What’s an ATS?

If you’ve run hiring or conducted interviews at your company, you likely used an Applicant Tracking System (ATS). Simply put, an ATS is a database for your candidates, kind of like a CRM for recruiting.

Applicant Tracking Systems originally served as a way to allow candidates to apply to jobs (as the name suggests). But as recruiting evolved from inbound to proactive methods like referrals and sourcing, ATS platforms have become the central workflow tool companies use for end-to-end hiring, from first touch to signed offer.

Hopefully, I’m better than this market map in helping you choose an ATS.

There are literally hundreds of ATS products out there today. Are some better than others? Do you actually need all these features? Which one is right for you?

I’ll dig into these questions in the post.

Why trust me?

I’ve been building a recruiting startup backed by YC and Founders Fund for the past 6 years. We’ve helped 1500+ companies hire for hard-to-fill roles by matching startups with world-class contract recruiters. As a result, our recruiters have worked closely with over 30 different ATS offerings for our customers.

We’ve incorporated a lot of these learnings into our own free ATS for startups.

The Applicant Tracking Systems that startups actually use

To narrow down the hundreds of options, I’ll briefly cover ~15 that I’ve actually seen used in the wild over the past 6 years. I’ve split them into broad categories.

Feel free to skip ahead to the bottom for my favorite ATS picks.

Note: My recommendations are targeted towards startups and fast-growing SMBs. If you’re at a massive company or you’re only hiring high-volume roles like retail or hospitality, look elsewhere.

DIY

Players: Notion, Airtable, Trello, Google Sheets

Notion

These ATSs… aren’t actually ATSs. Many founders want a quick-and-dirty to organize their candidates in the simplest way possible. These tools are appealing because the UI is familiar, you can make a simple candidate tracker super fast, and your team is already in there.

But you’ll pay the price later — these tools don’t have any ATS specific features (like job board integrations, email/calendar sync, scheduling templates, etc). It’ll also be a pain to migrate once you have hundreds of applicants or start doing sourcing.

If you’re going to DIY, Notion is the most popular one we’ve seen, primarily because easy to make a nice-looking careers page (example).

Recommendation: Notion could be a good choice if you’re hiring for only 1-2 roles and hiring primarily through team referrals, since you won’t have that many candidates to track.

Legacy

Players: Lever, Workable, Breezy, JazzHR

Lever

The old guard of ATSs. While feature-rich and pioneering in their own way, they now feel clunky and outdated (Lever and Workable were founded in 2012, Breezy in 2014, JazzHR in 2009). We used to see some companies on these platforms 4-5 years ago (especially Lever) but rarely now.

Lever only sells annual plans (starting at $5k/year) while the other three have monthly options.

Recommendation: I wouldn’t go with something from this category unless there’s a specific feature you’re looking for that you can’t find anywhere else.

Enterprise

Players: Gem, Greenhouse

Gem

These are more sophisticated platforms for larger teams. Packed with features and customization options, these are best suited for companies with 250+ employees and 5+ recruiters that need to support complex workflows across multiple departments.

Gem started as a browser extension that made sourcing candidates really easy. Since then they’ve expanded into a full ATS and CRM suite, but they still excel in helping bigger talent teams scale up and measure sourcing efforts. They’ve also placed heavy emphasis on really sophisticated reporting and analytics.

Greenhouse is the staple ATS for tech companies over 1k employees. It’s not always intuitive and has a steep learning curve, but has all the capabilities a large recruiting team will need. A quote from a customer: “you will probably not be able to find what you need immediately, but you know it’s there, and there will be 5 different ways to do it.”

Both only offer annual pricing and are on the expensive side: Gem starts at $4k/year (for one seat) and Greenhouse at $6.5k/year (for companies with 1-10 employees).

Recommendation: Once you have a larger recruiting team, you’ll likely consider both Gem and Greenhouse.

Startup-focused

Players: Ashby, Dover

Dover

These are the two most popular platforms used by VC-backed companies. Both are designed with modern recruiting practices and strong UX in mind. They balance between quick setup and scalability, making them ideal for startups and SMBs that want to hit the ground running but also need room to grow.

