Recruiterflow vs Bullhorn: Pricing and AI Screening Compared

Short answer: Bullhorn is cheaper to start and Recruiterflow is clearer about what you are buying. Bullhorn publishes Starter at $99 and Core at $165 per user per month. Recruiterflow publishes one plan, at $149 per user per month billed monthly or $119 billed annually. Neither published rate includes AI candidate matching: Bullhorn puts it on quote-only Pro and Max, Recruiterflow puts it on the quote-only AIRA Plan. If the AI is why you are shopping, both vendors stop publishing prices at exactly the same point.

Last updated September 2026. Every rate below was read from each vendor's own pricing page on September 5, 2026. Where a number comes from a third party rather than the vendor, this article says so instead of presenting it as a price.

How much does Recruiterflow cost compared to Bullhorn?

Both sell per user per month, so the entry line looks like a clean comparison. It is not, and the reason is the same on both sides.

Bullhorn publishes two of its four small-agency tiers. Bullhorn Starter is $99 per user per month and covers applicant tracking, resume parsing, client management, job posting with a career portal and support. Bullhorn Core is $165 per user per month and adds the app marketplace, custom fields and workflows, LinkedIn integrations and the email sidebar. Bullhorn Pro and Bullhorn Max both say "Talk to us". So do Front Office Growth, Enterprise, Bullhorn One and Recruitment Cloud.

Recruiterflow publishes one plan and prices it twice. The Platform Plan card reads "USD $149 per user / month", and switching the toggle to Annually brings it to $119. The AIRA Plan reads "Let's chat", custom pricing, with no figure anywhere on the page.

There is a quirk in how Recruiterflow serves those two numbers that is worth knowing if you have been reading comparison articles. The $119 is not in the page's HTML. Both plan cards ship reading $149, and a script rewrites the annual one after the page loads in your browser, while the meta description and the structured data separately tell search engines that pricing "starts at $119". We worked through where each figure lives in the full Recruiterflow pricing breakdown, including why some articles refer to a Recruiterflow "Advanced" plan that does not exist on the page.

Read the implementation row alongside the price row, because it moves real money. A ten-recruiter agency models $990 a month on Bullhorn Starter against $1,190 on Recruiterflow's annual rate, and Bullhorn also puts implementation in the box. Recruiterflow's white-glove migration is paid, priced on data volume, and typically takes 6 to 8 weeks, though they invite you to negotiate the fee away on a multi-year contract.

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

Both do it. Neither will tell you what it costs.

Bullhorn's Relevancy feature ranks candidates, and its Screening Score of 0 to 100 requires an Amplify Screener. The Amplify AI capabilities that matter for screening, AI search and match, Amplify Chat, AI data enrichment, process automation and AI resume formatting, first appear on Bullhorn Pro. Agentic screening and agentic AI matching, where the platform does the work rather than assisting with it, appear only on Bullhorn Max. Both tiers say "Talk to us".

Recruiterflow's equivalent is AIRA, a set of six agents: Notetaker, Matchmaker, Job Change Alerts, Field Updates Agent, Submission Agent and Task Agent. Matchmaker is the one that reads candidates against a role. All six are on the AIRA Plan, which is custom pricing. Recruiterflow's feature breakdown also puts LinkedIn communication on AIRA only, so the Platform Plan covers email, calls and text.

The one place Recruiterflow is genuinely more generous is metering. It states plainly that there are no add-ons and no extra costs, that AIRA customers get all current and future agents included, and that multi-year customers keep every new AIRA capability for the contract duration. That is a real commitment, and it is unusual: Ashby sells a monthly credit pool, Workable bills a credit per candidate, and Loxo includes 2,500 credits a seat without publishing what a search consumes. Recruiterflow's problem is not the meter. It is that the plan carrying the meter has no price.

What does each platform actually cover?

They are aimed at different sizes of firm, and the pricing pages show it.

