Free Applicant Tracking System: 10 ATS Compared
Free applicant tracking systems compared: which free plans are real, which are trials, the exact job and data limits, and what stopped being free.
Free Applicant Tracking System: 10 ATS Compared
Which free plans are permanent and which are trials in disguise, the exact job and candidate limits on each, the records problem that thirty-day retention creates, and which widely recommended free options quietly stopped being free
Most lists of free applicant tracking systems are wrong in the same way. They put permanent free plans and 15-day trials in one ranking, so a founder sets up a hiring pipeline, imports candidates, and discovers two weeks later that the account has gone read-only in the middle of an active hire. The difference between those two things is the only fact that matters, and it is the one the format hides.
The genuinely free list is shorter than it looks. Two of the best-known free plans cap you at exactly one open role. One popular free tier deletes candidate data after 30 days. Two widely recommended free options were withdrawn during 2026 and still appear in current roundups. And one product frequently listed as a free ATS has hiring tools on a paid tier entirely.
This compares 10 tools by whether the free tier is permanent, what it actually caps, and what happens when you outgrow it. One note on audience: this is written for employers choosing recruiting software. If you arrived looking for a free tool that scores your resume against an ATS, that is a different category of product and this page will not help.
What free actually means in applicant tracking
The word covers four different commercial models, and knowing which one you are looking at predicts almost everything about how the tool will behave in month three.
| Model | What you are actually getting | Who uses it | The catch |
|---|---|---|---|
| Permanent free plan | A capped version of the paid product with no end date | Breezy HR, Zoho Recruit | Caps on active jobs, data retention, or features |
| Free with a service attached | A full-featured free product funded by something else | Dover, Wellfound | The business model steers you toward the paid service or network |
| Open source | Unlimited software you install and maintain | OpenCATS | Hosting, updates, and support are your problem |
| Free trial | The paid product for a fixed number of days | Workable, JazzHR, Manatal, Recruitee, 100Hires | It expires, usually mid-hire |
The fourth row is where buyers get hurt. A trial is a good way to evaluate software and a bad way to run a hire, because the deadline arrives on the vendor schedule rather than yours. If you are still deciding whether you need applicant tracking at all, our comparison of ATS software covers the paid market and what the category does.
10 free applicant tracking systems at a glance
The two columns that decide most purchases are Free type and Candidate retention, and they are the two that comparison articles most often leave out.
| Tool | Free type | Jobs on free | Candidate retention | Board posting | Cost after free |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Breezy HR | Free forever | 1 active at a time | 30 days on free | $157 a month | |
| Zoho Recruit | Free forever | 1 active job | No stated limit | $25 per user | |
| Dover | Free forever | Unlimited | No stated limit | Free; recruiters billed hourly | |
| Wellfound | Free forever | Unlimited | No stated limit | Free | |
| OpenCATS | Open source | Unlimited | Your server | Hosting plus your time | |
| Workable | 15-day trial | Trial only | Trial only | $299 a month | |
| JazzHR | 21-day trial | 3 on the entry tier | Trial only | $75 a month | |
| Manatal | 14-day trial | Trial only | Trial only | $15 per user | |
| Recruitee | 18-day trial | 5 during the trial | Trial only | About $109 a month | |
| 100Hires | 14-day trial | Start tier capped | Trial only | $49 a month |
How we evaluated these tools
Every vendor in this category uses the word free, so we tested the word rather than the feature list.
Genuinely free plans
Five products here cost nothing on a permanent basis. They differ enormously in what they cap, and the right one depends almost entirely on whether you hire for one role at a time or several.
Breezy Bootstrap is the most generous permanent free plan in applicant tracking, and the reason is that it is not a stripped demo. It is the same interface paying customers use, with the same drag-and-drop pipeline, the same branded career site, and the same one-click distribution to more than 50 boards, capped at one open role. For a company making its first structured hire, that is a genuinely complete product at no cost.
Two limits decide when it stops working. The active position cap is absolute: you can create as many roles as you like but must close or archive one before activating another, so the second simultaneous opening forces a $157 monthly decision. Less obvious is candidate retention, reported at 30 days on the free tier by reviewers who tested it, which means the talent pool you think you are building quietly empties. The jump from $0 to $157 is also the largest single step in this comparison.
