Ten plans across five vendors publish a price. Normalised to three years at one seat, they run from $540 to $7,164: Manatal Professional at the floor, Loxo Professional at the ceiling, and a factor of thirteen between them on products a buyer would describe to you in the same sentence.
Every figure below was read on the vendor's own pricing page on 28 and 29 August 2026, in US dollars, and links back to the page it came from.
Find your seat count in the table, then read the section under it. The ranking is the easy half of this question and the constraints underneath it are the half that costs people money.
The ranking
Three years, at one, three and five seats. Where a pricing page offers a monthly and an annual rate the annual one is used, and each rate is multiplied by 36 and by the seat count with no discount assumed.
| Plan | Published rate | 1 seat | 3 seats | 5 seats |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Manatal Professional | $15 | $540 | $1,620 | $2,700 |
| Manatal Enterprise | $35 | $1,260 | $3,780 | $6,300 |
| Manatal Enterprise Plus | $55 | $1,980 | $5,940 | $9,900 |
| Crelate Essentials | $85, hard cap of 2 users | $3,060 | not available | not available |
| Bullhorn Starter | $99 | $3,564 | $10,692 | $17,820 |
| Crelate Business | $119 | $4,284 | $12,852 | $21,420 |
| Recruiterflow Platform | $119 annual, $149 monthly | $4,284 | $12,852 | $21,420 |
| Loxo Core | $149, limited-time offer | $5,364 | $16,092 | $26,820 |
| Bullhorn Core | $165 | $5,940 | $17,820 | $29,700 |
| Loxo Professional | $199, limited-time offer | $7,164 | $21,492 | $35,820 |
Rates are per user per month. At five seats the distance between the top and bottom of that table is $33,120 over three years.
One caveat sits on the two Loxo rows. Both are labelled "starts at", both carried a "New customer limited time offer" banner on the day they were read, and Loxo publishes no standard rate beside either. Those two figures are the cheapest the platform can be for a new customer, not a rate you can hold at renewal.
The limits that are not price but behave like it
Three constraints in that table cost real money without appearing in any cost column, and they are where the decision actually gets made.
The two-user cap on Crelate Essentials is the sharpest. At two seats it is $6,120 over three years, which beats Bullhorn Starter at $7,128 and Crelate's own Business tier at $8,568. Hire a third recruiter and staying with Crelate means moving to Business at a 40% higher seat rate, because Essentials will not take the third login. Manatal Professional, the cheapest row of all, has the same kind of ceiling in a different currency: 15 jobs per account and 10,000 candidates, where the $35 tier above it is unlimited on both. Plan the cap, not the price.
Billing term is the second, and Recruiterflow is the clean example because it publishes both states of the toggle. $119 a seat billed annually against $149 billed monthly is $1,080 per seat over three years, or exactly twice what Manatal Professional costs for the same period. The convenience of paying monthly on one seat is priced at two full subscriptions to the cheapest plan in the market. One vendor here has removed the choice altogether: Loxo's repackage withdrew monthly billing, so its published rate is the annual one or nothing.
Credit ceilings are the third and the newest. Loxo's repackaged lineup puts 2,500 credits per seat per month on Professional, pooled across the team and reset each cycle, where the old Professional advertised its sourcing as unlimited. A pooled allowance and unlimited access are different products at the same headline price, and only one of them has a ceiling you can hit in a heavy outbound week. None of the other pricing pages read here states a credit allowance at all, which matters mainly because this is the tier of the market where ceilings are starting to appear.
The ranking cannot invert, and that is worth knowing
The obvious next question is whether the order changes as you add recruiters. Inside the published range it does not, and it cannot.
Every rate in that table is published per user per month, and none of the five pricing pages shows a volume discount, a seat band or a seat minimum on these plans. Bullhorn says so outright in the FAQ on its pricing site, which we read at source for the Bullhorn pricing guide: you pay for the users you need and add them as the team grows without changing plans. So the three-year number is the rate times 36 times the headcount, and multiplying ten numbers by the same constant leaves them in the same order. The ranking at five seats is the ranking at one seat.
It stops being safe to extend much beyond that. Four of the five vendors go quote-only above the tiers in this table, and a quote is where volume pricing lives.
What that leaves is a ranking that is real, easy, and not the thing that decides anything. One row does leave the table as you grow, and not by getting more expensive: Crelate Essentials simply stops being available at three seats. That is the shape of every real decision in this market. Not where a plan sits in a cost ranking, but the point at which it stops being able to hold your desk.
