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Only one of the four prints a number. Workable does, and it bands the price by how many people you employ rather than how many recruiters log in. Greenhouse names three plans and prices none of them. Lever answers the question with available upon request. iCIMS has no pricing page at all. Whichever one you land on, the subscription buys the software and stops there. The pipelines, the scorecards, the job board feeds, the offer templates and the permissions are all still yours to design, and that is the part that decides whether anybody trusts the reports.
Before you book the demo
Most businesses shopping for an applicant tracker are not unhappy with their inbox in the abstract. They are unhappy that four people are reading the same CV, that the good candidate from March cannot be found again, and that nobody can say how long a hire actually takes. Every product here fixes the filing. What none of them settles is who writes the interview questions, who decides what disqualifies somebody, and who tells the candidate no. Those are hiring problems wearing a software costume, and if the answer is somebody who owns the system afterwards, what managed Zoho Recruit actually covers is set out in full.
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Three of the four will not tell you until you have taken a call, so the comparison you can run before that call is narrower than it looks. Workable publishes, at two hundred and ninety nine dollars a month on Standard for one to twenty employees, rising through nine employee bands above that. Greenhouse says the cost depends on the plan you pick, your hiring volume and your organisational complexity. Lever says available upon request. iCIMS offers a value calculator where a price would be. Go into each call with two numbers ready, your headcount and the hires you expect this year, because those are the two things every one of them prices against and the ranking changes depending on which is larger.
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A subscription hands you an empty pipeline and a login. Somebody still has to decide what the stages are called, which of them may be skipped and by whom, what a scorecard asks, which questions are legally safe in which state, what an automatic rejection says and how long a candidate waits before it arrives, and which of your job boards is worth paying for. On every platform here that somebody is you. Get the stages wrong and the reporting is worthless, because a time to hire measured against stages nobody follows describes the software rather than the business. The same gap runs through every comparison we publish.
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Standing it up is the easy half and all four will sell you help with that part. What repeats forever is the upkeep. Adding the requisition type a new department needs without breaking the reports built on the old one, revoking access for the manager who moved teams in March, noticing that a job board feed stopped publishing three weeks ago, rewriting the rejection template somebody softened into meaninglessness, and clearing the candidate records data protection says you should no longer be holding. None of the four does any of that inside the subscription. Ask who is doing it once the rollout is finished, and ask what that person costs.
Four vendors, one published price list, and four different answers to who runs the process.
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No Price On The Page
Automation Sits On Plus
The Audit Log Is Pro Only
Greenhouse is the name most hiring teams recognise on this list and it is a genuinely well built product, with Wayfair, Lyft and HubSpot among the logos on its own pricing page. What that page will not do is tell you the cost. There are three plans, Core, Plus and Pro, and not one of them carries a number. Greenhouse says the cost depends on the plan you choose, your hiring volume and your organisational complexity, then points you at a demo. Two things are worth knowing before that call. Single sign on sits on the entry plan, which is unusually generous. But texting, email automation, contact lookups, automatic rejection and the business intelligence connector all wait for Plus, and the audit log, the developer sandbox and resume anonymisation are Pro only.
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VS
The Only Published Price
The Meter Is Headcount
Texting And Video Cost Extra
Workable is the only vendor on this page that prints a number, and that alone puts it ahead on the thing buyers most want to know. Standard is two hundred and ninety nine dollars a month, Premier five hundred and ninety nine, Enterprise seven hundred and nineteen, and all three of those figures are quoted at one to twenty employees. That last clause is the whole story, because the plan price is banded by how many people you employ rather than by how many recruiters use the software, so the bill moves when the company grows and not when the hiring team does. There are nine bands above the first. On Standard, texting adds eighty nine dollars a month, video interviews one hundred and nine, assessments fifty nine, and performance and engagement thirty nine, while Premier and Enterprise fold all four in.
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VS
Price Available On Request
Three Add Ons Priced Apart
One Platform, Not A Tier Ladder
Lever belongs to Employ, which also owns JazzHR and Jobvite, and it is positioned in the middle of that range for teams that have outgrown a simple tracker. The core product is one platform rather than a tier ladder, with the applicant tracker and the candidate CRM in the same place, reporting included, and unlimited AI interview transcripts and summaries. Its own pricing FAQ answers the cost question directly and says the price is available upon request, tailored to your organisation size and hiring needs. Three things sit outside that core and are quoted separately: candidate insights, AI screening by VONQ, and onboarding. So the figure you eventually receive is a base quote plus up to three more, and none of it can be modelled in advance.
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VS
No Pricing Page At All
Three Products, Not One
Built For The Enterprise End
iCIMS is the enterprise option here and it is candid about that. More than four thousand four hundred companies across two hundred countries, a quarter of the Fortune 500, and a Leader placing in the Gartner Magic Quadrant. It is also the only vendor of the four with no pricing page in its navigation at all, and where a price would sit there is a value calculator and a sales number instead. The platform is three products you buy rather than one, with Hire for the tracker, offers and onboarding, Engage for sourcing and the candidate CRM, and Employer Branding for career sites, the chatbot and video, and professional services listed separately again as its own line of business. For an operation hiring at Cheesecake Factory scale that structure earns its keep. For a business hiring twenty people a year it is a great deal of platform.
