Top Applicant Tracking Systems (ATS) for 2025

Overall Score

3.89/5

Applicant tracking features

4.39/5

Platform/interface

4.31/5

Reporting and analytics

3/5

Pricing

4.31/5

Support

2.55/5

User reviews

4.19/5

Pros

Compare top qualifying candidates’ feedback side-by-side on the Business plan and up.
Over 800 interview questions, job descriptions, emails, checklists, and letter templates.
Logic-based questionnaires on Business plan and higher tiers.
Slack integration to respond to candidates and trigger other recruitment pipeline actions.

Cons

It’s an expensive cost jump to move from a free plan to a paid tier.
HR system integrations, offer management tools, and priority support are only available on its Business plan and higher.
Extra fees for anonymized candidate tools, SMS messaging, and candidate match scoring.
Bootstrap plans can only have one position open at a time, and access to candidate information is limited to 30 days.

Why I chose Breezy HR

With a total score of 3.89, Breezy HR is my top pick for ATS software. It provides scalable tiers, plus a free plan and CRM capabilities in higher tiers. It is also ideal for growing businesses that want affordable candidate engagement features and automations to quickly attract and recruit needed talent. What’s great is that startups can leverage Breezy HR’s Bootstrap plan for free, giving them access to a career site that can also aid in brand marketing.

It performed well for its platform interface, screening questionnaires and assessment options, and collaboration tools. Moving to a paid tier also gives you access to advanced automations, a must-have as your hiring needs grow and you need smarter ways to sort and evaluate candidates.

Breezy HR’s reporting and analytics are adequate, with standard visualizations and dashboards for time-to-fill, pipeline efficiency, and GDPR compliance. Still, custom dashboards and reports are available only on Pro plan subscriptions. This may make sense for scaling businesses, but enterprises might want to look to Greenhouse or Rippling for more robust analytics options.

Breezy HR checks all the boxes for a well-rounded ATS:

Visual pipeline: See all your candidates for a position in one place and drag them to the appropriate stages in your hiring process.
Resume parsing: Makes resumes searchable in more than 20 languages.
Collaboration tools: Tag hiring team members inside candidate profiles and take public or private notes during conversations with the candidate.
Interview management: Schedule multiple interviews with the candidate and various stakeholders, plus enable candidates to self-schedule.
Talent pools: Create separate pools to organize potential candidates for future roles and continued engagement.
Offer letters and rejections: Use pre-built offer letters and rejection templates to move forward with your hiring process.

Breezy HR also offers strategic hiring tools, like email nurture campaigns, a custom career site with its Hello Messenger AI chatbot, and employee referrals. However, most of these tools are only available in Breezy’s highest-paid plans, making it a more expensive option for startups needing candidate engagement features to establish a brand presence.

Another drawback is that Breezy requires you to subscribe to its Business plan or higher to integrate with HR platforms and send offer letters. This means more manual work to onboard hired candidates, as their applications, assessments, interview notes, and offer letters don’t seamlessly transfer to your HR platform. Your recruitment teams must also spend more time crafting offer documentation and receiving it from your new hire.

But Breezy is easy to navigate, making it ideal for first-time ATS users or small recruitment teams. It has a user-friendly interface and focuses on centralizing the recruitment process with features like candidate sourcing and visual pipelines, making it a simple and accessible ATS without overly intricate functionality.

Candidate messaging

Breezy HR lets you directly engage with candidates via email and text without leaving the platform. Although you can access SMS messaging on Teamtailor and JazzHR, Breezy HR takes an extra step by consolidating all messages to and from the candidate in one place in their candidate profile. With a click, you can switch between email and SMS texts to easily converse with the candidate in their preferred medium.

Even more convenient is its Slack integration, which allows you to respond to candidate messages within Slack. Hiring managers may find this particular useful since they can message promising candidates without logging into Breezy HR. It also means more timely responses to candidates, speeding up hiring efficiency and preventing great candidates from getting hired elsewhere.

You can view, send, and receive candidate email and text messages directly in Breezy HR to improve the efficiency of candidate communication and engagement. Source: TechnologyAdvice

Candidate management automations

Breezy HR gives you a lot of control over the automations of your hiring pipeline, including notifications, email drip campaigns, and sending assessments or questionnaires to candidates. Its automations are also very flexible so you can speed up processes in your hiring funnel with little involvement from you.

You can also move candidates to different stages in your pipeline or talent pool based on how they answer particular questions. Besides saving you time from screening candidates who don’t meet the minimum position requirements, you can also curate lists of great candidates to source for future roles.

For instance, if you’re hiring a Staff Writer II but a potential candidate doesn’t have the required years of experience, you can automatically add their application data to a Staff Writer I talent pool. This way, you can return to it when you need talent for the entry-level role without starting the job search from scratch.

