Applicant tracking systems let hiring officials manage job postings, sort through applications from prospective employees and hire the most qualified workers, all from a single centralized interface. Looking for the best ATS for your business? In our article below, we help you weigh the best ATS’ features, benefits and costs so you can find the right ATS for your business’s budget and needs.

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The best applicant tracking systems: Feature comparison table

FeatureRipplingPinpointFreshteam by FreshworksWorkdayBambooHR
Job board integrationsYesYesYesYesYes
Career page hostingNoYesYesYesYes
Collaboration tools for hiring managersYesYesYesYesYes
Customized hiring workflowsYesYesYesYesYes
Automated schedulingYesYesYesYesYes
Employee referral programNoYesYesYesYes
Starting price per month$8 per employee$600Free (allows for three active job postings)Custom pricing onlyCustom pricing only

Leading Applicant Tracking Systems

ATSs can provide both hiring and recruiting tools for teams looking to bring in new employees. Most large enterprises and a growing number of smaller companies are utilizing these ATSs to help sort through resumes quickly and efficiently to find the best candidates for a role. If you’re considering an ATS, we recommend looking at one of the following top providers.

Rippling: Best all-in-one ATS

Rippling logo.
Image: Rippling

Rippling’s ATS tool has the largest swath of positive reviews among the businesses that utilize an ATS. This cloud-based software system boasts high ratings from a number of different outlets for its ease of use and all-in-one capabilities.

Rippling syncs with various calendar applications such as Outlook, iCal, Google Calendar and other applications to take the onus off of the manager to get an interview time scheduled. The integration allows your hiring manager to view multiple calendars at the same time and find which times work best to conduct interviews to prospective candidates.

As with any platform, Rippling does have its drawbacks, however. Many reviews have noted that while Rippling has an easy-to-use interface, lack of support has been noted as an issue for those running into technical or clerical errors with the platform. Lack of customer service and slow to respond technical support have been the most common complaints with the ATS.

All in all, Rippling’s ATS tool is a great pick if you want features like user-friendly hiring manager collaboration, candidate tracking and candidate experience organization.

Rippling pricing

Rippling’s all-inclusive human capital management system starts at $8 per employee per month on top of an unlisted base fee. Rippling plans are fairly easy to customize, though each tool you add costs an extra per-employee fee. If you’re looking for a more affordable ATS solution than Rippling, you could find a better match on our list of the best free ATS solutions for small businesses.

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Pinpoint

Pintpoint logo.
Image: Pinpoint

Pinpoint is a relatively new solution within the ATS industry, offering hiring teams the ability to work within a branded career website to jumpstart the recruitment process. This solution provides simplification of the career page hosting by having the hiring manager spend less time on admin duties, making good talent acquisition faster and reducing the cost typically associated with recruitment agency spending.

Pinpoint boasts a branded careers website, capable of posting to over 1,450 job sites while maintaining the brand’s existing guidelines and house styles. The platform can assist teams and users by suggesting job descriptions to pull in more qualified candidates, and the ability to change the listings on all job boards once a position has been added, edited or removed from the branded site.

Pinpoint pricing

Pinpoint offers two plans: Growth, which starts at $600 a month, and Enterprise, which starts at $1,200 per month. The actual price you’ll pay for Pinpoint depends on your business’s size, however.

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Freshteam by Freshworks

Freshworks logo.
Image: Freshworks

Freshteam is a popular option from Freshworks that offers either free or paid options for hiring teams looking to create and host a career page through an ATS tool. The solution allows hiring managers and their teams to quickly set up a career site with customizable options ranging from a simple list of job openings to a collection of employees sharing their experiences with the company to attract potential candidates. Once a potential candidate has applied, they are then routed to the Freshteam ATS where their profiles can be combed through by the hiring team.

Freshteam pricing

Freshteam is free for businesses with up to 50 employees and no more than three active job postings at a time. Freshteam also offers three paid plans:

  • Growth (20 active job postings): $71 per month + $1.20 per employee per month.
  • Pro (100 active job postings): $119 per month + $2.40 per employee per month.
  • Enterprise (unlimited active job postings): $203 per month + $4.80 per employee per month.

Try Freshworks

Workday

The Workday logo.
Image: Workday

Workday is an incredibly powerful tool known for its work alongside major companies like Bank of America, Target and Patagonia. By giving your recruiter or hiring manager the ability to post a clear job description, then sort through thousands of potential candidates and their applications all with a few simple clicks, Workday’s recruiting software can provide businesses with peace of mind knowing they are pulling the correct employee from a large applicant pool.

