10 Best Free Recruitment Software Tools for 2025

Not only does Manatal cover most of the features you’d expect from a budget-friendly ATS, but the platform also tops that off with AI-powered actions, such as candidate filtering and recommendations. You can explore Manatal’s features for free for up to 14 days, with no credit card required.

Signing up for a trial is pretty easy. We finished the sign-up form, verified our email address, and the vendor let us access its product. We started by posting a job and there were a few pre-built templates available for us to get things started. However, the salary currency just supports USD only. But other than that, everything looked good. There are several employment types and options to put the exact location, tick the remote position box, or leave it blank.

Navigating through the dashboard was straightforward. We tried making for ourselves a career page. It turned out this tool of Manatal is customizable but has some locked features like post-application and post-referral email workflows that we couldn’t use unless we upgraded to a paid plan. While we were expecting to be able to publish our first job to some free job boards, the trial didn’t let us do so, which was a bit disappointing.

To sum up, while Manatal’s capabilities are great, users won’t get much value from its free trial, as certain features like posting jobs on free job boards aren’t available for them to use. And as Manatal doesn’t offer a free plan, the only way to see how it actually works is to purchase one of its paid plans.

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

Manatal has four plans and supports both monthly and annual billing. Below is its pricing when billed annually:

• Professional: $15/user/month, unlimited guests, 15 jobs per account, and 10,000 candidates.
• Enterprise: $35/user/month, unlimited jobs, candidates, and guests.
• Enterprise Plus: $55/user/month and includes Enterprise features, user groups, open API access, SSO log-in, priority support, and access to Beta features.
• Custom: Custom pricing.

Similar to Zoho Recruit, Wellfound offers a free-forever ATS for anyone to opt for on its platform. But what truly sets Wellfound apart is that it doesn’t cap the number of job posts, unlike Zoho Recruit, which restricts you to just one. Given its strong reputation as the hotspot for startup-savvy talent, most tech startups will likely find the right fit for their teams there pretty easily without dipping into the funds.

Diving into Wellfound's Job Platform felt like it was designed with lean startups like ours in mind—no frills, no fluff. You get to post job openings (as mentioned above, it’s free), and the platform enables you to neatly organize all applications, collaborate with other members using in-app notes, manage your conversations with candidates, schedule interviews, and track everything in one centralized location.

However, one downside we noticed was its lack of third-party job board integrations. Unlike most recruitment tools that allow you to post jobs to multiple platforms at no extra charge thanks to their built-in job board network, Wellfound restricts its free users to its job board, which hosts around 12 million job seekers. For a broader talent reach, there seems to be no other way but to either pay for job promotions or upgrade to a paid plan.

And when we compare the free ATS to alternatives like Recruit CRM or Zoho Recruit, we do feel a pinch from the absence of multilingual support and some AI-driven functionalities, like automatic job description generation.

25,000+ companies, including Modern Health, Xander, and Dosu.

Wellfound provides a free ATS for applicant access and tracking. Paid plans start at $149/month, with add-ons and custom packages available.

Zoho Recruit’s free plan gives users a lot more features than we thought a no-cost tool would. In addition to candidate management, you get email management, interview scheduling, and support through weekdays — all for free.

Though G-Suite, Outlook, and native HR tech integrations are only available for paid editions, Zoho Recruit does provide free users with Zapier access. This can be quite handy if you want to connect your free recruiting tool with some of your team’s day-to-day apps, like Google Calendar, Slack, and Zoom.

Zoho Recruit is also quite capable of language inclusion. As of 2024, this recruiting platform has supported 26 different languages, from English and Spanish to Arabic, Japanese, Vietnamese, and Chinese.

Not everyone likes the idea of doing things from scratch, so we’re glad the free plan comes with five customized email templates plus a user-friendly resume search feature for time-saving.

However, it's important to note that Zoho Recruit restricts its free users to having only one active job opening at a time. The storage limit isn’t ideal either — it’s capped at just 256MB.

Zoho Recruit also gave us quite an overwhelming feeling in our first encounter, mostly due to the abundance of tabs and menus.

Bosch, Deloitte, Saint-Gobain, PWC, Allianz

Zoho Recruit has different pricing for corporate recruiters and recruitment staffing agencies, with features such as client portal, video interview, data migration, and premium support are available as add-ons.

• For corporate HRs, there are three plans: Free, Standard ($25/recruiter/month billed annually), and Enterprise ($50/recruiter/month billed annually).‍
• For staffing agencies, there are four plans: Free, Standard ($25/user/month billed annually), Professional ($50/user/month billed annually), and Enterprise ($75/user/month billed annually).

