Building a great business starts with building a great team. Applicant tracking systems (ATS) make it easier to find and hire the right candidate for the job all while saving time and valuable resources. It’s automated, customizable, and takes you from recruitment to onboarding fast.
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Gusto – Best all-in-one payroll and ATS recruiting software for small business
Overview
Gusto tops our list for best ATS for small business with a wealth of powerful features and user-friendly functionality. Their intuitive interface simplifies even the most complex tasks, and their easy-to-use hiring tools integrate seamlessly with their best-in-class onboarding workflows and robust payroll and people management tools. Using an all-in-one solution for hiring, onboarding, and paying your team reduces your admin burden and streamlines your tech stack, all while saving you money.
While Gusto’s ATS isn’t as feature-heavy as some standalone software options, it comes included in their Plus plan, meaning you don’t have to pay extra when you start hiring, and transitioning promising candidates to full-time employees happens with a single click. As many other standalone ATS products cost hundreds of dollars each month, Gusto’s ease and affordability make it a top pick.
Gusto automatically shares postings on hundreds of job boards including LinkedIn, Indeed, and ZipRecruiter, and hiring workflows include candidate comments and interview scorecards to provide a single source of truth throughout the hiring process. AI-powered job descriptions save hours of tedious work while keeping you compliant with federal and state hiring law, and Gusto’s team of HR experts are always on-call should you have any more complex compliance questions.
Once you’ve found the right candidate, Gusto offers best-in-class hiring and onboarding tools to welcome new members to the team and increase retention rates, including custom offer letters and app provisioning. Background checks are available through Checkr, and unlike most competitors, Gusto handles state tax registration and compliance for new hires in all 50 states. Employee self-onboarding makes it easy to upload documents, e-sign contracts, select a benefits package, and gives employees lifetime access to paystubs, W-2s, and more. Both you and your new hires will get friendly dashboard reminders helping you stay on top of time-sensitive tasks.
All of Gusto’s tools feel designed with humans in mind, easily handling the full employee lifecycle from recruiting and onboarding, to engagement and growth, to an employee’s last day. Gusto’s pricing is fully transparent, and their ATS, along with the large majority of their powerful HR tools, are available on their mid-range Plus plan. Overall, they offer more fully integrated functionality from posting a job to bringing a new team member on board, giving them the top spot for best ATS for small business.
Key Features
- Seamlessly integrated ATS, hiring, onboarding, payroll, and benefits
- AI-powered job descriptions
- Free syndication to 100+ job boards
- User-friendly recruiting dashboard
- Candidate notes and scorecards
- Built-in compliance with state and federal hiring law
- New-hire reporting in all 50 states
- Hiring documents, e-signing and storage, onboarding checklists, custom offer letters and welcome cards, and benefits administration included with all plans
- Built-in background checks through Checkr
- Dedicated support from certified HR experts available
- Hundreds of software integrations
Pros and Cons
| Pros | Cons |
|---|---|
| Intuitive, easy to use interface | ATS and hiring tools only available on Plus and Premium plans |
| All-in-one solution for hiring, onboarding, payroll, benefits, and HR | ATS tools not available a la carte |
| Transparent pricing, no hidden fees | Lacks customizable hiring workflows |
| Support for complete employee lifecycle | |
| Great customer service; dedicated HR support available | |
| Hundreds of software integrations included with all plans |
Pricing
Gusto offers three pricing plans, with the Simple plan starting at $49 per month plus $6 per person per month. The Simple plan comes loaded with basic support for hiring and onboarding as well as benefits administration, but it doesn’t include the ATS recruiting software.
To access the applicant tracking system, you’ll need the Plus plan, at $80 per month plus 2 per person per month. It includes the ATS and the full suite of hiring, onboarding, and team management tools. Plus plans also come loaded with popular features like next-day payroll and Gusto’s integrated time tracking.
Dedicated support from certified HR pros along with compliance alerts is available only with the Premium plan or through the HR add-on at $8 per person per month.
Premium plans are priced exclusively, and include everything Gusto has to offer with no hidden monthly fees. For more info on Premium pricing, contact their sales team today.
Free Trial? Yes, Gusto is free until you run your first payroll.
Free Version: No.
Transform your HR processes with Gusto, a platform that’s already the choice of over 400,000 businesses.
Greenhouse – Best ATS software for mid-sized businesses
Overview
Greenhouse is a sleek and powerful ATS built with both candidates and hiring teams in mind. Their workflows are welcoming, and they provide a centralized hub to keep everyone on track in the hiring process. Interview planning, prep kits, and candidate scorecards, along with automated tasks and reminders, make sure everyone is on the same page, and nothing falls through the cracks.
