Lever’s pricing page doesn’t have any prices on it.
That’s the complaint that brings most people to a post like this. You can’t budget for the tool without booking a sales call, the quote you eventually get is negotiated rather than listed, and small teams end up paying somewhere between $4,000 and $8,000 a year — for software a competitor would happily price on its website.
Position disclosed upfront: we ran hiring at Venture Harbour on Breezy HR for over five years (six hires, 900+ applications), and Lever was one of the ten platforms we evaluated for our applicant tracking systems comparison. So I have a horse in this race — but it’s a horse we actually rode.
The quick answer
If you hire mostly through job postings — post a role, screen the applications, interview, hire — Breezy HR is the alternative I’d pick. It’s a flat $157/mo on the annual Startup plan with unlimited users and candidates, versus negotiating a $4–8K annual contract with Lever’s sales team. For most small and mid-sized businesses, that’s the whole decision.
If you’re leaving Lever but want to keep the CRM side — talent pools, nurture emails, tracking passive candidates — Manatal is the like-for-like swap. It includes a recruitment CRM at $15/user/mo, which is not a typo.
And if you’re a scaling startup that wants sourcing and proper hiring analytics in one product, Ashby is the strongest option at a published $400/mo.
How the alternatives compare
| Tool | Best for | Price from | Pricing transparency |
|---|---|---|---|
| Breezy HR | Small businesses hiring reactively | $157/mo (Startup, annual) | Published, plus a free tier |
| Manatal | ATS + CRM on a budget | $15/user/mo (annual) | Published |
| Ashby | Scaling startups | $400/mo (Foundations) | Published (Plus/Enterprise quote-only) |
| Workable | Built-in candidate sourcing | $299/mo (Standard) | Published |
| Greenhouse | Enterprise structured hiring | ~$6,000/yr (Core) | Quote-based |
| GoHire | UK small teams | $99/mo (Starter) | Published |
| Lever (for reference) | ATS + CRM combo | ~$4–8K/yr (small teams) | Quote-based |
Prices verified April 2026 as part of our full ATS comparison. Lever’s figures come from verified buyer reports, because there’s nowhere official to check them — which is rather the point.
Why people leave Lever
Three complaints come up again and again, and our research backs all of them.
The pricing is opaque. Every Lever contract is negotiated. Buyer reports put small teams at $4,000–$8,000 a year, rising to roughly $8,000–$12,000 once you’re running ten active jobs, with a rough benchmark of $6–8 per employee per month. Two companies of the same size can be paying meaningfully different amounts for the same product, and neither will know.
Annual lock-in, with add-ons on top. Annual contracts are standard, and several features you might assume are included — Candidate Insights, AI Screening by VONQ, Onboarding — are paid extras. The product you’re quoted and the product on the invoice can be some distance apart.
You may be paying for a CRM you never switch on. Lever’s genuine differentiator is its candidate relationship management — building talent pools and nurturing passive candidates over weeks or months before a role even opens. That’s a strategic advantage if you hire that way. If your team posts jobs and waits for applications, you’re funding machinery you don’t run. When we ranked Lever in our roundup, the verdict said exactly this: companies that primarily hire through job postings are served just as well by a traditional ATS at a lower price.
There’s a quieter fourth reason. Since the Employ acquisition, Lever’s product positioning has become muddier and standalone updates less frequent. Harder to put a number on, but existing customers notice it.
01Breezy HR — for teams that hire through job postings
The alternative I’d pick for most small and mid-sized businesses.
I’ll keep the disclosure going: Breezy is the ATS we ran our own hiring on for over five years, so this is the one recommendation on this list built on daily use rather than testing.
The pricing contrast with Lever is the headline. Breezy’s Startup plan is $157/mo on annual billing — unlimited users, unlimited candidates, unlimited active positions — and there’s a free Bootstrap plan for one active job. At ten active jobs, Lever runs roughly $8–12K a year. Breezy stays at $157/mo, because nothing in its pricing scales with jobs or seats.
The product holds its end up too. The drag-and-drop pipeline needs no training, and stage actions — automated emails, screening questionnaires and scheduling that fire when you move a candidate between stages — did the tedious 80% of our screening before a human opened a profile. One-click distribution to 50+ job boards and built-in video interviewing round it out.
Now the honest bit. Breezy’s reporting is light — I scored it 3.5/5 in our full Breezy HR review — and there’s no sourcing database and no CRM. If nurturing passive candidates is the reason you bought Lever, Breezy doesn’t replace that part at all. (I’ve also written up Breezy’s own alternatives if you want its gaps mapped properly.)
Choose Breezy if you’re under ~200 employees and your hiring is reactive. Skip it if the CRM is why you’re on Lever — that’s Manatal or Ashby territory.
02Manatal — the like-for-like ATS + CRM swap
The closest thing to Lever’s feature set at a fraction of the price.
Here’s the comparison worth spelling out. Lever’s small-team contracts start around $4,000 a year. Manatal is $15 per user per month on annual billing — three recruiter seats cost $540 a year — and it includes a recruitment CRM, which is the feature Lever charges thousands for.
