10+ Best Free Applicant Tracking Systems (ATS) in 2024

Though Manatal doesn’t offer a free plan, we feel that its 14-day free trial is more than enough for businesses to get to know the platform and see if it fits them. It gives users access to most of its functionality and doesn't ask for that sensitive credit card info. Its pricing is so clear— you know exactly how much you would pay for this tool, no unannounced charges, no hidden fees.

What we love most about this ATS, though, is its flexibility. Whether for someone like us, a remote startup with a small in-house hiring team, or a 100-employee recruitment agency, it seems to have everything we need.

From candidate sourcing, recruitment CRM software, profile enrichment, and AI-powered recommendations, to branded career pages, Manatal offers all these features at a starting price of just $15 per month. Moreover, the choice of four plans means it can grow with businesses, from those with just a couple of employees to global enterprises.

We have no gripes about Manatal’s user interface. Navigating the platform was straightforward, and the Help Center was impressively well-organized with detailed, digestible text and video tutorials.

However, we should warn you that during the trial, some features like job board posting and email automation are not available. As this tool leans more towards small and midsized businesses, you’d want to consider other options if you’re an enterprise seeking a vendor that offers tailored support rather than standard live chat and email.

10,000+ organizations, including Unilever, Coca-Cola, Panasonic, Ogilvy, and Toyota.

Here are four Manatal pricing plans when billed annually:

• Professional: $15/user/month, 15 jobs per account, 10,000 candidates, unlimited guests.
• Enterprise: $35/user/month for unlimited jobs, candidates, and guests.
• Enterprise Plus: $55/user/month and includes all Enterprise features, user groups, open API access, SSO log-in, priority support, and access to Beta features.
• Custom: Tailored for larger businesses requiring advanced functionalities and support. Pricing upon request.

While Monday.com isn't a dedicated applicant tracking software system, during our testing, we discovered that its pre-built templates provide a solid foundation for managing the entire hiring pipeline within a single platform.

One of the standout features is the highly customizable columns in the ATS template. We found it easy to add columns for specific information, such as an applicant's source and input category choices. The drag-and-drop functionality is a delight, allowing you to effortlessly move candidate cards between different stages of the recruitment process, like from “Screening” to "Qualified", and so on.

Monday.com strikes a balance between manual and automated processing. While moving cards is a manual task, you can set rules to automate repetitive actions, saving valuable time. The platform also offers a range of views, including Gantt charts, timelines, and calendars, enabling you to visualize your recruitment processes in a way that suits your preferences.

Integrations with recruitment platforms, Google tools, and other productivity software enhance Monday.com's ATS capabilities. You can perform tasks like resume parsing and access shared files and conversations for each candidate card. The ability to send emails, collaborate, and communicate with other HR staff directly within the platform is a notable convenience.

Its compliance tracking is well-liked. You can assign tasks related to privacy and security measures, from providing non-disclosure agreements to ensuring candidates undergo necessary training, right on this platform.

That said, you can’t find features like resume parsing, career pages, and job posting here as you’d find easily in most dedicated ATS platforms, so bear this matter in mind. And the integrations don’t belong to the free plan, you’ll get to upgrade to Standard to be able to use them.

Over 200,000+ businesses use Monday.com including Lionsgate, Glossier, and Oxy.

Monday.com’s pricing ranges from $9-$19, depending on the plan you choose. There’s also a free forever plan for up to 2 user seats and 3 boards.

If you’re a startup looking for global tech talent, we highly recommend Wellfound’s free ATS. One huge advantage of this platform is that it’s long been a go-to place for tech enthusiasts and startup-minded talent who are on the job hunt—just the talent pool you’re searching for.

We enjoyed our experience testing this free ATS, both from the hiring side and as an applicant. The UI is clear and easy on the eyes, plus having in-app messaging and the option to tweak the hiring workflow makes everything more streamlined and straightforward.

Given that most vendors in this space often limit their freebies to one active job at a time, it’s nice to see Wellfound take another approach—it does not cap the number of jobs you can post. In other words, you can have as many as you need.

Unfortunately, this free plan does not have Boolean search or advanced sourcing capabilities. But if your team is using Greenhouse, Lever, Workable, or Ashby alongside Wellfound, there's a workaround. Since this free tool can connect with these ATS platforms, you can transfer applicant information and use their search features instead.