Breezy HR displays its recruiting preferences dashboard with a pop-up window reading, "Add question"; the question, "How much experience do you have in the role?" shows multiple-choice answers for 0-1 years, 2-5 years, and over 5 years, plus a small notice that candidates who answer 0-1 years will be moved to a "not available" talent pool. — You can automate the pipeline stage or talent pool movement based on answers to screening questions, making it easier to organize candidates for future talent needs and improving your time-to-fill. Source: TechnologyAdvice

Breezy HR homepage. Source: TechnologyAdvice

Breezy displays its visual pipeline for the staff writer position with columns for applied, feedback, interviewing, and made offer, plus a candidate named Jane Doe moving from the applied to feedback column. — Breezy HR homepage. Source: TechnologyAdvice

Breezy HR offers several price plans: Bootstrap, Startup, Growth, Business, and Pro. You can start with its free Bootstrap plan or choose its Startup plan, which starts at $157 per month (if paid annually). Breezy HR includes several paid add-ons, such as SMS/text messaging, incognito apply, and candidate match score.

Breezy HR’s transparent fees, lack of long-term contracts, discounts, free plan, and 14-day free trial earned it top marks in pricing at 4.31 out of 5. For this reason, Breezy HR’s pricing scheme is ideal for startups, growing businesses, and those that want to customize their ATS functions.

Bootstrap

Forever free plan.
Unlimited users.
Access to candidate information for 30 days.
Career site.
Job post syndication to more than 50 job boards.
GDPR compliance controls and automations.
resume parsing.

Startup

Annual: $157 per month.
Monthly: $189 per month.
Includes everything in Bootstrap plan plus:
- Unlimited candidates, positions, and talent pools.
- Background check integrations.
- Customizable automations, questionnaires, and pipeline stages.
- EEO/OFCCP reporting.
- Calendar, video, and Slack integrations.
- Mobile app.
- Interview self-scheduling.
- Analytics and reporting.
- Task management.
- Video assessments.

Growth

Annual: $273 per month.
Monthly: $329 per month.
Includes everything in Startup plan, plus:
- Reference checking.
- Interview guides.
- Employee referrals.
- E-signatures.
- External recruiter support.
- Hello Messenger AI chatbot (for career site).
- Multiple position locations and recruiting pipelines.

Business

Annual: $439 per month.
Monthly: $529 per month.
Includes everything in Growth plan, plus:
- Multi-path questionnaires.
- Assessment and HR system integrations.
- Candidate comparison.
- Nurture campaigns.
- Custom roles and permissions.
- Job and offer approval workflows.
- Offer management.

Pro

Contact sales for a quote.
Includes everything in Business plan, plus:
- Dedicated account manager.
- Advanced reporting.
- Custom domains.
- Data export/import.

Add-ons

SMS/Text Messaging: Starts at $41 per month.
Candidate Match Score: Starts at $137 per month for subscription; $35 for single positions.
Incognito Apply: Starts at $137 per month.

Note: Annual pricing subscriptions include two months free.

Teamtailor: Best for automated workflows

Overall Score

3.72/5

Applicant tracking features

4.09/5

Platform/interface

4.44/5

Reporting and analytics

3.31/5

Pricing

2.06/5

Support

3.14/5

User reviews

3.96/5

Pros

Intuitive and easy-to-use modern interface.
Custom career site with drag-and-drop blocks.
Built-in video meetings support, so you don’t need video app integration.
Audience and meeting reports to measure candidate engagement.
Sourcing extension to add prospects from LinkedIn.

Cons

Can’t save hiring stage templates for faster job creation.
Lacks granular access controls for more advanced teams.
Limited EEO/OFCCP compliance options.
Non-transparent pricing.

Why I chose Teamtailor

With a score of 3.72 out of 5, Teamtailor offers automated workflows with features like triggers, message templates, candidate experience options, CRM tools, and bulk actions to help streamline the recruiting process. It performed well in almost all the categories I evaluated. It got a high score for ATS, missing points only for its lack of robust candidate DEI reports and bias checkers.

Teamtailor is not the best ATS if you need more specialized reports, access controls, and pipeline stages. It also lacks options to simplify in-person sourcing, like optical character recognition (OCR) for uploading paper documents. Yet, its features straddle operational and strategic needs, making it approachable for recruiters’ day-to-day processes and powerful enough to support future business hiring objectives.

Get a closer look at Teamtailor: Greenhouse vs Teamtailor: Recruitment & ATS Solutions

Although an ATS at its core, Teamtailor is unique in the way it blends strategic recruitment functions, like candidate experience tools, directly within its hiring pipeline. This makes it easier for you to understand the importance these features play in the success of your hiring initiatives.

