Ceipal vs Bullhorn: Pricing and AI Screening Compared

Short answer: Bullhorn publishes two of its four small-agency rates, $99 and $165 per user per month, and Ceipal publishes none at all. Its pricing URL now redirects to its homepage, and the only rate it still states is $25 per user per month on its own Capterra listing. The comparison that matters, though, is not the entry price. It is that on both platforms the AI screening you are probably shopping for sits on a tier with no published rate.

Last updated September 2026. Every figure below was read from each vendor's own pricing page on September 2, 2026, or from a listing the vendor supplies. Where a rate is a third-party estimate, this article says so rather than presenting it as a price.

How much does Ceipal cost compared to Bullhorn?

Bullhorn is the more transparent of the two, though only just. On its small agencies plans it publishes Starter at $99 per user per month and Core at $165 per user per month. Its two upper tiers, Pro and Max, both say "Talk to us." Everything else Bullhorn sells, including the Front Office Growth and Enterprise plans, Bullhorn One, and every product in its AI and automation line, says "Get a quote."

Ceipal publishes nothing on its own site. Checked on September 2, 2026, ceipal.com/pricing returns an HTTP 301 redirect to the Ceipal homepage. There is no plan table, no tier name and no figure anywhere on the site, and every call to action is a version of Book a Demo. The one rate Ceipal still puts its name to is on its Capterra listing, which vendors supply and maintain: a starting price of $25 per user, per month, on a Per User, Per Month model, with a free trial marked as available.

So on price transparency Bullhorn wins, and a ten-recruiter agency can at least model $990 or $1,650 a month before talking to anyone. With Ceipal the same team is working from a starting unit that may or may not include the product they want, with no published seat minimum to anchor it.

Which one screens and ranks resumes, and on which plan?

Both do it. Neither does it on the plan whose price you just read, and that is the single most useful thing to know before either demo.

Ceipal describes AI Matching inside its applicant tracking system and smart candidate matching that it says automatically ranks resumes. A customer quote on its own site refers to getting a ranked list based on job requirements. That is a real capability and a stronger claim than several better-known platforms make. Teamtailor returns a check or a cross against each criterion and states outright that it will not give you rankings or suitability scores. Recruitee says almost the same thing. BambooHR has no native AI resume screening at all.

What Ceipal does not disclose is what AI Matching costs, whether it is included in the $25 starting unit, or whether it is metered. There is no review allowance, no credit pool and no per-candidate rate published anywhere.

Bullhorn is clearer about where its AI lives and that clarity is bad news for the budget. Amplify AI, which covers search and match, chat, data enrichment, automation, resume formatting and call transcription, first appears on Bullhorn Pro. Agentic workflows, the ones Bullhorn describes as autonomous screening, matching, outreach and omni-channel engagement, first appear on Bullhorn Max. Both of those tiers say "Talk to us."

Read the bottom two rows together. If the reason you are comparing these platforms is that nobody has read the 900 applications sitting in your pipeline, then neither published rate is your rate, and the $99 against $25 comparison is close to meaningless. The number you actually need is on a tier neither vendor will quote publicly.

What does each platform actually cover?

These are not the same shape of product, and the overlap is smaller than the category label suggests.

Ceipal sells itself as a staffing operating system. Its site lists an applicant tracking system, Ceipal AI, a vendor management system branded Procurewise VMS, Workforce Management, and a Recruiter Assistant it describes as mirroring real recruiting workflows. The workforce and VMS modules are the differentiator: if you place contractors, run timesheets and manage supplier relationships, that is a real span of work most applicant tracking systems do not touch.

Bullhorn's roots are on the CRM side, and for an agency that matters more than the feature list makes obvious. Filling the role is only half the job. The other half is winning and keeping the account, which is why Bullhorn's product line runs through front office, back office and Bullhorn One rather than stopping at the candidate. Agencies increasingly hand the prospecting end of that to agents that run the research and outreach end to end, which is a different problem from anything in an applicant tracking system and worth budgeting separately.

