Is Ashby or Workable cheaper?

Ashby starts at $400 per month (Foundations, companies up to 100 employees). Workable starts at $299 per month for Standard at 1 to 20 employees; a per-job option at $99 per active job exists but is not shown on the pricing page (15 days trial).

Ashby vs Workable

An independent, review-free comparison compiled by the SaaSTracker editorial team. Both products are profiled in full, and neither can pay for placement here.

The short answer

Both sides assessed

Ashby compared with Workable

The most common head-to-head for a company outgrowing a basic ATS. Workable is cheaper, self-serve, ships with a free trial, and is stronger on candidate sourcing volume and job board syndication out of the box. Ashby wins decisively on reporting depth and scheduling automation, and its single-database design answers funnel questions Workable needs an export to approach. Choose Workable if you want to start today at a lower price with less setup; choose Ashby if the recurring pain is coordination volume and unanswerable pipeline questions.

Workable compared with Ashby

Ashby is the analytics-first ATS and it beats Workable decisively on exactly the axis where Workable is weakest: custom reporting, funnel analytics, and structured interview design. Ashby also has a free tier for very small teams. Workable answers with a much broader footprint, HR, onboarding, time off, and performance, and a simpler product for non-recruiters. A data-driven talent team with a real recruiting function should look at Ashby; an operations lead who owns hiring alongside four other jobs will get more from Workable.

Choose Ashby if

Companies hiring continuously with a dedicated recruiter or two, where the pain is coordination volume and unanswerable pipeline questions rather than the cost of the tool: venture-backed technology companies, AI startups, and any team that wants one system covering sourcing, scheduling, and reporting instead of three.

Choose Workable if

Companies of roughly 20 to 200 people that hire continuously, involve several non-recruiters in every hire, and want the applicant tracking system and the basic HR system to be one product with one employee record.

Side by side

13 attributes

Attribute	Ashby	Workable
Category	Hiring	Hiring
Starting price	$400 per month (Foundations, companies up to 100 employees)	$299 per month for Standard at 1 to 20 employees; a per-job option at $99 per active job exists but is not shown on the pricing page (15 days trial)
Pricing model	Tiered subscription priced by company headcount rather than recruiter seats at the entry level, with usage meters on top for email lookups, SMS, and AI credits. Only the Foundations tier has a published price; Plus, Enterprise, and standalone Analytics are quoted. Add-ons for Advanced Scheduling and the AI Notetaker are separate line items on every tier.	Flat monthly subscription banded by company headcount, not by recruiter seat: users and active jobs are unlimited within fair-use limits, and the price step is your employee count. Three published plans (Standard, Premier, Enterprise) with nine headcount bands, of which only the smallest publishes a price on the site. Annual billing saves up to 20 percent versus monthly. Workable Agent AI usage is metered separately in credits.
Free plan	No	No
Free trial	No	15 days, full Standard feature set, no credit card required
Best for	Companies hiring continuously with a dedicated recruiter or two, where the pain is coordination volume and unanswerable pipeline questions rather than the cost of the tool: venture-backed technology companies, AI startups, and any team that wants one system covering sourcing, scheduling, and reporting instead of three.	Companies of roughly 20 to 200 people that hire continuously, involve several non-recruiters in every hire, and want the applicant tracking system and the basic HR system to be one product with one employee record.
Setup time	Plan on one to three weeks of real configuration before going live, not an afternoon. Job templates, interview plans, scorecards, approval chains, and scheduling rules all have to be defined, and the quality of those definitions determines whether the reporting is worth anything later. Importing candidates from an existing ATS is the easier half of the work.	A first job can be live within an hour of signing up: account, careers page branding, job details, and publish. A full deployment with pipeline templates, scorecard attributes, email templates, calendar integration, and permissions for a dozen hiring managers is a week or two of part-time work. Turning on the HR side and loading employee records is a separate project of similar size.
Learning curve	Moderate to steep for administrators and light for occasional users. The recurring complaint in reviews is depth of configuration rather than confusing design: interview scheduling alone carries more than a dozen settings tabs, and common tasks can take more clicks than in a simpler tool. Hiring managers using job dashboards and feedback forms need almost no training.	Low for hiring managers and interviewers, who mostly review candidates and fill scorecards. Moderate for the administrator, since pipeline templates, automations, permission levels, and add-on configuration all need decisions made once and rarely revisited. The reporting section is where competent users most often get stuck, because the limits are in the product rather than in their understanding of it.
Platforms	Web application, Chrome extension for sourcing, Slack app, Mobile web (no native iOS or Android app)	Web application, iOS app, Android app, Chrome sourcing extension, Embeddable careers page widget
Compliance	SOC 2 Type II, GDPR, ISO 27001, CCPA, EEOC and OFCCP reporting support	GDPR, CCPA, EEOC reporting, OFCCP reporting, SOC 2 Type II, ISO 27001, EU AI Act alignment for Workable Agent
Founded	2018	2012
Headquarters	San Francisco, California	Boston, Massachusetts, United States (engineering base in Athens, Greece; offices in London and Singapore)
Ownership	Independent, venture-backed	Independent, venture-backed

