Loxo vs Bullhorn: Pricing and AI Screening Compared

Short answer: Loxo publishes more of its pricing than Bullhorn does. Loxo states Core at $149 and Professional at $199 per user per month, billed annually; Bullhorn publishes Starter at $99 and Core at $165 per user per month and quotes everything above that. Bullhorn is cheaper to start. Loxo is the only one of the two that publishes a rate which actually includes its AI, because Bullhorn gates Amplify AI to Pro and agentic screening to Max, and neither of those has a price.

Last updated September 2026. Every figure below was read from each vendor's own pricing page on September 4, 2026. Where a number is a third-party estimate rather than a published rate, this article says so instead of presenting it as a price.

How much does Loxo cost compared to Bullhorn?

Both sell per user per month, which makes them unusually easy to compare at the entry line and unusually misleading if you stop there.

Loxo publishes two of three tiers. Core reads "Starts at $149 per user / month, billed annually" and Professional reads "Starts at $199 per user / month, billed annually". Enterprise is a custom annual agreement. Underneath both paid tiers the page carries two conditions that most write-ups skip: "Annual plans, paid up front" and "New customer limited time offer". The first means the year is a single payment rather than a monthly one. The second means these are promotional rates for new business, and Loxo does not publish what they renew at.

Bullhorn publishes two of four small-agency tiers. Starter is $99 per user per month and Core is $165 per user per month. Pro and Max both say "Talk to us", as do Front Office Growth and Enterprise, Bullhorn One, and every product in the Amplify AI and automation catalogue. Bullhorn's pricing page mentions no free trial.

	Loxo	Bullhorn
Published entry rate	$149 per user per month, Core	$99 per user per month, Starter
Published upper rate	$199 per user per month, Professional	$165 per user per month, Core
Quote-only tiers	Enterprise	Pro, Max, Front Office, Bullhorn One, all AI products
Billing period	Annual only, paid up front	Stated per user per month
Are the rates promotional?	Yes. Labelled a new-customer limited time offer	Not labelled as such
Free trial	7 days, full Professional access, no card	Not mentioned on the pricing page
Cheapest plan that includes AI	Core includes AI search. Agents start on Professional, $199	Pro, which has no published rate

Read the last row before the first one. A ten-recruiter agency can model $990 a month on Bullhorn Starter or $1,490 on Loxo Core, and on that comparison Bullhorn wins by a third. But if the reason you are shopping is that you want the AI, Bullhorn's published rates stop being relevant and Loxo's do not.

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

Both rank candidates. The difference is that you can price one of them without a sales call.

Bullhorn's Relevancy feature ranks candidates, and its Screening Score of 0 to 100 requires an Amplify Screener. Amplify AI, covering search and match, chat, data enrichment, automation and resume formatting, first appears on Bullhorn Pro. The agentic workflows Bullhorn describes as autonomous screening, matching and outreach first appear on Bullhorn Max. Both tiers say "Talk to us", so the cheapest Bullhorn plan that screens for you has no published price at all.

Loxo puts AI search on every tier, including Core: natural-language, relevance-ranked, and stated as included rather than as an add-on. The agent workforce, which is the part that does the work rather than answering questions, starts on Professional at a published $199. Loxo describes a fully agentic search as the whole job: intake understood, a job description written, up to 10,000 candidates screened across its graph plus your own database, and a shortlist ranked on seven dimensions with evidence attached.

Capability	Loxo	Bullhorn
Ranks candidates	Yes, AI search on every tier	Yes, Relevancy ranking
Autonomous or agentic work	Full agent workforce, Professional	Amplify Digital Workers, Max only
Cheapest plan that includes it	$199 per user per month, published	Pro, no published rate
Is the AI metered?	Yes, 2,500 credits per seat per month	Not published
Is the meter rate published?	No. Credits per search are not stated	No
Can you price the AI before a call?	Partly. The seat rate yes, the overage no	No

That last row is where both vendors end up in the same place from opposite directions. Bullhorn will not tell you the plan price. Loxo tells you the plan price but not the consumption rate, so 2,500 credits a seat could be twenty full searches a month or two, and nothing on the page lets you work out which. The Boost add-ons show the shape of the gap without closing it: Boost 2x takes a seat to 5,000 credits a month and Boost 5x to 12,500, and neither has a published price.

This is worth planning for rather than discovering. You are committing a year up front against an overage rate that is not published, so it is the kind of software line worth watching month by month against a budget you set rather than reconciling at renewal, when the leverage to renegotiate has gone.

Why do so many comparisons say Loxo costs $169 per user?

Because that number is still in Loxo's pricing page, just not anywhere a visitor can see it.