It’s not a stripped-down product at that price either. You get AI candidate scoring, profile enrichment from 20+ social platforms, a sourcing hub of 600M+ profiles, an AI Interviewer for automated first-round screens, and posting to 2,500+ channels. Hiring managers are unlimited on every tier; you only pay per recruiter seat. There’s a 14-day trial with no card required.
The catch is depth. Manatal’s CRM leans towards recruitment agencies and is a simpler machine than Lever’s nurture campaigns, reporting is basic, and the career page builder feels like an afterthought. You’re trading polish for a bill your accountant won’t question.
Choose Manatal if you want to keep proactive sourcing and talent pools without the negotiated contract. Skip it if you need deep reporting or polished employer branding.
03Ashby — for scaling startups that want sourcing and analytics
The data-driven option, with a published price.
Ashby combines ATS, CRM, scheduling and analytics in one product, and its Foundations plan is a transparent $400/mo for companies under 100 employees. The analytics are the standout — pass-through rates by stage, interviewer calibration, source effectiveness — the numbers a Head of Talent at a Series B startup actually needs, and the area where Lever’s reporting gets outclassed.
The trade-off is that Ashby punishes casual users. Setup takes weeks rather than hours (the scheduling system alone has 14 tabs of settings), there’s no free trial, the interface is English-only, and annual contracts are typical. It rewards teams with someone who owns recruiting as their actual job.
Choose Ashby if you’re making 20+ hires a year and want to measure everything. Skip it if you’re a founder hiring occasionally — you’ll spend more time configuring it than recruiting through it.
04Workable — if sourcing matters more than nurturing
For finding candidates rather than waiting for them.
There’s a distinction worth drawing here: Lever’s CRM nurtures candidates you’ve already found, while Workable helps you find them in the first place. Its searchable database of 400M+ candidates — filterable by role, skills and employment history — is the closest thing to a built-in LinkedIn Recruiter inside an ATS, and it starts at a published $299/mo for the Standard plan.
The downsides are cost creep and focus. Add-ons stack quickly — texting is $89/mo, video interviews $109/mo, assessments $59/mo — and database access appears limited to annual plans. It’s also nearly double Breezy’s price for the core ATS work, so you’re paying for the database whether or not you open it.
Choose Workable if you hire for hard-to-fill roles and will genuinely run outreach campaigns. Skip it if your hiring is reactive — the 15-day trial is the cheap way to find out which you are.
05Greenhouse — if you want enterprise structure (and can stomach another quote)
The stronger pure ATS at Lever-level budgets.
Full honesty: Greenhouse doesn’t fix the transparency complaint. It’s quote-based like Lever, with Core typically running $6,000–$10,000 a year for companies under 50 employees and implementation adding $2,000–$8,000 on top.
What it does fix is the ATS itself. Structured interview kits, standardised scorecards, anonymised candidate reviews, in-app bias prompts and the largest integration marketplace of any ATS (500+ partners). In our roundup we concluded Greenhouse offers stronger pure ATS capabilities than Lever at similar price points — the trade being that you lose Lever’s nurture-focused CRM depth.
Choose Greenhouse if you’re a tech company that needs a defensible, structured process across dozens of hires a year. Skip it if you came here to escape sales calls. That’s most of you.
06GoHire — the budget pick for UK teams
Flat-rate pricing that undercuts everything else here.
GoHire starts at $99/mo (£89) with unlimited team members, and it’s the tool we came closest to switching to ourselves. It’s UK-built, integrates properly with Reed and Totaljobs — boards that US-focused platforms treat as an afterthought — and ships 700+ job description templates.
The compromise is reach and depth. Distribution covers 15+ job boards versus Breezy’s 50+, the Starter tier caps you at three active jobs, and reporting lags well behind Ashby or Greenhouse. Against Lever specifically, there’s no CRM and no sourcing — this is a pure, cheap, reactive-hiring tool.
Choose GoHire if you’re a UK small business hiring domestically. Skip it if you hire internationally or need wide syndication.
One more scenario: if the honest answer is that you don’t want to spend anything at all, a cheaper paid tool isn’t the fix either. Our free ATS roundup covers the genuinely usable free options, including Breezy’s Bootstrap plan.
When staying on Lever is the right call
Here’s the section most alternatives posts skip.
Lever’s CRM is genuinely differentiated. If your recruiters build talent pools and nurture passive candidates over weeks or months before they’re ready to apply — common in exec search, hard-to-fill engineering roles and competitive talent markets — none of the six tools above does that workflow as well. Manatal is far cheaper but simpler; Ashby comes closest at scale; neither is a clean substitute for Lever’s nurture campaigns.
If that’s how you actually hire, the maths change. A benchmark of $6–8 per employee per month is defensible for tooling that fills roles you couldn’t otherwise fill. Negotiate the add-ons, push back on the renewal terms, and stay put.
Everyone else — the teams that post jobs, screen applications and interview whoever applies — is paying an enterprise sourcing premium for a workflow a $157/mo tool handles comfortably. That was our conclusion when we ranked all ten ATS platforms, and nothing about Lever’s pricing model has given me a reason to soften it.