AI Talent Recruiting Software: Manatal, Loxo or Bullhorn Amplify?

For most small agencies, Manatal is the cheapest fit at $15 a user a month on annual billing; Loxo, from $149 a user, suits desks that source all day; and Bullhorn's small-agency plans start at $99 a user, though Amplify AI is named only in its Pro and Max plans, which are priced by quote.

Those three prices describe three different products. Manatal is a light recruitment system with AI features on every plan. Loxo is a recruiting CRM with sourcing built in, priced for agencies that live in it all day. Bullhorn is the long-established staffing platform that has added its Amplify AI on top. For a five-user agency the list prices run from $75 to $825 a month, and Loxo and Bullhorn both keep the price of their agent features behind a sales call.

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What each one charges per user

These are list prices from each vendor's own pricing pages in November 2026, in USD. Each vendor changes tiers often, so treat them as a snapshot and confirm on the page.

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A premise worth correcting: Bullhorn is often described as quote only, and for its larger plans and Recruitment Cloud that is true, but its small-agency Starter and Core plans do show per-user prices. The two plans that name Amplify, Pro and Max, are the ones with no price shown. In other words, you will have a sales call before you can price the Bullhorn option that includes its flagship AI.

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A five-person agency's costs over three years

Take an illustrative desk-based agency with four recruiters and one resourcer (a researcher who sources and manages the database). Five users. Roughly 30 live jobs, 14,000 candidate records, and an owner who wants fewer admin hours rather than more features.

The spread is large, about $2,700 against $29,700 over three years, and it only means something against what each option saves. Say the agency places 40 roles a year with a net fee of $9,000 each. One extra placement a year, from candidates found faster or follow-up that no longer slips, covers Loxo Core ($8,940) on its own. In that framing the question is not "which is cheapest" but "which tool is most likely to produce an extra placement in my desk's real workflow". That is a test, not a guess, and the matching test further down sets it out.

Note what the table leaves out: onboarding, data migration, paid add-ons, a Manatal AI Interviewer, Loxo credit boosts, and the extra Bullhorn modules the sales team will show you. Ask for those in the quote.

The billing term moves the numbers too. Manatal also sells month to month, at $19, $39 and $59 a user; five Professional users then cost $95 a month, or $1,140 a year, which is $240 more than on annual billing, the price of being able to leave after a bad quarter. Loxo's Core price is for annual plans paid up front, so there is no monthly route to compare, and Bullhorn's page does not state a term for Starter or Core. Put the term next to every price on your shortlist before you compare totals.

What the AI does in Manatal, and where it stops

Manatal puts its AI features on every paid plan: candidate enrichment from social profiles and CV parsing, AI recommendations that match candidates to jobs, and a Copilot chat that writes summaries, fit and gap analyses and interview prep. Its page lists the AI Interviewer as an add-on, and workflow automations only on Enterprise and above.

For a five-person agency that is a lot for $15. The caution is depth. A matching score from a recruitment system is a sort order, not a verdict. Try it on a job you filled last quarter: does the placed candidate appear in the top ten? An illustration: the system ranks your placed candidate 23rd, because the CV lacked the keyword "microservices" that the client's job ad used. That is how keyword-led matching fails, and it is why you test on past jobs before trusting it on live ones.

What the AI does in Loxo, and who it suits

Loxo's Core plan includes AI natural-language search and the full recruiting CRM. Its Professional plan adds the agentic workforce: agents for longlists, shortlists, outreach and an AI notetaker, plus 2,500 credits per user a month that the team pools. Contact details come with shortlists when they are available. Scheduling and deduplication agents are marked as coming soon on its page, so do not pay for them today.

Loxo suits an agency where recruiters spend their day sourcing and calling, because search, outreach and the record sit in one place. The risk is the ladder: Core gives you the search, but the agent features that make the product distinctive sit in a plan with no published price. Ask for a three-seat or five-seat quote on Professional before you decide on Core. Also decide whether you want an AI to message candidates on your behalf at all; the review points for AI agents in recruitment agencies set out where a person should always check.

What the AI does in Bullhorn Amplify

Bullhorn describes Amplify as AI for recruiting and staffing firms across its platform and Recruitment Cloud. Its page lists "digital workers" with named skills: enrich, match, screen, outreach, present, prospect, transcribe, verify, audit and extract. It also has Amplify Chat, a staffing-focused assistant that can answer questions about job orders and candidates and take actions such as launching a screen or updating a record. Bullhorn reports figures such as 80 per cent faster time to hire for its users; treat those as vendor claims, not independent results.

