9 Best Applicant Tracking Software for 2023

Of all the ATS on our list, Rippling excels in HR tools and integrations. You can add payroll, time tracking, benefits administration, learning management, IT management, and HR support. In fact, if you want a professional employer organization (PEO), Rippling has you covered. And with over 500 integrations, if you need a tool, you can probably add it with no problem.

Like the others on our list, Rippling’s ATS lets you post to job boards and social media with a click. Its application tools are not as robust as the others, but it does have resume parsing and search. However, it does not have recruiter tools, so check JobScore, and Breezy HR if you require them.

Unlike the others on our list, Rippling does not have screening questions, but you can customize workflows from hundreds of prebuilt templates. Plus, it has background screening, something we did not find in the others on our list.

Rippling integrates with Outlook, iCal, Google Calendar, and others, so you can easily schedule interviews with the candidate and your team. Unlike Breezy HR, you cannot contact them via SMS on the app.

Rippling has the best onboarding tools. It boasts 90-second onboarding and is the only system in this guide with e-signatures with its basic plan. You can send offer letters, run background checks, enroll them in payroll and benefits, and even assign them their work computer if you have the IT Device module.

The free plan is more limited than the others on our list but is still a good place to start. It parses resumes, allows for one position or candidate pool, lets you create a career site, and enables you to post to 50+ job boards.

Breezy is unique in that it offers two add-on programs. The first, Talent Search ($249/month), gives you access to millions of professional profiles, with the ability to search based on background, location, and skills. Once found, you can make contact via SMS or email from the platform. You can even start automated nurture campaigns if you don’t have a position available but want to keep the relationship going. MightyRecruiter has a similar resume search program for free, however. The second plan is SMS texting (explained next).

All Breezy HR plans have 10 SMS credits per month (about 1,600 characters), but if that’s not enough, you can purchase SMS/Texting ($149/month) for an additional 5,000 credits. Breezy HR has self-scheduling for interviews and video interviewing technology. You can collaborate with your teammates in the app or via Slack. If a team member is on mobile, they get push notifications in real time.

You can create custom job ads and post them to over 50 boards, including tweaking for paid promotions. If someone visits your website or career page, you can automatically reach out with the Hello Messenger app. This is unique among the ATSes on our list. You can also change the language in your careers site portal using its multilanguage support.

While Breezy HR lets you manage job and offer approvals, it does not have onboarding. It will automatically send a new hire to your integrated HRIS. If you need more onboarding tools, check Rippling.

Unlike Rippling, Breezy HR does not have HR tools. However, it does integrate with popular HR systems like BambooHR, Deputy, Gusto, and Zenefits. Thus, Breezy HR is a sound solution if you’re already using other HR tools but looking for a robust ATS. With EEO compliance surveys, Breezy HR can also track your compliance and reporting with ease.

With 4.49 out of 5 stars from real-world users across multiple review sites, Breezy HR is one of the higher-ranking software on our list. Users said it was easy to use, well-priced, and had the needed features. It has an online knowledge base, video tutorials, and weekly webinars. You get priority support with paid plans, which includes live chat support on the platform during business hours, but no phone support.

The free tier contains the basic tools you need for recruiting, and many users say it’s enough to get the job done. You can set up a career site (with video and images), post to job boards, share on social networks, run an employee referral campaign, and more. It has notes, candidate tagging, customizable workflows, and offer templates. Reports are minimal but include EEO compliance. MightyRecruiter ranks higher for free plans, however.

JobScore integrates with over 70 job boards, letting you post to your choices with a click. The application process (also mobile-optimized) makes it easy for applicants to apply—but you can also use the application builder to create one. Select questions from its list or add your own, and let applicants drag and drop their resume, which JobScore will parse it for you. If you want to entice your employees to refer people, the system lets you build a rewards program for referrals.

Sort through your slush pile using JobScore’s list of criteria. You rate the importance of each aspect, and it scores resumes on a scale from 1 to 10. You can schedule interviews and integrate them with Google and Microsoft calendars.

With JobScore, you can easily find talent with your employees’ help and reward them for each successful hire. With the employee referral portal, you can immediately check who’s referring and how the referrals are doing in the hiring process. You can even assess how the referral program is doing over time by checking the number of referrals and hires over time.