Teamtailor lets you change and access the following directly from its visual pipeline:

Job settings.
Hiring stages.
Job requisition automations.
Promotions.
Analytics.

As a result, you can adapt quickly when your hiring process needs to change. For example, it only takes two clicks to adjust interview stages, approval workflows, job posting boosts, or pre-employment assessments as you move candidates through your pipeline.

Teamtailor’s anonymous mode, which you can turn off and on at any stage of the hiring process, even helps minimize unconscious hiring bias. By comparison, Breezy HR’s Incognito Apply is a paid add-on.

However, Teamtailor’s modern interface, with drag-and-drop capabilities, mouse hover actions, and collapsible toolbars, comes at the cost of more granular customization tools. For example, experienced hiring teams may not like defining the stages for each new job post instead of creating and saving a template for use later.

Its custom reports are also rather limited—instead of starting a report from scratch, you must choose from one of the following base reports first and then manipulate the data to fit your needs:

Jobs.
Candidates.
Job applications.
Employees.

Viewing historical data trends in Teamtailor has also only been a feature since late 2023. However, you can export CSV files or connect with your business intelligence (BI) software if you need more in-depth insights.

Email nurture campaigns

With Teamtailor, you can create email nurture campaigns to engage with passive candidates or keep silver medalists updated on your company’s latest opportunities, position updates, blogs, and events. You can add candidates individually or in bulk so they can start receiving plain text or branded emails from you.

Teamtailor’s nurture customization options are somewhat limited. Compared to candidate relationship management (CRM) tools like Avature, it doesn’t offer email analytics and has few text placeholder fields.

However, Teamtailor’s simple visual campaign builder with adjustable wait times between emails is unheard of for most ATS, which are primarily concerned with managing candidate pipelines. If you have modest hiring needs or expect to fill particular difficult or key positions soon, nurture campaigns can help source candidates and keep them invested with minimal effort.

Teamtailor displays a nurture campaign dashboard with a pop-up window that shows an example email soliciting a candidate with marketing skills, as well as options for links, images, GIFs, placeholders, and company branding. — With Teamtailor, you can create email nurture campaigns to reach out to candidates at various stages of your hiring process. Source: TechnologyAdvice

Generative AI

Most modern ATS include AI features, such as machine learning algorithms, to help with recruitment pipeline management. Teamtailor offers this feature plus its new Co-pilot generative AI assistant that can craft job descriptions, summarize resumes, write candidate emails with specific feedback, and even develop interview questions.

If you lack formalized job descriptions, Teamtailor’s generative AI tools will speed up your job posting process. They also improve the efficiency of your hiring funnel by suggesting screening questions to help hiring managers narrow down qualified candidates and minimize bottlenecks.

Teamtailor displays a pop-up window with the title "New interview kit" plus suggested interview questions like "Describe how you effectively manage multiple writing projects with overlapping deadlines" and "How do you ensure the accuracy of the facts and data in your writing?" under the skill "writing." — Unlike other ATS with generative AI, Teamtailor’s Co-pilot can suggest questions to ask during formal interviews based on the required job skills for more consistent and in-depth candidate discussions. Source: TechnologyAdvice

Heads up!

I’ll be the first to tell you that I love Teamtailor’s AI functions, but they should never replace the human element. Teamtailor’s Co-pilot is possible because of its integration with Open AI’s ChatGPT, which means it does make mistakes. Remember to review what it produces to ensure it aligns with the details of your open position and your company brand and culture.

With the passing of New York City’s Automated Employment Decision Tools (AEDT) law and the European Union’s Artificial Intelligence Act, become familiar with how your ATS makes candidate decisions. It never hurts to review automatically disqualified candidates to ensure fair decision-making.

You can learn more about AI in recruitment by visiting AI Recruiting: Uses, Advantages, & Disadvantages.

Customizable career site

Teamtailor’s drag-and-drop page builder allows you to create a customized career site. You can add text, images, videos, and links that match your company branding, colors, and style. Although Teamtailor’s career site builder targets recruiting teams without coding abilities, you can apply custom HTML and CSS blocks and embed them on existing websites.

Unlike Rippling and BambooHR’s career sites, which let you customize your brand colors and logos only, Teamtailor allows you to accurately reflect your company culture and values. Its embedded candidate chat function, multilingual support, and campaign pages can be great tools for attracting qualified applicants and keeping them engaged.

I’m particularly fond of its team stories feature, which allows some employees to record snippets about the company workplace and post them to your career site. This personal touch boosts your authenticity with candidates and gives them a clearer idea of whether your company is right for them.