Regarding job distribution, while platforms Dover or Recooty can auto-spread your job posts across multiple boards, Wellfound sticks to its niche community for job postings. As a result, the reach may not be the same.

25,000+ companies, including Trace, Xander, and Dosu.

Wellfound offers a free ATS for applicant access and tracking that anyone can sign up for online. Paid plans start at $149/month, with job promotion add-on and custom packages available upon request.

Despite being a free solution, Dover brought a delightful look and feel to nearly every encounter we had with the platform. The dashboard is clear and well-organized, but if you need a bit of instruction, the help center can offer good help with well-explained articles and videos. For startups new to the software, Dover may even provide a personalized onboarding call.

We also found some really good AI features within this free ATS: an AI for job description generation, an auto-confirmation email for those who just applied, and a chatbot that can filter the best candidates who meet your criteria. We gave the chatbot a go and asked it, “Show me people with at least 1 year of experience,” and it took less than a second to show only the matches.

We didn’t expect a free solution to be this good at sequencing. We entered only our company name and domain before heading to this feature. To our surprise, it accurately described what we do in the email outreach (check out the above screenshot).

However, to streamline job distribution, we would have liked an option to filter job boards by free and paid. With 76 options available, choosing each one by one is definitely not the best use of time.

You should also keep in mind that Dover doesn't provide multiple software plans like most ATS platforms. Instead, it offers a free ATS and the option to outsource your sourcing to its recruiting partners. Hence, if you have a large team and want to manage everything internally, Dover might not meet your needs.

500+ companies, including OpenSea, WorkOS, and Scale.

Dover has two plans:

• The ATS is free and includes unlimited jobs, candidate tracking, AI applicant sorting, job board integrations, and an onboarding call for eligible startups.‍
• Recruiting Partner starts at $45 per month to help with sourcing, phone screening, interview scheduling, hiring strategy, and on-demand support.

Loxo is noteworthy in the ATS space because they insist that recruiting teams should move beyond this software category and opt for fuller recruitment suites that combine CRM features to improve the candidate experience and their effectiveness. It’s partly for that reason that they do offer a basic ATS, completely free and to use for as long as you like; because it’s the perfect gateway for teams to try their tool and, perhaps eventually, embrace their philosophy.

Checking out Loxo’s free ATS, we were immediately impressed by its simple and recruiter-centric UI. We think recruiters will love to discover that Loxo's dashboard prioritizes the people database by default, as, in our experience, it made it easy to get an overview of the total processed candidates and where they are in the workflow. The system offered us two visual styles: a quick candidate list or an expanded view. We went with the latter, which you can see in the screenshot below, and dug deeper into the tool’s talent pipeline.

Although it appeared we couldn’t customize the dashboard with our own hiring workflow, the platform did allow for the creation of new candidate lists. The entire process was straightforward: we named the list, chose whether we wanted it to be private, and populated it with candidate profiles either individually or in bulk. We can imagine this would save recruiters from manually looking up candidates from time to time, as they now just have to head to their created lists to find the right group whenever needed.

For the search and filtering workflows, the page loading speed had been impressive. The results appeared almost instantly during our tests, both when we used one filter and when we used five.

We also liked that, in addition to typical filters like name and location, there were some interesting ones, such as salary, last contacted, bonus, and equity. All of them functioned well in our tests. However, this wasn't the case with the Diversity filter. Oddly, when we selected "Female" under this filter, the results excluded all of our female candidates!

Those working in agency environments will find Loxo’s free plan particularly helpful, as besides ATS features like resume parsing and candidate pipeline, it covers project master Kanban, tasks, client portal, and even invoices. Just to be clear, though, certain features, such as outreach and communication, reports, and, unexpectedly, free job board integrations, are not offered in this plan.

We also hope to see some improvements in this vendor’s mobile app. On our last look at the product, Loxo still doesn’t offer an Android app, and its iOS app’s functionality is quite basic compared to the web-based version.

13,000+ companies, including Stryker, MRI, and Gecko.

Loxo offers a free plan and three paid subscription options. The paid plans start at $119 per seat per month when billed annually.

It features job widget integration, a tool to create a branded careers page, and social network sharing. From our experience, the free plan has enough functionality for small businesses that are just starting out and only need a basic ATS.

