Choose the workflow ceiling before choosing the tool. A team hiring for two to ten roles usually needs a visual pipeline, scheduling and clear hiring-manager tasks. A team hiring across departments needs scorecards, approvals, permissions and reporting that hold up under pressure.
Do the active-job maths. Breezy HR’s free Bootstrap plan and Zoho Recruit’s corporate Free plan can work for one active role, but both have active-job constraints. That is fine for testing. It is weak for ongoing hiring.
Budget for the plan you will need in six months. Breezy HR starts at $157/month on Startup, but Growth is often the scaling step because it adds scorecards, interview guides, referrals, e-signatures, multiple locations and multiple recruiting pipelines. Workable starts at $299/month for the 1–20 employee band and is easier to model than quote-based enterprise tools.
Treat AI as a usage cost, not a free feature. Breezy Intelligence credits start at $30 per 100,000 credits, and candidate sourcing can use 50,000 credits for a position. Ashby includes AI credits by plan, with extra credits sold separately. Workable includes 3,000 Workable Agent credits on paid accounts, with paid bundles for more.
Shortlist Greenhouse for governance, not for a cheap start. Greenhouse pricing is custom, and ATSLab records it as an enterprise-priced option. The trade-off is depth: structured interview kits, scorecards, reporting, SSO, Talent Matching and higher-plan controls for more complex hiring teams.
Pilot two finalists on a live role. Use the same requisition, the same hiring manager and the same scorecard. The better ATS is usually the one people actually use without chasing, not the one that looked best in the demo.