The half of the market that publishes nothing
Bullhorn Pro, Bullhorn Max, Bullhorn Front Office Growth and Enterprise, Bullhorn One, every Bullhorn Recruitment Cloud edition, Recruiterflow AIRA, Loxo Enterprise and Manatal Custom all publish no figure at all. Neither does Recruit CRM, whose pricing page names three plans and a billing toggle and gives no number for any of them. Counting tiers rather than vendors, that is fifteen unpriced against the ten priced above.
It goes wider than tiers. The forced-ranking questions that reach us name ten platforms, and four of them are absent from the table above for the same reason. Checked 29 August 2026: Ceipal's pricing URL redirects to its homepage with no figure anywhere on the site. Avionte publishes nothing, and iCIMS has no pricing page at the obvious address. Gem publishes two numbers and neither is a seat rate: a Startup Program for teams of 1 to 10 full-time employees, listed at $270 a month and discounted to $130, billed yearly, with everything above it custom-priced. TrackerRMS blocks automated access, so it was not read and nothing is claimed about it here.
Ceipal is the one to look at twice, because it is where this article's method bit us. Our own Bullhorn pricing guide listed Ceipal at $25 a seat, a figure that cannot be traced to anything Ceipal publishes, on a page whose argument is that exactly this kind of number cannot be reproduced from a vendor source. It is corrected. We are the third party we warned you about.
Two things follow for the call you are about to take. If the tier you actually want is quote-only, the published entry price tells you almost nothing about your invoice, so ask what the quoted tier costs per seat rather than what the total comes to. And treat the decision to publish as information in itself: a published price is a number you can hold a vendor to at renewal, which is never true of one that only ever existed in a proposal.
Bullhorn is the exception worth naming on the other side. Starter at $99 and Core at $165 both publish a price and include implementation free, and Loxo makes migration free at three seats and above, which is the same idea attached to a seat count.
Why the numbers you find elsewhere disagree
Third-party figures were wrong on three of the five vendors priced here, checked against the vendors' own pages on the same two days.
Recruiterflow's published annual rate is $119, against a $99 to $159 band in an agency cost analysis published by Execue, which sells the automation platform its conclusions recommend. Loxo is $149 and $199, against $119 to $169 in most of what still ranks for its name. Crelate publishes $85 and $119 where comparison tables print a flat $119.
One of the wrong figures was ours, and it is the most instructive of the three. Our Bullhorn pricing guide listed Recruiterflow at $149 with no billing term beside it, in a comparison table where two other rows named theirs. Nobody invented that number. It is Recruiterflow's real monthly price, and unlabelled next to annual ones it turns a choice about billing into what looks like a difference in product. That is how most wrong prices in this category happen: not fabrication, but a right number carried across from a different question.
Which is the argument for checking every figure above against the vendor before you negotiate against it, ours included. This page carries the date it was verified for that reason.
What the number leaves out
Three years of seat licences is a floor, not a budget.
Migration is the largest missing line and it is paid in your own hours. Moving candidates, jobs, notes, custom fields and pipeline stages out of a tuned system is commonly planned at four to eight weeks, which is a planning figure rather than a measurement because nobody publishes one. Teams that run two systems in parallel through a quarter pay both bills while they do it.
Implementation is the second, wherever it is not free, and any module sold separately from the tier is the third. On the two Bullhorn tiers above, implementation is included. Everywhere else, ask.
There is also the option of buying no platform at all, which we priced separately in the three-year cost of self-hosting an ATS. The short version: once the owner's hours are costed at a market rate, self-hosting beats Loxo Core inside the first seat and does not beat Manatal Professional until the fifth.
What to do with this
Pick your seat count, read the row, then check the three limits before you check the price. Can this plan hold the team you expect in eighteen months. What does the billing term cost you. Is there a credit or volume ceiling under the feature you are buying it for.
Then get the quote-only tier priced per seat, so it is comparable to the table rather than to itself.
If your shortlist is really about which tool fits a small team rather than what it costs, the best ATS for small recruiting teams and freelancers sorts the same market by fit. If you are comparing against a LinkedIn Recruiter seat rather than another agency ATS, that is a different shortlist on a different axis and it is in LinkedIn Recruiter alternatives. And if what you are really costing out is a placement rather than a subscription, the solo desk P&L puts the software line next to the two that dwarf it.