Horsefly Analytics review: enterprise labor market data with no published price

By Jan Suski. I go deep on every review, checking every number against its source and digging up details other coverage misses, a habit from six years of SEO and link building for tech companies. Bylines at Surfer, Brand24, and Senuto. How the scoring works.

Published 11 July 2026 · Updated 29 August 2026Prefer this source on Google

Recruitment

Horsefly Analytics sells labor market data. It's a search and analytics platform: the candidate sourcing, job posting and applicant-pipeline work of a recruiting tool sits with a separate ATS. What it does is answer a narrower question with a bigger dataset than most buyers expect from a company this size: where does the talent for a given role live, what does it cost to hire, and how hard will filling it be.

AI Recruitment Technologies Ltd, the Liverpool-registered company trading as Horsefly, built the platform around 1 trillion-plus labor market data points spanning 170,000 towns and cities in 65-plus countries, then wraps it in a search interface aimed at recruiters, hiring managers and workforce planners who don't need specialist data-science knowledge to use it.

This review covers what a buyer gets across the five quote-only tiers, what the one public price on record says about cost, what the platform's own case studies and the two independent reviews that exist say about strengths and gaps, and where Horsefly sits against LinkedIn Talent Insights, Revelio Labs and Lightcast, the three labor market analytics vendors it's most often weighed against.

It's aimed at organizations doing enough hiring, expansion planning or workforce restructuring that a data subscription pays for itself: multinational employers, RPO providers pricing proposals across sectors, and public-sector bodies with defined budgets and procurement processes. A hiring manager filling one role a quarter has no reason to be here.

Horsefly markets itself hard on breadth. Its platform page claims the widest global data footprint of any talent acquisition platform, "covering more countries than any other talent acquisition data platform," a claim it doesn't back with a named rival-by-rival comparison.

That's worth flagging up front, because the same page structure repeats through the rest of Horsefly's marketing: real, checkable scale numbers sitting next to unqualified superlatives about being the workforce intelligence platform built for global leaders. This review separates the two.

One example of the real numbers underneath the marketing: Horsefly's own homepage cites live movement in its dataset, stating that demand for software development roles is down 36% this year, whilst education sector job demand has increased by 21% over the same period.

Neither figure carries a methodology note or a comparison period beyond "this year," which is typical of how Horsefly presents its own market commentary throughout its blog: real numbers, thin sourcing detail.

↑ FACT SHEETWhat Horsefly Analytics does

This workforce intelligence platform is organized around five data modules, reachable from a single search builder: granular search, salary data, diversity data, supply and demand, and skills taxonomy. A recruiter opens the search builder, adds job titles, skills or keywords, sets a location and radius, and the platform returns results plotted on a map alongside the underlying numbers.

The screenshot below shows the actual builder: a UK search for customer-service roles around Manchester and Liverpool, with search terms grouped into inclusion and exclusion sets.

X-Ray Search is the module that does the heavy lifting: it lets a user combine job titles, skills and Boolean-style term groups in a single query, without running each combination separately and reconciling the results by hand. The Difficulty of Hire Score attaches a 1-10 rating to a role and location combination, built from the same supply-and-demand data.

Global heat maps visualize where talent concentrates, letting a team adapt its hiring plan as the underlying supply shifts, and the skills taxonomy standardizes 815,000 job titles and skills across 39 languages, so "customer service rep" and "service de la clientèle" resolve to the same underlying role for comparison purposes.

Two named UK case studies illustrate the intended use. Ørsted, the Danish renewable-energy company, used the platform for location-based hiring strategy; Horsefly's own published account states the work found locations where hiring could cut salary costs by 60 to 70% for 200 to 300 annual hires, and credits the engagement with $40 million in identified savings.

Admiral Group used the same town-level granularity to build a remote-hiring strategy around pay and supply data. Both figures come from Horsefly's own case-study pages: self-reported, unaudited, the vendor's account of its own engagement.

Where the data comes from and how much of it there is

Horsefly's data set draws on job postings, social media profiles and government labor statistics, refreshed and validated daily according to the company's own materials. The vendor doesn't publish a breakdown of what share of the 1 trillion-plus data points comes from each source, or a third-party audit of accuracy.

What's checkable is the truth of that scale claim itself, repeated consistently across the company's platform page, API documentation and G-Cloud listing: 1 trillion-plus data points, 170,000-plus towns and cities, 65-plus countries, and a skills taxonomy of 815,000 job titles translated into 39 languages.

