Every ATS vendor claims to have a free option. Most of them mean a 14-day trial with a sales call waiting at the end.
Genuinely free applicant tracking systems — no time limit, no card — are rarer. Having tested ten ATS platforms and run Venture Harbour’s own hiring on Breezy for over five years (six hires, 900+ applications), I count two that qualify properly, one startup-focused newcomer, and two trials worth knowing about. That’s this list.
Quick disclosure before we start: the Breezy, Manatal and GoHire links here are affiliate links. It hasn’t changed the ordering — Zoho and Dover aren’t, and they’re still here.
The quick answer
Breezy’s Bootstrap plan is the best free ATS for most small teams. You get one active position with unlimited users and candidates, a polished pipeline, and one-click distribution to 50+ job boards — the same product we paid for, capped at one open role. The catch is 30-day candidate retention, so you can’t quietly build a talent pool on the free tier.
Zoho Recruit’s Forever Free plan is the strongest pure-free option — one active job, candidate management, email integration and interview scheduling, with no time limit and no retention catch. The trade-off is an interface that feels dated next to Breezy.
Dover offers a free ATS aimed squarely at startups, with a more limited feature set than either.
And if one active job isn’t enough, Manatal and GoHire both run 14-day trials before paid plans at $15/user/mo and $99/mo respectively.
How the free tiers compare
| Tool | Free tier includes | Biggest limit | Paid from |
|---|---|---|---|
| Breezy HR | 1 active position, unlimited users & candidates, 50+ job boards, branded career site | 30-day candidate retention | $157/mo (Startup, annual) |
| Zoho Recruit | 1 active job, candidate management, email integration, interview scheduling — no time limit | Dated interface, slow support on lower tiers | $25/user/mo (Standard, annual) |
| Dover | Free ATS built for startups | More limited feature set | — |
| Manatal | 14-day trial (full AI features, no card) | Not actually free — trial only | $15/user/mo (annual) |
| GoHire | 14-day trial (no card) | Not actually free — trial only | $99/mo (Starter) |
Pricing verified April 2026. Now the detail.
01Breezy HR — best free ATS for most small teams
We ran hiring at Venture Harbour on Breezy for over five years, so I know exactly what the paid product does — and the remarkable thing about the Bootstrap plan is how little has been stripped out. I wrote up the full five-year experience in our Breezy HR review.
The free tier gives you one active position, a branded career site, distribution to 50+ job boards with a single click, GDPR compliance, multi-language support and resume parsing. And it includes unlimited users and candidates — so your co-founder, your ops lead and whoever else can all screen applicants without anyone buying a seat.
That last point matters more than it sounds. Most free tools cap collaborators to force the upgrade. Breezy caps the number of open roles instead, which is a far more honest constraint for a founder making their first hire.
The pipeline itself is a drag-and-drop Kanban board (think Trello), and candidates apply through a careers page that doesn’t look like it came free. Across our 900+ applications, the thing that kept us on Breezy was being able to hand whole chunks of the process to other people without losing visibility — and that collaborative layer is intact on Bootstrap.
Now the catch, because there is one. The free plan retains candidates for 30 days, so you can’t sit on a candidate database for months without paying. Run a hiring cycle, make your hire, done — fine. Build a long-term talent pool at $0 — no. And you don’t get the stage-triggered automation (auto-sent screening questionnaires, rejection emails) that makes the paid product genuinely time-saving.
When you outgrow it, the Startup plan is $157/mo on annual billing with unlimited active positions and still no per-seat charges.
Try Breezy’s free Bootstrap plan →
02Zoho Recruit — strongest pure-free option
If your requirement is “free, forever, no asterisks,” Zoho Recruit wins. The Forever Free plan includes one active job, candidate management, email integration and interview scheduling — and unlike Breezy’s free tier, there’s no candidate retention window hanging over you. You can run a complete hiring cycle, keep the data, and never pay a penny.
For a bootstrapped startup with zero recruitment budget, that combination is hard to argue with. It’s a genuinely usable plan rather than a demo, which is rare in this category.
The compromises are the ones you’d expect from a budget tool. The interface feels dated next to Breezy or Teamtailor, initial setup has a steeper learning curve than it should, and support can be slow on lower-tier plans. The career page builder is basic too — candidates will notice the difference, which matters if you’re competing for talent on brand.
One situational bonus: if your business already runs on the Zoho ecosystem (CRM, Mail, People), the native integrations make Recruit close to a default choice. If it doesn’t, that advantage evaporates.
Upgrading gets you to Standard at $25/user/mo (annual) with 10 active jobs — the cheapest paid step-up of any tool on this list, though it’s per-seat where Breezy and GoHire are flat-rate.