Teamtailor displays a dashboard with options to change the colors, links, and typography of your career site on the left, plus a preview of the career site with the title "Welcome to TechnologyAdvice" in the middle. — Teamtailors lets you customize the look and feel of your career site by changing colors and fonts and adding images and videos where you want. Source: TechnologyAdvice

Teamtailor displays a homepage with links to jobs, candidates, nurture, surveys, content, analytics, promotions, and employees at the top, plus widgets for my jobs, my to-dos, and upcoming meetings calendar. — Teamtailor homepage. Source: TechnologyAdvice

Teamtailor displays six gray boxes plus a horizontal list of blocks at the bottom reading latest hire, recent connect, team stories, custom message, video, and image, which you can drag into the gray boxes. — Teamtailor homepage. Source: TechnologyAdvice

Teamtailor does not reveal its pricing on its website; you must contact its sales team for a personalized quote. Unfortunately, its lack of transparency regarding price, discounts, and contracts made it second-to-last in my roundup for pricing, with a score of 2.06. Teamtailor only saved itself from last place in this category with its free 14-day trial. But even then, you must speak with its sales team before accessing a trial.

While this is disappointing for an ATS platform, many users find Teamtailor relatively affordable for the features you get. Some review websites indicate the software starts at or around $1,250 annually for unlimited users, candidates, and job openings. However, this amount will likely be more to access sophisticated features, such as advanced automations, AI, and employee referrals.

Manatal: Best for AI recruitment

Overall Score

3.67/5

Applicant tracking features

3.13/5

Platform/interface

4.13/5

Reporting and analytics

3.75/5

Pricing

3.81/5

Support

4.05/5

User reviews

3.39/5

Pros

AI candidate sourcing capabilities that allow you to filter candidates by required skills, education, and experience.
Posts job openings to over 2,500 free and premium job boards.
Pricing is low compared to other ATS software.

Cons

Lack of automation when communicating with candidates.
Limited integration with HR apps.
No phone support.

Why I chose Manatal

With a score of 3.67 out of 5, Manatal made it on my list of top ATS software, ranking third overall. One of the things I like best about Manatal is how comprehensive its AI recruitment and candidate enhancements are. Because it sources everything about the candidate, like resumes, social media accounts, job history, and education, you get a full picture of them and how well they fit with your job descriptions.

Manatal is an AI recruitment software that allows you to post jobs to multiple job boards and manage candidates through the entire hiring process. It also integrates with social media to provide an overall view of the candidate, from application to resume to social accounts.

Manatal offers the following applicant tracking features

Remote team management.
Team collaboration.
Recruitment metrics.
Career page builder.
Candidate scoring.
Recruitment CRM.
Candidate sourcing capabilities.
Social media profile enrichment.
Comprehensive recruitment analytics.
Enhanced candidate engagement.

While Manatal has a multitude of candidate engagement features, it doesn’t have a lot of automated communication with candidates, compared to Teamtailor that has fully automated workflows. This can make interacting with individuals that you are interested in moving through the hiring pipeline a bit more time consuming.

Integration is another area where Manatal is both good and bad. The good news is that it integrates with a lot of job board apps and a few job assessment products to help you get a clearer picture of the overall qualification and skills of candidates. On the other hand, it is limited in the amount of human resources apps available, although it does integrate with BambooHR and HiBob.

AI Candidate sourcing

Manatal has a centralized AI candidate sourcing platform that allows you to post jobs, import profiles directly from LinkedIn, and access over 600 million candidates from its Sourcing Hub. I particularly like its ability to post job openings to over 2,500 free and premium job platforms, like Indeed, LinkedIn, Monster, and CareerJet. You can then monitor all your sponsored job advertising campaigns from a single platform.

Within the candidate sourcing platform, you can create a personalized career page (available in any language) where you can highlight your employer brand and tailor application forms to show your company name and logo.

Plus, any candidate that applies through your career page is automatically parsed and AI scored based on their capabilities, work experience, talents, and skillsets. This information is then all automatically added to the candidate’s profile and is searchable through Boolean and advanced search functionality.

AI recommendations

Manatal simplifies the process of finding quality candidates using AI-powered recommendations. It will suggest both a suitable candidate for your vacancies and specific jobs for the candidates within your database. The system ranks your candidates based on relevancy to your job descriptions and will cross-reference the results with your talent pool.

One of the things I like best about Manatal’s AI capabilities is that you can use customizable criteria to filter recommended candidates and shortlist your top choices based on skills, experience, and academic background, to name a few.

Candidate enrichment

The candidate enrichment feature goes beyond simple resume parsing. Instead, it combines data and social media to give a holistic view of each candidate. I believe this sets Manatal apart from the others as it’s the only software on our list with this type of data sourcing.

