Best Applicant Tracking Systems of 2024

Updated


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Applicant tracking systems (ATS) help businesses optimize and streamline the entire recruitment life cycle. By automating and simplifying some of the more repetitive tasks, the best ATS enable you to hire top talent quicker than ever before. We tested leading ATS to identify the best in the market.

Best Applicant Tracking System (ATS): Our Top Pick

We chose Zoho Recruit as the best ATS for its affordable pricing tiers, intuitive interface, dashboard, and navigation, and over 40 pre-built reports.

Our Top Picks

Zoho Recruit

Best ATS Overall

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Recruitee

Best for Fast Growth Companies

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JobScore

Best Employee Referral Features

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VIVAHR

Best for Recruitment Marketing

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ApplicantStack

Best for Small Budgets

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Odoo

Best Open-Source Option

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Digital.com dives deep into every topic it covers to offer trusted and reliable recommendations for the best business tools. See how we review applicant tracking systems.

Tips From an Expert

Understanding what you need is the crucial first step.

“If you want to hire top talent and provide an excellent candidate experience, you’ll need to implement a top ATS to help you. However, before you make your final decision, you must evaluate each of the best software solutions on the market. This will help you ensure that you’re investing in the right ATS for your unique recruiting, talent acquisition, and candidate relationship management needs.”

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The Top Applicant Tracking Systems (ATS)

Zoho logo

Zoho Recruit

Best ATS Overall

Features

  • Affordable pricing tiers
  • Intuitive interface and navigation
  • 40 pre-built reports + custom reports

#1 Top Pick

Zoho Recruit is an affordable ATS with a lot of value for the money. It’s a robust all-in-one platform, yet still easy to use.

Starting Price
Free plan, $25/month

Ease of Cancellation
1-month notice before end of your subscription

Capabilities
Applicant tracking, talent sourcing, candidate management & assessments, custom reporting, analytics

Read More

With its robust platform, cost-effective pricing plans, and highly-intuitive interface, Zoho Recruit tops the list of the best ATS solutions. In addition to strong, advanced ATS features, Zoho Recruit also offers video interviews, applicant portals, and employee referral portals to centralize all aspects of the recruiting life cycle.

Given its abundance of great features and high levels of customization, Zoho Recruit is an excellent choice for in-house HR teams and recruiters, and staffing and recruitment agencies alike.

The home screen inside Zoho Recruit. Shows unattended calls, completed interviews, upcoming interviews, and my actions

Zoho Recruit is an all-in-one recruiting and applicant tracking solution aimed at both in-house HR teams and recruiters and staffing and recruitment agencies.

I selected Zoho Recruit as the best ATS due to its:

  • Full range of core applicant tracking features
  • Intuitive user experience
  • Abundance of automations
  • Affordable pricing tiers

Thanks to the provider’s many useful video tutorials, I found Zoho Recruit easy to set up. And its features, while comprehensive, are straightforward enough to navigate and understand quickly. Plus, Zoho Recruit offers features such as video interviews, applicant portals, and employee referral portals to truly centralize and streamline all aspects of the recruiting life cycle.

The platform offers several AI-powered features as well as many customized rules and actions that help automate numerous parts of the recruitment process. You can also set up an inbox to which applicants can send their resumes through a portal, and the solution’s “Radius Search” feature identifies candidates in close proximity to you through matching skills and location information.

You can post job listings to multiple job boards in one click, push listings to your customizable careers portal and social media channels, and set up a dedicated employee referral portal to encourage existing employees to recommend suitable candidates.

It also has strong reporting features via syncing with its sister product, Zoho Analytics, to help you track and analyze recruitment data and optimize your processes.

Other features I rated highly include the ability to leave candidate reviews and ratings, attach notes and documents, and send emails and text messages from within the platform.