Workday pricing

Workday offers custom pricing only. According to user reviews, Workday is one of the more expensive ATSs on the market today.

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BambooHR

The BambooHR logo.
Image: BambooHR

BambooHR is one of the premier HR platforms for small and midsize businesses. Its ATS solution has thorough collaboration tools, with the ability to cut communication time by allowing for customization in hiring roles, automated notifications, offer letter templates and new hire packages. Using their suite of collaboration tools, enterprises can get offers out to job seekers faster and begin the onboarding process very quickly after an offer has been accepted.

BambooHR pricing

BambooHR offers two plans: Essentials and Advantage. Advantage is the only BambooHR plan that includes an ATS. While the ATS company doesn’t list pricing on its site, getting a custom quote is a fairly easy process. You can also opt for a 21-day free trial.

As an all-in-one human resource management suite, BambooHR also offers add-on features like benefits administration and full-service payroll software. Make sure to account for these extra costs while budgeting for your ATS solution.

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JazzHR

Jazzhr logo.
Image: JazzHR

JazzHR is a top recruitment software option for many small to medium businesses (SMBs) as their aggregate recruiting tool allows users to post across various job site networks, both free and paid. Users of the platform can purchase job traffic through pay-per-click and pay-per-post job boards from around the internet. This promotes better organization of suitable candidates through a watchlist once a set number of candidates are chosen for interviews, giving the hiring team control over settings, which ultimately creates a more specialized experience for the recruitment team when sourcing candidates.

JazzHR pricing

JazzHR has three plans that make scaling up simple for growing companies:

  • Hero: Starts at $49 per month and allows for three active job postings. Companies can add extra active job postings for $9 per posting. Hero costs $99 a month for staffing companies only.
  • Plus: Starts at $239 per month. Allows for unlimited active job postings.
  • Pro: Starts at $359 per month. Allows for unlimited active job postings.

Try JazzHR

Greenhouse

Greenhouse logo.
Image: Greenhouse

Greenhouse is another popular ATS tool, used by a number of notable companies such as DoorDash, Wayfair and DocuSign. The platform can assist those overseeing large businesses as well as the more intricate needs of SMBs as well. The platform allows hiring teams the ability to optimize and access postings for over 1,000 job boards and Greenhouse boasts its own job ad market. This board makes the recruiting process easier by recommending candidates based on historical and industry performance all within Greenhouse’s board.

Greenhouse pricing

Greenhouse has three plans: Essential, Advanced and Expert. The site doesn’t list its pricing online. To get a quote, you must schedule a demo through Greenhouse’s website.

Try Greenhouse

Recooty

Recooty logo.
Image: Recooty

Recooty is another ATS solution that is known for its ease of use for hiring teams. The dashboard within this system allows hiring teams to check resumes and create a shortlist based on the most qualified candidates that have submitted applications. Recooty, in addition to its reputation as an easy-to-use tool, is also more affordable for SMB’s than some of the larger ATS platforms.

Recooty pricing

Recooty has three plans and clear, transparent pricing:

  • Pro: Starts at $49 per month and allows for 10 active job listings.
  • Ultra: Starts at $99 per month and allows for 25 active job listings.
  • Max: Starts at $199 per month and allows for 75 active job listings.

Try Recooty

Breezy

Breezy logo.
Image: Breezy

Breezy offers a leg up in team collaboration by giving managers the capacity to organize different teams and assign individual members to those teams with no restrictions on the team members that can be invited. In addition, users of Breezy can discuss and evaluate potential hires in real-time, and allow for the shared scorecards of applicants to help companies find the best fit for their organization’s needs.

Breezy pricing

Breezy has one free plan that allows for one active job posting at a time. It also has three paid plans with either annual or monthly pricing. If you pay for an annual plan, you’ll get two months free:

  • Startup: $157 a month when billed annually or $189 when billed month to month.
  • Growth: $273 a month when billed annually or $329 when billed month to month.
  • Business: $439 a month when billed annually or $529 when billed month to month.