Its AI engine will browse through over 20 social media sites, like Facebook, LinkedIn, X, and GitHub to create a comprehensive candidate profile that helps you or your recruiting team better understand the candidate, beyond what is on their resumes.

Plus, once you’ve got applicants in your database, you can easily perform a Boolean data search to quickly find the most suitable candidates.

Branded career page

A career page can help candidates connect with your company culture and brand as it is hosted on your website. Manatal will help you create and manage your career page and ensure it is properly branded with your company identity. Setup is easy and requires no coding or development.

Plus, you can integrate your job page through Manatal’s career page and manage your candidates directly through Manatal; putting everything you need to make hiring decisions in one location.

Customizable application forms

Within Manatal’s career page you have the ability to create custom application forms. You can create mandatory and optional fields, open questions, and drop down answers, allowing your applications to hone in on requirements of the position.

You can access the application forms using the career page tab on the left navigation bar. You can use one of the default or basic forms provided, or create your own. Plus, you can mark any questions as required, which will make it so the candidate must answer to complete the application.

Manatal home dashboard showing notification, recent action, and top performers. — Home dashboard. (Source: TechnologyAdvice)

Manatal's candidates dashboard showing all active candidates. — Home dashboard. (Source: TechnologyAdvice)

Manatal has four plans available: the Professional Plan for individuals and small teams, the Enterprise Plan for growing teams, the Enterprise Plus Plan for industry leaders, and a Custom Plan for large companies needing unique workflows and integrations. Plans start at $15 per month per user and go up to $55 per month per user (if paid annually).

Professional

Annual: $15 per month per user.
Monthly: $19 per month per user.
Up to 15 jobs/account.
Up to 10,000 candidates.
Unlimited hiring managers.
Candidate enrichment.
AI recommendations.
Applicant tracking system.
Candidate sourcing.
Data privacy compliance.
Team and collaboration.
Activities management.
Reports and analytics.
Support and assistance.

Enterprise

Annual: $35 per month per user.
Monthly: $39 per month per user.
Includes everything in Professional, plus:
- Unlimited jobs.
- Unlimited candidates.
- Workflow automation.

Enterprise Plus

Annual: $55 per month per user.
Monthly: $59 per month per user.
Includes everything in Enterprise, plus:
- User groups.
- Advanced report builder.
- Single sign on.
- Open API.
- Priority support.
- Access to Beta features.

Custom

On demand pricing (contact for quote).
Includes everything in Enterprise Plus, plus:
- Dedicated account manager.
- Phone support.
- Custom features.
- Custom integrations.
- Custom compliance and reports.

*14-day free trial available on all plans

BambooHR: Best for first-time ATS users

BambooHR career page. Source: TechnologyAdvice

Overall Score

3.52/5

Applicant tracking features

3.08/5

Platform/interface

4.19/5

Reporting and analytics

3.19/5

Pricing

3.13/5

Support

3.79/5

User reviews

4.4/5

Pros

Candidate data flows into employee onboarding and training as part of its all-in-one HR suite.
Hiring module is included in all subscription plans.
Simple-to-use reporting and analytics module for new users.

Cons

Its HR and hiring mobile applications are separate.
Number of job openings is limited to five on the Core plan and 20 max on the Pro plan.
Lacks generative AI capabilities for more efficient job and candidate management.

Why I chose BambooHR

Although BambooHR is not the most powerful ATS on my list, its simple interface and clean layout make it quick to learn and start hiring if you’re new to recruiting. In particular, creating a new job opening can take less than 10 minutes since it only has a few steps and customization options before job board syndication.

That said, BambooHR’s overall score of 3.52 mainly results from its ease of use. For example, reports and approval flows are pre-built, making BambooHR an ideal plug-and-play HRIS and ATS for infrequent hiring needs and onboarding.

If you’re a more advanced ATS user, you may be frustrated by its lack of customizable pipeline stages, hiring team controls, interview kits, and interview management. I would look to Breezy HR instead if you need these features at an affordable starting price.

However, BambooHR has recently introduced knockout questions. These allow you to ask candidates questions during the application process and depending on their answer it will knock them out of the running and place them in the “no” pile. This can save your hiring managers valuable time by not having to review resumes of unqualified candidates.

BambooHR differentiates itself in this roundup by being the only all-in-one HR software on my list of the top five ATS platforms. It beat Rippling, another comprehensive HR suite, by a very slim margin. This is because BambooHR is a highly user-friendly ATS with customer support available via phone, chat, and email. Plus, it’s more affordable to start with than other all-in-one platforms that reserve the hiring function in a separate module or paid add-on.

BambooHR’s biggest benefit is that it serves as the single source of truth for your hiring and HR teams—you don’t need to integrate with or import data into your HR platform from a standalone ATS like Teamtailor. Its ATS also uses the same interface as the rest of the platform, including its navigation tabs, lowering the learning curve for users already familiar with BambooHR’s layout.