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What the flat seven hundred covers
Managed Zoho Recruit is not a subscription with our name on the invoice. You buy your Zoho licences from Zoho and we do not resell them, so the price you see is the price you pay. Seven hundred dollars a month buys the work that sits on top of it: the candidate database and the way it is structured, the hiring pipelines and their stages, the career site and the job board publishing, the screening rules and assessment steps, the offer templates and their approvals, the role based permissions, and the integrations across the rest of your Zoho environment so a signed offer reaches the rest of the business instead of stopping in a recruiter inbox. If the shape of the problem turns out to be the whole employee record rather than the hiring end of it, meaning payroll, leave, appraisals and everything after day one, the managed Frappe HR service is where that conversation goes next.
Only one of the four above publishes a price, and that is the most useful thing on this page. Workable prints its plans and bands them by employee count. Greenhouse names three plans and sends you to a demo. Lever says available upon request, then adds three separately priced modules on top of whatever the base turns out to be. iCIMS does not have a pricing page. A quote is not automatically worse than a list price, and on a large or complicated hiring operation it is usually better, because the list price was never going to fit anyway. What it does mean is that you cannot compare three of these four without spending a fortnight of somebody's calendar first.
There are cases here where buying one of these directly is the right answer, and it is worth saying which. If you are fifteen people who hire four times a year and somebody in the office genuinely enjoys running a pipeline, Workable Standard at two hundred and ninety nine dollars a month is less than half our figure and this page has not talked you out of anything. If you are hiring across several countries with works councils, staffing agencies and a compliance team reading over your shoulder, iCIMS is built for exactly that and we are not. And if you already run Greenhouse well, moving is disruption with no obvious prize at the end of it. What none of the four sells inside the subscription is somebody who owns the process afterwards.
Underneath all of it is a question about who does the tending. Every platform here will have you posting a job by Thursday and not one of them will mention what the pipeline looks like in year two. A stage added in a hurry that three reports now quietly exclude, a permission set that grew by exception until a hiring manager can read offers they should never see, a job board feed that stopped syndicating in April, and rejection emails going out four weeks late to people who took other work a month ago. Together those add up to a system that still loads and still looks right while the numbers coming out of it drift away from the truth. An applicant tracker nobody trusts is worse than the inbox it replaced, because it looks authoritative. How much of that work somebody in the business can absorb is the real question, and owners tend to be optimistic about it.
An empty pipeline changes nothing on its own. Which stages exist, who may move a candidate between them, what a scorecard actually asks, which rejections go out automatically and which wait for a person, where the job gets published, and what happens to the record afterwards decide whether any of it works, and every one of those is a decision rather than a setting. We read how the business already hires before any of it gets configured.
Three of the four vendors on this page will not quote you without a call, and the fourth prices by how many people you employ. Seven hundred dollars a month covers the candidate database, the pipelines and their stages, the career site and job board publishing, the screening and assessment steps, the offers and their approvals, the permissions and the integrations across your Zoho environment. That number is on this page rather than behind a form, and it does not move in the quarter you take on six more staff.
A broken tracker rarely announces itself either. Applications keep arriving, the screens keep loading, and the gap surfaces when somebody notices that a job board stopped feeding in April, or that a stage nobody uses is holding twelve people who were never told anything. Watching the pipelines, the automations, the feeds and the integrations is part of the fee rather than something bought separately afterwards.
How do you compare four systems when only one publishes a price?
You compare what you can and you are honest about the rest. Workable publishes, at two hundred and ninety nine dollars a month on Standard, five hundred and ninety nine on Premier and seven hundred and nineteen on Enterprise, all quoted at one to twenty employees. Greenhouse, Lever and iCIMS all quote instead. So the comparison you can run before the calls is about what each one includes rather than what it charges, and there the gaps are real: Greenhouse puts texting and automation on its middle tier, Lever sells onboarding and candidate insights as separate modules, and iCIMS sells the tracker, the sourcing CRM and the career site as three products. Take your headcount and your expected hires into all three calls and ask each of them to price the same thing.
How does an applicant tracker decision go wrong?
Rarely on the software. It goes wrong on the stages and on the handover, and nobody quotes for either. Somebody capable configures something genuinely useful in a fortnight, hiring managers start relying on it, and then that person changes role and nobody left can safely add a requisition type. Meanwhile a pipeline that fitted the first six months does not fit the year you open a second office, and the fixes get bolted on sideways. Ask who maintains it before you ask what it costs.
Who owns the candidate data if you configure this for us?
You do, and it is not a clause we negotiated for you. The Zoho account is in your name and billed to you, we do not resell the licences, and every candidate record, note, scorecard and offer stays inside it. Stop paying us and nothing switches off. That matters more here than with most software, because candidate data carries retention obligations you cannot discharge from somebody else's account, and the day a subject access request arrives is not the day to work out whose login it sat under.