The company's growth trajectory matches that claim in direction if not in independently verified detail: Horsefly's own "About" materials describe growing "from 1 country to 38 countries" within three years of launch, before reaching its current 65-plus-country footprint. Ownership has scaled alongside the data.

AI Recruitment Technologies Ltd, the legal entity behind the Horsefly brand, took a private-equity investment on 16 March 2023, partnering with LDC on what founder and CEO Will Crandle called a plan for US expansion and continued product investment. Crunchbase lists the company at 11 to 50 employees as of this review, still headquartered in Knowsley, near Liverpool.

↑ FACT SHEETPricing: five tiers, one number in public

Every one of Horsefly's five plans, Base, Professional, Global, Enterprise and the UK-only Public Sector Professional tier, is quote-only. The published feature matrix caps seats at 5, 15, 25 and 50 across the product line's four standard tiers, with country access widening from a single country on Base to global coverage on Global and Enterprise, and API access reserved for Enterprise alone. None of the five carries a list price.

The one number that exists on the public record comes from the UK government's Digital Marketplace: a G-Cloud 14 listing pricing a single Horsefly Analytics licence at £27,500 a year, with no free trial and no education discount offered, deployed as a revolving subscription that removes data access at contract end.

That figure isn't a floor or a ceiling for the other tiers; it's one buyer's price for one licence type, disclosed only because UK public-sector procurement notices are open records. No aggregator such as Vendr, G2 or TrustRadius carries contract-value data for Horsefly, which means a buyer negotiating a quote has nothing else published to compare it against, aside from that single G-Cloud figure.

Every figure above comes from Horsefly's own published plan comparison and the single UK G-Cloud 14 listing; no aggregator such as Vendr, G2 or TrustRadius carries independent contract data for the other four tiers.

Documented limits

Horsefly's fair usage policy sets two concrete API caps: 10,000 calls a day, and a maximum of 128 concurrent connections, both framed as abuse-prevention measures. The same policy prohibits automated scraping, bots or AI-driven query tools against the platform outside the sanctioned API, and defines excessive support usage as more than ten times a customer's average request volume, after which Horsefly can limit access or add fees.

None of this is unusual for an enterprise data platform, but it's worth knowing before a workforce-planning team builds an integration that assumes unlimited throughput.

The API itself is gated to the Enterprise tier only; Base, Professional and Global buyers get the web interface and nothing programmatic. A team planning to pipe Horsefly data into an internal BI tool needs to budget for the top tier from the outset, since there's no add-on path described in the public plan comparison.

Security and data handling

Horsefly's UK G-Cloud listing is the most detailed public source on its security posture, since the vendor doesn't publish a standalone trust page. It holds Cyber Essentials, the UK government's baseline certification, but not ISO/IEC 27001, ISO 28000, CSA STAR, PCI or Cyber Essentials Plus, according to the same listing's standards-and-certifications section.

Buyer-to-supplier traffic runs over a private network, public-sector network, or an IPsec/TLS VPN gateway, with TLS 1.2 or above required to protect data in transit within Horsefly's own network. User authentication is username and password; management access adds public-key authentication and dedicated VPN links, with role- and unit-based permissions, and the listing states that Horsefly will undertake penetration testing at least once a year.

System logs are retained for at least 12 months, and Horsefly commits to 99.98% uptime with scheduled, notified maintenance windows.

Exit terms are concrete where many vendors leave them vague: data exports in CSV, ODF, PDF, PNG or JPG, imports in CSV or ODF, and a formal end-of-contract report with final user statistics from the Customer Success Team. Onboarding covers the entire team, delivered on-site or online, with documentation supplied in PDF.

For a buyer weighing Horsefly against a vendor that won't say what happens to the data when the contract ends, that specificity is a genuine point in its favor, separate from the price transparency question, which remains unresolved.

↑ FACT SHEETWhat the two public reviewers say

Horsefly carries exactly two verified reviews on G2 as of this review, a 4.8-out-of-5 average built from a small sample, and none on Capterra, TrustRadius or SourceForge. That's thin coverage for a platform that's been selling since at least 2011, and it means the strengths and weaknesses below rest on just two voices.

Both reviewers describe the same core value: fast access to global labor-market comparisons without building the analysis themselves. "Horsefly's instantaneous global value of labour market data has been valuable in decision-making regarding recruitment," writes Ahmed H., a senior sales associate at a small business, in a G2 review dated 7 November 2024.

