Bullhorn Pricing, $99 and $165 Per User, AI Tiers Quoted

Short answer: Bullhorn publishes two rates and quotes everything else. Re-checked on September 9, 2026, bullhorn.com/pricing still lists Bullhorn Starter at $99 per user per month and Bullhorn Core at $165 per user per month for small agencies, both with free implementation. Bullhorn Pro, Bullhorn Max, Front Office Growth, Front Office Enterprise, Bullhorn One and the Salesforce-based Recruitment Cloud are all quote-only, and so is every Amplify AI product. The number most agencies get wrong is not the sticker price, it is the multiplier: Bullhorn charges per recruiter seat, so a ten-person desk on Core is $19,800 a year before a single AI feature is switched on.

How much does Bullhorn cost?

For a small agency, $99 or $165 per user per month depending on the plan. Those are Bullhorn's own published figures, read from its pricing page on August 11, 2026, and they cover the two entry tiers. Every plan above them, and every AI product, is priced through a sales conversation. Even the published tiers route to a Get a quote button rather than a checkout, so you are talking to someone either way. The rate just tells you where the conversation starts.

That makes Bullhorn unusually transparent for this category, which is worth saying before the criticism starts. Most of its peers publish nothing at all. Greenhouse, Lever, iCIMS, Workday, HireVue and Eightfold all keep their numbers behind a demo. Bullhorn at least lets a small agency owner work out whether the entry tier is plausible before booking a call.

Bullhorn pricing per user, plan by plan

Here is everything on the pricing page as it stood on August 11, 2026, including the plans with no number attached, because knowing what is quote-only is half the useful information.

Plan	Published price	Who it is aimed at	What it adds
Bullhorn Starter	$99 per user/month	Small agencies	Applicant tracking, resume parsing, client management, job posting with career portal, support, free implementation
Bullhorn Core	$165 per user/month	Small agencies, growing teams	Everything in Starter plus the 300+ partner app marketplace, custom fields and workflows, LinkedIn RSC and Apply Connect, email sidebar
Bullhorn Pro	Quote only	Small agencies wanting AI	Everything in Core plus recruitment CRM sales pipeline, AI search and match, Amplify Chat, AI data enrichment, process automation, AI resume formatting, AI call transcription, real-time analytics, dedicated account manager
Bullhorn Max	Quote only	Agencies going agentic	Everything in Pro plus agentic screening, agentic AI matching, agentic data enrichment, omni-channel candidate engagement, multi-step AI outreach, website chatbot, interview scheduling
Front Office Growth	Quote only	Larger firms	Applicant tracking, recruitment CRM, AI Assistant, custom fields and workflows, resume parsing, process automation, real-time analytics
Front Office Enterprise	Quote only	Scaling firms	Everything in Growth plus omni-channel engagement, SMS from Bullhorn, website chatbot, interview scheduling, configurable reporting
Bullhorn One	Quote only	Front-to-back agencies	Everything in Front Office Enterprise plus timesheet management, time interpretation, invoicing and billing, pay and bill automation
Recruitment Cloud	Quote only	Global enterprise staffing	Enterprise front-to-back solution built on Salesforce

Read that table as a ladder with a break in it. The first two rungs have prices. Everything from Pro upward requires a scoping call, and that break falls in exactly the place where the AI starts.

Where the AI sits, and what it costs

This is the part worth slowing down on, because it is where most buyers misread the pricing page. Starter and Core both list resume parsing. Neither lists AI search and match. Parsing and screening are not the same job. Parsing turns a PDF into structured fields so the record is searchable. Screening decides which of 400 applicants deserves a recruiter's Monday morning. Buying Core gets you the first one.

AI search and match, Amplify Chat, AI data enrichment, AI resume formatting and AI call transcription all begin at Bullhorn Pro. Agentic screening and agentic AI matching appear one rung higher, at Bullhorn Max. Both tiers are quote-only, so the honest answer to "what does Bullhorn's AI screening cost" is that nobody outside a sales cycle knows.

Worth knowing before that conversation: Bullhorn produces four different candidate scores and they are not interchangeable. The Relevancy Score predicts placement likelihood from historical hiring outcomes, the Classic Matching Score works on job title, location, category, skills and specialties, the Screening Score runs 0 to 100 but only exists once a candidate completes an Amplify Screener, and the Engagement Score tracks email opens and clicks. We break down what Bullhorn AI resume screening actually does, score by score, and which tier each one needs.

On top of the plans, Bullhorn sells its AI as separate products, also quoted: Amplify Digital Workers, Amplify Search and Match, Recruitment Automation and VMS Automation. The Digital Workers page lists more than fifteen skills, including Match, Screen, Present, Enrich, Outreach, Research, Transcribe and Audit, with Screen described as interviewing candidates and generating summaries. It is a genuinely ambitious product line. It is also the part of the bill you cannot forecast from the website.

