Best Applicant Tracking Software - 2026
- Onboarding module to ease the transition from candidate to new hire.
- 300+ integrations with third-party solutions for numerous people ops needs.
- Collaboration-enabling features distribute the hiring workload across multiple stakeholders.
- Customizable workflows and pre-built templates speed up job posting and collaboration.
- Plentiful customizable workflows and pre-built templates speed up job posting and collaboration.
- Recent improvements to Job Notes, scheduling links, and interview formatting streamline internal coordination.
Greenhouse was founded in 2012 by Daniel Chait. Chait had previously founded a banking software startup, Lab49, and while managing it, he experienced first-hand the challenges of recruiting and realized the need for software to streamline it. After he sold his stake in Lab49 in 2011, he decided to focus his next business venture on recruiting tech, and Greenhouse was born.
Greenhouse supports over 6,500 customers today and has expanded beyond their New York HQ to have offices in San Francisco, Denver, and Dublin. The company has also won several awards over the last few years, including Inc. Magazine Best Workplace (2018 – 2022) and Glassdoor #1 Best Place to Work, Forbes Cloud 100, Deloitte Technology Fast 500, Inc. 5000, Crain's Best Places to Work NYC, and Mogul’s Top 100 Workplaces for Diverse Representation (2022).
- Workflow Automations let teams scale repeatable tasks org-wide, not job-by-job.
- Intuitive career site builder helps attract and convert candidates quickly.
- Highly customizable workflows and referral tools.
- Unlimited jobs and users across all pricing tiers.
- Strong customer support via chat, email, or phone.
Pinpoint was started by Tom Hacquoil. Tom had previously run a cloud computing company where M&A was a big part of their growth strategy. He realized very quickly that talent was the most essential aspect of growing this company. So, he started a bootcamp to train new employees.
Tom didn’t think any existing options met his bar for a quality candidate experience, so he built his own tool to manage applicants for the bootcamp. This was the first version of Pinpoint.,
From there, the product grew with recruiting and candidates in mind, while translating the best ideas from sales/marketing/product/customer service to recruiting.
- Offers native tools for sourcing, video interviews, assessments, and even Core HR, all under one roof.
- Excellent recruitment automation capabilities for emails, pre-assessments, disqualifications, and self-scheduling.
- AI job posting assistant supports tone adjustments, version control, and sentence-level edits.
- Multilingual candidate interface supports French, German, Greek, Spanish, and Portuguese.
- 290+ integrations and API access enable broader customization.
Created in 2012 by Nikos Moraitakis and Spyros Magiatis in Athens, Greece, Workable’s aim is to help companies source the best talent, communicate more effectively and scale faster. Not long after its creation that Workable secured investors and started getting adopted by customers. Today, Workable has offices in Boston, London, Athens, San Francisco, and Sydney, and is used by over 20,000 companies in more than 100 countries.
- Offers the flexibility to use only ATS or to consolidate it with sourcing, scheduling, and CRM tools.
- Built-in database with 800+ million profiles and unlimited AI sourcing, no credit caps or candidate limits.
- Native automation for scheduling, application ranking, outreach, and talent nurturing.
- Smart calendar sync and Slack interview prep streamline recruiter workflows.
- Enterprise clients can adopt modularly, easing ATS migration concerns.
- Flexible integrations with several ATS platforms.
- Robust, yet easy-to-use analytics.
The co-founders of Gem, Steve Bartel and Nick Bushak, were working as engineering managers at Dropbox and Facebook when their companies decided to scale at speed. However, finding the best talent, a.k.a the 'gems', wasn't easy, given that the best people were already taken. And that's when they realized that tracking and managing relationships with passive candidates is crucial. And with no existing system that effectively did this, they set out to build one of their own. That's when Gem was born.
Since then, Gem has grown leaps and bounds, with funding from investors like Greylock, ICONIQ, and Accel. It is now a Unicorn and one of the fastest-growing SaaS businesses with a $1.2B valuation.
- VidCruiter can be fully customized to meet specific recruiting needs.
- Easy to use for both job seekers and recruiters.
- Works on all devices. No app installation is needed.
- Quick Apply feature lets candidates apply directly from Indeed and LinkedIn and auto-syncs the candidate's info to the user’s existing ATS.
- Dedicated client success manager, 24/7 applicant support, phone, email, and live chat.
VidCruiter was founded in 2012 after CEO Sean Fahey experienced first-hand how traditional hiring processes can be slow and inefficient when he was tasked with rapidly hiring 200 people.
Worth noting about VidCruiter
On the topic of AI, VidCruiter’s product team reports that while they may use the technology to generate interview questions, they believe it can introduce unintended bias if used for evaluations. As state and federal laws adapt to this new landscape, employers should carefully consider if and how they will use AI in hiring.