  • Who is Zoho Recruit best for?
    I found that Zoho Recruit is a great all-around choice for in-house HR teams and recruiters, and staffing and recruitment agencies. As a complete recruiting solution, Zoho Recruit is a great choice for businesses of all sizes, although its pricing might put the product out of reach of smaller businesses if they want to scale up from the provider’s free forever plan.
  • Recent upgrades to Zoho Recruit
    Boosting its already impressive functionality, Zoho Recruit recently announced the following product upgrades to help better manage your recruiting and hiring pipelines:
    • Multi-org functionality enables you to log in to multiple Zoho Recruit accounts with a single set of credentials
    • Complex searches enable you to filter and locate specific information based on keywords, field values, and proximity
    • Integration with scheduling platform Calendly to streamline the interview and meeting scheduling processes
  • Zoho Recruit pricing
    Pricing begins with a free forever plan for freelance recruiters or recruitment agency startups with one active job. Paid plans start at $25 per recruiter per month when paid annually.

Reasons to choose Zoho Recruit

  • Robust feature set
  • High levels of customization available
  • Intuitive, clutter-free interface
  • Zoho Recruit API for integration with third-party applications, portals, and websites

Reasons to avoid

  • Dashboards are a little underwhelming
  • Video interview tool costs extra
  • Initial setup can be lengthy

What Customers Are Saying About Zoho Recruit

Zoho Recruit has mostly positive reviews with a large sample of thousands of users. When reading through customer feedback, what stuck out to us was how flexible the application is for different use cases, including temporary workers, staffing agencies, and even enterprise HR departments.

Visit Zoho Recruit

Recruitee logo

Recruitee

Best for Fast Growth Companies

Features

  • Kanban-like recruiting pipeline
  • Highly-collaborative tool
  • Unlimited users

Starting Price
$222 per month

Ease of Cancellation
45-day guarantee

Capabilities
Applicant tracking, talent sourcing, candidate management & assessments, reporting

Read More

Recruitee is a well-known hiring and applicant tracking solution that’s great for fast-growing businesses looking for a cost-effective platform. The solution’s excellent roster of core ATS features, great collaborative hiring functionality, and excellent UI secures Recruitee’s well-deserved second place in the best ATS software.

Adding a new evaluation form inside of Recruitee

Recruitee is a hiring and applicant tracking solution with a strong focus on a user-friendly product and collaborative hiring features.

I selected this applicant tracking tool as best for fast-growing companies since it offers highly-scalable plans, enabling you to add five job postings to your plan as needed while retaining the same features.

Recruitee’s platform was easy to set up and customize. It has kanban board-style recruiting pipeline views, the ability to add as many stages to your unique recruiting workflows as possible, and the drag-and-drop functionality to move candidates from one stage to another easily.

It’s clear from the outset that Recruitee’s product is centered around collaborative hiring which enables businesses to remain agile and able to streamline their hiring processes.

For example, you can easily:

  • Request evaluations from interviewers
  • Share documents, notes, and candidate profiles with the right people
  • Collaboratively review candidate profiles via in-app chat and project workflows

You can also create customizable scorecards and evaluation forms.

The platform is also highly customizable, enabling you to set up the applicant tracking solution to fit your exact needs. You can create automation triggers for pipeline stages. For example, you can create a trigger that automatically disqualifies a candidate based on a specific reason and automatically requests a candidate evaluation from others at certain points along the hiring process.

  • Who is Recruitee best for?
    Recruitee is a good choice for fast-growing businesses that want to amplify their applicant tracking processes and their entire recruiting and hiring processes.
  • Recent upgrades to Recruitee
    Recruitee provides a detailed product roadmap page on its website, divided into three sections: “In research,” “Under consideration,” and “In development.”

    According to the page, there are several product updates currently in development:
    • Unbiased hiring features that will help teams make more objective hiring decisions by hiding candidates’ profile details (candidate name, picture, gender, and age)
    • An integration with ADP Workforce Now
    • An option to mark candidates as hired and limit access to their profiles
  • Recruitee pricing
    Recruitee’s plans are $222 to $399 per month or custom pricing for a top-tier plan. The pricing page offers a drop-down list of “job slot” values for both the Launch and Scale plans. As the amount of job slots increases, so does the price for each tier.