The feature that interests a small agency most is not the biggest one. "Verify" checks candidates for authenticity signals and flags possible fraud, and "present" builds branded candidate submissions, both of which save real time. But the range is built for firms with volume. For an agency of five, the useful question is which two or three skills you would actually switch on in month one. If the answer is "transcribe and present", ask whether a lower plan covers them.

A matching test on three past jobs

This test needs two hours per tool and removes most of the salesmanship from a demo.

1. Pick three jobs you filled in the last year, one easy, one niche, one with a vague brief.
2. Load 200 candidate records, including the three you placed, into a trial of each system. Ask each vendor to help with the import; how they handle it is itself a test.
3. Run the AI matching or search using only the original job ad text.
4. Record the rank of the placed candidate in each search.
5. Time how long a candidate summary takes from CV to client-ready text.
6. Check the audit trail: can you see why the system recommended someone?
7. Export everything back out and check the file opens and keeps notes.

A filled-in illustration for one niche job. System A ranks the placed candidate 4th, writes a summary in 30 seconds that needs a two-minute edit, and exports cleanly. System B ranks the candidate 19th, writes a summary with an invented job title, and exports without notes. System A wins on that evidence even if it costs more. The point of the invented title is real: AI summaries must be checked against the CV, and how recruiters use AI to write candidate summaries clients read shows a checking routine you can copy.

Break-even sums for the three price points

A quick way to cut through the table is to ask how many extra placements a year each option has to produce to pay for itself. The calculation is the yearly cost for your seat count divided by your average net fee. Using the illustrative $9,000 fee and five users:

• Manatal Professional, $900 a year: one placement covers it 10 times over.
• Manatal Enterprise, $2,100 a year: one placement covers it about 4 times.
• Bullhorn Starter, $5,940 a year: one placement covers it, with $3,060 to spare.
• Loxo Core or Bullhorn Core, about $8,940 to $9,900 a year: one placement roughly covers it, a second makes a profit.

The point is not that dearer is better. It is that any of these options pays back quickly if it genuinely adds a placement, and none of them does so on its own if the recruiters never open it. Adoption matters more than the price gap. If you expect only two of five recruiters to use a tool daily, price it for those two and add seats later.

Testing the Copilot or chat feature with a real CV

Every one of the three vendors now has a chat assistant. The easiest test is to ask it for a client-ready summary from a CV you know well, and compare. Here is a prompt and an illustrative output.

Summarise this candidate for a client in five bullet points. Use only
facts that appear in the CV. Mark anything you inferred with (inferred).
Role being filled: Operations Manager, 40-person distribution firm.

A typical answer gives five tidy bullets, for example "Eight years running warehouse teams of up to 25", "Led a move to a new stock system in 2022", and one marked "(inferred) comfortable with budgets". What you would fix: check each number against the CV, remove the inferred line unless you can confirm it, and add the notice period and pay expectation, which a CV rarely shows. If the assistant refuses the "mark inferences" instruction and presents guesses as facts, that is a mark against it. It is also worth testing what the assistant does with a CV that has gaps. A trustworthy tool says "dates 2019 to 2020 not shown"; a risky one fills the gap with a plausible job.

Moving your database without losing the notes

Migration is where small agencies lose the most value. Candidate notes, call history and placement dates are often the most valuable part of a database and the part most likely to arrive blank. Before you commit, run a migration of 200 real records and check: names and emails, the last contact date, the notes field, attached CVs, and placement history. An illustration of a common failure is a migration that keeps the CV but drops the "do not contact" flag. A candidate who asked to be left alone is messaged again, which is a trust problem and may be a legal one. Make the flag, the source and the consent date part of your sample check, and ask the vendor to show them in the imported records. Loxo's page offers free migration to Core teams of three or more seats; ask other vendors what migration help they include, and whether it is part of the price or a separate fee.

Fairness and consent live in the system you pick

Any system that ranks people for jobs carries a duty to check for bias, and the regulation is tightening. Ask each vendor three questions: can you see which fields influenced a ranking, can you switch AI scoring off per job, and does the system log who accepted or overrode a recommendation. Manatal also lists a consent request tool for candidate data, though its trial excludes it, so ask for a demonstration before you count on it. Read the bias checks every recruiter should run and run them on a sample before you rely on a score.

If you need a separate sourcing tool on top, compare seat prices in AI sourcing tools priced for three recruiters first. Many small agencies find that Manatal or Loxo already covers enough sourcing.