Try Breezy

RecruiterFlow

Recruiterflow logo.
Image: Recruiterflow

RecruiterFlow’s solution is also paramount to proper time management by not only syncing with other calendar applications, but also letting interviewers log detailed notes about the interview and the candidate that can be viewed by the entire hiring team. Additionally, the platform’s calendar integration allows hiring managers to create, alter or cancel interview times across multiple users’ calendars if availability or the status of the open position changes.

RecruiterFlow pricing

RecruiterFlow has three plans, all of which include unlimited active job listings and a 14-day free trial:

  • Growth: Starts at $99 per user per month.
  • Scale: Starts at $109 per user per month.
  • Enterprise: Starts at $129 per user per month.

SEE: Meet the duellists… and compare Oracle vs Workday in an HR software comparison.

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Key ATS features

While companies use ATS platforms for many different hiring tasks, from interview scheduling to performance management, most ATS software tools have similar features. They usually include career page hosting, tools for sourcing candidates, automated interview scheduling, job distribution, application sorting, collaboration tools for hiring team members and basic onboarding tools.

Career page hosting

Career page hosting is the first step when it comes to attracting potential candidates, as many different ATS software options offer the opportunity to host a career branded site. These career pages typically are where open positions are posted, on an enterprise’s website. An advantage that the utilization of an ATS provides is the ability to manage these career pages directly through the ATS’s platform.

As the ATS makes it easier to set these pages up, hiring managers and their teams can focus more on finding the right candidate for the job rather than having to worry about updating a multitude of external job boards.

Job distribution

To cut down on the amount of time spent getting word of open roles out to potential candidates, many of these ATSs will utilize a job distribution system to post to numerous job boards all at once, eliminating the time consuming process of posting to these boards individually. In addition, many of the major job boards such as Indeed or ZipRecruiter will often have partnerships with ATS software, allowing hiring teams to alter, add or remove the job posting as needed.

Many companies utilize an ATS due to the ability to sort thousands of submitted resumes, automatically gathering candidate information so companies can find a job applicant whose mindset aligns with the company’s core values. Several can also help hiring teams manage the flow of incoming emails, allowing teams to communicate with a number of applicants at the same time and not requiring individualized responses to every candidate.

Application organization

Another key feature of ATSs is the ability to sort and organize prospective candidates’ applications to find the best applicants for the role. This in turn allows for less time spent trying to order the attributes of candidates and more time spent reaching out to those who best suit the position. Using an ATS, hiring teams can pull a number of candidates and their applications into one portal and allow those making the hiring decision to sort and filter through candidates quickly.

Calendar integration

With speed being a key factor in the hiring process, it is important that not only the members of the hiring team be in the loop with the times interviews are taking place, but also the interviewee being kept informed about where they are in the process. To do this, many systems and platforms allow for integration with calendar applications, allowing managers to view the availability of both the members of their teams but also the times in which their applications are free to have an interview scheduled.

Collaboration tools

With so many industries looking for employees post-Great Resignation, it’s no surprise that enterprises are looking to make decisions on candidates and get offers out faster to those desired applicants and fill openings. To streamline the hiring process, it is important that all hiring team members be up to speed with the stages each candidate is currently in, and that every member of the team has the tools to remain informed on important deadlines and milestones.

How do I choose the best ATS for my company?

As hiring has gotten more competitive due to mass departures by employees, it is imperative that hiring teams put their time and resources to good use. Many companies are looking to hire numerous new employees and speed up the onboarding process to get incoming employees familiarized with the responsibilities of their new roles.

So how can you choose the best ATS for you? The answer largely depends on which ATS features you need and how large your company is. For large enterprises, applicant tracking software can help sort through a large number of applications and applicants for a job, picking out specific skills that align with the company’s goals and values.

As many large businesses are typically receiving anywhere from hundreds to thousands of resumes for just one job posting, businesses are likely to see a significant return on investment with an ATS if they’re screening more than 1,000 resumes annually. Once these ATS platforms have sorted the resumes, they then can do anything from organizing employees by percentage of effectiveness in the role to handling the onboarding process of incoming workers that have accepted offered positions.

On the other hand, for small-to-medium businesses, using an ATS tool can help business owners streamline their hiring process through a number of different features. Moving away from using spreadsheets to a fully-formed ATS solution can cut down on the amount of time and money spent between emails, booking interviews with relevant candidates, handling documents and on-boarding processes.

Additionally, small business owners are less likely to need a staffing firm or recruitment agency, and can save revenue dollars in commissions by using one of these platforms that typically cost less than a recruiting team.