Reasons to choose Recruitee

  • Unlimited users
  • Customizable, built-in evaluations
  • Easy-to-use interface with Kanban-style boards
  • Communication between all stakeholders

Reasons to avoid

  • Lacks a free plan
  • Limited reporting features
  • Can become unwieldy with 50+ candidates
  • Onboarding is only available for customers in the highest pricing tiers and only via integrations

Visit Recruitee

JobScore logo

JobScore

Best Employee Referral Features

Features

  • Generous free plan
  • Customizable job workflows
  • Robust employee referral feature

Starting Price
Free plan, $99/month

Ease of Cancellation
Cancel any time

Capabilities
Applicant tracking, talent sourcing, candidate management & assessments, reporting

Read More

JobScore offers an enjoyable user experience and core ATS features for small businesses with low hiring volumes. The provider also has a generous free plan for businesses that only need to hire one candidate at a time. However, the platform lacks some important automation features needed to streamline recruitment processes.

Building an automation in JobScore. Shows events, conditions, and actions

JobScore is an ATS for in-house recruiters with a strong focus on employee referral features.

The provider offers the core applicant tracking features you’d expect from an ATS platform and has unlimited users across all of its plans. Yet JobScore doesn’t offer as many bells and whistles as the top three ATS — Zoho Recruit, Recruitee, and Freshteam.

Despite this, I was impressed with the platform’s minimalist design and UI, and its free plan offering which includes one active job listing and the same functionality as its paid plans.

I found that JobScore’s setup was straightforward. You’re instantly greeted with a quick start guide that steers you logically through the setup of the relevant features the platform has to offer. Once you’ve put these processes in place, the platform is highly navigable and intuitive.

In addition to the drag-and-drop functionality that captures candidates’ resume details, JobScore offers a decent reporting tool that helps you monitor your job postings to see how many clicks and views you’re receiving. This very handy tool helps you evaluate which sourcing channels are working best for you.

While JobScore’s workflow stages are functional, they don’t quite offer the same level of uncluttered organization as platforms with Kanban-style boards such as Zoho Recruit and Recruitee. Yet I did appreciate the help window that appears next to the workflow stages pane which guides you through setting them up in the most logical way.

  • Who is JobScore best for?
    JobScore is designed for in-house recruiters with low hiring volumes since even its most expensive package only allows you to manage 10 open jobs.
  • Recent upgrades to JobScore
    JobScore has a product upgrade page that is updated on a semi-regular basis. Here’s how JobScore has upgraded its product offering over the last 12 months:
    • Added fields to enter public compensation data for jobs on your careers site for compliance with pay transparency laws
    • Interviews can now be inserted into the candidate stage menu
    • LinkedIn recently made JobScore a GOLD LinkedIn talent solutions partner. Applicants can import data from their LinkedIn profile when applying for a job from your JobScore-hosted careers site
  • JobScore pricing
    JobScore’s Start plan ($99/month) and Scale plan ($299/month) only allow you to manage five and 10 open jobs at a time respectively; I appreciated that there are no additional costs per user. This means that an unlimited number of people can use the platform.

Reasons to choose JobScore

  • Clean, uncluttered UI
  • Unlimited users
  • Robust employee referral features
  • All plans include a career page builder

Reasons to avoid

  • No 24/7 customer support
  • Lacks advanced automation features
  • Many integrations are only on higher tiers
  • Expensive for the number of open jobs

Visit JobScore

VIVAHR logo

VIVAHR

Best for Recruitment Marketing

Features

  • Unique culture pages for each job posting
  • Self-uploading candidate resumes
  • Custom candidate questionnaires

Starting Price
7-day trial, $71/month

Ease of Cancellation
Not refundable

Capabilities
Applicant tracking, talent sourcing, candidate management & assessments, reporting

Read More

VIVAHR is a simple ATS with a strong focus on recruitment marketing features. The solution offers solid ATS features and reasonable pricing tiers. With limited reporting functionality and career page customization options, though, VIVAHR isn’t the most comprehensive ATS solution on the market.

Main dashboard inside of VIVAHR. Shows new candidates, total hired, and total disqualified with a list of active jobs

VIVAHR is an ATS designed with small businesses in mind, offering a good roster of standard, highly-functional ATS features and reasonable pricing for packages with unlimited users and candidates. The platform is simple while offering the ideal ATS tools you need to optimize your hiring processes.