The job kick-off form helps you collaborate and align with hiring managers on what success looks like for new roles, and their “candidate experience” approach increases transparency and makes the hiring process smoother and more engaging for the talent you’re looking to attract.
Greenhouse also offers native onboarding once you’ve made a hiring decision. They provide personalized welcome experiences, new-hire goal setting and tracking, and task setting for stakeholders throughout the hiring process.
Overall, Greenhouse is a powerful and beautifully designed tool, but it may be more powerful than most small businesses need, and at a much higher price point. Unless you’re a growing business consistently hiring for multiple new roles each month, it’s likely you can get all the features you need from another ATS at a much more attractive price.
Key Features
- Custom, automated hiring workflows
- “Candidate experience” approach
- 1000+ job boards included
- Powerful team collaboration tools
- Candidate scorecards
- Robust hiring pipeline reporting
- GDPR compliance
- Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion feature set
- Built-in onboarding tools
Pros and Cons
| Pros | Cons |
|---|---|
| 400+ software integrations | Expensive and no transparent pricing |
| Highly customizable | Too many features for smaller teams |
| Compliance and anti-bias focus | Large learning curve |
| Built-in onboarding tools | |
| Access to 1,000+ job boards |
Pricing
Greenhouse offers three tiers for their recruiting tools, Essential, Advanced, and Expert, however they don’t list pricing on their website. The Essential tier includes their ATS, collaboration and structured hiring tools, candidate experience, GDPR and DE&I, access to their mobile app and software integrations, and their CRM + one event.
The Advanced plan adds on 10 events for the CRM, scalable workflows, SSO, and custom reporting. Finally, their Expert plan, targeted at Enterprise solutions, includes unlimited CRM events, expert data configuration, and a developer sandbox.
Their onboarding tools are priced separately through the Greenhouse Welcome and Greenhouse Onboarding plans. If you’re looking for standard onboarding tools like e-signing documents and HR integration, you’ll need the higher-tier plan.
Free Trial? No.
Free Plan: No.
Learn more about Greenhouse
JazzHR – Best ATS recruitment software for beginners
Overview
JazzHR is a highly rated and easy-to-use ATS that makes it easy for startups and small businesses to put their best foot forward in a competitive hiring market. Their entry-level pricing makes them accessible to businesses of any size, giving you access to aggregated job postings and a centralized hiring hub for your business.
While their base-level plan is bare bones to say the least, their higher tier plans provide more powerful hiring tools to scale with your business. Collaborative hiring workflows keep everyone on the same page allowing you to manage, rank, track, and discuss candidates every step of the way. Their candidate experience tools include branded messaging, automated candidate contact workflows, and email and messaging sync.
Like many other applicant tracking systems, JazzHR has interview and assessment tools to reduce bias and make sure interviews are conducted fairly and equally. Pre-planned questions, evaluation templates, and automated applicant scores help your team make better, more informed judgments.
For startups especially, integrating JazzHR with a powerful payroll and HR provider like Gusto is a great way to centralize and streamline all your people management needs.
Key Features
- Custom collaborative hiring workflows
- Custom branding for job postings and emails
- Integrated background checks
- Dozens of software integrations for HR, payroll, scheduling, and more
- Skills and coding tests
- 18 job boards included
- Interview design and evaluation tools
- Workflow, candidate, and compliance reporting
Pros and Cons
| Pros | Cons |
|---|---|
| Transparent pricing | Hero plan isn’t much more than a job posting tool |
| Easy to learn | Pricing jumps up dramatically |
| Pro tools available as a la carte add ons | E-signatures and custom permissions only available on Pro plan |
Pricing
JazzHR offers three pricing tiers, Hero, Plus, and Pro. The Hero plan is $49 per month (billed annually) and includes unlimited users and 3 open job postings. This plan does not include their applicant tracking tools, however, and is only used to manage job postings. The Plus plan jumps to $239 per month and includes job postings, ATS, and interviews & assessments for unlimited roles. The Pro plan adds on offers and e-signatures, and reporting and compliance for $359 per month.
Free Trial? 21 days.
Free Plan: No.
Learn more about JazzHR
BambooHR – Best ATS / recruitment software for full-stack HR
Overview
BambooHR is great for both small- and medium-sized businesses who want to easily hire, onboard, and manage their teams. BambooHR is a Human Resources Management System (HRMS) at heart, with payroll, benefits, and time tracking as extras.
BambooHR’s ATS provides all the bells and whistles you’d expect from a major HR platform including collaborative workflows, messaging templates, syndicated job postings, social media integrations, and a powerful mobile app. Candidate experience is smooth and optimized, and managing the hiring pipeline is a breeze.
Adding custom permissions makes it easy to gather input from stakeholders and team members at any stage. Automatic alerts and in-system messaging keep things moving without drops in communication, and centralized candidate data pushes instantly to desktop and mobile, ensuring everyone involved is on the same page.