However, BambooHR is not the best ATS for teams with more than an occasional hiring need. For example, the system is still largely manual, requiring you to move candidates to the next stage in the pipeline since it does not include stage automations like Teamtailor and JazzHR. This can quickly become overwhelming if you have multiple positions and applicants to manage at once.

Nevertheless, BambooHR is significantly more approachable for new recruiting teams that need to understand the various aspects of the recruitment process. Its lack of automatic candidate scoring dramatically reduces the chance of violating AI transparency in hiring laws since the majority of actions human involvement.

Custom talent pools

BambooHR lets you create custom talent pools to source qualified candidates from past or current applications. The goal is to keep a talent reserve for future open roles. Talent pools also ensure you keep records of your silver medalist candidates to tap if your first choice for a position does not work out or you need sources for backfilling an urgent role.

Many other ATS offer talent pool functionality, which is one of the cornerstones of more strategic hiring. However, BambooHR excels in one key arena: simplicity. For instance, Breezy HR’s talent pool functionality is rolled into its open positions dashboard, making it difficult to distinguish between the two.

BambooHR, on the other hand, has a separate dashboard for talent pools. You can customize talent pools with icons to make them quicker to differentiate from one another. You can also include reasons why you added candidates to different talent pools to provide context when you return to their applications in the future.

BambooHR displays a talent pool dashboard for sales professionals with a candidate named John Stone listed, plus the job opening they applied for, star rating, added-on date, and the reason they were added. — BambooHR enables you to create talent pools for more control over how you categorize your candidates for future talent needs. Source: TechnologyAdvice

Document management

One major benefit of choosing BambooHR as your ATS is that any candidate who becomes your new employee keeps all their documents. Their application, resume, and offer letters move automatically with the candidate into your human resources information system (HRIS) without manual imports or data entry.

Unlike Breezy HR and JazzHR, which relegate offer letter management to higher price tiers, BambooHR offers these features standard. You can also upload existing company offer letters and edit them with placeholders that populate with candidate data, like name and address. Candidates are immediately funneled into BambooHR’s onboarding workflow, which collects additional documentation that they can e-sign for faster ramp-up periods.

BambooHR displays an edit offer letter template dashboard with a sample offer letter with gray boxes interspersed throughout the text, like the candidate's first name, job title, and start date, as placeholders. — You can create your own offer letters in BambooHR with field placeholders, allowing you to save templates to reuse over again for similar employment statuses. Source: TechnologyAdvice

BambooHR displays its candidate's dashboard with filters like job status and star rating on the left, plus a list in the middle of candidate names, job openings, statuses, star ratings, and last email.

BambooHR displays a résumé for a candidate named Fred Hunt in the middle, tabs for candidate info, notes, and emails at the top, and the candidate's star rating and demographic info on the right.

BambooHR displays its create a job opening page with a list of steps, including job information, application details, and job search on the left plus fields like posting title, job status, hiring lead, department, and compensation in the middle filled in with data about an open Staff Writer I position.

In 2024, BambooHR changed its pricing plans. What were once the Essentials and Advanced subscription tiers are now the Core and Pro plans. The lower Core tier has significantly more features, making it comparable to all-in-one HR software like Rippling and TriNet HR Platform.

However, because it is an HR suite, it is quite expensive compared to standalone ATS platforms. To access BambooHR’s hiring module, you must pay a minimum of $250 monthly for its Core plan.

With a pricing score of 3.13, BambooHR is the best choice if you’re also looking for an HRIS or onboarding system since you can access its ATS in all plans. However, its pricing is not transparent and you must contact sales for a price quote. Below is a quote we received based on 25 employees.

Core*

For up to 25 employees: $250 per month flat rate.
For more than 25 employees: $10 per employee per month (PEPM).
Volume discount applies after 25 or more employees.
Includes:
- HRIS and reporting.
- Hiring and onboarding.
- Time off and benefits tracking.
- Access to integrations marketplace.

Pro*

For up to 25 employees: $425 per month flat rate.
For more than 25 employees: $17 PEPM.
Volume discount applies after 25 or more employees.
Includes everything in Core plus:
- Performance management.
- Employee experience and rewards.
- Employee community.

Add-ons:

Payroll**: $190 base price for up to 25 employees; $7.47 per additional employee.
Benefits administration: $140 base price for up to 25 employees; ~$5.48 per additional. employee
Time tracking: $3 per employee for up to 25 employees; ~$2.97 per additional employee.

* There is a one-time implementation fee for the Core and Pro plans and the Payroll add-on. If you have fewer than 25 employees, you can opt for the QuickStart implementation for a lower fee.