Although the name of the product suggests that it offers other HR features, its feature set is limited to applicant tracking and recruitment marketing tools.

VIVAHR’s UI is clean, uncluttered, and easy to navigate. The platform’s standout features include its tool for creating unique culture pages and profiles for each job posting. This helps you market the job for each role, and source and engage the right candidates.

Although more basic than its competitors’ offerings, I liked VIVAHR’s branded career page builder that enables you to add your company’s logo and color palette.

Evaluating candidates and providing feedback is easy with the platform’s side-by-side resume and ratings view. You can also create custom scorecards for each of your job postings and include the criteria most important for the role.

Overall, VIVAHR offers a sleek and modern platform with just the right amount of solid ATS features for small businesses, with a unique focus on recruitment marketing unlike most of the solution’s competitors.

  • Who is VIVAHR for?
    VIVAHR is a good choice for businesses looking for a simple ATS with a strong focus on recruitment marketing. The Starter plan, which begins at $129/month, offers many solid features and tools that would suit startups and small businesses. Since its two most expensive plans offer unlimited job postings, users, and candidates, it could also be a good choice for fast-growing companies with ambitious growth plans.

    If you’re seeking a more robust, end-to-end recruiting solution, you’ll need to look elsewhere like Zoho Recruit and Recruitee which provide post-offer functionality such as onboarding.
  • Recent upgrades to VIVAHR
    Unfortunately, I couldn’t find any information on VIVAHR’s product upgrades, neither from the platform’s website nor its Twitter and LinkedIn profiles. This is disappointing, especially considering most of VIVAHR’s direct competitors openly display product roadmaps and/or recent upgrades.

    Yet VIVAHR does offer a wealth of resources, including a huge bank of job description templates for different positions, and other hiring resources such as human resources templates, job interview questions, and detailed job board guides.
  • VIVAHR pricing
    If you want access to unlimited job postings with VIVAHR’s Grow plan, $179/month is very reasonable. But it seems that this is the only extra feature you’re offered as a step up from the Starter plan. I like that VIVAHR’s pricing plans are completely scalable as you grow and offer great value for the money when you consider its strong recruitment marketing focus.

Reasons to choose VIVAHR

  • Very user-friendly interface
  • Good roster of collaboration features
  • Unlimited candidates with all plans
  • Customizable candidate pipelines

Reasons to avoid

  • Short free trial period
  • Limited reporting functionality
  • Cannot cancel your subscription at any time
  • Limited career page customization

Visit VIVAHR

ApplicantStack logo

ApplicantStack

Best for Small Budgets

Features

  • No-frills UI
  • Customizable workflows
  • Self-explanatory set-up

Starting Price
14-day trial, $99/month

Ease of Cancellation
Cancel any time

Capabilities
Applicant tracking, limited talent sourcing, candidate management & assessments, reporting

Read More

ApplicantStack has basic yet functional ATS features for smaller businesses. While it doesn’t offer the advanced features that many businesses might need to manage a bustling candidate pipeline, the solution is a good, no-frills system that comes at a reasonable price.

List of applicants inside of ApplicantStack

ApplicantStack is an ATS that’s best suited to recruiters or smaller teams that need a simple, straightforward solution with basic ATS functionality. I found that despite the platform’s lack of advanced features that prevent it from competing with the likes of Zoho Recruit, Recruitee, and Freshteam, the pricing plans and associated features do provide good value for the money.

Moving candidates through the pipeline is easy to do, with one-click actions that include a phone screen, interview, and reference check. You can also set up automations to email candidates when they get moved on to the next stage to facilitate interview scheduling and manage the rejection processes.

Also, you can make use of the platform’s “Rule Wizard,” a tool that helps to rank and score applicants based on their resumes. Beyond this, you can also use the platform’s “Questions” module to ask applicants specific questions to help you define your own hiring criteria and apply your scores to each applicant.

Publishing job listings to your internal job board and recruitment sites such as Indeed, Glassdoor, CareerBuilder, Monster, and ZipRecruiter can be done in one click. ApplicantStack also offers several turn-key reports, including applicants per day, the number of applicants and hires from each source, and candidate activity summary.