Dover is the only product here with a permanent free plan and no cap on active jobs, which makes it the default answer for a company hiring three or four roles simultaneously without a budget. Unlimited users, AI-assisted candidate screening, and distribution to over 100 boards on a free tier is an unusual amount of product to give away.
The business model explains it. Dover monetises through fractional recruiters and hiring services rather than through software subscriptions, so the free ATS is a channel rather than a loss leader with an upgrade path. That is not a criticism, but it is worth understanding: the product is designed to make the recruiting service feel like the natural next step. Independent reviewers also note a more limited feature set than Breezy and tighter constraints on seats in practice than the marketing implies.
Zoho Recruit Forever Free earns its place on one specific strength: it keeps candidate data without a retention clock. If you want a permanent record of everyone who ever applied, and you are prepared to do the work manually, this is the free plan that allows it. It also sits inside the wider Zoho ecosystem, which matters if you already run other Zoho products.
Everything that saves time is excluded. No resume parsing means every application is a document a human opens and reads. No job board posting means you distribute the role yourself. Five email templates and 256MB of storage are tight enough to notice within a month. The upgrade to Standard at $25 is the cheapest step in this comparison, but Zoho charges per recruiter seat, so a three-person hiring team pays $75 rather than $25, and the platform ships in two editions with different job caps at the same price.
Wellfound, formerly AngelList Talent, pairs a job platform with a free applicant tracking layer, and the candidate pool is the product. For a venture-backed company hiring engineers or early operators, the people browsing Wellfound are self-selected for exactly that kind of role, which does more for a hard search than any pipeline feature. It also integrates with the major paid systems, so it can sit alongside an existing ATS rather than replacing it.
Outside that niche the fit degrades quickly. Postings stay inside the Wellfound network rather than distributing to external boards, so a restaurant, a contractor, or a professional services firm gets very little reach. The tracking features themselves are basic, with limited analytics, limited customisation, and no mobile application, and matching is confined to candidates already in the network.
OpenCATS is the only entry here with no commercial limits at all. Unlimited jobs, unlimited candidates, unlimited users, full customisation, and your data on your own server with no vendor able to change the terms. For an organisation with a genuine data residency requirement or a strong preference against vendor lock-in, that combination is not available at any price from the hosted products.
The cost is real, it is just not a subscription. You install it, host it, patch it, back it up, and support it, and when something breaks at 6pm before an interview there is no one to call. The interface is visibly dated next to any hosted competitor, there is no AI or modern parsing, and mobile use is poor. For a small business without technical staff this is usually more expensive than $157 a month once someone counts the hours.
Free trials, not free plans
These five appear in most free ATS roundups and none of them has a permanent free tier. They are worth knowing because a trial is a legitimate way to evaluate software, and because these are the products you land on when a free plan stops working.
JazzHR is the natural destination for a company that hit the one-job wall on a free plan. The entry tier at $75 a month allows three active roles, which covers most small business hiring, and the 21-day trial is long enough to run a real search rather than a demo. It is the cheapest genuine step up from free in this comparison.
There is no free plan at any point, the three-job cap on the entry tier is its own ceiling, and features that feel standard elsewhere sit on higher tiers. If your hiring is genuinely one role at a time, a free plan still costs less.
Manatal is the cheapest way to get AI candidate scoring and sourcing without a sales conversation. At $15 per user with scoring included rather than sold as credits, a solo founder pays less than a fifth of what the next comparable product costs, which makes the absence of a free plan easier to accept.
Per-user pricing is the constraint. A three-person hiring team pays $45, which erodes the advantage precisely when applicant tracking becomes necessary. The trial is 14 days, reporting and customisation are basic next to mid-market platforms, and independent review coverage is thinner than for the incumbents.
Workable is the most complete published-price platform that appears in free ATS searches, combining its own sourcing database, screening scores, and an AI recruiting agent with credits allocated per tier. As a 15-day evaluation it is a fair look at what a full recruiting platform does.
It does not belong on a free list. The read-only state after expiry is reported to leave you able to view a pipeline but not act on it, which is the worst possible position mid-hire, and the entry price is $299 a month. Pricing bands by employee count rather than hiring volume, which penalises a company with staff but few openings.
