Every comparison article written by a software supplier picks a slow, expensive incumbent and wins against it. Mine did too. So this one starts from the opposite end: four products that are genuinely good, priced under what I charge on a small desk, and adding AI features faster than any one person can.
Prices below were checked on 3 August 2026. Three of the four publish theirs openly and I read them straight off the vendor page. Recruit CRM is the exception: their pricing page builds the numbers in the browser, so a plain fetch returns the tiers and the features but no figures. Their $85, $100 and $165 come from three third-party listings that agree with each other, not from the vendor directly, so treat them as close rather than exact.
What they are, and what they cost
- Leonar, $95 a user a month on Starter, $149 on Professional. ATS and CRM, email sequences, AI sourcing, AI credits per user, agent access on the higher tier. A call transcription bot is an add-on on top.
- Recruiterflow, $149 a user a month for Platform. ATS, CRM, multichannel sequences, recruitment and sales automation, bulk sourcing, open API. Their AI agent tier is not publicly priced.
- Recruit CRM, $85 a user a month on Pro billed annually, $100 monthly, up to $165 on Enterprise. Parsing, sourcing extension, matching, sequences higher up. The cheapest published entry point of the four.
- Loxo, $169 a user a month on Basic. Their outreach, agents and notetaker sit on tiers that are not publicly priced.
Two of the four put the AI they market hardest behind a sales call. That is worth knowing before you compare headline numbers, because the headline is not the number you would pay for the thing in the advert. It is also, in fairness, exactly what I used to criticise the big platforms for, so I will not pretend it is a scandal. It is just a reason to ask.
Where they beat a custom build, honestly
They exist today. You can be running on Monday rather than in eight to twelve weeks. That alone settles the question for a lot of firms and it should.
They are also carrying hundreds or thousands of paying customers, which buys you things a bespoke build cannot: bugs found by somebody else, features that arrive in your subscription because another agency asked first, and a support desk that is not one person's calendar. New AI capability lands as an update, not as a project you commission and pay for.
And the risk profile is different in a way I am not going to talk you out of. A company with a hundred and fifty staff behind it is a different bet from a single builder, whatever that builder promises. If your workflow is ordinary and the seat cost is comfortable, renting is the rational answer, not just the lazy one.
The part where the money does not go my way
On a six person desk, Recruit CRM on its cheapest annual tier lands around $85 a seat. Over five years that is materially less than a build plus its term with me. I have seen the maths and it does not flatter me at that size.
There is a line on this site saying the costs meet somewhere around three or four desks. That number was worked out against Bullhorn at roughly $150 a seat, and it does not survive being carried over to a rival at $85. Against Loxo at $169 it holds up fine. The honest version is that the crossover depends entirely on which product is actually on your table, so if you want that number, tell me who you are comparing me to and I will do it with their price, not with a convenient one.
The one thing none of them do
I checked all four for three specific things: whether the system can run in your own Microsoft 365 or cloud tenant, whether you get the source code, and whether there is any way to own it outright rather than subscribe forever.
None of the four offers any of the three. All four are standard multi tenant software, hosted on the vendor's infrastructure, billed per seat for as long as you use it. I looked for this deliberately, on their own pricing and security pages, and I would have written it down if I had found it.
That is the whole of my remaining advantage, and I would rather state it that plainly than pad it. The AI is not my advantage any more. Sourcing, parsing, matching and sequencing are table stakes in this segment now. What is still unusual is your data sitting in infrastructure you already pay for, code you can hand to somebody else, and a system that stops costing you a monthly fee once it is paid off.
So when should you pick them
- You need something working this month, not this quarter.
- Your process is close enough to a normal agency process that a good product fits it.
- You are under about ten seats and the per seat cost does not frighten you.
- You want somebody else responsible for uptime, security posture and the roadmap.
And when should you talk to me
- Your process is genuinely not the standard shape, and you have already bent yourself around one product and did not enjoy it.
- You have a reason for the data to stay in your own tenant. Sometimes that is a client demand, sometimes it is a regulator, sometimes it is just that you do not want it anywhere else.
- You are growing, and the idea of paying more every time you hire someone bothers you more than the build cost does.
- You want the thing to still be yours in five years without a renewal conversation.
What I have stopped saying
Two lines I used to lean on do not survive contact with these four, so they are gone.
"They are stuck on old technology." Not true of any of them. All four ship real AI today and update it monthly. That line only ever worked against genuinely old platforms.
"Seat prices climb every year." I found evidence of that pattern for one of the four, from reviewers rather than from policy, and none for the other three. What is true, categorically, is simpler and I will keep saying it: they all charge per seat, and I do not.
If you are weighing one of these four against a build, send me the quote you have. I will tell you where they win, and I will tell you if the answer is that you should buy theirs.