Greenhouse alternatives for small teams in 2026

If you are a 20-person company that needs a price this week, do not start with Greenhouse. Greenhouse is structured hiring sold on a demo. On greenhouse.com/pricing (opened 2026-08-28) the plans are Core, Plus, and Pro. Every plan’s CTA is “Get a demo.” Greenhouse’s own FAQ says pricing is customized from the plan, hiring volume, and organizational complexity. There is no printed dollar amount. Hirelane does not invent one from old roundups.

What does have a printed price, same day: Manatal Professional $15/user/mo billed annually; Plural Hire $59/month (3 hiring managers); ApplicantStack Starter $29.99/mo; Breezy Startup $157/mo billed annually (unlimited users on paid plans); JazzHR Hero $1,000/yr; Workable Standard $299/month ($3,588/year) for 1–20 employees. That is the shopping list. Greenhouse is not on it.

Hirelane is a review publication, not an ATS vendor. We are not selling a Greenhouse competitor. Tool-by-tool picks: best ATS for small business. Cost models: ATS pricing 2026. How we treat list prices: methodology.

Some links may be affiliate links. Ranking is not for sale; we still only list dollars we can see on the vendor’s own site. Affiliate disclosure.

Why Greenhouse exists — and why it mismatches most 10–75 person teams

Greenhouse exists to run structured hiring: interview kits, scorecards, a shared rubric, scheduling, reporting, and (on higher plans) automation and governance. Core’s published feature set includes structured interview kits and scorecards, an AI notetaker, scheduling, reporting, SSO, talent matching, and sourcing/CRM. That is a talent-acquisition platform for companies that already treat hiring as a process, not a founder’s inbox.

That is a mismatch for most 10–75 person teams. You were told to “just get Greenhouse,” or you bounced off a demo because nobody would name a number. Structured hiring is a method. Greenhouse is software for that method, sold with a sales cycle. A 20-person company that posts two roles a quarter needs a careers page, a pipeline, and a bill it can approve this week. Checkout-this-week software prints a price. Greenhouse does not.

The other tell: implementation. Greenhouse’s public site funnels you to greenhouse.com/demo. There is no self-serve sticker, no monthly/annual toggle with dollars, no “start free trial” on the pricing page we opened. If the only CTA is a demo, it is not a small-business default. That is the same rule we use on the pricing page.

When you SHOULD still talk to Greenhouse

Honesty, in one section. Take the demo if:

• You already run interview kits as process — not as a wish — and a recruiter (not a founder) owns the board.
• You need Greenhouse-class governance: multi-brand job boards, DE&I reporting, offer approvals, auditability, or a talent CRM that will be inspected.
• You will sit through implementation and a custom quote, and you are not shopping for software you can buy on a credit card this afternoon.
• You are past “first HR hire at 40 people” and closer to a talent function. The 10–75 band in this article is the mismatch. A 200-person company with a TA lead is a different buyer.

If those are not true, skip the demo. The rest of this page is the printed-price map.

Greenhouse alternatives with a published floor (2026-08-28)

Checked on the vendors’ own pages on 2026-08-28. “Who it replaces Greenhouse for” means which 10–75 person situation — not that the product is Greenhouse.

Not in the table (no dollars, or quote-only): Greenhouse, Lever, Ashby (not ranked), Recruitee, Freshteam (404 on 2026-08-28), Breezy Custom Pro. Details below.

Manatal — AI per-seat

Verdict: The cheapest published paid AI seat with candidate scorecards. Not Greenhouse. The right “I was told to get an ATS” buy when one recruiter (or a founder who hires) will live in the tool and hiring managers can stay free.

manatal.com/pricing, 2026-08-28. Professional $15 per user per month billed annually ($19 monthly) — 15 jobs, 10,000 candidates, unlimited hiring managers. Enterprise $35 annual ($39 monthly). Enterprise Plus $55 ($59 monthly). Custom is on demand. FAQ on that page: Professional is $15 USD per user/month (billed annually); 14-day trial, no card. “User” is the recruiter you pay for. Three recruiter users = $45/mo annual. Interviewers can stay $0 extra on Professional if they are hiring managers.