Recruitee is built around collaborative hiring, with the assumption that several people evaluate every candidate rather than one recruiter deciding. The 18-day trial reportedly allows five active jobs, which is enough to test a realistic multi-role pipeline rather than a single contrived one.
Pricing is the least transparent of the trial group, reported from around $109 a month and climbing with tier and volume, and there is no permanent free tier at any point. For a company where one person does the hiring, the collaboration features that justify the price go unused.
100Hires has the lowest reported paid entry point in this comparison at around $49 a month, with a volume-capped tier rather than a feature-capped one. For a business hiring a handful of people a year, paying a low fixed amount for full functionality is often better value than working around the caps on a free plan.
The candidate volume cap is the thing to model before committing, because a single well-distributed posting can consume it. Pricing is third-party reported rather than clearly published, and the company is smaller than the established platforms with correspondingly less independent review coverage.
What stopped being free
This category churns hard, and most published roundups have not caught up. Four of the options you will still find recommended are either gone, no longer free, or were never a free ATS in the first place.
| Product | Status | What changed |
|---|---|---|
| Freshteam | Being withdrawn | Freshworks stopped renewals on 7 March 2026, with full shutdown reported by April 2027; existing customers need a migration plan |
| SmartRecruiters SmartStart | Free tier closed | The free plan for smaller teams was discontinued following the SAP acquisition; evaluation now runs through a sales process |
| Google Hire | Discontinued | Shut down in September 2020 and still appears in older roundups |
| Homebase | Never a free ATS | The free Basic plan covers scheduling and time tracking for one location; hiring tools sit on a paid tier and onboarding higher still |
| Indeed free posting | Tightened | Free hosted posts capped at three per employer per calendar month from December 2025, with organic visibility cut from 120 days to 30 |
| Greenhouse and Lever | Never free | Both are quote-based enterprise platforms with no free tier and reported annual costs in the thousands |
The Indeed change matters more than it looks for anyone relying on a free ATS. Free distribution was the main practical benefit of posting through these tools, and a three-post monthly cap with 30 days of organic visibility is a materially smaller benefit than it was. Our comparison of job boards covers where postings actually go now.
The limits that force an upgrade
Free plans do not fail gradually. They fail at a specific moment, and knowing which one applies to you tells you whether free is a strategy or a delay.
| Trigger | What happens | Which products | What it costs to fix |
|---|---|---|---|
| Second simultaneous open role | Free plan becomes unusable immediately | Breezy HR, Zoho Recruit | $157 a month, or $25 per recruiter |
| Building a talent pool | Candidate records expire before you reuse them | Breezy HR free tier | Upgrade, or export candidates manually |
| Volume of applications | Manual reading becomes the bottleneck without parsing | Zoho Recruit free tier | $25 per recruiter for parsing and automation |
| Adding a second hiring manager | Per-seat products multiply | Zoho Recruit, Manatal | The rate again for every seat |
| Needing external distribution | Postings reach only the vendor own audience | Zoho Recruit, Wellfound | A paid tier, or post to boards manually |
| Trial expiry | Account locks or becomes read-only mid-hire | Workable, JazzHR, Manatal, Recruitee, 100Hires | The full subscription, on their timing |
The records problem nobody mentions
Free tiers that delete candidate data sit awkwardly with federal record retention rules, and no vendor page raises this because it is the employer obligation rather than theirs.
Two practical steps. Check the retention line on any free plan before importing candidates, because it is usually in the documentation rather than on the pricing page. And if a discrimination claim ever arrives, the records that establish how a hiring decision was made are the ones sitting in the applicant tracking system, which is a poor argument for the cheapest possible option in that specific respect.
Where a free ATS stops
Every product on this page ends at the accepted offer. What follows is not a recruiting problem, it is a deadline problem, and it is where small employers most often lose the time the software saved them.
| Step | Deadline | Covered by anything on this page? |
|---|---|---|
| Offer letter signed and stored | Before the start date | Some paid tiers; not the free plans |
| Form I-9 employer section | Within three business days of the start date | No |
| W-4 and state withholding | Before the first payroll run | No |
| State new hire reporting | Typically within 20 days of hire | No |
| Policy acknowledgements and training | Usually the first week | No |
The federal side of this is not optional and not size-dependent. Form I-9 applies to every new employee regardless of company size, and the W-4 has to be collected before payroll runs. Our guide to new hire paperwork covers the full sequence, and SHRM publishes a broader toolkit on the recruiting process itself.