GoHire has a full recruitment solution that includes job description templates, posting to job boards, applicant tracking, and even background screening. Once you decide to hire, you can also use its onboarding tools that include e-verify, W-4 and I-9 forms, and offer letter management.

Like other providers in this guide, GoHire lets you make job posting quicker using its 700+ job description templates. You can post to more than 15 job boards in just one click.

Promote your company and attract suitable candidates using GoHire’s employee branding tools. With its tools, you can customize your careers site to reflect your brand and company culture.

Although GoHire allows you to integrate with third-party software, this is only limited to job advertising and social media apps.

Currently, Manatal only offers three job description templates for software engineer, sales manager, and digital marketing manager.

With Manatal, you can add a job listing by filling out a form. You can save this as a template for use later in case you need to hire for the same position.

Customizing your careers website with Manatal is easy enough because it has a few personalization options. However, I like its ability to let you see how your careers page would look like on desktop, mobile, or tablet.

Manatal has a drag-and-drop customizable hiring pipeline, which is beneficial for new and old users alike.

Manatal lets users analyze hiring numbers related to candidates, hiring performance, or jobs. While Manatal doesn’t allow you to create custom reports, it offers a user report, which lets administrator accounts analyze the participation of different members in the hiring team.

MightyRecruiter offers a database of over 21 million resumes so you can search for a candidate that may not be on your job boards. In addition to keywords, it offers Boolean search tools to help you narrow candidates down.

MightyRecruiter offers over 200 customizable job descriptions. You can customize these with its editor, and then post to any of 29 different boards or social media sites with a simple click. Job boards include popular sites like Monster, local sites like Craigslist, and specialized sites like VetJobs.

There are several ways to evaluate candidates: a star system, a yes-no-maybe, and thumbs-up. You can add notes on candidates and create tags to make it easier to search for them in the future. It has a simple screening questions tool, with a library of questions you can use. Compared to others on our list, it is basic but has enough to get the job done.

Unlike Breezy HR, MightyRecruiter only works with email for communication.

With one click, SmartRecruiters can post jobs on more than 300 job boards. Its SmartDistribute tracking reports and post-to-hire metrics even identify which job boards are helping you fill your talent pipeline, a function only SmartRecruiters offer.

Available via SmartRecruit, this recruiting module lets you configure different hiring processes. You can customize user roles and access levels, customize workflows with compliance in mind, and provide scalable collaborative hiring tools for global teams. SmartGlobal supports 37 languages.

To fast-track the hiring process, SmartRecruiters allows hiring managers and other stakeholders to communicate, share resumes and notes, and collaborate on one platform. You can maintain communication records with its historical message tracking and create a consistent messaging system with SmartRecruiters’ template library.

SmartRecruiters’ unique workflow management is one of the best in the market as it’s so simple to configure, unlike other providers where inexperienced users may need guidance. This solution prevents workflow stagnation with configurable tasks and reminders, easy approvals, and real-time dashboards. You can also keep passive candidates updated with scheduled check-ins, improve candidate experience with timely feedback, and even set reminders to reduce the time you spend on each vacant job position.

SmartRecruiters has customizable application forms that let you identify qualified candidates quickly—a function JobScore also has. It even has fully integrated assessments and skills tests to predict if a candidate is fit for the role and if they will stay with the company for a long time—something Indeed can also do.

You can schedule virtual interviews with multiple candidates and provide interview updates automatically. Standardized scorecards are used to get objective feedback from interviewers.

You can set hiring goals and monitor and improve the hiring team’s performance during the recruitment process.

Only with SmartRecruiters can you extend timely offers to applicants using integrated and configurable offer letter templates and forms and automated approvals via any mobile device. You can even let candidates view, sign, and accept their offers quickly and from any device using SmartRecruiters’ DocuSign integration. It also has an automated onboarding process complete with background checks for new hires.

While other providers charge monthly fees on a per-employee basis, only Homebase bills you based on the number of business locations you have. This is optimal for employers with plans to grow their workforce in one location.