Scorecards are on the Professional feature list. That is structured-hiring-ish at a printed $15, not Greenhouse interview kits with a TA ops owner. Skip Manatal if you need a forever-free plan, or if three people must be recruiter seats — then a flat bill (Breezy, JazzHR, Plural) is the comparison, not a $15 sticker. Agency-desk math lives on Manatal vs Recruit CRM. Trial: Manatal signup.

Breezy HR — flat, unlimited users

Verdict: The honest first ATS off Gmail when hiring managers will log in, and the only one in this set with a real free plan. Paid Startup is a flat company bill. Extra logins do not raise it.

breezy.hr/pricing, 2026-08-28. Bootstrap free. Startup $157/mo annual / $189 monthly. Growth $273 / $329. Business $439 / $529. Annual pricing includes two months free. Paid plans: unlimited users and unlimited positions. Custom Pro is contact us (quote-only). Bootstrap: one active pool or position; unlimited candidate access is only for records added in the last 30 days. Bootstrap also prints unlimited users — the free cap is the live job, not the login count.

Scorecards and customizable interview guides land on Growth ($273/mo annual), not Startup. If you bounced off Greenhouse because you wanted kits, Growth is the Breezy rung — still a printed price, still not enterprise structured hiring. Add-ons on the same page: Intelligence credits from $30/100,000, SMS from $41/mo, Onboard from $49/mo. Trial: Breezy signup — 14-day full-feature trial, no card, 100,000 Intelligence credits (vendor copy, 2026-08-28). Three-way with JazzHR and Workable: JazzHR vs Workable vs Breezy.

JazzHR — yearly invoice

Verdict: The lowest published dedicated ATS floor if you will take annual billing. Hero is a small-business invoice, not a per-seat meter.

jazzhr.com/pricing, 2026-08-28. Hero $1,000/yr. Plus $3,480/yr. Pro $5,508/yr. Page: “save up to 24% by paying yearly.” We cite the yearly dollars shown. A Monthly toggle exists; no monthly dollar stickers appeared in the yearly view we captured, so we do not invent them. Hero job postings start at 3/month (vendor wording, eligibility caveats). No per-seat fee on the public page.

Plus is where JazzHR prints “Structured Interviews & Assessments,” AI-powered candidate matching, and up to 200 active jobs. That is $3,480/yr — Workable/Breezy-Growth money, not the $1,000 story. Offers/e-signatures and advanced visual reporting are add-ons on lower tiers. Some features are consumption-based. Skip JazzHR if you refuse annual, or if you needed Plus on day one and thought Hero was the structured-hiring plan.

Workable — headcount band (closest “serious ATS” with a public 1–20 price)

Verdict: Workable is the one name in the Greenhouse/Lever conversation that will show you a 1–20 employee sticker. It is a sourcing suite at that sticker. Do not buy it as a Trello replacement.

workable.com/pricing, 2026-08-28. 1–20 employees, annual view: Standard $299/month ($3,588/year); Premier $599 ($7,188/year); Enterprise $719 ($8,628/year). Page advertises up to 20% savings on annual/bundle. Higher employee bands are listed (21–50 through 1000+); those dollars were not in the public figures we captured, so they are not in the table. Standard add-ons in the 1–20 band: texting +$89/mo, video +$109/mo, assessments +$59/mo.

Core recruiting features on that page include interview kits and scorecards, 200+ job-board distribution, and a careers page. You pay for headcount, not hires. A 20-person company that posts twice a year is buying a sourcing suite. Paid accounts start with 3,000 Agent credits; extra packs $0.12 / $0.10 / $0.095 per credit (5,000 / 10,000 / 50,000). Credits expire in one year; non-refundable. 15-day trial, no card; trial does not include the Agent. Trial: Workable free trial.