- Multiple practical AI-powered hiring tools are embedded directly into workflows.
- Automated interview scheduling eliminates calendar chasing.
- Clear visibility of feedback, candidate progression, and hiring stages.
- Strong analytics framework, including unified assessment reporting and a new “Qualified” metric for performance tracking.
- Collaboration features like scorecard libraries and structured evaluation summaries reduce bias and improve alignment.
- Built-in one-way video interviews and AI phone screening integration (Team Me) streamline early-stage screening.
- Flexible packaging: ATS available standalone or as part of a broader talent suite (performance, learning, engagement, compensation).
- Intuitive UI across recruiting and onboarding workflows.
- ClearInsights enables cross-lifecycle analytics, connecting sourcing, hiring, performance, and learning data in one environment.
- Emphasis on responsible, assistive AI rather than opaque automation.
- Numerous reports of smooth implementation and attentive customer support.
Since 2004, ClearCompany’s full-spectrum Talent Management platform has enabled thousands of companies to maximize talent by empowering people at every stage of the employee journey. ClearCompany integrates data-driven best practices, expert-informed content, and tailored software tools to recruit, ramp, recognize, and retain employees, uniting people and processes to achieve business success.
- Highly customizable workflows that make navigating the hiring process easy.
- Unlimited job posts.
- Management must-haves are built-in, letting users create offer letters and collect e-signatures without integrating with other tools.
Trakstar was founded by David Martin in 2001. Working out of his college dorm room, David initially wanted to create a solution that digitizes and simplifies employee evaluations. Fast forward to today, the company is not only known for solid performance management tech, but through several acquisitions and rounds of development, has grown to be a vendor of several people management solutions, including applicant tracking, learning management, and people analytics.
- Among the most affordable ATS options in the market. Offers a 14-day free trial.
- Easy to use with drag-and-drop enabled pipelines.
- Native AI-based recommendations feature.
- Web-based, so it works on multiple devices.
- Free data migration from your existing hiring software.
- Boolean Search and Advanced Search can now be used together.
Manatal was founded by Jeremy Fichet and Yassine Belmamoun in early 2019. Their aim was to create a solution that simplifies the recruitment process for recruiters, hiring managers, and candidates alike. Though relatively new to the HR tech space, Manatal’s done quite well for themselves; their customer list includes big brands like Unilever and Cocacola. The company has also grown to have two locations (Singapore and Bangkok), employing a diverse team of over 50 people.
- Pricing is straightforward and affordable for most businesses.
- Zia AI supports resume matching, multilingual summaries, and interview note generation.
- Resume Harvester and job board integrations reduce sourcing time.
- Built-in video interviews and automated scorecards streamline candidate evaluation.
- Vendor and client portals support collaborative hiring workflows.
- Automated emails, hiring triggers, and approval workflows save time.
The Zoho story goes back to 1996, with the founding of AdventNet Inc. Back then, the company made a network management tool that was popular internationally, but mainly in the Japanese market. Then, in 2001, they launched Zoho CRM, which quickly became one of their best-selling apps.
Then, in 2005, the company caught up with the times and started offering cloud-based applications. They began with the Writer app, then Show (a presentation tool), Creator (custom application builder), and Zoho Sheets. It wasn’t long until they realized that there could be a Zoho tool for just about every kind of business app. If you’re curious, the Zoho ‘about page’ actually has an interactive timeline where you can see the evolution of the company year to year. Nowadays, Zoho has over 75 million users worldwide, several offices across the globe, and more than 50 products for marketing, finance, customer and tech support, team collaboration, and of course, HR and recruitment.
- This is one of the few solutions that allow you to do month to month pricing, a nice option to have!
- Free 7-day trials are available (and you can definitely extend these another week or so if needed).
- The mobile app works well and offers built-in application review, communication, and collaboration features.
- They have a ridiculously fast response time on customer success queries, less than 2 minutes in our experience.
BambooHR was started in 2008 by Ben Peterson and Ryan Sanders. Their goal was to create a product that customers would love using and that would save countless man hours. At the same time, they wanted the company behind this product to be a place people would enjoy working at.
This approach worked, as they have kept growing both their employee and customer count quite steadily over the years. They had 470 employees around the end of 2019. Now, as of Summer 2025, they have over 1730. Their product is used by thousands of companies in well over 100 countries.
An interesting bit about the way they manage their company is that they have an “anti-workaholic policy”. Basically, BambooHR employees are forbidden from laboring over 40 hours per week.
Also noteworthy is the fact that while both founding members are still on the board, BambooHR’s CEO is now Brad Rencher. He was previously a marketing executive at Adobe Inc., before being recruited for the post in October 2019.
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The best ATS software can take tedious manual tasks off your plate, enhance candidate experience, screen applications at scale, and give you clear visibility into what is actually working in your recruiting process.
