when available, the complete agentic workforce, API access, and 2,500 credits per seat per month. Credits pool across the team and refresh each cycle; unused capacity does not carry over. Boost levels (2× and 5×) raise the pool, their price is not public.
- Core teams with three or more seats get free migration.
- Smaller Core teams get guided self-service tooling.
- Complex or custom migrations, including Professional and Enterprise, are scoped as fixed packages before signing.
- The seven-day trial exposes the full Professional platform and does not require a credit card. There is no permanent free plan.
Best pricing fit: a search firm that will replace separate ATS, CRM, sourcing, outreach, and data tools, and can measure whether the Professional bundle removes enough other spend. If you only need a database and pipeline, price Core.
What Recruiterflow actually costs
The Recruiterflow pricing page shows the Platform plan at $149 per user per month. On 24 August the annual toggle showed $119; the 30 October re-check displayed only $149, so confirm the annual rate before you plan around it. AIRA is custom-priced.
Platform includes ATS and CRM, multichannel sequences, recruitment and sales automation, access controls, Chrome sourcing, reporting, and API access. The vendor says there are no add-ons, but that does not make AIRA part of Platform: AIRA agents (notetaker, matchmaker, job-change alerts, submission and task agents), omnichannel communication sync and custom BI dashboards belong to the quote-based AIRA plan.
CSV/Excel self-service import is free. White-glove migration is paid, depends on data volume, and typically takes six to eight weeks. The vendor says buyers can discuss waiving the fee on multi-year contracts, which makes a waiver a trade for a longer commitment, not a standard inclusion.
Best pricing fit: an agency that needs ATS, CRM, outreach sequences, automation, and API access in one predictable platform tier. If the annual rate is $119, annual billing saves $30 per seat per month, or $1,800 a year for five seats.
What Bullhorn actually costs
The Bullhorn pricing page publishes Starter at $99 and Core at $165 per user per month for small agencies. Pro and Max require a quote. Implementation is labelled free on Starter, Core, Pro and Max, but the contract term, payment cadence, seat minimum, migration scope, and renewal rule are not published.
The tier boundary matters more than the $99 headline. Starter includes applicant tracking, resume parsing, client management, job posting with a career portal, and support. Core adds the partner marketplace, custom fields and workflows, LinkedIn integrations, and the email sidebar. The page places the recruitment CRM sales pipeline, AI search and match, Amplify Chat, AI enrichment, process automation, call transcription, analytics, and a dedicated account manager in Pro; agentic workflows sit in Max.
A buyer searching for a Bullhorn CRM price should therefore not automatically model Starter or Core. Ask Bullhorn to map each required workflow to a tier.
Best pricing fit: a staffing firm that values configurable workflows and a broad partner ecosystem. The entry cards are budget anchors, not a total-cost quote.
Implementation, migration, and the costs outside the licence
“Free implementation” and “free migration” are not interchangeable. Implementation can mean configuration and enablement. Migration means extracting, cleaning, mapping, importing, validating, and reconciling records and documents. Ask each vendor to define both in writing. A migration budget should cover:
- candidate, client, contact, job, placement, activity, consent, and attachment history;
- duplicate handling and ownership rules;
- email, calendar, job-board, telephony, reporting, and finance integrations;
- workflow recreation, permissions, templates, and training;
- parallel-run months and read-only access to the old database;
- post-import sampling and a failed-import rollback plan.
The typical mistake we see in quotes is comparing seat prices while ignoring AI credits, the second system you keep for sourcing, and the overlap months. Add those lines before you compare.
Data protection: what to check in the EU
Do not move every historic candidate record simply because it exists. Check the lawful basis under Art. 6 GDPR, the retention limit in Art. 5(1)(e), the information duty towards sourced candidates in Art. 14, and a processor agreement under Art. 28. For German employers, § 26 BDSG covers data processing in the employment context. If the vendor stores data in the US, ask which transfer mechanism applies, for example the EU-US Data Privacy Framework. AI features that rank or filter candidates fall under the high-risk rules of the EU AI Act (Annex III, employment). A useful ATS migration plan separates what must move, what should be archived, and what should be deleted. Confirm the details with counsel (status: October 2026).
Agency CRM or in-house recruiting software?
This is the most important filter in the comparison. An agency makes placements for clients. It needs business development, client contacts, job orders, submissions, and placement tracking. An employer hires into its own organisation. It needs requisitions, hiring-manager collaboration, candidate experience, screening governance, and connections to HR systems. Buying an agency CRM for in-house hiring means paying for client and placement machinery you do not need. Compare employer systems in the ATS comparison.
The cheaper way to a candidate CRM: Sprad
If the bottleneck is finding and reaching candidates, the cost logic changes. In Sprad the CRM, pipeline, career site and talent network are free for the whole team; you pay for AI work through credits (a free account includes 100 credits a month) or a flat seat: Recruiter Lite at €79 per seat and month, or Atlas Recruiter at €299 with unlimited fair-use search, deep search and one automated LinkedIn and mailbox account. Whether that is cheaper than separate LinkedIn and XING recruiter licences depends on what you pay today, so compare it with your own invoices.