Plural — explicit Greenhouse-switch marketing + printed $59

Verdict: The only vendor in this set that puts “switching from Greenhouse” on the pricing page and still prints a number. Use the number. Treat the guarantee as marketing.

pluralcareers.com/pricing, 2026-08-28. Hire $59/month. Hire + Retain $179/month. Enterprise $299/month. Figures we captured are the monthly prices shown (the page toggles monthly/yearly). Hire includes 3 hiring managers and 5 offices, unlimited job postings, a public careers page, ATS, outbound recruiting, and a review assistant. 14-day trial on paid plans; free to start, no card. Same-page JSON-LD yearly Offers: Hire $590, Hire + Retain $1,799, Enterprise $2,999.

The page also says: “Switching from Greenhouse, Workable, or another ATS? We guarantee at least 75% off what you pay today, with free onboarding.” That is a marketing guarantee, not a list price, and not a Greenhouse invoice we can verify. We quote $59 because $59 is on the page. We do not quote “75% of Greenhouse” as a dollar, because Greenhouse still has not printed one. Skip Plural Hire if you need a fourth hiring-manager login on that tier.

Zoho Recruit and ApplicantStack — cheaper / narrower

Zoho Recruit (zoho.com/recruit/pricing.html, USD from Zoho’s published price file recruit-pricing-val.json loaded by that page, 2026-08-28). Corporate HR Standard $25/recruiter/month billed annually ($30 monthly); Corporate Enterprise $50 ($60 monthly). Staffing edition on the same file: Standard $25/$30, Professional $50/$60, Enterprise $75/$90 (annual/monthly). Forever Free $0, one active job. 15-day trial, then Free; 45-day money-back on paid editions; no forced contracts, per the pricing page. Taxes extra. Three Corporate Standard recruiters: $75/mo before add-ons. Hiring-manager/employee licenses are sold in packs of 10. Use Zoho if you already live in Zoho. Do not use it as a Greenhouse stand-in; it is a per-recruiter seat with a free one-job floor.

ApplicantStack (applicantstack.com/pricing, 2026-08-28). Starter $29.99/mo (1 job, 1 admin, 5 hiring managers). Growth $49.99/mo (3 jobs). Recruit $109.99/mo (unlimited jobs; add seats). Bundle $159.99/mo. Month-to-month; vendor: no required contract or cancellation fee, no required setup fee. Extra seats on Recruit/Bundle have no public unit price. Vendor form: US and Canada only. 14-day trial; vendor says you can only view the first 100 candidates until you upgrade. Narrower than Greenhouse in every dimension that matters to a TA team. Fine as a cheap US/Canada pipeline. Not a structured-hiring platform.

Lever and Ashby — quote-only cousins, not ranked

We do not rank Lever or Ashby as small-team Greenhouse replacements. They sit in the same buying motion: demo or calculator, not checkout-this-week for a 20-person first ATS.

• Lever (lever.co/pricing, 2026-08-28). “Get Your Customized Quote.” FAQ: pricing is available upon request, tailored to organization size and hiring needs. No dollar amounts on the page we opened. Quote-only cousin. Not in the table.
• Ashby (ashbyhq.com/pricing, 2026-08-28). Foundations is an interactive calculator (company-size bands up to 100 employees). Plus is “best for 101–1000 employees” with pricing “based on company size, usage, and commitment.” Enterprise is “best for 1,000+ employees” with a “predictable pricing model.” We are not ranking Ashby as a small-business printed floor. It is a growth/enterprise all-in-one, not a founder checkout.
• Recruitee (recruitee.com/pricing, 2026-08-28). Start / Advance / Optimize. No dollars. FAQ: subscriptions are tiered by plan, employee count, and billing period; annual is a 20% discount; minimum commitment one year. Quote-only European option. Mentioned so you do not treat a Recruitee demo as a printed-price SMB default.
• Freshteam. freshworks.com/freshteam/pricing returned page not found on 2026-08-28. No dollar figure.

If a vendor will only quote, it is a research project. Greenhouse, Lever, Ashby, Recruitee, and Breezy Custom Pro belong in that bucket for this audience. Workable is the exception among the “serious” names because the 1–20 band prints.