Which one wins for which kind of desk

• Manatal: the agency with a tight budget, a mixed bag of roles and one or two people who will configure it. Good value; check the add-on prices and test matching on past jobs.
• Loxo: the agency that sources heavily, wants AI search in the record, and can justify around $745 a month for five users or a Professional quote. Ask about migration support.
• Bullhorn Starter or Core: the agency that expects to grow into a bigger staffing operation, or has staff who have used Bullhorn before. Confirm what AI is in your tier before paying for Amplify.
• Bullhorn Pro or Max: only when the quote shows Amplify features you will use in month one and the price still works against two extra placements a year.

Contract points that change the real price

Pricing pages leave out the clauses that decide what you really pay. Before you sign any of the three, get these answered in writing.

• Billing term. Annual billing cuts the monthly rate, as Manatal's $15 against $19 shows, but it commits you for twelve months. Start with monthly billing for a quarter if the vendor allows it.
• Seat changes. Can you add or remove users mid-term and at what rate? A recruiter who leaves in month four should not leave you paying for a seat until year end.
• Credits and add-ons. Loxo's pooled credits and Manatal's add-ons are metered. Ask what happens when you run out and what a top-up costs.
• Data export. Request a full export on a trial account, with notes, attachments and placement history. Open it. If the notes are missing, assume they would be missing on exit.
• Training on your data. Ask whether candidate records or prompts are used to improve the vendor's models, and keep the answer.

A realistic mistake: an agency signs annually on the strength of a demo, finds in month two that email sync with its mail provider needs a plan one tier up, and pays the difference for the rest of the year. Ask about email, calendar and job-board integrations by name, not as a category. How much of the work AI can really take over, once the system is in, is covered in how much time AI saves a recruitment agency per role, and the questions to put to a vendor are listed in evaluating the AI features in recruitment software.

A three-week plan from shortlist to decision

Week one: narrow to two systems using the price table, and book the demos. Send each vendor the same three past jobs so the comparison is like for like. Week two: run the matching test above, one trial account each, and have the recruiter who will use it most do the work, not the owner. Week three: score each system out of five on matching, summaries, export, consent features and total cost, with the owner and two recruiters scoring independently. If the totals are within a point, choose the cheaper one and revisit at the first renewal. The agency that finishes this process knows what it is buying, and the AI features are judged by what they did on your jobs rather than by a slide.

When you have a shortlist and want to sanity-check it, that is the kind of decision I cover in an AI implementation consultation, and the AI guide links the rest of this series.

Questions small agencies ask before a demo

Is Bullhorn Amplify sold on its own?

Bullhorn's pricing page says its Pro small-agency plan is powered by Amplify AI and Max adds agentic workflows, while Digital Workers also appear as separate quote-only products. Ask the sales team in writing which Amplify features sit in your plan and which are add-ons.

Does Manatal's low price mean it lacks AI?

No. Manatal lists AI enrichment, recommendations and a Copilot chat on all three paid plans, even at $15 a user. The gap is elsewhere: workflow automations start on Enterprise, and its Interviewer is an add-on, so check the add-on price before assuming parity.

How many seats do I need to start?

Start with the people who touch candidate records daily, usually the recruiters, and add admins or researchers later. Loxo offers free migration to Core teams of three or more seats, so ask whether your seat count changes the onboarding offer.

Can I move my candidates out if I leave?

Ask before you sign. Request an export of candidates, notes, placements and attachments in a spreadsheet or standard file, and test it on a trial. A system that cannot export cleanly is a lock-in cost the price table does not show.

Further reads

• AI Screening: Bolt It Onto Your ATS or Switch Systems? — Decide whether to bolt AI onto your ATS or switch.
• Job Intake Form for Recruiters: Fill It From the Call With AI — Fill the intake form straight from the client call.
• Recruitment Agency KPIs: A Weekly Scorecard From Your CRM Export — Measure the new system with a weekly scorecard.
• AI for Recruitment Agencies: Re-Engaging Your Candidate Database — Get value from candidates you already hold.
• How Staffing Agencies Automate Candidate Follow-Up With AI — Automate candidate follow-up once the system is live.
• AI in Recruitment and Hiring: A Bias Test Checklist for Small Agencies — A bias test checklist for small agencies.
• EU AI Act and Recruitment: What High-Risk Means for an Agency — What the high-risk label means if you place candidates in the EU.
• Temp Staffing Payroll Software: Timesheets, Pay Runs and AI Features — What a small staffing agency should test in payroll software for temps, what six vendors publish about price and AI, and the pay-run checks AI can run.
• AI Tools and AI Development: The Complete 2026 Guide — the AI hub, including every tutorial in the AI-for-business series.

Sources: the pricing and product pages of Manatal, Loxo and Bullhorn (including Bullhorn Amplify), read in November 2026.