** Please note that additional factors, like the number of FEINs or states where you need payroll, can affect this price. Please contact BambooHR for specific pricing quotes.

Currently, BambooHR offers a discount if you combine its payroll and benefits administration add-ons with its Core or Pro plans. Visit BambooHR below to learn more.

Greenhouse: Best for candidate experience and DEI

Greenhouse candidate profile. Source: Greenhouse

Overall Score

3.42/5

Applicant tracking features

3.69/5

Platform/interface

3.81/5

Reporting and analytics

3.69/5

Pricing

1.25/5

Support

2.76/5

User reviews

4.41/5

Pros

Huge integration marketplace of nearly 500 applications.
Chrome extension for prospecting candidates from social media sites like LinkedIn.
Predictive analytics for forecasting when a candidate will accept a job offer.

Cons

Uses an employee headcount model for pricing, making it costly for light recruitment needs.
Mobile hiring applications are poorly rated.

Why I chose Greenhouse

Greenhouse stands out for its dedication to fair and equitable hiring practices that create a better candidate hiring experience. It is the best choice if you want an ATS that forces your recruiting stakeholders to be more conscientious in their hiring decisions.

Greenhouse’s CRM tools, such as outbound recruiting functions, email outreach campaigns, talent pools, social media posting, and candidate experience surveys, also make it a better tool for planning future talent needs.

Despite this, Greenhouse only earned a 3.42 overall because its strategic hiring, reporting, and customization functions can be overwhelming for teams that only need an ATS. Its interface is more complex than Teamtailor or BambooHR, requiring more effort to locate the data to act quickly on incoming prospects.

Learn more about Greenhouse and its features in Lever vs Greenhouse Comparison 2024.

Greenhouse’s recruiting platform combines the capabilities of an ATS and a CRM. Where it lacks some of the user-friendly interface features of Teamtailor and Breezy HR, it makes up for this through its focus on structured hiring and DEI. This provides quality hiring experiences for job seekers plus tools to ensure you source applicants with respect to values fit.

Greenhouse includes all features typical of an ATS, from candidate auto-advance and rejections to visual drag-and-drop pipelines and collaborative application reviews. But Greenhouse embeds candidate-centric aspects throughout its platform, such as:

Job kickoff forms: Help stakeholders agree on job position requirements and candidate scoring.
Diverse job board distribution: Syndicate job posts to more than 1,000 job boards, including those targeting minority groups.
Anonymous assessment grading: Minimize hiring manager and recruiter bias when evaluating candidate skills.
Interview prep kits and scorecards: Create alignment and consistency during interviews.

However, Greenhouse’s emphasis on more strategic sourcing, candidate experience, and careful applicant evaluations can slow the hiring process. Many of Greenhouse’s features also fall outside those of a traditional ATS, even in its starter subscription. As a result, Greenhouse is better suited for experienced ATS users who want some of the strategic features for attracting passive candidates and making progress on company DEI initiatives.

Events hiring tool

Greenhouse’s events hiring tool is a unique mobile application for sourcing candidates from in-person events, like career fairs or industry conventions. Although the tool is specifically designed for iOS devices, it allows candidates to apply for jobs on the spot and have their information instantly transferred to your Greenhouse ATS.

The events hiring tool also lets you capture photos of resumes and other documents on the spot, plus important notes from conversations with candidates. Once the information is added to the ATS, Greenhouse’s reporting and analytics track these candidates’ progress in your hiring pipeline so you can invest in the hiring events that source the best recruits.

Greenhouse displays its Greenhouse Events application homepage with a list of events, like Rutgers Career Fair and Cheese Party, on the left, plus prospect names like Jean James and West East on the right. — Greenhouse Events’ mobile app lets you collect candidate information on the go from in-person events, broadening your candidate pool and the likelihood of finding top talent. Source: Greenhouse

Expert Tip

Career fairs are only one of many original ways to find candidates besides online job boards. For tips on finding top talent, check out 6 Creative Ways to Find and Hire Employees.

Anti-bias controls

Greenhouse provides a series of anti-bias tools that promote inclusivity throughout the software. For example, creating a new job requisition always includes job kickoff forms and scorecards to ensure all of your recruiting stakeholders evaluate each candidate based on their measurable skills and attributes rather than their personal backgrounds and personalities.

Greenhouse keeps candidates’ names and biographical information transparent, choosing to “nudge” recruiting stakeholders with reminders inside job posts, application reviews, interview kits, and scorecards to avoid biased thinking. The idea is to bring our biased tendencies to the forefront so that we can acknowledge and be less likely to act on them.

