Free to use if you only use Odoo’s recruitment application
Best features:
Kanban-style candidate boards
Activity view of candidate pipeline
Easy to create new job positions
ATS help businesses optimize and streamline countless processes throughout 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. That’s why I spent over 40 hours researching dozens of ATS to identify the best in the market.
I sat through demos, evaluated the products during free trials, combed through customer reviews, and assessed each product’s pricing options and feature set to create the definitive list of the top applicant tracking solutions.
About Digital.com’s expert reviewer, Rhiân Davies:
I’m a digital marketing specialist, specializing in HR, recruitment, and e-commerce. A seasoned tech writer and reviewer, my work has appeared on MarTechSeries, HR Technologist, and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.
In addition to our seasoned editorial team, I surveyed and spoke with past and current power users of each platform to get real-world feedback on these platforms and take them into account in my review.
How I Rated the Applicant Tracking System Providers
I took an in-depth look at each ATS software solution as a whole and evaluated them based on the five key features and factors below.
The right ATS provides your HR and hiring teams with a centralized recruiting and hiring platform, helps them find more candidates, and completes tasks faster.
When evaluating each ATS software platform, I noted the presence of the following key applicant tracking features and evaluated how well each of these features performs:
Applicant tracking
Talent sourcing
Candidate management
Candidate assessment
Reporting and analytics
Robust third-party integrations
Making sure that the ATS platform integrates with the job boards, HR systems, and social media platforms you already use within your recruiting processes is essential.
Not only do third-party integrations reduce platform switching, but they support improved data accuracy, speeder decision-making, and a better overall user experience.
Ease of use
Whether you’re hiring your first employee or your thousandth, using an ATS should make it easier to manage your candidate pipeline and hire the best candidates. When testing each ATS solution, I looked at 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
The availability of demos and/or free trials is a key factor I took into consideration when evaluating ATS solutions.
You can’t judge an ATS solution by its cover, so gaining an in-depth understanding of the features through free trials and demos is essential to help you make the right selection.
Testing the platform enables you to evaluate how suitable the solution is for your needs and how well it can scale, and will also help you determine whether it’s missing any must-have features that would make it incompatible for your use case.
Final costs and ease of cancellation
While there’s no standard pricing for ATS solutions, you’ll need to be aware of how providers stack up against each other in terms of cost. While some providers charge a flat fee for the use of a platform, others charge a flat fee plus extra per user, per month.
When making a final decision, you’ll need to keep your hiring, recruitment, and overall business goals in mind, and consider whether your chosen platform can scale with you at a cost that you can afford.
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.
Starting price: Free for 1 active job
Applicant tracking: Yes
Talent sourcing: Yes
Candidate management: Yes
Candidate assessment: Yes
Reporting and analytics: Yes
Free trial or demo: 15-day free trial
Ease of cancellation: 45-day money-back guarantee
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.
Pros and cons of Zoho Recruit
Pros
Robust feature set
High levels of customization available
Intuitive, clutter-free interface
Zoho Recruit API for integration with third-party applications, portals, and websites
Cons
Comple system for businesses looking for a standalone ATS
Dashboards are a little underwhelming
Video interview tool costs extra
Initial system setup and configuration 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.
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.
Starting price: Prices start at $222/month for 10 job slots
Applicant tracking: Yes
Talent sourcing: Yes
Candidate management: Yes
Candidate assessment: Yes
Reporting and analytics: Yes
Free trial or demo: 14-day trial
Ease of cancellation: 1-month notice before your subscription expires
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.
Pros and cons of Recruitee
Pros
Unlimited users
Easy-to-use interface with kanban-style boards
Customizable, built-in evaluations
Communication between all stakeholders can be found in one place
Cons
Limited reporting features
Onboarding is only available for customers in the highest pricing tiers and only via integrations
Lacks a free plan that other direct competitors offer
Can become unwieldy when adding over 50 candidates
Freshteam’s end-to-end recruiting platform is a great choice for a broad range of businesses with reasonable pricing options and robust ATS features. The provider also offers a very generous free forever plan for up to 50 employees, unlike many of its main competitors. But the system does have a higher learning curve than other modern ATS solutions.
Starting price: $1 to $4 per employee/month, plus $59 to $169 platform fee/month
Applicant tracking: Yes
Talent sourcing: Yes
Candidate management: Yes
Candidate assessment: Yes
Reporting and analytics: Yes
Free trial or demo: 21-day trial
Ease of cancellation: Cancel anytime policy
Freshteam is an HR and recruiting solution with a strong focus on optimizing the various recruiting and hiring processes for growing companies. The platform offers a comprehensive recruiting feature set for companies looking for an end-to-end solution, as well as strong applicant tracking features.
A well-known recruiting solution, Freshteam’s platform offers a highly-intuitive user experience with clutter-free dashboards and a sleek design. I found the setup and customization processes a breeze to complete, and was impressed with its deep feature set.