03Dover — free ATS built for startups
Dover is the newest name here and the one I have the least mileage with — I haven’t run a hiring cycle through it, so treat this section as a signpost rather than a verdict.
The pitch is straightforward: a free ATS aimed specifically at startups. If you’re an early-stage founder and the incumbent free tiers feel like cut-down versions of products built for someone else, that focus is appealing.
The trade-off, as far as I can establish, is a more limited feature set than either Breezy’s Bootstrap plan or Zoho’s Forever Free tier. You’re getting a narrower product in exchange for the startup-first framing.
My honest suggestion: shortlist it alongside Breezy and Zoho, run your next real role through whichever two feel best in the first hour, and let the candidates arriving in your pipeline settle it. Free tools have a compelling property — the cost of trialling all three is your time, not your money.
04Manatal — free trial, then the cheapest serious paid ATS
Manatal doesn’t belong on a strictly-free list, and I’m including it anyway — because if your hiring is anything more than one role at a time, its 14-day trial into a $15/user/mo plan (annual) will likely serve you better than squeezing into a free tier that doesn’t fit.
The trial needs no credit card and includes the full product: AI candidate scoring, profile enrichment from LinkedIn and 20+ social platforms, a sourcing hub of 600M+ profiles, and an AI Interviewer that runs automated first-round video screens. That last one is a real time-saver on high-volume roles, not a gimmick.
At $15/user/mo on the Professional plan you get 15 jobs — fifteen times what any free tier allows. For the price of a couple of coffees per user, the one-active-job problem disappears.
The catches: reporting is basic, customisation is limited, and the career page builder feels like an afterthought. And it’s per-seat pricing, so the maths get worse as your recruiting team grows (hiring managers are unlimited, which softens this).
Try Manatal free for 14 days →
05GoHire — free trial for UK teams
GoHire is the other trial-then-paid option worth knowing, particularly if you’re hiring in the UK. The 14-day trial needs no card, and the Starter plan after it is $99/mo (£89) — the cheapest flat-rate paid ATS we’ve tested, with unlimited team members included.
Its distinguishing feature is proper UK job-board coverage. Reed and Totaljobs are first-class citizens rather than afterthoughts, and it ships 700+ UK-tailored job description templates. Registered charities get 30% off, which makes it one of the better options for UK non-profits doing occasional hiring.
The limits: Starter caps you at 3 active jobs, distribution covers 15+ boards versus Breezy’s 50+, and there’s no free tier at all — once the fortnight’s up, you pay or you leave. If your hiring is mostly outside the UK, Breezy or Manatal make more sense.
When free stops making sense
Every genuinely free ATS on this list shares the same core constraint: one active job at a time. That single fact decides when you upgrade, and it usually arrives sooner than founders expect.
The moment you have two roles open concurrently, you’re forced to choose. The upgrade paths, from cheapest to most complete:
Manatal at $15/user/mo (annual) is the smallest step up in absolute cost, and it brings AI scoring and sourcing along with the extra job slots. Best if your team is one or two people doing the recruiting.
Zoho Recruit Standard at $25/user/mo (annual) gets you 10 active jobs and keeps you in the Zoho ecosystem. The logical path if you started on Zoho’s free tier and it’s working.
GoHire Starter at $99/mo is the cheapest flat-rate option — 3 active jobs, unlimited users, strongest for UK-focused teams.
Breezy Startup at $157/mo (annual) is where we landed ourselves: unlimited active positions, unlimited users, and the stage-triggered automation that the free tier withholds. It’s the most expensive path here and the one I’d still pick for a growing team, because flat-rate pricing with unlimited collaborators is the model that ages best as headcount grows.
The full breakdown of all ten platforms we’ve tested — including what you get at each price point — is in our applicant tracking systems comparison. And if you start on Breezy and later wonder what else is out there, we’ve covered the Breezy HR alternatives worth switching to (spoiler: fewer than you’d think).
A closing dose of honesty
Free ATS tiers are built for light hiring. One role open at a time, a founder or office manager running the process, a hiring cycle every few months. Used that way, they’re excellent — you get structure, a careers page and a paper trail for the price of a spreadsheet.
What they are not is a hiring system for a growing company. No automation, one job slot, and (in Breezy’s case) a 30-day clock on your candidate data. If you’re hiring regularly, the free tier is a test drive, not a destination — and the honest advice is to treat it as one.
Start with Breezy’s Bootstrap plan if candidate experience matters, Zoho Recruit if permanence does, and budget for the upgrade before you need it. Migrating an ATS mid-hiring-cycle is a slog… better to pick the tool whose paid tier you’d be happy on.