If you’re looking for a solution to help you manage a relatively small hiring plan, you might not need more than what ApplicantStack currently offers.

Overall, I found that ApplicantStack’s pricing is level with the features it offers in each tier. The platform’s navigation is not as easy or intuitive as some of its competitors, though.

  • Who is ApplicantStack best for?
    ApplicantStack is a great, low-cost option for businesses that don’t have an in-house recruiter or hiring team and that want to hire lower volumes of employees, or for inexperienced recruiters looking for a basic ATS.
  • Recent upgrades to ApplicantStack
    ApplicantStack doesn’t offer much in the way of a product roadmap or upgrade information, but we found the following updates:
    • A new Indeed Sponsored Jobs integration that allows you to post a job to your Indeed Sponsored Job account with a couple clicks from the ApplicantStack platform
    • A new partnership with background screening provider Verified First for a variety of background screening services
  • ApplicantStack pricing
    ApplicantStack pricing ranges from $99 to $144 per month, with the starter plan providing basic ATS functionality for a flat fee with no contracts or cancellation costs involved. It could be a good option if you’re looking for a no-fuss, no-frills system for a reasonable price.

Reasons to choose ApplicantStack

  • Straightforward setup
  • In-app wizard and tips
  • Pricing is in line with feature offering
  • Customizable workflows

Reasons to avoid

  • Limited feature set
  • No phone or live chat support
  • Lacks reporting features
  • Dated interface

What Customers Are Saying About ApplicantStack

ApplicantStack can make the job of recruiting potential employees easier for small employers and HR departments alike. This applicant tracking system (ATS) is user-friendly and helps simplify the hiring process. However, if your company needs to integrate with job boards, there are better ATS options available.

Visit ApplicantStack

Odoo logo

Odoo

Best Open-Source Option

Features

  • Kanban-style candidate boards
  • Activity view of candidate pipeline
  • Easy to create new job positions

Starting Price
Free plan + 15-day trial

Ease of Cancellation
60-day guarantee

Capabilities
Applicant tracking, talent sourcing, candidate management, reporting, and analytics

Read More

As an open-source ERP tool, Odoo operates on a modular basis — you only pay for the modules you need. While Odoo is a highly API-friendly solution, the out-of-the-box solution lacks the modern interface and advanced features that most of its competitors offer.

Adding a new employee inside of Odoo

Odoo is an open-source ERP tool with a suite of modules created for small to medium-sized businesses. From accounting and inventory, to project management and recruiting, you can select the modules to use according to your business needs.

If you only want to use Odoo’s recruitment module, then the platform is free. Thanks to its modular design, Odoo is a highly API-friendly solution that offers a large degree of flexibility for businesses.

Yet Odoo’s recruitment module is not as easy to use as many of its competitors. When setting the system up, I found that it took a lot longer to set up since it’s not a plug-and-play solution. Without the customization needed, Odoo’s interface is incredibly basic and not super intuitive compared to competitors.

However, after some digging around, I figured out how to change the candidate applications tab to a kanban-board style, view the pipeline stages more clearly, and begin adding extra columns.

Odoo’s reporting tab gives you some insight into your recruitment pipelines and processes. This is another area where, without customization, you can’t glean a huge amount of relevant information, though.

Once you’ve received applications from candidates, you can begin scheduling tasks such as interviews, emails and calls, and generating job offer links and the option to create a new employee. However, without customization, I found that there was a large chasm between the candidate evaluation stages and moving candidates to the rejection/offer stages.

After all, using one Odoo module is free, and the platform appears to offer a good level of customization — if you know how.

  • Who is Odoo best for?
    While Odoo certainly involves a much bigger learning curve than most, if not all of its competitors, the platform could be a good option for businesses with a solid IT team that could help get the most out of the solution.
  • Recent upgrades to Odoo
    Odoo releases a new version of its ERP every year. If you use a cloud version of Odoo recruitment, updates will be taken care of automatically. But if you utilize your own hosting infrastructure, you’ll need to update both the source code and database.
  • Odoo pricing
    If you only need Odoo’s recruitment module, the platform is free for unlimited users and for an unlimited time, which means you only pay for what you use. You can also download the community version for free. You’ll only start paying when you begin adding other modules. Pricing depends on which modules you need and how many users you want to add.