How to choose a free ATS
Four questions settle this, and the first one eliminates half the options.
A closing note on sequencing. Run one real role through whichever free plan you pick before committing to a process around it, and export the candidate data at the end so you own it regardless of what the vendor does next. This category has removed two free tiers and tightened one major distribution channel inside a year, and a small business hiring a few people annually should assume the terms will change again. If free stops being enough, our comparison of hiring software covers the paid market properly.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is there a truly free applicant tracking system?
Yes, but fewer than the lists suggest. Breezy HR Bootstrap and Zoho Recruit Forever Free are permanent plans capped at one active job each. Dover and Wellfound are free with unlimited jobs, monetising through recruiting services and their own candidate network respectively. OpenCATS is open source and unlimited if you host it. Everything else marketed as free is a trial: Workable 15 days, JazzHR 21, Manatal 14, Recruitee 18. A trial gives you a deadline rather than a tool.
What is the best free ATS for a small business?
For hiring one role at a time, Breezy HR Bootstrap is the strongest free plan: the same product paying customers use, with a branded career site, resume parsing, unlimited users, and distribution to over 50 boards. The catch is 30-day candidate retention on the free tier. If holding candidate records indefinitely matters more, Zoho Recruit Forever Free has no retention clock but no parsing or board posting. If you hire several roles at once, Dover is the only free option without a job cap.
What is the difference between a free ATS and a free trial?
A free plan has no end date and no card requirement; a trial expires and usually needs a card to continue. Most roundups mix the two, which is how buyers end up with a read-only account in the middle of a hire. Breezy HR, Zoho Recruit, Dover, Wellfound, and OpenCATS are plans. Workable, JazzHR, Manatal, Recruitee, and 100Hires are trials. Check the vendor pricing page before importing candidates, because migrating a live pipeline mid-search is the worst time to change systems.
What are the limits on free ATS plans?
Four limits do most of the work. Active job caps are the most common, with Breezy and Zoho both allowing exactly one open role. Data retention is the least visible, with Breezy free reported at 30 days. Feature gating removes what saves time, since Zoho free excludes resume parsing, AI, and board posting. Distribution limits mean some tools post only to their own site. Read the retention and distribution lines before the feature list.
Is Breezy HR really free?
Yes. Bootstrap is a permanent free tier, not a trial, with unlimited users, unlimited candidates, a branded career site, resume parsing, and distribution to more than 50 boards. The hard limit is one active position or candidate pool at a time; you can create more but must close or archive one before activating another. Independent testing reports 30-day candidate retention on the free tier. Paid plans start at $157 a month on annual billing, with SMS and AI priced separately on top.
Is Zoho Recruit free forever?
Yes, with no time limit, but the plan is narrow: one active job, roughly 256MB of storage, five email templates, candidate management, email integration, and interview scheduling. Resume parsing, AI matching, and job board posting are all excluded, so every application is read and distributed manually. Paid plans begin at $25 per recruiter per month on annual billing, and Zoho ships two editions with different job caps at the same price, so confirm which one you are signing up for.
Can you post to job boards from a free ATS?
Some free plans do and some do not, and it decides whether a free ATS saves any time. Breezy HR Bootstrap posts to more than 50 boards and Dover to over 100, both free. Zoho Recruit Forever Free has no board posting, and Wellfound keeps postings in its own network. Separately, Indeed capped free hosted posts at three per employer per calendar month from December 2025 and cut organic visibility from 120 days to 30, which reduces what free distribution is worth. See our job boards comparison.
What does a free ATS not do?
It stops at the accepted offer. What follows carries statutory deadlines: Form I-9 with the employer section completed within three business days of the start date, a W-4 before the first payroll run, state new hire reporting, and offer letters and policies signed and stored. Almost no free plan touches any of it, and the products bundling onboarding put it behind a paid tier. Federal application record retention rules also apply, which sits badly with free tiers that delete candidate data after 30 days.