Bamboo’s ATS is only included in their Advantage plan, but this also includes access to a wealth of their most powerful HR tools. Onboarding, offboarding, document storage, employee satisfaction, and robust reporting options are all built right in along with their employee self-service portal, new-hire packets, and e-signatures.
The onboarding process is easy, friendly, and people-focused, and their document and personal data storage, along with automated workflows, help your HR department run as smoothly as possible. Their onboarding suite is best-in-class with customizable pre-boarding packages and checklists along with a wealth of features to highlight personal connections for new employees. Unfortunately, they don’t offer software or hardware provisioning, and they don’t support background checks or new-hire state reporting.
While Bamboo’s ATS is both powerful and user-friendly, they are the best fit for businesses looking for a more robust, long-term HR solution.
Key Features
- Fully integrated hiring, onboarding, and people management
- Collaborative workflows with automated alerts
- Syndicated job site + social media postings
- Customizable communication, offer letter, and email templates
- Powerful mobile hiring app
- Intuitive, user-friendly onboarding and offboarding workflows
- Employee self-service, e-signatures, and document storage
- Works with businesses in over 120 countries
- Payroll, benefits, time tracking, and performance management available as add-ons
- 350+ software integrations
Pros and Cons
| Pros | Cons |
|---|---|
| Fully integrated hiring, HR, benefits and more | Bamboo Hiring app is separate from their main app |
| People-focused hiring and onboarding with robust employee self-service portal | Must purchase Advanced plan to access ATS |
| Highly customizable | Chat and telephone support only available on Advanced plan |
| Easy-to-follow workflows with built-in reminders | No transparent pricing |
Pricing
For fewer than 20 employees, BambooHR charges a flat rate based on which package you choose. Over 20 employees, and you’ll pay on a per-employee-per-month basis. Unfortunately, they no longer post pricing on their website, and you’ll need to reach out for a quote.
BambooHR has two available plans along with a handful of optional add-ons.
To access their Applicant Tracking System as well as their onboarding and offboarding tools, you’ll need the Advantage plan. This also includes advanced reporting, custom workflows, and employee wellness features.
BambooHR also offers four add-on packages: payroll, benefits administration, performance management, and time tracking. These modules all have volume discounts, so the per employee cost will drop as your business grows.
Free Trial? Yes, 7 days.
Free Plan: No.
Learn more about BambooHR
Zoho Recruit – Best ATS software for staffing agencies
Overview
Zoho Recruit is one of the few ATS software platforms specifically designed with staffing agencies in mind. While they do offer options for corporate HR, their powerful ATS in conjunction with their CRM and AI-powered candidate screening tools make them best suited to companies with high-volume hiring needs.
The AI features can grade applicants according to your preferred requirements, helping your recruitment team narrow down applicant records. Their resume parser easily imports data from PDFs, LinkedIn, Gmail, and more, compiling candidates into a centralized database. Pre-screening assessments help you quickly rate and compare applicants, and Zoho also offers internal referral management, tapping into a valuable source of potential candidates to keep your pipeline full.
Zoho Recruit offers one of the most powerful suites of automated and AI-powered hiring tools on the market. For staffing companies or companies with high-volume hiring needs, they’re an easy choice at a respectable price. But for startups and very small businesses, it may be more than you need.
Key Features
- Designed specifically for staffing agencies
- AI-powered candidate selection
- Customizable, automated recruitment workflows
- Automatic resume parsing
- Built-in background checks & pre-screening assessments
- Post to 75+ job boards
- Custom branded careers page
- Internal referrals
- Bias-reduction tools
- Recruiting analytics & KPIs
- Mobile app
Pros and Cons
| Pros | Cons |
|---|---|
| Robust suite of hiring tools | No 24/7 customer support |
| Tons of customization options | Can be overwhelming for beginners |
| Affordable plans start at just $25 per recruiter per month | |
| AI-powered candidate selection and matching can save hours for high volume positions | |
| Hundreds of seamless integrations |
Pricing
Zoho Recruit has two separate pricing structures, one for corporate HR and one for staffing agencies. Their forever free plan allows you to manage a single job posting, along with interview scheduling and candidate management. The Standard plan includes 10 active jobs and comes loaded with standard hiring tools like candidate sourcing, resume management, premium job boards, customized reporting, and 50+ integrations. For their most powerful tools, you’ll need the enterprise plan at $50 per recruiter per month. This adds on their AI-powered recruitment tools along with advanced customization and reporting, and 20 active job postings.