Reasons to choose Odoo

  • Expandable when you need it
  • Recruitment module on its own is free
  • Flexible, modular design
  • Unlimited scalability

Reasons to avoid

  • Dated, sometimes clunky UI
  • Limited features
  • Not a plug-and-play solution
  • Complicated pricing plans

What Customers Are Saying About Odoo

Offering numerous integrations and options for customization, Odoo is solid enterprise resource planning software that is easy to use for companies of all sizes. As open-source software, the entry-level option is free for one app, but the paid options can get pricey. A large number of developers and users are available to help answer questions.

Visit Odoo

Compare Applicant Tracking Systems (ATS)

Applicant Tracking System

Best Features

Starting Price

Zoho logo

Zoho Recruit

Best ATS Overall

  • Affordable pricing tiers + free plan
  • Intuitive interface and navigation
  • 40 pre-built reports + custom reports

$25 per month

Recruitee logo

Recruitee

Best for Fast Growth Companies

  • Kanban-like recruiting pipeline
  • Highly-collaborative tool
  • Unlimited users

$222 per month

JobScore logo

JobScore

Best Employee Referral Features

  • Generous free plan
  • Customizable job workflows
  • Robust employee referral feature

$99 per month

VIVAHR logo

VIVAHR

Best for Recruitment Marketing

  • Unique culture pages for each job posting
  • Self-uploading candidate resumes
  • Custom candidate questionnaires

$71 per month

ApplicantStack logo

ApplicantStack

Best for Small Budgets

  • No-frills UI
  • Customizable workflows
  • Self-explanatory set-up

$99 per month

Odoo logo

Odoo

Best Open-Source Option

  • Kanban-style candidate boards
  • Activity view of candidate pipeline
  • Easy to create new job positions

Free

What You Need to Know

What makes a good applicant tracking system?

A good Applicant Tracking System (ATS) must provide quick and simple search functionality with great results that are displayed in a logical format and are easy to understand and comprehend. A good applicant tracking system would also provide excellent resume parsing capabilities to make searching easier and more accurate.

What types of applicant tracking systems exist?

There are two main types of ATS: Stand alone and all-in-one HR suites. Which type you invest in will differ depending on your needs and what software and systems your company already has in place.

What are the benefits of an ATS?

The benefits of an ATS can include:

  • Improvement of the efficiency of the recruitment process
  • Personalization of the candidate experience
  • And continued enhance ment of the recruitment process

What are the drawbacks of an ATS?

The drawbacks of an ATS may include:

  • Automatic elimination of every resume that the system can’t read and interpret
  • Missing out on potential great hires and great pipeline talent when resumes are eliminated
  • Misread resumes in PDF format
  • The inability to read most, if not all, graphics
  • Incorrectly categorized data from resumes that were created in an unusual format

How We Review Applicant Tracking Systems

I tested each ATS by signing up and purchasing a plan to check out what each provider offers users. In addition, I spent time navigating the software, testing features, and evaluating integration options. I also noted the level of customer support that’s available to you. Evaluating each platform’s core features and how well they serve the intended audience, I took note of any unique features, assessed pricing options, and ascertained whether a free trial or demo is available.

I took an in-depth look at each ATS software solution as a whole and evaluated them based on the five key features:

  • Core applicant tracking features: does the platform offer applicant tracking, talent sourcing, candidate management, candidate assessment, and reporting and analytics?
  • Robust third-party integrations: does the platform integrate with the job boards, HR systems, and social media platforms you already use within your recruiting processes?
  • Ease of use: how easy it would be for businesses to implement the software, the ease of task automation, the system’s navigation and interface, and finally, its customer support options?
  • Demo or free trial: does the software offer a demo or free trial?
  • Final costs and ease of cancellation: will the platform can scale with you at a cost that you can afford?

I tested the effectiveness of each provider’s features, and how well the provider presents its products in an honest, clear, and transparent way. During my tests, I also compared the list of features each company claims it offers, to what I actually had access to once I began using the platform.

Learn more about our review methodology.

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