Should we not just buy one of these instead?
For a lot of businesses, yes, and we would rather say so here than after an invoice. If you hire a handful of people a year and somebody in the office is happy to run the pipeline, Workable Standard at two hundred and ninety nine dollars a month does that job and seven hundred does not need spending. Where the arithmetic turns is volume and enforcement: enough openings that screening becomes somebody's second job, enough hiring managers that the process has to be enforced rather than suggested, and enough integration that a signed offer has to reach payroll and IT without anybody retyping it. What no platform price includes is that somebody.
So which one is actually the cheapest?
Workable, on the only evidence any of them publishes, and that is a narrower claim than it sounds. Two hundred and ninety nine dollars a month at one to twenty employees is the lowest number on this page, and it climbs through nine employee bands from there, with eighty nine more for texting, one hundred and nine for video interviews and fifty nine for assessments if you want them on Standard. Greenhouse, Lever and iCIMS publish nothing, so anybody who ranks those three for you is guessing. Our figure is seven hundred dollars a month, it is on this page, and the difference is that it includes a person.
What happens when something breaks after we go live?
On a subscription the platform is supported and whatever you configured on it is not, and almost everything that goes wrong is the thing you configured. A candidate stuck in a stage because of the way an automation was scoped is not a bug their support desk can fix, because somebody scoped it. Here it is one company and one number, fixes sit inside the fee rather than being quoted for, and when Zoho ships a platform change that breaks a workflow you depend on, that is our problem before it is yours.
Do we have to move every requisition at once?
No, and most should not. The usual order is the role you hire most often, because that is where the time comes back soonest and where you find out quickly whether the stages suit how you actually decide. The rest follows once that one is running. A senior search that runs on three conversations and a shared document can stay that way, and there is rarely a reason to rush it. Moving everything in one quarter is how a business ends up running two half finished processes and trusting neither.
Can you take over a tracker somebody else set up?
Often, and it is real work rather than a tidy up. We read the pipelines and their stages, the screening and scoring rules, the automations and templates, the permission sets, the job board connections and the reports nobody has opened in a year, then say plainly what is worth keeping and what should be rebuilt. Inherited trackers tend to be sound in the parts somebody tested and quietly wrong in the parts nobody did, and working out which is which is most of the first month.
How long before it actually runs your hiring?
Four to ten weeks for most businesses, and longer where several managers do not currently agree on how a decision actually gets made. The candidate structure comes first, then the pipelines and permissions, then the career site and job board publishing, then the screening, the offers and the reporting. Configuration starts the week we begin rather than after a discovery phase that bills separately. What people notice first is rarely the software. It is that nobody is asking which spreadsheet holds the current shortlist.
We already have a recruiter who does this. What is left for you?
Quite possibly nothing, and that is a fine answer. A recruiter who owns the process and actually keeps it current is most of this. Where we tend to be useful alongside one is the parts that are not their job at all: the pipeline structure that is expensive to change later, the Deluge scripting, the permission design, the retention rules, the integration into the rest of Zoho so a hire reaches your books and your CRM, and noticing the week a job board feed stops. Plenty of clients keep the recruiter and hire us for the engineering around them.
When would you tell us not to bother?
Two cases, and both are common. If you hire twice a year and both times through somebody you already know, buy a cheap plan or nothing at all, because there is no process here worth managing. And if what you actually need is the whole employee record rather than the hiring end of it, meaning payroll, leave, reviews and everything after day one, then stretching a recruiting tool to cover it is an expensive way to arrive somewhere a proper HR platform already is.
What if the software is not the actual problem?
We will say so before taking your money, and the fit review costs nothing. Hiring that feels chaotic is usually chaotic because two managers disagree about who makes the final call, not because the tracker is slow. A fair number of these conversations end with one agreed process, one person accountable for the decision, and no new software at all.
What does this cost through you, in writing?
One flat monthly rate of seven hundred dollars, listed on the managed Zoho Recruit page and on this one. It covers the candidate database, the pipelines and their stages, the career site and job board publishing, the screening and assessment steps, the offers and their approvals, the role based permissions, and integration with the rest of your Zoho environment. Your Zoho licences sit outside that and are billed to you by Zoho, because we do not resell them. Nothing in our figure moves when you open more roles or hire more people.
What happens if we want to leave?
Thirty days notice ends it and nothing is stranded. The Zoho account, the configuration and every candidate record in it were always yours and always billed to you, so there is no migration and nothing to hand back. What stops is us. The pipelines keep running, the automations keep firing and the career site keeps taking applications. What you give up is the person who would have noticed the week one of them stopped.
What do you need from us to begin?
Whatever you are hiring out of now, in whatever state it is in, read access to wherever the candidate records live, a copy of the last few job descriptions and offer letters, and an hour with whoever actually runs an interview loop rather than whoever owns hiring on the org chart. The walk through takes a few days and costs nothing, and it ends with a plain answer about whether Zoho Recruit suits the job or whether you want something else entirely.