Recruitee is among the most straightforward tools we’ve ever tested. We found the ATS was ready to use as soon as we completed the signup form. Though the free version does not allow users to create a custom domain, they can build a branded career page and create and post jobs on job boards like Indeed, LinkedIn, and Glassdoor. Recooty also makes it easy to post jobs via social media.

There has been a huge (sad) product change since our last review, however: Recooty’s free plan, which allows for one active job post at a time, no longer exists. We also don’t see significant progress in its integration capability—the ATS only connects with Slack and LinkedIn, and only the two highest-priced plans are equipped with API. And there is still no sign that the platform will build a mobile app anytime soon.

5,000+ companies, including Sendlane, Airtable, Uber, Rack Bank, and Trello.

The company offers four pricing plans:

• Starter goes for $99/month with 10 Active job slots, 10 users, and 3 locations.
• Growth costs $149/month with 20 active job slots, 50 users, 10 locations, and all features under the Starter plan.
• Business is $199/month and offers 50 active job slots, 100 users, 20 locations, and all features under the Growth plan.
• Enterprise with custom pricing.

All the plans come with a 14-day trial period in which you can test the service without providing your credit card details. After the trial period ends, you will need to update your card to continue using the services.

VanHack’s free ATS software is one of the most generous offerings we’ve seen in the space. This freebie supports unlimited users and jobs, and it doesn’t even require a credit card to get started. As a startup, this seems like a great deal. And after rigorously testing the free applicant tracking tool, we can confirm it truly is.

VanHack’s job pipeline has made good use of the Kanban view—it made it clear and efficient to organize and keep track of applicants' progress.

We also loved how easy it was to schedule an interview; we could do it in as little as three clicks. Additionally, the ability to post jobs directly from the ATS platform to multiple job boards at no cost was a real time-saver for budget-conscious companies, we can imagine.

It’s worth mentioning, though, that VanHack focuses primarily on tech-related positions, so searching for roles outside of this field won’t be as effective.

While we appreciate that VanHack puts effort into filtering out spam, we did notice that some messages and emails still managed to slip through the cracks.

We also couldn’t help but feel disappointed to discover that there are no mobile apps available for hiring managers or recruiters. We would have loved to have the flexibility to manage our recruitment on the go, as this would greatly enhance our efficiency when moving between meetings or events.

600+ companies, including Deloitte, Brex, Booking.com, and Zalando.

VanHack is completely free for job seekers. For employers, VanHack charges a fee per hire that amounts to 20% of the candidate’s annual salary. Job posts, interviews, and candidate searching are all free.

GoHire is a simple applicant tracking system that is perfect for smaller companies focused on growing their teams.

We got ourselves a free trial. Although we had previously used it without any issues, this time, we kept seeing this message “Please use your work email to get started.” even though we did use our company email. However, the support team did help us resolve the issue shortly.

Navigating the platform is incredibly straightforward. We particularly appreciate the ease with which we can customize a career page. The dashboard features a dedicated career page editor section where we can effortlessly add and edit information using text, images, and videos, effectively representing our company's brand. The editor's interface resembles that of WordPress, making it user-friendly even for non-technical users.

However, it's worth noting that the career page editor only allows us to direct it to a single domain. This restriction may pose challenges for users who need to point job seekers to multiple domains, potentially causing some inconvenience.

Going further, GoHire simplifies job posting by integrating with multiple job boards and social media sites. With over 700 job description templates, you can quickly prepare postings. The platform even goes beyond basic job posting by providing additional features like candidate screening, ranking, and messaging.

Snagajob, Promoter, Sweetberry, Swapcard, Voucher Cart.

GoHire offers three plans (with prices going up slightly compared to our last review of the product) and a free 14-day trial.

• Starter costs $83 per month and includes baseline features, with 3 active job posts, a custom career page, interview scheduling, and unlimited team members.
• Growth costs $166 per month and provides everything from Starter plus customizable pipelines, bulk actions, screening questions, and mention team members.‍
• Pro costs $249 per month and provides all Growth features plus unlimited job posts, automated stage actions, advanced reporting, video questionnaires, and private notes.

Teamtailor is a cloud-based applicant tracking system with features that help organizations hire and nurture talent. What caught our eye is its unique approach to talent acquisition, which emphasizes how your team markets itself to candidates.

Teamtailor’s user experience is on par, if not better, than other peers, with a platform design that is not only accessible via both browsers and mobile devices but also easy on the eye. We highly recommend you check out its career site builders when you’re on its free trial—it was a delight during our testing. Within a few drags and drops, and a sleek landing page was done—no coding knowledge was required in the making.

