Bullhorn holds about 35% of the UK recruitment agency software market and serves 10,000+ customers globally. Its dominance does not mean it is the best choice for every agency. A 10-person agency on Bullhorn Core pays £14,400 a year. G2 reviews call the screens old and slow. A standard set-up takes 6 to 12 weeks. The alternatives have matured significantly and offer better value or better usability for most agency sizes below the enterprise tier. One of them, Atlas, is a London product designed with AI from the start, and Bullhorn is the first system listed on its migration page.
Bullhorn publishes two UK prices for small agencies: Starter at £80 and Core at £120 per user per month. Bullhorn Pro, which adds the Amplify AI features, and the plans for larger agencies are priced by quote. For a 10-person agency on Core, that is £14,400 a year before add-ons.
The G2 reviews (1,236 verified at time of writing, rated 4.2 stars) contain consistent themes:
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Bullhorn holds about 35% of UK recruitment agency software. The complaints above are well known, and the share stays. That is worth explaining.
It stays because of what a move costs. Your candidates, clients, placements and history sit in one product, in its form. Every job board feed, every integration and every report points at it. An export gives you files, and a new vendor must map all of it again.
A shared foundation removes that cost. A candidate, a client, a vacancy and a placement are declared once, with permanent identifiers, and every agency system reads the same forms. Your agency owns its own system on top of that, so a move is a move, and not a rebuild.
When leaving is cheap, a vendor must earn the renewal. We explain that market in what does an interoperable software market look like. We show how a whole sector shares one foundation in bespoke software for a whole sector.
The Access Group bought Vincere, and now calls it Access Vincere Evo. It holds about 5.7% of the recruitment agency market. 30% of its customers are in the UK. For its size it is therefore the strongest UK choice next to Bullhorn.
Pricing is published: from £69 per user per month for the core ATS/CRM, plus AI packs of £25 to £349 per agency per month. The mid-tier includes automation and analytics as standard rather than as paid add-ons. Vincere supports permanent, contract, and temp recruitment including shift scheduling, pay and bill: covering the full cycle of what a mixed recruitment business needs.
Vincere claims time-to-fill reductions of 38% and the ability to scale up to 5x without increasing headcount, based on its own case studies. LinkedIn integration and Indeed database access are built in. The complaints on Capterra include expensive data export charges, slow support (one-day response times), and bugs that can sit unresolved for extended periods.
Vincere suits a mid-sized agency, with 5 to 50 consultants, that does several kinds of recruitment. It gives better analytics and automation than Firefish. It costs less than Bullhorn, and takes less work to set up.
Atlas is a London-built CRM and ATS launched in 2024, designed with AI from the start. Its migration service lists Bullhorn first among the systems it moves agencies from, and it says a migration takes two to three weeks.
It addresses each Bullhorn complaint. Atlas records calls, transcribes video meetings, syncs email and stores WhatsApp messages against the record, and an AI note taker writes up each conversation, so the recruiter does not enter the data. Search accepts plain English and covers the whole database with no Boolean string. Background agents score deals, draft replies, tag candidates and create tasks. Branded shortlist and longlist reports are a strength for search firms. Support runs through in-app chat.
Atlas publishes its prices. Atlas Basic is £105 per user per month paid yearly, or £125 paid monthly. Atlas Premium adds verified mobile numbers and personal emails for every profile you shortlist, and is £135 paid yearly, or £160 paid monthly. Both plans have a 12-month commitment and a 14-day free trial. Agencies with ten desks or more get a custom price with volume discounts. Atlas rates 4.9 out of 5 on G2.
The limitation is back-office functions. There are no timesheets and no pay and bill, so a temp desk needs a separate system. Atlas suits executive search, contract and specialist perm agencies, which is where its named customers sit. We compare it with the other AI-first products in AI-first recruitment software for UK agencies.
Firefish is UK-built and targets small agencies and solo recruiters. Firefish has three plans (Basic, Professional and Enterprise) but does not publish per-user prices. Add-on modules start at £150 per module. It scores higher for ease of use than any other product in the sector. One recruiter, after several years with it, called it the best CRM they had used in 17 years.
Firefish has real limits. A candidate search takes 30 to 45 seconds, which is the same complaint people make about Bullhorn. Reviewers still rate Firefish higher overall. Its reports need you to build them, because it gives you no useful screens ready made. Its job board links have gaps, because a reply arrives by email. It does not go onto the candidate record for that role.
Contracts are 12-month minimum, which is worth noting if the agency is still evaluating whether the product is right for them.
Firefish suits solo recruiters and small agencies (1-10 consultants) where ease of onboarding and a minimal learning curve matter more than analytics depth.
Mercury is built on Microsoft Dynamics 365, which is both its main advantage and its main limitation. Agencies already running Microsoft infrastructure benefit from Power BI integration, Office 365 connectivity, and the security and compliance baseline of the Microsoft platform. Pricing is estimated at about £30 to £50 per user per month, with small businesses closer to £50.
Reviews make the same complaints about how it works. You cannot drag a CV onto it. Some set-ups have no boolean search. It does not connect to Outlook by itself, although it is built on Microsoft. It also takes much longer to learn than Vincere or Firefish. Mercury suits agencies with in-house IT capability who want the depth of the Microsoft ecosystem and are prepared to invest in setup and configuration.
Tracker RMS is differentiated by its back-office functionality. It is the only UK-specialist platform that integrates invoicing, timesheets, and compliance management alongside the ATS/CRM. Pricing starts at $79 per user per month for the Launch plan (up to 5 users), with a 6-month minimum. A temp or contract agency does three jobs every day. It pays contractors. It invoices clients. It watches the margin. One system that holds all three beats three separate platforms.
JobAdder (price by quote) offers native multi-board job posting and 100+ tool integrations. Loxo starts at $149 per user per month, billed yearly. It calls itself a talent intelligence platform. It joins a normal ATS and CRM to AI that finds candidates beyond a database search. Both work well for a certain kind of agency. Loxo suits a search firm with high volume. JobAdder suits an agency that posts to many job boards.
| Product | Price (per user/month) | Best suited to | Key limitation |
|---|---|---|---|
| Bullhorn | £80-120 (published); Pro by quote | Large multi-division agencies | Cost, slow UI, slow support |
| Vincere | From £69 + AI pack (published) | Mid-sized full-cycle agencies | Data export charges, bugs |
| Atlas | £105-160 (published) | Perm and executive search, AI-first design | No pay and bill |
| Firefish | Quote (not published) | Small agencies, solo recruiters | Reporting depth, search speed |
| Mercury | ~£30-50 (estimated) | IT-capable agencies on Microsoft stack | Steep setup, usability issues |
| Tracker RMS | From $79 (published) | Temp/contract agencies | Less known; smaller community |
| JobAdder | Quote (not published) | Multi-board posting focus | Less back-office functionality |
| Loxo | $149-199 (published) | AI-driven search and discovery | Newer; smaller UK user base |
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You can see this in a working system. The ESRE live recruitment demo opens without a login. Sign in as a consultant and move a candidate from job order through to payroll, or as compliance and run a right-to-work check. It is a working system, not a screenshot.