What you get: one search across LinkedIn, GitHub and your own talent pool, where AI checks every profile against your requirements instead of matching keywords (if results appear instantly, it is usually a keyword search). Outreach runs on LinkedIn and email from one inbox, with a warning if a colleague already contacted the person. All of it sits on one profile per candidate, and your data stays yours if you cancel. In the recruiting area of the open PeopleSearchBench, four systems have published scores (Lessie 68.2, Juicebox 65.7, Exa 64.7, Claude Code 50.5); our own re-measurement of Atlas, converted to that scale, comes to about 73.5 and is not an entry in the benchmark's table (published by Lessie, October 2026). In our own measurement (Sprad, as of 15 August 2026, method), Atlas found 38 % of the candidates that four other systems found; the best of those came to 9 %. Honest limits: no call notetaker, no placement reporting, the client CRM for agencies is in beta, and the deep search takes a few minutes while Quick Search answers in about three seconds. See Sprad for recruitment agencies, the pricing page and the active sourcing tools comparison.
A quote checklist that makes the offers comparable
- Fix the seat definition. List recruiters, sourcers, operations users, managers, and client users separately.
- Price the required tier. Name the exact workflows that force an upgrade: sourcing data, sales pipeline, AI agents, API, automation, analytics, or middle office.
- Request three totals. Year one, renewal year, and exit year, including tax, services, migration, options, and old-system overlap.
- Write down the term. Initial commitment, invoicing schedule, renewal cap, notice deadline, and permitted seat reductions.
- Define migration acceptance. Record types, attachments, history depth, deduplication, validation sample, and remedy for failed imports.
- Test with real work. Run one live search, one client workflow, one placement, one report, and one data export.
Also verify whether your talent pool is merely stored or genuinely reusable, so a database-size claim does not stand in for search quality, data freshness, consent, and recruiter adoption.
FAQ
What is a recruiting CRM?
A recruiting CRM is software that manages relationships with candidates and, for agencies, client companies: contacts, pipelines, outreach, notes and placements in one database. It differs from an ATS, which runs the process for a specific open job.
How much does a recruiting CRM cost in 2026?
The public entry prices of agency CRMs are about $99 to $165 per user per month (Bullhorn Starter and Core, Recruiterflow Platform $149, Loxo Core $149). AI, sourcing data and sales-pipeline features often cost extra or require a quote. Sprad's CRM and pipeline are free; sourcing runs on credits or a seat from €79 per month.
Is there a free recruiting CRM?
Yes, with limits. In Sprad the CRM, pipeline, career site and talent network are free for the whole team, and AI work runs on included credits. Loxo offers a seven-day trial but no permanent free plan. Free tools rarely include client and placement management for agencies.
Loxo or Recruiterflow: which is better?
Loxo suits firms that want sourcing data and AI agents inside one annual contract and can afford Professional. Recruiterflow suits agencies that want ATS, CRM and sequences in a predictable tier and can wait for AIRA. Decide with the first-year cost of the tier you need, not the entry price.
How much does Recruiterflow cost?
Recruiterflow shows Platform at $149 per user per month; $119 billed annually was visible on 24 August 2026 and should be confirmed. AIRA is custom-priced. Self-service import is free; white-glove migration costs extra.
How much does Loxo cost?
Loxo lists Core from $149 per user per month, billed annually and paid upfront. Professional was $199 on 24 August and is now quote-only. Enterprise is custom. Core migration is free from three seats.
Does Bullhorn publish pricing?
Yes: Starter $99 and Core $165 per user per month on the US page. Pro and Max are quote-based. Contract length, payment schedule and seat minimum are not public.
Which is cheapest for a five-recruiter agency?
On public rates Bullhorn Starter has the lowest arithmetic total at $5,940 for 12 rate-months, Recruiterflow annual $7,140, Loxo Core $8,940, Bullhorn Core $9,900. The scopes differ, so the cheapest relevant tier may be another one.
Is a recruiting CRM GDPR compliant?
Not by itself. You need a lawful basis (Art. 6 GDPR), defined retention periods, an Art. 14 notice for sourced candidates, a processor agreement and a transfer mechanism for non-EU storage. Check these before migrating data.
What should an in-house recruiting team choose?
Do not start with these three prices. Decide whether you need an employer ATS, sourcing, screening, a candidate portal, or talent-pool reactivation. An agency CRM is designed around clients and placements.
Jürgen Ulbrich
Jürgen Ulbrich has more than a decade of experience in developing and leading high-performing teams and companies. As an expert in employee referral programs as well as feedback and performance processes, Jürgen has helped over 100 organizations optimize their talent acquisition and development strategies.