The practical read: Ceipal is stronger if your complexity sits after the placement, in contractors, timesheets and VMS programs. Bullhorn is stronger if your complexity sits before it, in client accounts and submissions. Both are heavy platforms, and both are annual commitments.

Ceipal vs Bullhorn: which is better for a staffing agency?

For a small agency that wants a number before a sales cycle, Bullhorn, because you can at least start the evaluation. Starter at $99 and Core at $165 per user per month are real figures you can put in a model, even though the AI is not in either of them.

For an agency whose work is contractor-heavy, Ceipal, because the VMS and workforce modules address something Bullhorn charges separately for and quotes separately on. Its 4.6 rating across 1,264 Capterra reviews is a genuinely strong score in this category, and the ranking capability is real.

For a team whose actual bottleneck is unread applications, honestly, neither on their entry plans. Buying a full staffing platform to fix a reading problem is an expensive route to a narrow outcome, and on both vendors the screening layer is the part you cannot price. That is the case for keeping the platform decision and the screening decision separate: a dedicated screening step that reads and ranks the inbound pile can sit in front of whichever system you land on, and resume screening built for staffing agencies is a smaller commitment than switching your system of record.

Why do Ceipal prices online vary so much?

Because none of them come from Ceipal. When a vendor withdraws its pricing page, the gap fills with estimates, and estimates compound: one article guesses, the next cites the first, and a year later a number nobody sourced gets repeated as fact.

The figures currently circulating run from roughly $24 per user per month for the applicant tracking system, to a five-seat minimum putting a small team near $120 to $125 a month, to about $48 per user per month for automation bundles, to roughly $60 per user once the VMS is included. One widely repeated pair prices TalentHire at $114 a month billed monthly against $120 a month billed yearly, which would make the annual option the more expensive one. That is backwards from how essentially every contract in this category works, and it is a good indicator of how much of this is copied rather than checked.

The high end of that spread is roughly double the low end for what is described as the same product. We do not publish any of it as Ceipal's price, and the full breakdown of Ceipal pricing separates the one figure with a traceable vendor source from the estimates that do not have one. The same discipline applies on the other side: our breakdown of what Bullhorn costs works through the two published tiers and what the quote-only ones add.

What neither price tells you

Three things, on both vendors, and each of them moves the number more than the headline rate does.

The seat minimum. Per-user pricing is only meaningful alongside how many users you must buy. Ceipal publishes no minimum at all, and third-party sources that mention one do not agree. Ask whether you are billed on licenses assigned or licenses used, because agencies with seasonal recruiters pay for the difference.

The module stack. Neither vendor sells one thing. Ceipal has five product lines and Bullhorn has four plan families plus a separate AI and automation catalogue, every item of which is quote-only. A quote for the base platform is not a quote for the platform you described in the demo.

The renewal. Multi-year agreements in this category routinely carry an uplift that is not on the order form's first page, and a per-seat contract compounds it as you grow. Ask for the uplift in writing before signing, and once you are running the thing, watch what each software line actually costs month by month rather than finding out at renewal.

Does Ceipal or Bullhorn have a free trial?

Ceipal has one and will not tell you the terms until you register. Its registration page is headed Start Your Free Trial and its Capterra listing marks a trial as available, but neither states the length, whether a card is required, which of the five products it covers, or any seat and usage limits. Bullhorn does not mention a trial on its pricing page at all.

Compare that with the self-serve end of the market, where the terms are the pitch. Manatal runs 14 days with no card. Workable runs 15 days with no card and the full Standard feature set. Breezy runs 14 days on every feature. Zoho Recruit runs 15 days and backs it with a 45-day money-back guarantee. Each of those tells you what you are getting before you hand over your details, which is the entire point of publishing it.

If you want to see how a screening layer behaves on your own applicants before committing to a platform, that is a different kind of evaluation and a much shorter one. You are testing whether the ranking is defensible on roles you actually hire for, not whether a system of record fits your agency. Our Bullhorn alternative comparison covers where a screening-first tool fits alongside a staffing platform rather than replacing it, and the ATS pricing comparison puts both vendors next to the twenty others we have checked.