The annual arithmetic nobody puts on the page

Per-user pricing is easy to underestimate because the monthly number looks small. Multiply it properly. These figures use the published Core and Starter rates at list, with no discount, no annual commitment assumption and no AI:

Recruiter seats	Starter at $99/user/mo	Core at $165/user/mo	Core, per year
3	$297/mo	$495/mo	$5,940
5	$495/mo	$825/mo	$9,900
10	$990/mo	$1,650/mo	$19,800
15	$1,485/mo	$2,475/mo	$29,700
25	$2,475/mo	$4,125/mo	$49,500

The pattern that matters is what the bill responds to. It responds to headcount. It does not respond to applications. A desk that gets buried when a hot role draws 600 applicants pays exactly what it paid in a quiet month, and a desk that adds two recruiters pays $3,960 a year more on Core whether or not those recruiters increase the workload of the system. For a system of record that is defensible, since seats really are what consume a CRM. For screening it is the wrong axis, because screening work is created by applicants.

How much is Bullhorn per month for a small agency?

For a small agency the published monthly cost is $99 per user on Starter or $165 per user on Core, so a five-recruiter desk is $495 or $825 a month and a ten-recruiter desk is $990 or $1,650. Those are the only two Bullhorn rates that exist in public. Pro and Max, which are where the AI lives, both say "Talk to us".

Two things distort that monthly figure once a real quote arrives. Bullhorn does not publish a seat minimum, so whether you are billed on licenses assigned or licenses used is worth settling before signature, and it is the single biggest variable for agencies that flex headcount seasonally. And most Bullhorn contracts in this category are annual rather than month to month, so the monthly number is a division rather than a payment option you can cancel out of.

Is Bullhorn ATS pricing different from Bullhorn CRM pricing?

No, and that is the point of the product. Bullhorn does not sell an applicant tracking system and a recruiting CRM as two priced things: the Starter and Core rates cover both in one seat, because for a staffing agency the candidate record and the client record are the same workflow. Searches for Bullhorn ATS pricing and Bullhorn CRM pricing land on the same two numbers.

Where the bill does split is above that line. Middle office, onboarding, messaging, analytics, VMS automation and the whole Amplify AI catalogue are separate quote-only products, and Bullhorn One is the front-to-back bundle rather than a tier of the ATS. So the honest framing is that $99 and $165 buy the recruiting system of record, and everything that makes it an operating system for the agency is priced separately and privately.

Agencies weighing the per-seat model against a rival that publishes more of it usually end up comparing against Loxo, which states $149 and $199 per user per month and includes its AI search on both. Our Loxo pricing breakdown works through that comparison, and the Loxo vs Bullhorn comparison puts the two side by side on the tier where AI screening actually starts.

Does Bullhorn offer a free trial?

No. Bullhorn now answers this itself, in its own words: "Bullhorn does not currently offer a free trial." Re-checked on September 9, 2026, there is no free tier, no trial length and no self-serve signup path on any plan, including the two with published rates. Treat evaluation as a demo-and-sandbox process rather than something you can start on a Tuesday afternoon.

What Bullhorn does include is free implementation, and it covers more tiers than most comparison articles admit. Bullhorn states that implementation is free with Starter, Core and Pro, its three small-agency tiers, and that Max is quoted separately with implementation scoped into that quote. That matters because several widely-read comparisons quote Bullhorn implementation fees of $1,000 to $50,000. We could not verify a five-figure implementation charge against any Bullhorn source, and for the three tiers most agencies actually buy the vendor says the fee is zero.

Is Bullhorn built on Salesforce?

One product is, and the rest are not. Bullhorn Recruitment Cloud is described on Bullhorn's own pricing page as an enterprise-grade front-to-back recruitment solution built on Salesforce, aimed at agencies scaling globally. The Bullhorn most agencies actually use, meaning Starter, Core, Pro, Max and the Front Office plans, runs on Bullhorn's own platform. If a vendor comparison tells you Bullhorn is a Salesforce app, it is describing one enterprise edition and not the mainstream product.

Does Bullhorn charge per user?

Yes. Bullhorn confirms it directly: "Bullhorn pricing is per user, per month. You only pay for the users you need, and you can add users as your team grows without changing plans or migrating data." That is the sentence to hold on to when you compare Bullhorn against vendors that bill on a different axis, because the unit decides the invoice more than the rate does.

Three teams with identical hiring volume land on very different bills depending on which model they walked into. Bullhorn and Manatal charge per user, so cost tracks recruiter headcount. BambooHR charges per employee, so cost tracks the whole company whether or not those people touch hiring. Workable charges a flat fee that steps by employee band. None of the three responds to how many applications arrived, which is the thing that actually creates screening work.