A verified enterprise user, writing on G2 in August 2021, put it this way: "A simple and easy way of understanding the talent market across multiple geographies. The platform is easy to navigate and interpret the results."

"A simple and easy way of understanding the talent market across multiple geographies. The platform is easy to navigate and interpret the results."

Verified User, Outsourcing/Offshoring, Enterprise (1,000+ employees), G2 review, August 2021

Asked if she'd recommend Horsefly to others, the same enterprise reviewer answered in four words: "You won't regret it!"

That review also documents a resolved complaint worth naming, since it shows Horsefly acting on customer feedback: the reviewer originally needed highly customizable queries to compare talent across countries side by side, and wrote that "it was difficult trying to compare talent in different countries but Horsefly have listened and have now developed this feature."

The newer review carries the sharper complaint. Ahmed H. rated Horsefly 4.5 out of 5 overall but flagged report customization as the weak point, writing that report refinement felt limited: "The set of reporting templates is somewhat fixed and does not allow for fine tuning to cover all the recruitment questions we may have."

"The set of reporting templates is somewhat fixed and does not allow for fine tuning to cover all the recruitment questions we may have."

Ahmed H., Senior Sales Associate, Small-Business (50 or fewer employees), G2 review, 7 November 2024

A note on sourcing: this review's own standard is a floor of ten independent user quotes drawn from G2, Capterra, TrustRadius, Reddit, Hacker News, LinkedIn and X. Horsefly doesn't clear that bar. Searches across all seven sources turned up two reviewers, full stop; SourceForge lists zero reviews, Capterra's own listing pages 404, and neither Reddit nor Hacker News has a discussion thread naming the product.

This review's sourcing rules exclude vendor-published case-study quotes by design, so the four quotes above are what's independently verifiable, and the gap itself is a data point about how few buyers are talking about this tool in public.

↑ FACT SHEETCompany stability

AI Recruitment Technologies Ltd, trading as Horsefly, was founded in 2011 by Will Crandle, who had previously co-founded a company called Jobs the Word, still visible as Horsefly's registered LinkedIn company name. LDC, the UK mid-market private equity arm of Lloyds Banking Group, made what it called a "significant investment" on 16 March 2023, with the amount undisclosed.

LDC investment manager Jacob Leone described the platform as providing "actionable insights for workforce shaping in a changing economy" at the time of the deal; Crandle's stated goal was expansion into the US market alongside continued feature development.

Crunchbase puts current headcount at 11 to 50 employees, unchanged in scale terms from a company Horsefly's own materials describe growing from 1 to 38 countries of coverage within three years of launch, before reaching today's 65-plus.

Named enterprise and public-sector clients across Horsefly's case-study library include Lloyds Banking Group, Hays, Mimecast, the UK Home Office, HM Revenue and Customs, BT, Royal London, Virgin Media, Accenture, Ernst & Young and the Office for National Statistics, spanning both private and public sectors.

The private clients are the kind LDC's own banking-sector network would plausibly introduce; the public-sector buyers are the ones whose G-Cloud listing supplies this review's only independently disclosed price.

Support and contract terms

Support runs phone and email, 9-5 UK time Monday to Friday, with a documented one-hour response target inside those hours and a 24-hour target outside them; on-site support is available to customers at extra cost per the G-Cloud listing. The platform itself needs no installation and runs in-browser across every major browser including Internet Explorer 11, which points to an enterprise client base still running legacy environments.

Contracts run on what Horsefly's G-Cloud listing calls a "revolving subscription basis," with data access removed once the contract lapses, no minimum term specified in that listing, and no free trial offered at any tier. That's consistent with a sales-led enterprise motion: nothing here is built for a self-serve trial-to-paid path.

Horsefly Analytics vs the alternatives

Several companies sell labor market data as a subscription. LinkedIn Talent Insights answers a version of the same question from inside LinkedIn's own member graph.

Pricing isn't published either, but four UK public contracts give Talent Insights a real price range Horsefly doesn't have: the Cabinet Office paid £18,850 a year, the Financial Ombudsman Service's three-year deal works out to the same figure, and Post Office Limited paid £110,000 for one year of the identical named product, a six-fold spread across two unconnected public buyers.

Talent Insights leans on LinkedIn's member-supplied profile data, which the platform doesn't independently verify, against Horsefly's blend of job postings, social profiles and government statistics. A team already paying for LinkedIn Recruiter has a natural upgrade path into Talent Insights that Horsefly can't offer. Read the full LinkedIn Talent Insights review for the complete cost breakdown.