Like its other popular competitors, Zoho Recruit and Recruitee, Freshteam offers a kanban board style to track and manage candidates across the various pipeline stages. The platform also has impressive resume parsing functionality, as well as a tool that auto-populates candidate profiles based on their online resumes.
I found it easy to create job postings and publish them across multiple job boards. Moreover, I also enjoyed how simple it was to design a career site since it provides all of the relevant fields and customization you’ll need to put your company’s branding front and center.
Freshteam offers a high level of customization and automation features, with options to create custom workflow stages for each job post and customized application forms. You can also take advantage of autopilot workflow automations that reduce the amount of manual, repetitive actions usually involved in the hiring process.
I also found Freshteam’s talent center to be practical and uncomplicated. You can move candidates through the hiring funnel from one window, arrange interview processes and video interviews within the platform, and develop useful feedback scorecards for candidates.
Overall, Freshteam provides a robust applicant tracking tool for growing businesses, and an excellent free-forever plan for up to 50 employees, which is uncommon among its competitors.
Who is Freshteam best for?
My testing showed that Freshteam is a good choice for expanding teams, especially small businesses.
Recent upgrades to Freshteam
In general, Freshteam continuously improves its already broad product offering. Recently, the platform announced the following upgrades:
New hire forms enable you to easily capture new hires’ details and data, and you can add custom fields to suit your needs
Passive candidate management with Freshteam CRM allows you to broaden your top-of-the-funnel sourcing
An integration with Checkr, an AI-powered background verification platform, offers you different types of background checks, the ability to track their progress, and review the results within the Freshteam dashboard
Freshteam pricing
Freshteam offers a very generous free forever plan for up to 50 employees, unlike many of its main competitors. This makes Freshteam a great option for smaller businesses looking to centralize their recruiting processes into one platform. In fact, considering Freshteam’s feature offering — and that it’s an end-to-end recruiting platform — the solution’s paid plans are cheaper than many of its competitors.
Pros and cons of Freshteam
Pros
Generous free forever plan for up to 50 employees
Kanban-style view of the full hiring process
Highly scalable platform for growing teams
Robust ATS features
Cons
Can be unsuitable for larger businesses that do volume hiring
Could benefit from more third-party integrations
Higher learning curve than other, more basic ATS systems
Amount of features can be overwhelming for smaller teams
What customers are saying about Freshteam
Those looking to make the hiring and onboarding of new employees easier should consider Freshteam. It can streamline all of the steps in the recruitment process and offers HR options as well.
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.
Starting price: $99 to $299/month
Applicant tracking: Yes
Talent sourcing: Yes
Candidate management: Yes
Candidate assessment: Yes
Reporting and analytics: Yes
Free trial or demo: 30-day free trial
Ease of cancellation: Cancel anytime policy
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.
Pros and cons of JobScore
Pros
Clean, uncluttered UI
Robust employee referral features
Unlimited users
All plans include a career page builder
Cons
Lacks automation features
No 24/7 customer support
Many important integrations are only available with most expensive plans
Expensive plans for the number of open jobs you can advertise
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.
Starting price: $129 to $279/month
Applicant tracking: Yes
Talent sourcing: Yes
Candidate management: Yes
Candidate assessment: Yes
Reporting and analytics: Yes
Free trial or demo: 7-day trial
Ease of cancellation: Fees for each subscription term are non-cancelable and non-refundable
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.
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.
Starting price: $99 to $144/month
Applicant tracking: Yes
Talent sourcing: Yes, but limited
Candidate management: Yes
Candidate assessment: Yes
Reporting and analytics: Yes
Free trial or demo: 15-day free trial
Ease of cancellation: Cancel anytime policy
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.
Pros and cons of ApplicantStack
Pros
Straightforward setup and implementation
In-app wizard and tips
Pricing is in line with feature offering
Customizable workflows
Cons
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.
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.
Starting price: Free if you only use Odoo’s recruitment package app
Applicant tracking: Yes
Talent sourcing: Yes
Candidate management: Yes
Candidate assessment: No
Reporting and analytics: Yes, but limited
Free trial or demo: 15-day free trial
Ease of cancellation: Refund claims are allowed within the first two months after the purchase date
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.
Pros and cons of Odoo
Pros
You can add standalone applications as and when needed
Recruitment module on its own is free to use
Flexible, modular design
Unlimited scalability
Cons
Dated, sometimes clunky UI
Limited features
Not a plug-and-play solution
Complicated pricing plans when adding extra applications
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.
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 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.
I selected each ATS solution based on it being at the top of its game for one aspect of applicant tracking or another. In particular, I assessed each solution’s ease of use, core ATS features (including applicant tracking, talent sourcing, candidate management, candidate assessment, and reporting and analytics), and integrations offering.
From all-in-one ATS solutions to modular platforms, I’ve put together this list of the best of the best to help you find an ATS solution that suits your business and recruiting needs.