Are there hidden costs with Bullhorn?

Bullhorn answers part of this on its small-agency pricing page, and the answer is more useful than the estimates circulating elsewhere. Marketplace access is included from Bullhorn Core onward. AI search and match is included in Bullhorn Pro and Bullhorn Max. Onboarding and Back Office remain optional, are priced separately, and are not required to use the platform.

The line Bullhorn does not publish is the meter on its AI. There is no statement anywhere about whether Amplify is billed per seat, per action or per candidate screened, so a busy month cannot be modeled in advance. That gap is worth a direct question on the call, and we walk through the full tier-by-tier breakdown in our Bullhorn Amplify pricing guide.

One contract note before you sign. Bullhorn's public terms-of-service URL redirects to the terms for Able Software, a Bullhorn company covering onboarding, rather than to a master agreement for the core ATS. Those Able terms auto-renew for the same length as the initial term unless either party gives 30 days' written notice, require 90 days' notice to terminate for convenience, and allow the fee tier to be increased if annual hires exceed the selected plan. They are not the ATS contract and should not be assumed to apply, but they do indicate Bullhorn's house style on renewal and notice. Ask for the core agreement in writing.

How Bullhorn pricing compares to other agency ATS vendors

Every figure below was read from each vendor's own pricing page on August 11, 2026, with the Recruit CRM row re-verified on October 6, 2026 and the Bullhorn and Ceipal rows re-verified on September 2, 2026. Where a vendor publishes nothing, the table says so rather than repeating a directory estimate.

Vendor	Published entry price	Free trial	AI matching or screening
Bullhorn	Starter $99, Core $165 per user/mo	None listed	Starts at Pro, agentic screening at Max, both quote-only
Crelate	Essentials $85 (2 users), Business $119 per user/mo, $149 monthly. Business Plus and Enterprise Custom, structured-data floors $149 and $299	Offered	AI Assistant on Business, Advanced AI Assistant on Business Plus
Recruiterflow	Platform $149 per user/mo	Not stated	AIRA agents sit in a separate quote-only plan
Loxo	Core $149, Professional $199 per user/mo, annual	7 days of full Professional access, no card	AI search on both. Agent workforce and API start on Professional
Recruit CRM	Pro $95, Business $135, Enterprise $215 per user/mo	30 days on Pro and Business	AI resume parsing on all plans; AI matching and sourcing included but metered at 3 credits per 100 profiles from a shared credit pool
JazzHR	Hero $1,000/yr, Plus $3,480, Pro $5,508	Yes	AI candidate matching starts at Plus
Ceipal	None on its own site. $25 per user/mo on its Capterra listing	Available, terms not stated	AI Matching ranks resumes, but its cost and metering are unpublished

The Crelate row carries the opposite quirk. Its pricing page marks Business Plus and Enterprise "Custom", while the structured data Crelate serves on that same page states floors of $149 and $299 per user per month, and its contract applies an automatic renewal increase of at least 7 percent. Our breakdown of Crelate pricing shows where each of those figures lives and which of the circulating seat-minimum claims the vendor actually supports.

The Ceipal row is the extreme case of the pattern, and it moved recently. Checked on September 2, 2026, ceipal.com/pricing returns an HTTP 301 redirect to the Ceipal homepage, so the vendor now publishes no rate on its own site at all. The only figure it still stands behind is on a directory listing it supplies itself. That leaves Bullhorn looking transparent by comparison, which says more about the category than about either company. Our breakdown of Ceipal pricing separates that one traceable figure from the third-party estimates in circulation, which disagree with each other by roughly a factor of two, and the head-to-head sits in Ceipal vs Bullhorn.

Two conclusions fall out of that. Per-seat pricing is the category norm, so switching vendors changes your multiplier rather than escaping the model. And AI matching is nearly always the upsell rather than the base plan, which means the capability that probably prompted the search is the one you will be quoted for wherever you land. A fuller breakdown of who publishes what sits in our guide to resume screening software cost, and the same quote-only pattern shows up in enterprise recruiting too, as our look at iCIMS pricing found.

One row in that table deserves a caveat we only found by checking it three times. Loaded from Europe on August 18, 2026, Recruit CRM's plan cards rendered in euros while the add-on cards on the same page were quoted in US dollars. Re-checked on October 6, 2026, the page we read printed Pro at $95, Business at $135 and Enterprise at $215 per user per month in US dollars, with "Save up to 17%" on annual billing. The catch has moved from the currency to the AI. The fixed per-plan match caps are gone, and AI Candidate Matching and AI Sourcing now consume credits at 3 credits per 100 profiles, drawn from a pool of 100, 200 or 2,000 credits per user a month that enrichment, automation and messaging also spend. Get your seat rate and credit allowance in writing at your seat count. Our Recruit CRM alternative page works through what that credit rate means for a screening workload.

