Join has been selling hiring software to small companies since 2018, and the basics a small company needs from an ATS are well understood by now: post a job to several boards at once, collect the candidates in one pipeline instead of an email inbox, schedule interviews, give the team a place to comment, put up a careers page. Most tools on this page cover all of that; where one misses a piece, its entry below says so.
The first item on that list deserves far more weight than the rest. What small companies struggle with is rarely the process. It is getting enough applications: without an employer brand, few candidates search for you, so the ones you get are the ones your job ads reach. The reach and cost of a tool’s multiposting matter more than any pipeline feature — scorecards and automations do nothing for a role that gets a handful of applications a month.
Beyond reach, what separates these tools is what they cost, what you commit to, and how they feel after two weeks of real use. Cost and commitment are facts, so we went through every vendor’s pricing page and wrote them down. Feel is yours to judge, and the end of this guide covers how to do that for free.
Half the market won’t tell you the price
Of the ten tools a small company is most likely to shortlist in 2026, only six publish a usable number. Workable, Breezy HR, Zoho Recruit, 100hires, Homerun, and Join print prices. Recruitee’s pricing page describes tiers by employee count without an amount, Teamtailor’s offers a quote form, Personio prices by demo call, with a one-time setup fee and a 12-month minimum on annual contracts, and Factorial advertises “from $8 per user”, but that buys its HR core without the recruiting module; a plan with hiring in it is quoted.
For a ten-person company this is more than an annoyance. A quote-only page means a sales call before you know whether the tool costs one month of a junior salary or three, and the price that comes back tends to reflect what the call revealed about you. We think a small business should be able to budget for hiring software from the website.
The shortlist, with numbers
The ten tools, in alphabetical order. Sources and detail follow below the table.
| Tool | Entry price | Best for | Minimum commitment |
|---|---|---|---|
| 100hires | €86/month | A first ATS for a one-person hiring team | 1 month |
| Breezy HR | $189/month | Occasional hiring on a budget (free plan) | 1 month |
| Factorial | Quote only | An HR suite on per-user pricing | 1 month |
| Homerun | €139/month | Simple hiring with a polished careers page | 1 year |
| Join | €20/job/month | Getting candidates in front of you fast | 1 month |
| Personio | Quote only | An HR suite with hiring included | 1 year |
| Recruitee | Quote, by employee count | Collaborative hiring across a European team | 1 year |
| Teamtailor | Quote only | Employer branding and the careers site first | 1 year |
| Workable | $299/month, by employee tier | One tool covering the whole hiring surface | 1 month |
| Zoho Recruit | €30/recruiter/month | Teams already running on Zoho | 1 month |
100hires has the clearest pricing page of the ten: €86 a month, or €43 if you pay the year upfront, for companies up to 20 employees. The limits are real, though. The Start plan allows three jobs, 100 candidates, and a single user, which even the vendor describes as a tier for companies not actively hiring. Unlimited jobs and users begin on the Advanced plan.
Breezy HR offers the cheapest way to start, which is free: the Bootstrap plan costs nothing and allows one active job at a time, with unlimited users and a branded careers page. The paid Startup plan is $157 per month billed annually ($189 monthly), and that step is where automations and bulk candidate actions live. A company hiring once or twice a year could sit on the free plan indefinitely. Breezy is US-based with no European office we could find; if GDPR paperwork matters in your buying process, factor that in.
Factorial is a Barcelona HR platform that calls itself “the HR system for SMBs”, where recruiting is one paid module among many on top of a per-user Core plan. The advertised “from $8 per user per month” is for Factorial Core, which does not include recruiting, so for hiring you get a quote, not a price. Monthly plans exist and cancel without penalty, per the pricing FAQ.
Homerun is for teams that care how their hiring looks; the Amsterdam company is built around careers-page design. The Core plan is €139 per month, or €109 billed annually, with three published jobs at a time and a 15-day trial. The catch sits in the FAQ: every plan runs on a yearly commitment even if you pay monthly, cancellable with 30 days’ notice before renewal. Homerun describes itself as built for companies of 21 to 250 employees; below that range, weigh the commitment as carefully as the price.