Like Manatal, Recruit CRM doesn’t ask for your credit card info to grant you access to its free trial. What sets this vendor apart, though, is that this free trial has no time limit, meaning you can use it for as long as you want.

Recruit CRM’s search function is universal across its plans. You can do Boolean, filter searches (including radius search), or a combination of the two. The only downside is that you can't search for specific words in your call logs. This is on Recruit CRM’s product roadmap and, given how responsive they are to customer requests, it’ll likely be available soon.

We were immediately impressed by the detailed instructions integrated into the dashboard. Plus, there’s a live chat box in the right corner. The humans behind it didn’t disappoint, with responses coming in a few minutes.

Recruit CRM’s resume parser is pretty awesome, too. You can parse up to 49 resumes, check for duplicates, and even get your non-English resumes parsed.

In terms of CRM features, Recruit CRM's free trial is a good starting point for small employment agencies. You get the basics like a deal pipeline, a custom dashboard, and invoicing, plus GPT integration. You even have access to Zapier to connect the platform with other apps you use.

However, you can only use one sequence and have one hiring pipeline with the free version. There’s also no call recording, no texting, and no resume formatting.

Recruit CRM is more focused on agencies than corporate companies. So, if you need things like referral management or onboarding, you'll have to look elsewhere.

1,200+ agencies such as Blue Recruiting, G4 Global Partner, and Zeren have used Recruit CRM.

Recruit CRM offers three pricing plans. Billed annually, the Pro plan costs $85 per user per month, while the Business plan costs $125 per user per month. For the Enterprise plan, annual billing is the only option, and it costs $165 per user per month.

If you've been following the buyer guide, you might have noticed that SeekOut is no longer on our recommended free recruitment software list. They've made changes and now only offer their sourcing extension to paid users. No worries, though—we've found a great alternative in Breezy HR.

As we first checked out Breezy HR, we were struck by how straightforward their pricing is. You know exactly what you’ll pay for each plan. The free plan, Bootstrap, is super easy to sign up for. You fill in a form (no need to give your credit card info), and that's it. After confirming our email, we landed on this dashboard.

We liked the simplicity of the platform’s design. It makes it easy to figure out where to go for what. And the fact that the live chat got back to us within an hour didn’t sound bad at all for a free service.

Like most other free recruiting tools, Breezy HR’s Bootstrap lets you have one active job. Yet beyond that, it allows you to add as many users as you want, customize your career site, including a referral page, and access over 50 job boards to distribute your open positions.

When you check out this recruitment solution yourself, don’t forget to visit the resume parsing tool. It can handle more than 20 languages while making sure all your parsed resumes are searchable, which is undoubtedly the free parser par excellence we’ve tested.

However, our biggest letdown with Breezy HR’s free plan is that it only allows access to candidates added in the past 30 days. This basically means that despite having unlimited candidate pools at your fingertips, there's a good chance you won't be able to move candidates through your recruitment process within that time frame, let alone kick off any talent nurturing campaigns.

Breezy HR is used by over 17,000+ companies, including Tonal, Duolingo, and Product Hunt.

Breezy HR’s Bootstrap is free forever, as introduced above. In addition, there are three fixed-pricing paid plans: Startup, Growth, and Business, which cost $157,$273, and $439 per month billed annually, respectively. Pro plan has custom pricing. Some advanced features, such as SMS/Text Messaging and Candidate Match Score, are offered as add-ons.

GoHire stood out in our testing as a recruiting tool that incredibly fits startups and small businesses. Its affordable price has remained unchanged for years, and you can test it out for free for two weeks. Plus, it’s packed with all the SMB ATS features we’d think of, from job boards to career pages, email engagement, onboarding, and even AI hiring tools.

Our initial impression of GoHire was its improved platform design, both visually and functionally. The latest version is much easier to navigate, unlike the previous one, which could be a bit clunky at times. We tested the platform on different browsers and mobile devices, and the experience had consistently been positive.

During the free trial signup process, we had a little trouble with email validation. But thanks to that, we experienced firsthand the responsiveness of GoHire’s support team. Jerome helped us out and resolved the problem the same day we got in touch with them.

GoHire’s dashboard provided a step-by-step guide to familiarize us with each feature. We also had a dedicated account manager for further assistance. Creating our first job post was straightforward, aided by the availability of over 700 job description samples. Custom questions for pre-screening purposes were limited to paid plans, but we could easily publish our job posts on 15+ integrated job boards and invite team members to collaborate.

Recently, the ATS provider introduced new AI hiring tools that help users generate job descriptions, career pages, outreach emails, interview questions, and onboarding checklists. We tried some, and they did deliver good enough answers in a few seconds.