What is actually in Bullhorn One, and why agencies pay for it

Bullhorn One is the front-to-back edition, and the four things it adds are the least glamorous and most sticky parts of running a staffing agency: timesheet management, time interpretation, invoicing and billing, and pay and bill automation. Time interpretation in particular is the sort of feature nobody demos well and everybody needs, because it is the logic that turns raw hours into overtime, shift differentials and the specific pay rules of whatever contract that worker sits under.

This is the piece agencies most often try to unbundle and most often re-buy. Contract and temp desks live or die on billing accuracy and on how quickly those invoices actually get paid, because payroll for placed workers goes out long before the client settles. If you are evaluating a cheaper front-office-only ATS to escape Bullhorn's per-seat cost, price the back office you will need alongside it before you decide you have saved anything.

Questions to take into the Bullhorn sales call

Six that change the number, in rough order of how much money they move:

• Minimum seat count and contract length. Per-user pricing usually comes with a floor and an annual or multi-year term. Ask what happens to the bill when your headcount drops, because in recruiting it eventually does.
• Which tier the AI you were shown lives in. Demos move fluidly between Core, Pro and Max features. Get the mapping in writing before you compare quotes.
• Whether Amplify is bundled or separate. Digital Workers, Search and Match, Recruitment Automation and VMS Automation are listed as their own products with their own quotes.
• How the AI is metered. Per seat, per candidate, per action or a flat platform fee are four very different bills at the same headline rate.
• What implementation covers above Core. Bullhorn now states that free implementation is included with Starter, Core and Pro, its three small-agency tiers, and that Bullhorn Max is quoted separately with implementation scoped into that quote rather than included at no cost. Get the Max scope in writing.
• Renewal uplift. Ask for the cap in the contract rather than the reassurance on the call.

Bullhorn's per-user model is one of three pricing units in this category, and the unit usually matters more than the rate. Our ATS pricing comparison sets the per-user platforms against the per-employee and flat-rate ones across 22 systems, which is the fastest way to see why two similar-looking quotes produce very different invoices. If the per-user model is what appeals and the $99 starting rate is what does not, Zoho Recruit charges $25 per recruiter a month on the same unit, though its candidate matching sits a tier above that.

The cost that never appears in any quote

Here is the line item no vendor prices, and it is usually the biggest one. A job order goes live, 400 people apply in nine days, and a recruiter works the applications in arrival order until the day runs out. Applicant 210 was never read. Not rejected, not deprioritized, just never opened. You paid for the job board spend that brought that person in, you paid for the seat that was supposed to review them, and the placement fee went to the agency down the road that got to them first.

No applicant tracking system fixes that by tracking better. Bullhorn is storing those 400 records perfectly well. The reading step is what is unstaffed, and the honest choice is between buying up the Bullhorn ladder until you reach Amplify, hiring more recruiters to read faster, or putting a screening layer in front of the pile you already have.

That third option is what Prescreener does, and it is priced on the thing that actually varies. It reads every inbound application, applies the knockout and eligibility criteria you set for that job order, asks the short screening questions you would ask on a first call, scores role-fit and hands the whole pile back ranked with a written reason on every candidate. Plans are published at $199, $499 and $1,290 a month based on applicant volume and open jobs rather than recruiter seats, so the ten-seat desk paying $1,650 a month for Bullhorn Core is not paying a second per-seat bill to get the pile read. It runs alongside Bullhorn rather than replacing it, which is the whole point: the shortlist goes back into your ATS as the submissions you were always going to make.

Bullhorn is not the only agency platform that keeps its screening tier behind a quote, and the per-seat unit is the variable that decides most of these comparisons. Best ATS for recruiters and recruitment agencies prices the published rates against a real agency headcount, and Lever pricing covers the other major platform that publishes no rate at all but does have observed contract data behind it.

If you are weighing a migration against a layer, the honest comparison of Bullhorn alternatives lays out which products genuinely replace Bullhorn and when you should keep it. If your problem is specifically the depth of the pile, bulk applicant screening covers how a whole pile gets read in one pass, and resume screening for staffing agencies covers the agency workflow specifically. Every ranking is a recommendation, never an automatic rejection: AI use is disclosed to candidates, screening is bias-audited to support EEOC standards and NYC Local Law 144, and a recruiter makes every call.

Pricing in this article was read from each vendor's own pricing page, and the Bullhorn Starter and Core rates were re-verified against bullhorn.com on September 9, 2026. Vendors change their rates and their packaging often, so confirm current pricing directly before you budget.