Moreover, this vendor’s DEI features really stood out in our tests, with a handful of well-built features such as anonymous hiring and equal employment opportunity (EEO) surveys.

But we can’t say the same for its analytics tool. It’s not as straightforward as we hoped. And since this vendor is hyper-focused on the applicant tracking aspect, it doesn’t cover other HR functionalities. To be fair though, Teamtailor’s 350+ third-party integration options can be just a perfect alternative to sync data across your HR tech stacks.

Kry, Goodbye Kansas, Vitamin Well, Ponsse, Daniel Wellington.

Teamtailor’s pricing is custom-based on customer business size and requirements. For teams under 25 employees, the price for unlimited job postings, candidates, and users in the system typically starts at $3,300.

We filled in Zoho’s form and got ourselves a Zoho Recruit's free plan. Overall, Zoho Recruit's free version offers valuable features for candidate and email management, but it does come with limitations in terms of active job openings and storage.

It’s good to see the free plan incorporates some essential services for candidate management, like email and interview scheduling. The career site is customizable (on a basic level, though). We can also post jobs on both free and paid job boards.

Another aspect we appreciated is the seamless integration with Google applications and the support for 26 languages, allowing for a diverse pool of applicants to be reached. Platforms that provide pre-designed templates are always a time-saver, and Zoho Recruit delivers five customizable email templates. Additionally, the user-friendly resume search feature makes finding relevant candidate information easier.

However, the free plan has some limitations. The most notable drawback is that you can only access one active job opening at a time. For hiring teams dealing with multiple positions simultaneously, this limitation can be pretty restrictive and could hinder efficient recruitment efforts.

Another thing to keep in mind is the storage limit, which is set at 256MB. This might not be ideal for businesses with larger databases and extensive recruitment needs. We also noticed that instead of 24/5 support, free users can only get 8/5 support from the Zoho team. On a brighter note, Zoho Recruit provides a 45-day money-back guarantee.

8,000+ organizations, including Bosch, Deloitte, Saint-Gobain, PWC, and Allianz.

Zoho Recruit provides two paid plans for Corporate HRs and three for staffing agencies in addition to its free plan. All plans share the same starting price of $25 per user per month when billed annually.

MightyRecruiter truly impressed us with the efficiency of its free ATS system.

Without spending any dime, you can access this tool’s custom-branded career page, post unlimited job openings across 29 job boards, tap into a resume database of over 22 million candidates, as well as rank and filter candidates by the candidate’s commute distance, years of experience, ex-employers, education, and a handful others.

To speed up your talent sourcing efforts further, the platform packs over 200 ready-to-use job description templates and suggests suitable candidates for your job posts based on defined criteria.

In terms of reporting capabilities, the built-in dashboard gave us a nice view of our job postings' performances across job boards and channels. During our tests, we didn’t find any delays in the presented stats; all were updated in real-time.

Unfortunately, MightyRecruiter’s current integration capabilities leave something to be desired. The free ATS software can only connect with job boards and social media. There seems to be no way to connect, for example, a candidate assessment or video interview app with the platform.

ThinkGlink Media, DocuSign, OpExpert, GTM Pros, Small World Recruiting

MightyRecruiter is free to use. However, viewing the full resumes of candidates on their resume database costs extra.

Recruitee is on our recommended free ATS list for some concrete reasons. The first one is that it’s very intuitive and boasts features to make hiring more efficient. It’s easy to track candidates through different stages of the hiring process, and we can collaborate with other hiring team members on assessments and interviews.

Another reason is the team collaboration feature. We especially like the way that Recruitee makes it easy to collaborate with other team members on making fair hiring decisions. You get to add as many team members to the platform as you wish, assign them appropriate roles, and have them assess the candidates more objectively— without adding extra numbers to your bill.

One of the few downsides to Recruitee is its dependence on third-party integrations for essential functions, which could be found as built-in ones in competing vendors, such as skill assessments, onboarding, video interviewing, or e-signatures. This can be a bit of a hassle and can add to the cost of opting for Recruitee; unless, of course, you don't really need any of these features.

5,000+ companies, including Semrush, Mark and Spencer, and Transcom.

Recruitee offers custom plans based on the number of employees. For teams with fewer than 20 employees, the price starts at $199 per month, annual contracts.