Join is ours. One posting flow reaches 10+ organic job boards and 250+ paid ones, with Quick Apply on 7 of the major boards and every candidate landing in one pipeline; 20,000+ companies run their hiring on it. Pricing is public: €20 per job, per month, month-to-month, with unlimited users. Because the price is per job rather than per seat or per employee, a retail or hospitality team can open a dozen roles ahead of a seasonal peak and let that number fall back to two once it passes, with no contract to renegotiate either way.
Personio is the same shape as Factorial, from Munich: an HR system purchase in which recruiting comes as a paid app on top of the Core plan, so you cannot buy the ATS alone. It makes sense when you want personnel records, absences, and hiring in one place, and it describes itself as suitable for companies with 10 to 5,000 employees. Annual contracts carry a 12-month minimum and a one-time setup fee. If this shape fits you, get quotes from both and compare.
Recruitee is Amsterdam-built for European teams that hire collaboratively. Pricing is tiered by plan and employee count with no public amount; the Start plan is pitched by the vendor “for early-stage teams building their hiring foundation”, allows five active jobs, and carries a one-year minimum commitment, inside which monthly payment is possible.
Teamtailor, based in Stockholm, puts the careers site first and bundles unlimited job ads and unlimited users around it. If your problem is that too few people apply, that is the right end of the funnel to fix. There is no public price at all, so you will be talking to sales before you can budget, and plan for yearly terms too: billing runs in first-year terms, with renewals afterward.
Workable is the most complete of the published-price tools. The Standard plan starts at $299 per month, tiered by employee count, with a 15-day full-feature trial. Read the add-on column before comparing: texting candidates, video interviews, and assessments are paid extras on Standard. Founded in Athens with offices in Boston and London, it is the most European of the US-priced options.
Zoho Recruit is the budget pick among the published prices: €30 per recruiter per month, or €25 billed annually on the Standard plan, plus a permanent free edition with one active job. Check two caps before buying: Standard allows ten active jobs per licence, and several things you might assume are included (video interviews, additional job slots) are paid add-ons. Zoho runs EU data centres in the Netherlands and Ireland.
What switching looks like at this scale: Shayp, a 33-employee Brussels company hiring across five countries, doubled its application volume after consolidating recruitment on one platform. Their HR officer Simona Marano described what came before in words we hear from most teams this size: recruitment that “wasn’t well-structured and was an extremely long process”.
The names we left off
Greenhouse, Lever, and Ashby appear on most “best ATS” lists. We left all three out.
Neither Greenhouse nor Lever publishes a price. Negotiated-contract data from the procurement platform Vendr puts the median Greenhouse buyer at $26,646 per year and the median Lever buyer at $15,400 per year — third-party figures rather than list prices, but the right order of magnitude for budgeting. Lever’s parent company Employ sells a separate product, JazzHR, as its small-business offering, which tells you where Employ itself places Lever.
Ashby does publish its floor: $400 per month for up to 100 employees. It is a strong product, and at ten employees that floor works out to $40 per employee per month before add-ons. All three are priced for companies with a dedicated recruiting function. Revisit them when you hire one.
How we’d choose
Settle the shape of tool you need before comparing a single price. If a full HR suite matters more than the ATS itself, Personio and Factorial are worth a look. Breezy’s free plan suits infrequent hiring. Homerun if the careers page matters more than the pipeline. If the actual bottleneck is not enough candidates, or not enough of the right ones, that is what Join is built around.
The headline prices above are in different units: per company, per seat, per user, per employee band, or per job. Convert every candidate to a yearly cost at your size and hiring volume before comparing anything else, and ask two questions on every demo: how many active jobs does this plan allow, and which of the features I was just shown are add-ons? Where a price is in dollars, convert at today’s rate and ask which currency the invoice actually comes in; with a dollar contract, the exchange-rate risk is yours.
What is left to compare after that is reach and feel, and both only show up in a trial. Shortlist two tools and run the same real role through both free trials; most run 14 to 18 days without a credit card. Compare how many applications each pulls — that is multiposting reach measured on your own role — count the clicks from “job ad written” to “first interview booked”, and notice which of the two your hiring managers open without being reminded. Check the review platforms while the trials run: Join holds 4.2 on G2 and 4.6 on Capterra, every tool above has an equivalent page, and the one-star reviews tell you more than the five-star ones.
Prices, caps, and plan names in this post were read from vendor pages on 5 August 2026 and will drift. If you spot a number a vendor has since changed, tell us and we will correct it.