We have tested dozens of platforms over the years, from lightweight applicant tracking systems for startups and small teams to enterprise-centric solutions. Our latest evaluation showed that Greenhouse, Pinpoint, and Workableare among the best ATS systems for most organizations.
Other Top ATS Systems Worth Considering
- SmartRecruiters: Great TA suite for enterprises, featuring collaboration and AI natively
Benefits of ATS Software
ATS systems are essential for growing companies because they streamline recruitment, enhance employer branding, provide detailed analytics, and facilitate smooth engagement of managers and employees beyond HR and talent acquisition teams. Statistically, 94% of recruiters found ATS has positively impacted their hiring processes.
- Customized workflows: Top ATS systems can customize and automate tasks like application processing, screening, and collecting feedback, which dramatically improve hiring efficiency. This benefit is especially significant to organizations hiring from very different candidate pools. If, for example, your team is hiring both truck drivers and software engineers, you can bet these workflows won’t be interchangeable.
- Improved employer branding: Candidate tracking systems will help your organization create and manage a custom career site, helping your company stand out. Showcasing your best features will make it easier to attract top talent. With integrations to networks like LinkedIn, reaching a wide audience is easy.
- Better quality talent pools: The best ATS software can save time and money by maintaining already-sourced candidates. If you maintain occasional contact with a pool of qualified candidates, your recruiting process doesn’t start from zero each time you open a new role.
- Wider internal engagement: Rather than relying exclusively on your HR or TA teams for recruiting, top ATS systems will also involve your hiring managers and employees as part of the process. Employee referrals, feedback on job candidates, and social media can all be leveraged to fill open positions.
- Streamlined hiring and onboarding: An ATS can do more than streamline recruiting; it can work wonders for onboarding. A good first impression sets the stage for good candidate experience, so it’s critical to make the onboarding process employee-focused, timely, and effective.
- More effective recruitment strategies: An effective hiring process is one that is data-driven. Any good ATS software dashboard will put recruiter productivity, cost per hire, cost of job boards, cost of paid media, time to hire, and other key data at your fingertips.
How To Choose the Best ATS
Any business choosing an ATS should aim to get the maximum functionality for its price point (while ensuring key functions for its specific business are best-in-class), focus on potential long-term benefits rather than short-term costs, and understand the software vendor's product roadmap. Beyond key features and pricing, user experience (UX) and user interface (UI), scalability, and customization are also critical factors to look for in a top ATS system.
- What do you want to achieve with the ATS?: Depending on your business, you can have one person or multiple teams across your company branches interacting with the ATS day-to-day. Each may have a different pain point they want the recruitment tool to tackle. Knowing the center goals of these stakeholders and the importance of each can help you create a list of features ranked from most to least desired.
- What can you afford?: An ATS that can schedule interviews, manage employee referrals, and parse resumes will lighten the load on your HR/TA team, leading to increased efficiency. That said, investing in a feature-rich ATS could mean more complexity, steeper learning curves, and higher costs to the system. So, besides the feature list, you’d need to note down your allowed budget and the human resources involved in onboarding and maintaining the ATS system.
- Focus on individual features during your vendor research: Evaluate precisely what you need. The feature list and resource note that you have prepared in the earlier steps will help you stay focused on options that truly matter.
- Think long-term: Trying to anticipate the future is critical given how hard these tools are to replace over time (migrating tons of candidate data, different workflows for different types of jobs, etc.). Beyond the platform's capacity to scale up as you grow, pay attention to how this growth will affect product pricing and, therefore, the ATS ROI.
- Understand the roadmap: A tool with no future plan for improvements may cause trouble for future software updates, but a vendor with an ambitious list of feature enhancements, yet a very humble track record of delivery, is not any better. Ask the sales rep specific questions relevant to your business needs, and review content published on the company's channels for more information.
- User Experience and Interface: When looking at well-known platforms like Greenhouse, BambooHR, and Pinpoint, it’s easy to see that a well-designed interface partly contributes to higher adoption rates and, consequently, the growing popularity of these platforms. A great UX/UI enhances user satisfaction, reduces training time, and improves recruitment processes. It also benefits job applicants, as a smooth and intuitive application process helps improve the candidate experience and increase the likelihood of successful hires.
- Customization and Scalability: An applicant tracking system that seems ideal for your 20-person team today may become inadequate if it cannot support your international hiring needs as your team scales globally. Be sure to assess how customizable the system is (e.g., branding options, workflow customization, automation tools) to meet both your current and long-term needs. Oftentimes, seeking advice from HR tech experts results in faster and more accurate ATS shortlists, as they provide candid insights that a vendor’s sales team might not disclose.
Check out this video for insights from our experts on selecting the right applicant tracking software for your needs.
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