For staffing agencies, pricing is based per user per month. The Standard plan is $25 per user per month and includes 100 job postings along with the same basic tools as their corporate Standard plan: candidate sourcing, resume management, premium job boards, talent pipeline, customized reporting, and 50+ integrations, but lacks their more powerful AI. With the professional plan, at $50 per user per month, you get 250 postings, access to AI-powered tools, pre-screening assessments, background checks, and custom reports and dashboards. And finally, their Enterprise plan, at $75 per user per month, tacks on integrations with Google Meet and Microsoft Teams, and advanced customization for assignments, territories, roles, and profiles.
Free Trial? Yes, 15 days, plus a 45-day money-back guarantee.
Free Plan: Yes, for one active job posting.
Learn more about Zoho Recruit
BreezyHR – Best free ATS software for small business
Overview
BreezyHR is a fun and user-friendly platform with a forever free plan for one job posting along with unlimited users and candidates. While the free plan won’t get you access to their more powerful tools like candidate automations, questionnaires, and integrations, you still get one-click posting to 50+ job boards, a branded career site, and world-class resume parsing. For small businesses that only need to hire for the occasional open position, you won’t find a better option.
For those looking to spend a little more money, BreezyHR has some of the most powerful recruiting tools on the market. Their automated workflows, scheduling, and candidate management make managing the hiring pipeline a breeze, and candidate matching, interview guides, and scorecards help reduce bias and improve hiring decisions.
While BreezyHR does integrate with all the most popular HRIS and payroll platforms like BambooHR and Gusto, these integrations are only offered on their highest-tier plan, meaning you’ll need to manually onboard any new hires to your existing people platform.
Key Features
- Custom, automated hiring workflows
- Drag & drop pipelines
- Anti-bias and DE&I tools
- Background check integration
- Resume parsing
- Automated candidate matching
- Collaborative hiring & streamlined scheduling
- Internal referrals
- Interview guides
- Branded careers page
- Robust integrations
Pros and Cons
| Pros | Cons |
|---|---|
| Forever free plan | No phone support |
| User-friendly interface | Large price jump to paid plan |
| Powerful suite of automated tools | No integration with HRIS on lower-tier plans |
| Transparent, straightforward pricing | |
| Unlimited users and candidates on all plans |
Pricing
BreezyHR offers transparent, straightforward pricing for each of their four pricing tiers. The forever free plan includes one active job posting along with unlimited users and candidates.
At $157 per month (billed annually), you can add unlimited positions along with access to candidate pipelines, questionnaires, automations, background screening, integrations, and scheduling tools.
Their Growth plan, at $273 per month, tacks on reference checks, interview guides, scorecards, along with employee referrals and e-signatures.
And finally, their Business plan, at $439 per month, gives you access to HRIS and payroll integrations, advanced questionnaires, candidate nurturing, custom roles and permissions, and offer management.
Free Trial? Yes, 14-days.
Free Plan: Yes, unlimited users and candidates for one posting.
Learn more about BreezyHR
FAQ
What is an applicant tracking system (ATS)?
An applicant tracking system, or ATS, is recruiting software used to manage the hiring process from start to finish. It handles job postings, resume inspections, highlights applicants that fit your job description, sets up interviews, and other key steps HR departments and business owners take to hire new people for their company. It also allows hiring managers to review and make notes on the findings for a collaborative effort to be made with ease.
Does my small business need an applicant tracking system?
Not all companies use an Applicant Tracking System, but not using one can make the hiring process clunkier than necessary. Using an ATS is a proven way of streamlining the recruitment process and helping teams communicate more efficiently. Taking advantage of ATS systems for small business cuts down on the time spent hiring new applicants, creates a better user experience, and improves the quality of new hires. In a highly competitive hiring market, using an ATS puts you ahead of your competitors.
What features should small business applicant tracking software solutions include?
The most basic applicant tracking software should allow you to easily post open positions across multiple jobs boards in a single click. It should provide a central dashboard to track candidate progress and keep team members on the same page, as well as to store interview notes and scorecards from various team members throughout the hiring process.
More advanced ATS systems may offer custom workflows, automated candidate messaging, and a centralized hub to keep track of all communication with a candidate. Many will also offer perks like AI-powered job descriptions, AI-powered candidate matching, along with branded careers pages, and built-in background checks when you’re ready to hire. Integration with HR and payroll platforms is also something to look for.
No matter what, a good ATS should provide a seamless experience both for the candidate and the hiring team.
How much do ATS systems for small businesses cost?
As there is a wide range of applicant tracking software for small business, there is a wide range of prices depending on how powerful a tool you need. Many tools built for smaller businesses tend to include only the most basic functionality in order to keep prices low. Many more robust tools are simply too expensive for startups and very small businesses to afford. But there are affordable, yet robust options targeted specifically for businesses with fewer than 50 employees and minimal hiring needs. The best applicant tracking software will save both time and money with integrated payroll and HR solutions when you’re ready to turn a candidate into an employee.