Revelio Labs sells the same category of labor-market data as flat files, standardizing job titles across hundreds of millions of employment records into what the company calls "the world's first universal HR database." Its Human Capital Dynamics dataset lists at $85,000 for a one-year AWS Data Exchange subscription, the only vendor in this comparison with an actual list price on record anywhere.

Revelio's customers skew toward consulting and investment firms running economic analysis, and the product carries no seats, no dashboard and no API built for a recruiter to log into day to day. Nineteen free trial datasets let a buyer sample the data before committing to the $85,000 figure, something none of Horsefly's five tiers offers at any price.

Lightcast covers the same strategic workforce-planning ground as Horsefly and adds a layer neither Horsefly nor Revelio Labs carries: the company claims "100+ government sources" feeding a dataset of 2.5 billion job postings and 800 million career profiles, aggregated with what it calls proprietary modeling to fill gaps that government agencies redact for privacy.

Lightcast sells that three ways, as software, as consulting, or as a raw data feed piped into a buyer's own systems, and publishes no price for any of the three, leaving Horsefly's single G-Cloud figure as the only anchor number across all three vendors in this comparison.

Across all three, the honest read is that no vendor in this market analytics category competes on published price, because none of them publish one consistently.

Horsefly's edge is town-level compensation granularity and a search interface built for non-analysts, including niche industries where a generic skills taxonomy usually breaks down; LinkedIn's is the member graph and a natural bundle with Recruiter seats already in place; Revelio's is raw data breadth for teams that want to build their own analysis; Lightcast's is government-source depth for pure workforce-planning use cases.

The primary reason to pick Horsefly over any of the three is that search interface; with no vendor here publishing a list rate, no one can say with confidence which is the cost effective option until a real quote is on the table.

Verdict

Horsefly Analytics is for organizations that hire or restructure at enough scale that a five-figure annual labor market analytics subscription is a rounding error against the decisions it informs: multinationals planning where to open a location, RPO providers pricing client proposals against real market data, and public-sector bodies with the procurement infrastructure to run a formal quote process.

For that buyer, hiring decisions matter enough that the platform's scale becomes a real strategic advantage. The town-level compensation granularity and the Difficulty of Hire scoring are the differentiators behind that claim, backed by named case studies with specific figures attached, even where those specific figures are self-reported by Horsefly.

It's not for a hiring manager filling one role a quarter, a startup without a workforce-planning function, or anyone who needs price certainty before starting a sales conversation. Every one of the five plans is quote-only, there's no free trial at any tier, and the single published price, £27,500 a year for one UK public-sector licence, tells a buyer almost nothing about what a 25-seat Global plan or a 50-seat Enterprise plan with API access will cost.

It might suit a mid-market team that can absorb a sales cycle and has a specific, recurring use case: compensation benchmarking for specific roles ahead of a union negotiation, say, or a single high-stakes location decision, where the cost of a wrong call outweighs the cost of a subscription with no public price history to negotiate against.

The practical advice is straightforward: with two G2 reviews and no presence on Capterra, TrustRadius, Reddit or Hacker News, a buyer is trusting Horsefly's own account of its strengths more than most software purchases require.

Frequently asked questions

Does Horsefly Analytics publish its pricing?

No. All five plans, Base, Professional, Global, Enterprise and Public Sector Professional, are quote-only. The one public figure is £27,500 a year for a single licence, from a UK G-Cloud 14 listing.

Does Horsefly Analytics offer a free trial?

No free trial is published at any tier. The G-Cloud listing confirms no education discount either.

Who founded Horsefly Analytics?

Will Crandle founded the company, trading as Horsefly under the legal entity AI Recruitment Technologies Ltd, in 2011.

How much data does Horsefly Analytics have?

Horsefly claims 1 trillion-plus labor market data points across 65-plus countries and 170,000-plus towns and cities, plus a skills taxonomy of 815,000 job titles and skills translated across 39 languages.

Does Horsefly Analytics source candidates?

No. It sells labor market data: the candidate sourcing, job posting and applicant-pipeline work of a recruiting tool sits with a separate ATS.

What are the alternatives to Horsefly Analytics?

LinkedIn Talent Insights, Revelio Labs and Lightcast are the three labor market analytics vendors Horsefly is most often weighed against.