Ashby has been winning the hearts and minds of recruiters for the past few years. Ashby is feature-rich and continues to rapidly iterate on their product. They recently launched an enterprise plan to take on Gem and Greenhouse in the upmarket segment. The biggest piece of negative feedback we hear is that it’s often too complex for smaller teams and requires a few onboarding calls to set up (although they do offer dedicated support and onboarding).

Dover’s free ATS focuses on simplicity and efficiency. It’s self-serve, which means you can set up your careers page, first job, and interview plan in under 15 minutes. Founders and business leaders are busy, but don’t want to outsource hiring at the early stages — so Dover is designed to be intuitive enough for founders and hiring managers to run their own hiring processes without needing a dedicated recruiting team. Dover's AI-powered features assist with tasks like applicant review, sourcing, and scheduling. When you need help, you can hire an expert fractional recruiter to help with anything from finding candidates to interviewing to logistics (this is how Dover makes money). Disclaimer: Dover is my startup!

Dover ATS is completely free. Ashby starts at $400/month.

Recommendation: For any startup under 250 employees, go with one of these two. Try Dover if the founder/hiring managers are responsible for hiring. Try Ashby if you have a full-time recruiting team of 2 or more.

Bonus category: HRIS with ATS add-on

Players: Rippling, Gusto, BambooHR

There are several Human Resource Information Systems (HRIS) that have added ATS capabilities. These can be appealing for companies looking for an all-in-one solution, but these aren’t ATS companies, so you can expect less depth and attention to detail in the product. You also can’t use these as standalone ATSs — both require you to buy into their broader HRIS ecosystem.

Bonus category: job boards as ATS

Players: Wellfound (formerly AngelList Talent), Work at a Startup (for YC companies only)

These are primarily job boards that help you manage candidates a bit past the initial application. For example, you can set up templates for responding to applicants and have a view to track your later-stage interviews.

Work at a Startup is used by thousands of YC companies to post their first few roles and is free for YC companies.

Recommendation: These job boards integrate with other ATSs in my categories above. If you don't want to be locked into one candidate source, I’d skip this step and go straight to a proper ATS as soon as you’re hiring for more than 1 role.

An excerpt from some work we did on feature comparisons between ATS companies. Email me at max@dover.com if you want me to send you the full spreadsheet 🙂

Making your decision

Now that we’ve covered each popular ATS in some detail, let’s look at a few other considerations.

Which features are must-haves?

Every ATS on the list has basic functionality like posting to job boards and tracking candidates. From there, these products can get infinitely complex and customizable.

We’ve found that there are a few features offered by only some ATS platforms that we consider must-haves:

• Email/calendar sync: your team’s emails and calendar events will sync to the candidate page in the ATS, which keeps all candidate comms in one place.
• Interview plan and one-click scheduling: a modern ATS will have templates that automatically plug in the correct scheduling link for the next stage in the interview process.
• Application+careers pages: make sure it’s actually fast and painless for candidates to apply to your jobs, and that it’s easy to create a careers page with custom URL on our own site.
• Kanban view: your team will appreciate this UX for viewing and progressing your candidates.
• Sourcing extension: many top ATS offerings have a built-in sourcing extension that you can use to send one-click cold emails to top candidates.

What else should you consider?

Besides features, what else should you look out for when choosing an ATS?

• Usability: Like with most products, there is a trade-off between complexity and ease-of-use. Keep in mind that while recruiters spend most of their day inside an ATS, you’ll generally need a platform that’s usable by hiring managers, interviewers, and execs as well. Overcomplicating your recruiting setup has a lot of other downsides, like making it hard to benchmark yourself against other companies.
• Lock-in: Look for low commitment (monthly vs annual) and easy data export. Once you hire a recruiting leader, they will likely want to use specific tools they are familiar with.

Pricing

ATS pricing can be more complex than it first appears. Many are seat-based, with seats determined by GSuite users—this often leads to overpaying if only a small team uses the ATS. For startups, your hiring needs will vary quarter to quarter, so I recommend you look for flexible pricing models that allow you to adjust based on your actual usage and hiring volume. Some companies let you switch between flat-rate tiers as your open role count changes (like Breezy), and others are completely free (like Dover), which can be cost-effective for startups with fluctuating needs.

My final recommendation

In summary, here’s what I’d go with based on the number of recruiters on your team and how many open roles you’re planning to hire for simultaneously.