Greenhouse also asks candidates for their personal pronouns and name pronunciations before an interview. Besides giving you a chance to prepare and make the candidate feel comfortable, it is one of the most obvious ways to demonstrate your company’s DEI commitment to incoming talent. It also reduces the chance you make incorrect assumptions about candidates.

Greenhouse displays a dashboard with a weekly calendar at the top to select times for an interview, followed by a button to record a name and then the options "she/her/hers," "he/him/his," "they/them/theirs," and "self-describe, please specify" to select your personal pronouns. — When candidates provide their interview availability, Greenhouse lets them record their name pronunciation and personal pronouns so that they can feel more at ease during their meeting with your hiring team. Source: Greenhouse

Greenhouse displays its reports dashboard with a list of essential reports to choose from, such as individual goals over time, current pipeline per job, department summary, candidate pipeline email, and candidates by source.

Greenhouse displays its visual candidate pipeline for the position of Software Engineer I with columns for application review, preliminary phone screen, phone interview, and take-home test, plus the names of candidates in each stage.

Greenhouse displays its create a job dashboard with the interview plan tab open to show application review, preliminary phone screen, phone interview, and hiring manager review hiring stages, plus links to interview kits or questions to ask the candidate during each stage.

Greenhouse has three subscription plans: Essential, Advanced, and Expert. The company does not reveal its pricing, so you must contact its sales department for a custom quote.

Pricing depends on your employee headcount rather than the number of system users or recruiting stakeholders you have. Because even its lowest plan includes several CRM capabilities, like employee referral portals and surveying, Greenhouse is not ideal for small businesses that hire infrequently. You should not be surprised to pay thousands to tens of thousands of dollars annually for a Greenhouse Essential subscription if you have 50 or more workers.

With a score of 1.25, Greenhouse performed the worst in pricing of any provider in my roundup for reasons like its unclear contract requirements and lack of free trial. But remember, you may have some leeway negotiating your price as a result, especially if you’re evaluating multiple ATS simultaneously.

Essential

Includes:

Applicant tracking.
Talent pools.
Talent finder.
One Greenhouse Event.
DEI tools (name pronunciation, personal pronouns, and company initiatives).
Structured hiring.
Team collaboration.
Automated task management.
Multi-channel sourcing.
Core reports.
GDPR compliance.

Advanced

Includes everything in Essential plus:

10 Greenhouse Events.
Automated workflows.
Advanced data configuration.
Single sign on.
Custom reporting.
Advanced career page options.

Expert

Includes everything in Advanced plus:

Unlimited Greenhouse Events.
Expert data configuration.
Developer sandbox.
Connector to BI software.

Honorable mentions

Not all of my choices may be right for you. Check out my runners-up below for more options to fit your budget and business goals.

Rippling: Best for reporting and analytics

Alternative for: BambooHR

Overall score: 3.53/5

When to choose Rippling

Arguably, Rippling has a stronger ATS than its competitor BambooHR. Unlike BambooHR, you can customize pipeline stages (milestones) and facilitate interview arrangements.

In particular, it has the most detailed reporting and analytics of any platform here since you can combine recruitment information with any data point in its system. As a result, Rippling is a great tool for understanding the impact of your hiring process at every stage of the employee life cycle.

Plus, Rippling has just introduced AI summaries, something other ATSs currently don’t have. These summaries save recruiters and hiring managers time by pulling in important information from candidates profiles and providing an overall summary of their skills, education, and qualifications.

Why it didn’t make the list

Despite Rippling’s sleek interface, its ATS is confusing to navigate, especially if you are used to visual pipelines that let you drag and drop candidates between stages like Teamtailor and Breezy HR. It’s also an expensive choice if you only need an ATS since you must purchase Rippling Platform and the recruiting module to access it.

JazzHR: Best for SMBs

Alternative for: Teamtailor and Breezy HR

Overall score: 3.46/5

When to choose JazzHR

JazzHR offers a great balance of ATS features for small and medium businesses (SMBs) with moderate hiring needs. Features like its job post meta descriptions increase search visibility, while its resume parsing capabilities make it easier to search your candidate database for the skills you need.

If you have a large number of frontline workers, JazzHR allows you to scan resumes on your career site so candidates can apply in person with physical applications.

Why it didn’t make the list

JazzHR does not offer a mobile application, preventing you from managing hiring needs on the go. Also, most of its reporting capabilities are reserved for its highest subscription plan, Pro. Even necessary compliance reporting for EEO and the OFCCP is unavailable until its Pro plan subscription. As a result, JazzHR is not the best option if you’re a federal contractor and required to report on your affirmative action plans.

Read more about JazzHR’s features at Top 5 JazzHR Competitors & Alternatives.

Recruitee: Best for global recruiting

Alternative for: Greenhouse

Overall score: 3.26/5