The page ships a leftover block of JavaScript that swaps a displayed price between two values, writing $169 in one branch and $149 in the other, driven by an element with the id "checkbox". Reading the served HTML on September 4, 2026, none of the elements that script reaches for exist in the document any more, including the checkbox itself and the price element it writes into. The control was removed and the script that drove it was left behind, so the visible page today shows a single static $149 with no toggle beside it.

That is almost certainly where the figure comes from. When Loxo last ran a toggle here, one of its states read $169, the comparison articles written at the time captured it, and those articles have been cited and re-cited since. A retired promotional state became the number most of the first page of Google reports as current.

The same staleness shows up in the claims around it. Several widely cited pieces put Loxo's talent graph at 1.2 billion profiles when Loxo's own page now says 850 million and more. Others give a Professional tier near $299 per user as an estimate, when Loxo publishes Professional at $199. Where a vendor and a comparison article disagree about the vendor's own price, the vendor is the source. The full Loxo pricing breakdown works through each circulating figure against what loxo.co actually states today.

What does each platform actually cover?

These are not the same shape of product, and the category label hides how different they are.

Loxo is built outbound. Professional opens Loxo Source across a proprietary graph of 850 million plus professionals, searched in one motion alongside your private database, with contact information attached to shortlists where available and API access starting at the same tier. The pitch is that it replaces a stack: an applicant tracking system, a recruiting CRM, a sourcing tool and a data provider on one bill. If you genuinely run all four today, $199 a seat can be less than what you already pay. If you run one, it is not.

Bullhorn is built around the agency as a business rather than around the search. Its product line runs through front office, middle office, onboarding, analytics and Bullhorn One, which is why staffing firms that place contractors, run timesheets and invoice clients keep choosing it. Filling the role is only half of an agency's job; getting paid correctly for a hundred contractors is the other half, and no sourcing graph touches that.

The practical split: Loxo is for firms whose constraint is finding people, and Bullhorn is for firms whose constraint is running the operation once they are found. Our Bullhorn alternative comparison goes through where a screening-first tool sits alongside a staffing platform rather than replacing it.

Does Loxo or Bullhorn have a free trial?

Loxo does, Bullhorn does not mention one.

Loxo runs a 7-day free trial with full Professional access and no credit card required. The terms are better than they first look, because the trial covers the top self-serve tier rather than the entry one, so you are testing Loxo Source and the agents rather than an ATS shell. Seven days is still short for a recruiting platform, since a real test means running a live requisition and most agency roles do not produce enough signal inside a week. Compare Workable at 15 days on the full Standard feature set, Manatal at 14 days with no card, or Zoho Recruit at 15 days backed by a 45-day money-back guarantee.

If you take the Loxo trial, plan the week before it starts. Have an open role, a real batch of applications and a comparison shortlist ready on day one, because there is no free plan waiting at the end of it: the next step is an annual contract paid up front.

Which should a recruiting agency choose?

Pick on the constraint, not on the entry price, because the entry prices are $50 apart and the real contracts are not.

Choose Bullhorn if you place contractors, need middle office and back office in the same system, want the deepest marketplace of staffing integrations, or are large enough that a sales-led contract will beat any published rate. Accept that you will not know the cost of the AI until you are in the process.

Choose Loxo if your bottleneck is finding candidates who are not applying to you, you are a small to mid-sized agency, and you would rather replace three or four subscriptions with one. Accept the annual commitment paid up front and the unpublished credit consumption rate.

Choose neither if the problem is that 900 people already applied and nobody has read them. That is inbound screening, and it is a different job from both of these: an 850 million profile sourcing graph does not help with a pile that already arrived, and a staffing system of record will file it without reading it. A screening layer priced on volume rather than on seats sits in front of whatever you already run, which is what our staffing agency resume screening page covers, and the ATS pricing comparison puts both vendors alongside the twenty others we have checked.

What neither price tells you

Three things, and each moves the number more than the headline rate does.

The renewal. Loxo labels both published rates a new-customer limited time offer, in writing, on its own page. That makes year two a different number by design, and it belongs on the order form rather than in a conversation twelve months from now. Ask for a renewal cap while you still have leverage.

The seat count. Per-user pricing only means something next to how many users you must buy. Loxo publishes no minimum, though free migration is included for teams of three or more. Bullhorn publishes none either. Ask whether you are billed on licenses assigned or licenses used, because agencies with seasonal recruiters pay for the difference every quarter.

The consumption. This is the one specific to Loxo and the one most likely to surprise you. A seat comes with 2,500 credits a month, Loxo states that credits are only consumed when work is completed for you, and no rate converts that allowance into a number of searches. Ask for credits per fully agentic search on a typical requisition, and ask what Boost 2x and Boost 5x cost per seat, before signing rather than after. Our breakdown of what Bullhorn costs works through the equivalent questions on the other side, where the unpublished number is the plan price itself.