3,000+ companies, including Snagajob, Promoter, Sweetberry, Swapcard, and Voucher Cart.

GoHire has three plans; each comes with a free 14-day trial you can sign up for using your email.

• Starter costs $89 per month and includes basic features, 3 active job posts, a custom career page, interview scheduling, and unlimited team members.
• Growth costs $150 per month and has all features from Starter plus customizable pipelines, bulk actions, screening questions, and mention team members.‍
• Pro costs $290 per month and has all Growth features plus unlimited job posts, automated stage actions, advanced reporting, video questionnaires, and private notes.

Workable is a well-rounded recruiting software that brings together AI-powered hiring tools, automation, job posting, and candidate management in one intuitive platform.

From the moment we landed on the platform’s dashboard, we noticed how intuitive and easy it was to navigate. Managing job postings, tracking applicants, and automating communication felt intuitive, with a well-structured interface that required minimal, if any, training. 

We also spent some time testing Workable’s job posting capabilities. The AI-powered job description tool made it simple to craft compelling, well-structured postings with the flexibility to adjust tone and wording as needed. Its career site builder was another pleasant surprise—not only is it easy to use, but it also allows teams to collaborate on the design, ensuring consistency in employer branding.

More importantly, Workable’s free trial actually enables users to distribute job postings to multiple free job boards, rather than limiting distribution behind a paywall, as some competitors do with their freebies.

It's also great to see that the recruiting software has been rolling out frequent product updates, with some standing out as particularly helpful. For example, the introduction of automatic signature dates for offer letters ensures accurate timestamps without requiring manual edits, while new visibility controls help businesses protect sensitive information by restricting access to certain offer letters, salary details, and compliance documents.

While Workable performs well in almost every area we tested, it’s worth noting that it doesn’t offer a free-forever plan like Wellfound or Breezy HR. The free trial lasts only 15 days while paid plans start at $169 per month—a higher price than some alternatives like Manatal and Zoho Recruit.

In terms of integrations, Workable connects with most major tools, including HRIS, email, calendar applications, and background check providers. However, some advanced integrations, such as payroll systems, are not included in the trial, and features like candidate texting and video interviewing cost extra.

Additionally, while the candidate-facing multilingual experience is a great feature, it’s not available in the trial, and the employer interface is only offered in English, which could be a drawback for some.

30,000+ organizations, including Ogilvy, The Telegraph, and Eurobank.

Workable's pricing starts at $169 per month. They also offer a free trial and bundle discounts.

Gem is a paid recruitment platform. Although compared to our last review round, they no longer provide a free plan for early-stage startups, those eligible (founded less than three years ago, with under 15 employees, and raising less than $7 million in funding) can access their product with decent discounts. Plus, this vendor has a free trial anyone can opt for with their company email.

We headed to Gem’s dashboard and immediately loved clean and simple layout. Getting around is super easy, thanks to their step-by-step guides.

Gem’s Chrome extension is quite a nice feature which let us lift and save candidate info right within LinkedIn and Indeed for later use. One thing we didn’t like about it, though, was that finding the extension on the Chrome Web Store can be a bit of a headache. We ended up using the direct link from Gem since searching for it directly in the Web Store didn’t work.

In our latest review, we decided to test out how well Gem plays with Calendly, Gmail, and Slack. The self-help integration guide was pretty straightforward, but we thought we would bug Gem's support to get a feel for their customer service. And they didn’t disappoint—integrations were a breeze, the support team got back to us in about half an hour, and it seems they're pretty open to adding new integrations if you've got some in mind.

We heard lots of good things about Gem’s Sequence, so we went in with high hopes. Thankfully it totally lived up to our expectations. This single feature let us incorporate our email signature, add curated content, schedule the emails, and even keep an eye on our hiring data. We particularly found Gem’s analytics tool attractive—it lets you track critical stats on how your outreach campaigns and sequence content are performing in real-time. The platform also makes it easy to share these data points with stakeholders.

Unfortunately, Gem still has no mobile apps. It’s been months since the vendor stated on their website this is on their roadmap, yet we haven’t seen any progress at all. Also, it's a bummer that the platform doesn't offer built-in features for email template library, internal hiring, or a referral program.

Coinbase, Slack, Asana, Dropbox, Lyft, Indeed, Pinterest, Doordash

Gem has custom pricing. You can reach out to their sales team for more information.

Recooty is one of the few vendors that lets you actually publish jobs to a number of job boards during your free trials. Moreover, they allow you to have up to 5 active jobs, not 1 like you often see in other free recruiting platforms.

Signing up for Recooty’s 14-day free trial doesn’t require sharing your credit card info. After your trial ends, the platform will give you access to its free ATS, which covers most of the features small businesses need.