Compared to all of the applicant tracking software we reviewed, only Homebase has a robust offering of free-to-use hiring, scheduling, and time tracking tools. You even get a built-in team messenger and a self-service portal where employees can manage their own information.

It has an easy-to-use platform with intuitive controls that enable users to create and post jobs to multiple online job boards and social media platforms, such as Indeed, ZipRecruiter, Google, Facebook, and LinkedIn. Applicants can also send their resumes through the job boards and go directly to the Homebase Hiring dashboard, where you can message, interview, and hire applicants all in one place.

Like Indeed and MightyRecruiter, you can use screening questions to make the vetting process even easier with Homebase. You get up to three questions that can be attached to a job post. Applicants can respond to these questions when they apply.

To get your job post in front of more applicants, you can purchase Homebase’s Premium Boost, which lasts for 30 days and increases the number of applicants you’ll receive.

Aside from reaching out to applicants via job boards and social media platforms, Homebase offers different ways you can find applicants:

• Referrals: You can send a link to your job post to your team members.
• QR code: Applicants can download a QR code that they can scan on their phones.
• Text-to-apply: To capture walk-ins, you can send applicants a text message with a link to your job post—a unique feature that only Homebase offers.
• Career page: Customize your career page and use it to describe your business and advertise your company culture. You can also send the career page’s link to applicants.
• Manual: Add applicants directly to Homebase through its Hiring page.

Only Homebase narrows the number of applicants down using different filters—Status, Distance, Application Quality, Source, and Availability.

New employees hired using Homebase will receive a welcome packet and can e-sign direct deposit, W-4, W-9, and I-9 forms.

Your free Indeed company page informs job seekers what it’s like to work for your company. You can add photos, and employees can leave reviews about your company.

Indeed’s Sponsored Jobs is the only PPC plan to boost your job postings in this guide. You can post jobs directly on its platform for free, but you can also pay a small fee (starts at $5 per day) to sponsor jobs. Sponsoring your ad is one way to maximize your job post on Indeed. If you have an existing company career site, you can post a job for free in the general search results or pay to advertise.

Like SmartRecruiters, you can cast a wider net for qualified applicants since Indeed job postings automatically receive applications via Indeed Apply, even on mobile. Indeed Apply is a feature that allows job seekers to quickly send their applications using an Indeed Resume or a traditional resume file.

Like MightyRecruiter and Homebase, you can add screening questions to the job application form, such as “How many years of experience do you have?” You can also ask job seekers to complete online exams to verify their skills, like customer support, typing, or Excel.

Like all the other providers, Indeed lets you and members of the hiring team send messages to candidates or schedule an interview from its platform. It also stores all messages, allowing you to track applicant communications easily.

You can create templates for common messages, such as “Thank you for applying” or “We’ll be contacting you for an interview.” This lets you correspond using standardized communications to keep job seekers in the loop.

Only Indeed works seamlessly with more than 200 third-party platforms, such as Applicant Pro, Breezy HR, Greenhouse, Hirebridge, JazzHR, TalentReef, Workable, and Zoho Recruit.

There is no one-size-fits-all solution when it comes to choosing the best software for a small business. The best applicant tracking system would depend on their budget, hiring frequency, size of company, or hiring processes. Thus, the best ATS for you is one that would help streamline your processes. Generally, you need something that will help you post jobs, accept applications, select and interview candidates, and even onboard new hires.

ATS pricing can vary greatly depending on the provider features and pricing models. Based on this guide, the pricing can vary from $25 to $720 monthly. While there are free applicant tracking systems you can use, most of these usually have limited capabilities.

An ATS helps you find qualified candidates for your open positions by first creating job descriptions and posting these to job boards. These job listings may also be shared via social media and through employee referrals. ATS can parse resumes, store candidate information, and lets users communicate with the candidates and their fellow recruiters. Some applicant tracking systems let you schedule and perform interviews with candidates. When you’ve chosen an applicant to hire, some software also lets you onboard new hires into the system.

Whatever business size you have, an ATS can bring you benefits. For one, ATSes help bring your brand in front of potential candidates. It also makes hiring efficient as you don’t have to track emails or create spreadsheets for tracking applicants plus all your communications with the hiring team and candidates are in one place.