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

Short answer: Bullhorn publishes two rates and quotes everything else. Checked on August 11, 2026, bullhorn.com/pricing 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.

Last updated August 2026.

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.

Does Bullhorn offer a free trial?

The pricing page does not list one. Checked on August 11, 2026, there is no free tier, no trial length and no self-serve signup path on any plan, including the two with published rates. What Bullhorn does include on Starter and Core is free implementation, which is a real concession in a category where onboarding fees of several thousand dollars are common. Treat evaluation as a demo-and-sandbox process rather than something you can start on a Tuesday afternoon.

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.

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 August 18, 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, Business $119 per user/mo	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	Free $0, Basic $169 per user/mo	7 days of Professional features	Loxo AI Chat and AI agents on Professional and Enterprise
Recruit CRM	Three per-user tiers published, currency varies by region	Yes	AI resume parsing on all plans; candidate matching capped at 2 matches on Pro, 50 on Business and Enterprise
JazzHR	Hero $1,000/yr, Plus $3,480, Pro $5,508	Yes	AI candidate matching starts at Plus

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 twice. Recruit CRM does publish all three of its tiers, which is more than most vendors here manage, but the plan prices are rendered in the browser and the currency shown depends on the region you load the page from. Loaded from Europe on August 18, 2026, the plan cards read in euros while the add-on cards on the same page were quoted in US dollars. Third-party roundups that state one confident dollar figure for its tiers do not match what the vendor's own page rendered for us, so get your number in your currency at your seat count in writing. Our Recruit CRM alternative page works through what its published feature caps mean 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. Free implementation is listed on Starter and Core. Nothing on the page promises it further up.
• 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.

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.

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 resume 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 on August 11, 2026. Vendors change their rates and their packaging often, so confirm current pricing directly before you budget.