Leaving Greenhouse — or skipping it — without a fake how-to

We are not publishing screenshots of a Greenhouse export wizard. Vendors change that UI. At a high level, any move (or any decision to never start) has the same three piles:

1. Candidates. You need a CSV/JSON of people, stages, and files you are allowed to keep. Manatal’s pricing FAQ says you can import candidates, jobs, contacts, clients, or departments via CSV or JSON. JazzHR’s pricing FAQ says data migration is included in select plans. Zoho offers data migration as a separate paid service. Breezy and ApplicantStack expect you to start posting and collecting. Budget time for the pile, not a magical one-click.
2. Careers page. Greenhouse hosts a branded board. So do Breezy, Workable, Plural (custom careers domain on Hire), Manatal, Zoho, and ApplicantStack. Plan a URL cutover and a week of “apply here” confusion. Do not keep two live boards.
3. Interview scorecards. This is the structured-hiring artifact people miss. Greenhouse kits are a process object. On printed-price tools: Manatal Professional lists candidate scorecards; Breezy Growth lists customizable scorecards and interview guides; JazzHR Plus lists structured interviews; Workable Standard lists interview kits and scorecards. Rebuild the rubric in the new tool. Do not expect a kit-for-kit import.

If you have never been on Greenhouse, you are not migrating. You are refusing a demo. Export nothing. Buy the printed-price tool that matches how many people log in.

FAQs

How much does Greenhouse cost in 2026?

Greenhouse does not print a dollar amount. On greenhouse.com/pricing (opened 2026-08-28) the plans are Core, Plus, and Pro. Every plan’s CTA is Get a demo. Greenhouse’s own FAQ: pricing is customized from the plan you choose, hiring volume, and organizational complexity. Hirelane does not invent a starting price from old roundups. Demo: greenhouse.com/demo.

What is the best Greenhouse alternative for startups?

If you need a price this week, do not start with Greenhouse. For one recruiter, Manatal Professional $15/user/mo billed annually (15 jobs, 10,000 candidates, unlimited hiring managers). For three people logging in, Plural Hire $59/month (3 hiring managers) or Breezy Startup $157/mo billed annually with unlimited users on paid plans. JazzHR Hero is $1,000/yr. Workable Standard is $299/month ($3,588/year) for 1–20 employees — the closest “serious ATS” with a public 1–20 price, not the cheapest. Picks by hire volume: best ATS for small business.

Greenhouse vs Lever vs Workable: which should a small team buy?

Greenhouse and Lever are quote-only cousins. Workable is the one of the three with a printed 1–20 employee price: Standard $299/month ($3,588/year) on workable.com/pricing, 2026-08-28. A 20-person company that only needed a pipeline should not buy Workable’s sourcing suite, and should not take a Greenhouse or Lever demo as a first ATS. Compare the printed SMB flats: JazzHR vs Workable vs Breezy.

Can a small team use Greenhouse?

Technically yes if you will sit through a demo and accept a custom quote. Practically, most 10–75 person companies do not need Greenhouse’s structured-hiring platform as a first ATS. Use it when you already run interview kits as process, have a recruiter, and will take implementation. Do not buy it because a board member said “just get Greenhouse.”

What is the cheapest structured-hiring-ish ATS with a public price?

On 2026-08-28, Manatal Professional prints candidate scorecards at $15/user/mo billed annually. Breezy Growth prints customizable scorecards and interview guides at $273/mo billed annually ($329 monthly). JazzHR Plus prints structured interviews and assessments at $3,480/yr. Workable Standard includes interview kits and scorecards at $299/month ($3,588/year) for 1–20 employees. None of these is Greenhouse. The cheapest printed scorecard-capable floor we opened is Manatal Professional.

Close

Structured hiring is a method. Greenhouse is enterprise software for that method, sold without a sticker. A 20-person company that needs a price this week buys a printed floor: Manatal if one recruiter runs the board, Breezy or Plural or JazzHR if three people will log in, Workable only if the sourcing suite is the product, Zoho or ApplicantStack if you want cheaper and narrower. Lever and Ashby stay in the quote pile with Greenhouse. Recruitee too.

Next: best ATS for small business, ATS pricing 2026, JazzHR vs Workable vs Breezy, Manatal vs Recruit CRM.