Sortinghat vs Loxo: The 2026 Comparison for Search and Staffing Firms

Loxo's pitch is a large external profile database inside the ATS. That helps on the narrow set of roles where the person you need has never heard of your firm. On the roles most staffing firms actually run it is an expensive answer to a problem they do not have, where our audit of one firm's 3 million records found 80% were real, current people sitting behind stale records nobody could search. Renting reach while your own database goes unused is an expensive way to source.

Last reviewed June 2026. Loxo information taken from its published pricing and product documentation.

Renting reach versus owning depth

Loxo's approach. A large external profile database with contact data, built into the ATS and CRM. Sourcing and pipeline sit in one subscription rather than two, which is a real convenience for outbound-led firms.

Sortinghat's approach. Your own records, made findable and placeable. Plain language search resolves conditions that never appear as keywords. Then the platform screens: AI voice and video calls against the role's weighted criteria, producing a ranked, evidenced shortlist without a recruiter dialling.

The question that settles it takes an afternoon. Take your last ten placements and count how many were already somewhere in your own database before the search started.

Sortinghat vs Loxo at a glance

Row two is worth reading twice. Everything you surface through a rented database stays with the vendor. A pool you build compounds; a subscription you rent resets the day you stop paying.

Where the two platforms actually differ

What happens to your own database

Loxo. Records live in the ATS, and sourcing attention goes to the external pool because that is what the subscription is for. The database your firm spent years building sits behind filter and keyword search.

Sortinghat. Plain language search across your own records, with enrichment refreshing what is stale. Our audit found 10% duplicates, 10% junk and 80% real people behind out-of-date records. Making that 80% reachable is cheaper than renting access to strangers.

Bottom line: You already paid to build a database. Renting reach while it goes unsearched is paying twice.

Screening the people you find

Loxo. Sourcing surfaces the candidate. A recruiter then calls, verifies and qualifies every one of them, which is roughly 40 calls a day and three or four worth submitting.

Sortinghat. AI voice and video screening runs against the role's criteria and returns a ranked shortlist with notice period, compensation and CV claims confirmed. Around 300 contacted in parallel produces roughly 10 submission-ready profiles in hours.

Bottom line: Finding people is half the job. Loxo does the half that a licence can buy.

Reporting and desk economics

Loxo. Reporting covers pipeline and activity. Connecting recruiter activity to desk margin usually means exporting and rebuilding it outside the platform.

Sortinghat. Desk margin, recruiter capacity and pipeline forecasting sit in the same workspace as the data they measure. A founder sees which desks are profitable without a spreadsheet in between.

Bottom line: Reporting activity is not the same as knowing what it earned.

Adoption, which is where most rollouts fail

Loxo. Implementation is self-serve or guided. Whether the team adopts it is left to the team.

Sortinghat. Implementation, migration, training and any gap-filling customisation are included in the licence. If your desk depends on something the platform does not have, we build it inside the migration window rather than logging it on a roadmap.

Bottom line: The most common failure in this category is not a bad platform. It is a good one nobody switched to.

Running the whole desk

Loxo. Strong on sourcing and CRM, with back office handled elsewhere.

Sortinghat. Full front and back office in one platform: pay-and-bill, timesheets and invoicing alongside the ATS and CRM, with 400+ pre-built integrations and an open read-write API.

Bottom line: One platform instead of a sourcing subscription plus a back-office system plus the reconciliation between them.

What each platform actually costs to run

Loxo publishes a free tier, with Basic reported around $169 per user per month and Professional quoted custom. Published figures vary across sources, so get a current written quote and confirm what the database access costs at your seat count.

The licence is rarely the largest line. Six costs decide what a platform actually costs over three years:

The last two lines are usually larger than the first four combined. A platform that removes an hour a day from every recruiter is not comparable to one that costs slightly less per seat.

What Sortinghat does that Loxo does not

AI is in the platform, not on the invoice

Voice screening, video interviews, the AI interview assistant, evaluation against weighted criteria, natural language search and the notetaker are all part of the platform. There is no AI tier, no separate contract and no account manager conversation before you can use them.

Search is a sentence, not a Boolean string

Describe the person you want and get a ranked result. Compound conditions that never appear as keywords, institution tier, company stage, domain depth, resolve without anyone building a query. Sourcers are productive in a session rather than a quarter.

Screening runs at enterprise volume

A pool search on a volume role surfaces around 1,200 relevant profiles, narrows to a ranked 300, and contacts them by call, WhatsApp and email in parallel. That produces roughly 10 submission-ready profiles in hours. On a high-volume QA requirement we submitted 120 profiles in a single day.

Full front and back office

Timesheets, invoicing and pay-and-bill alongside the ATS and CRM, with client-specific formats built to your requirement rather than configured around.

400+ pre-built integrations

Job portals, messaging, calendar, assessment, interview and finance systems, plus an open read-write API for everything else.

Migration in two weeks, and gaps get built

Notes, call history, attachments and submission history carry across. If your desk depends on something the platform does not have yet, we build it inside the migration window rather than logging it on a roadmap. Implementation, migration, training and that customisation are included.

Built for firms running at scale

Our customers include firms of 400+ employees. The platform is designed for enterprise staffing volume rather than scaled down from it.

Switching from Loxo: what it takes

Loxo migrations are clean on the ATS side, with one thing to understand before you commit.

• The rented pool does not travel. Profiles surfaced through Loxo's database belong to Loxo. What transfers is the records you created and worked.
• Enrichment data may carry licensing conditions. Check your agreement before assuming contact data transfers with the record.
• Outreach and engagement history. We verify it arrives threaded rather than as a flat log.
• Notes, calls, attachments and submission history all carry across, validated before sign-off.

Our migrations run in two weeks. Week one is export, field mapping and validation while your team keeps billing. Week two is your own environment, your team's specifics and full validation before anyone signs off. Go-live is a final export and cutover with no downtime. Implementation, migration, training and any customisation your desk needs are included rather than quoted as professional services.

Where Loxo is still a good choice

Not every firm should switch, and these are the cases where Loxo remains the better answer.

• Your desk is purely executive search into cold markets. If every placement comes from someone who has never touched your firm, rented reach has a case.
• You have no database worth searching. A firm in its first year has nothing to make placeable yet. Come back when you do.

Frequently asked questions

Bottom line

Loxo rents you access to strangers. That is worth paying for on a narrow set of roles and it is not what most staffing firms spend their week on. Sortinghat makes the database you already own actually work, then screens the people it finds, evaluates them against criteria generated from the job description, and runs the back office as well. The reach you rent disappears at renewal. The pool you build compounds every time a recruiter works it.