Bullhorn is built to grow into. The published small-agency tiers are the entry to a catalogue that runs through Front Office Growth, Enterprise, Bullhorn One and a Salesforce-based Recruitment Cloud, plus a separate AI and automation line. That breadth is the reason the quote-only tiers exist, and it is also why Bullhorn buyers talk about implementation timelines and module pricing more than seat rates. Free implementation on the published tiers is a direct answer to that reputation.

Recruiterflow is deliberately one product. The Platform Plan includes the ATS and CRM together, multichannel sequences, recruitment and sales automation, client and team access control, bulk sourcing through a Chrome extension, reports and API access. API access at the published tier is worth flagging, because Loxo puts its API behind the $199 Professional plan rather than the $149 entry. If you want the whole agency workflow on one bill with no module conversation, that is the pitch, and it holds up.

Neither platform brings you candidates. That is still job boards, referrals and your own network, and the volume you get depends mostly on where you post. Agencies that specialize tend to do better on narrow boards than broad ones, whether that is a trade site for skilled trades or a job board that carries marketing roles only, because the applicants who arrive are already the right shape. Which matters here for a practical reason: your ATS bill is fixed per seat, but your screening workload is not.

Which is better for a small recruiting agency?

If you are under ten recruiters and buying a system of record, Bullhorn Starter at $99 with free implementation is the cheaper start, and Recruiterflow's Platform Plan at $119 annually is the more complete one. Starter has applicant tracking, resume parsing, client management and job posting; it does not have a recruitment CRM, which arrives on Pro. Recruiterflow includes the CRM, the sequences and the automation at its only published tier. Compare Starter against Recruiterflow and you are not comparing like for like. Compare Core at $165 against Recruiterflow at $119 to $149 and you are closer.

If you are buying the AI, neither price list helps you and the shortlist should be built differently. Ask both vendors for the Pro or AIRA rate in writing, ask what it renews at, and ask what happens to the rate when you add a seat mid-term. Our breakdown of Bullhorn pricing covers what buyers report paying above the published tiers, and the Bullhorn alternative comparison puts both platforms next to the rest of the agency market on the same rows.

What do the published rates leave out?

Three things, on both sides.

Renewal is the first. Neither vendor publishes an uplift. Recruiterflow does not label its rates promotional, which is better than Loxo, whose $149 and $199 both carry a "new customer limited time offer" line. But not labelling a rate promotional is not the same as committing to hold it, and the year-two number is the one worth getting in writing.

Seat minimums are the second. Several comparison sites state a three-seat minimum on Recruiterflow. That is not published anywhere on Recruiterflow's pricing page, including in the source, so treat it as an open question rather than a fact. Bullhorn publishes no minimum either.

The AI line is the third, and it is the one that decides the budget. On both platforms the published rate buys the database and the workflow, and the capability that reads your inbound applications sits one tier up with no number on it. That is a defensible way to sell software. It is a difficult way to buy it, because you are committing to a per-seat contract before you know what the part you actually wanted costs.

A different way to price the screening

Per-seat pricing charges by how many recruiters have logins. It has nothing to do with how many resumes arrive, which is the number that actually moves in agency work. A vacancy that pulls 40 applicants and one that pulls 900 cost the same on Bullhorn or Recruiterflow, and the second one is where recruiters lose their week.

Prescreener prices the other axis. It reads every inbound application, applies your knockout and eligibility rules identically to all of them, scores role fit and hands back the pile ranked with written reasons behind each placement, and it runs alongside whichever ATS you land on. The rate is published, at $199, $499 and $1,290 a month, so the screening line is a number you can put in a budget before the sales call rather than after it. It never auto-rejects: it ranks and flags, and a recruiter decides.

If you are choosing between agency platforms right now, the useful move is to separate the two decisions. Pick the system of record on workflow, integrations and implementation, where both of these are strong. Then price the screening on its own, where you can actually see the number. Start with resume screening built for staffing agencies, or compare the whole market's published rates in the ATS pricing comparison.