The free plan supports one active job post at a time, integrates with a dozen free job boards, and enables users to create a branded career pages and share jobs across social media platforms. Users can also store received candidates on the system to build their own talent pool and reuse them later.

We found that Recooty’s free plan is easy to set up and use. Posting an opening takes just a couple of clicks, and now, with the help of the AI multilingual job description generator, it is even more streamlined. Tracking and managing applicants are also simple, thanks to automated email notifications, an up-to-the-minute dashboard, and application filters.

However, the biggest drawback of the free plan is that it only allows one user. This and the absence of a Chrome extension and built-in communication tools make it challenging for collaborative hiring.

As a free plan user, LinkedIn and Slack are the sole two third-party integrations you get. While API support can serve as a workaround for this shortcoming to sync data across your HR tools, it’s only available for Recooty’s paid users.

We haven’t seen this ATS roll out its mobile app, though users have requested it often in the two years we’ve been keeping an eye on the company and its product.

Sendlane, Airtable, Uber, Rack Bank, American Hospital, Trello.

Recooty pricing has gone up a bit over the past few years. When billed annually:

• Free: It is no longer promoted on the vendor’s site but is still available after the free trial. This plan offers one active job slot, one user, and one company location.
• Starter: $99/month for 10 active jobs, 10 users, and 3 locations. A free trial is available.
• Growth: $149/month for 25 active jobs, 50 users, and 10 locations. Free trial available.
• Business: $199/month for 50 active jobs, 100 users, and 20 locations. A free trial is available.
• Enterprise: Custom pricing.

Indeed is perhaps the biggest and most popular job board available today. To date, there are over 3 million users who have posted jobs on this platform.

We love the recent additions of smart recommendations to its job posting process. These AI-powered features include a tailored job template that you can edit and a suggested pay range based on Indeed’s analysis of similar jobs posted on the platform in the last 12 months.

It’s entirely up to you to choose whether to advertise your job posts on Indeed for better visibility. The job portal platform also offers a free trial that’ll sponsor your job at a $27 daily budget for free in 3 days but under two conditions: your account must be verified, and your payment method must be added.

Being in the employment market for over two decades helps Indeed build out one of the best talent pools, which is the foundation of its great talent matching tool. Once you finish your job post, you’re prompted to rate at least 4 of 20 talent profiles the job portal gives you. Based on your answers, the system will match you with the best matches for your job.

Indeed also has built-in messaging features you can use to reach out to candidates and schedule interviews. However, our testing shows these are not as good as what you could find from ATS, such as GoHire and Manatal, and software interviewing leaders like Willo, Jobma, and SparkHire.

Furthermore, due to its popularity, your free job posts could easily get buried with numerous other postings in a matter of days.

Indeed is used by over 3,000,000 companies, including Nokia, Schwab, McDonald's, and the University of Oxford.

• Posting jobs on Indeed's general search results is free.
• The fee to sponsor your listing varies based on job title, location, and available job seekers.
• Indeed calculates the price and shows it before payment so you can decide if it fits your budget. You also have 48 hours to reject unwanted applications before being charged.

Calendly is an appointment scheduling platform that comes with an indefinite free plan. Although not exclusively built for recruiting per se, HR managers can take advantage of this freebie at the interviewing stage of recruiting.

We think simplicity is the best word to describe how Calendly looks and works. Even if you're new to setting up interviews, navigating this tool won’t make you scratch your head. Plus, the automatic language and timezone detection is such a nice touch to make booking interviews seamless for candidates and colleagues worldwide.

Calendly natively integrates with most popular calendars and video conferencing tools. In the free version, you can create unlimited one-on-one events, send automated event notifications to your candidates, and customize your booking link.

Another thing we really like about this scheduling app is its reasonable pricing. Though it has gone up a bit since last year, it's still pretty affordable (at $10 per user per month) compared to other interview scheduling tools like Paradox and GoodTime. And the best part is, there's a free 14-day trial you can sign up for without having to give in your credit card info.

Unfortunately, Calendly's free plan only supports one-on-one events and one active booking page at a time. The customization features provided in this plan also disappoint us, with only two options available: the ability to change your event’s color and its name.

Some users may find the mobile apps less intuitive and functional compared to the browser version, as they can be slow and lack some key functionality.

eBay, Compass, Lyft, Dropbox, La-Z-Boy, Twilio, and Stack Overflow.

Calendly is always free for a single calendar per user. Regarding paid options, it has 3: Standard and Teams start at $10 and $16 per user per month when billed annually, respectively, while Enterprise requires annual billing and starts at $15,000 per year.