Strengths and limitations

Ashby

Strengths

Reporting is genuinely a first-class part of the system rather than an exported module, and it shows in questions competitors cannot answer without manual data work.
Sourcing CRM, ATS, scheduling, and analytics share one database, which removes the sync failures that plague a stitched-together stack.
Interview scheduling automation is among the strongest in the category, and it addresses the single biggest time sink for coordinators.
Pricing at the entry tier is published, which is rare in recruiting software where almost every vendor hides behind a demo.

Limitations

No free plan and no self-serve trial, so a small business cannot evaluate the product without going through sales.
The $400 monthly floor is priced on total company headcount, so a 95-person company hiring two people pays the same as one hiring forty.
Configuration depth is real work: reviewers count more than a dozen settings tabs in interview scheduling alone, and initial setup takes longer than a lightweight ATS.
Sourcing filtering is dropdown-based rather than boolean, which experienced sourcers find slower and less expressive than a query string.

Workable

Strengths

One of the fastest paths from an unwritten job description to a live posting on 200 boards, with AI drafting removing the usual delay.
Headcount-based pricing with unlimited users means every hiring manager and interviewer can be inside the system, which is where collaborative hiring actually improves.
Recruiting and core HR share one employee record, so a hire does not get rekeyed into a second system on their first day.
Resume parsing and candidate profiles are mature after more than a decade, and the searchable talent pool makes past applicants a real asset rather than dead storage.

Limitations

No free plan at all; a 15-day trial then a paywall, where several direct competitors offer a free tier or a much cheaper entry point.
Reporting customization is the most consistent complaint in user reviews: the standard reports are fine, but anything beyond them means exporting to a BI tool.
The LinkedIn sourcing extension is repeatedly reported as unreliable, and contact data on sourced profiles is often stale, so outbound reply rates disappoint relative to the database's headline size.
Texting, video interviews, assessments, and performance reviews are unbundled on Standard, which makes the advertised $299 misleading for most real deployments.

Pricing compared

Ashby

Tiered subscription priced by company headcount rather than recruiter seats at the entry level, with usage meters on top for email lookups, SMS, and AI credits. Only the Foundations tier has a published price; Plus, Enterprise, and standalone Analytics are quoted. Add-ons for Advanced Scheduling and the AI Notetaker are separate line items on every tier.

Foundations$400
PlusCustom quote
EnterpriseCustom quote
Ashby AnalyticsCustom quote

Ashby is the most expensive published entry point in this category, and it is not close: $4,800 a year buys a full free plan plus several years of a cheaper ATS elsewhere. The defence is straightforward arithmetic on coordinator time. If interview scheduling and pipeline reporting currently consume ten hours a week of someone's salary, the tool pays for itself; if you make four hires a year and schedule them by email in twenty minutes each, it does not. Judge it on hiring volume rather than company size, and price in the two add-ons plus the headcount threshold before comparing quotes, because the $400 headline is the floor rather than the number most teams pay.

Workable

Flat monthly subscription banded by company headcount, not by recruiter seat: users and active jobs are unlimited within fair-use limits, and the price step is your employee count. Three published plans (Standard, Premier, Enterprise) with nine headcount bands, of which only the smallest publishes a price on the site. Annual billing saves up to 20 percent versus monthly. Workable Agent AI usage is metered separately in credits.

Pay As You Go$99
Standard$299
Premier$599
Enterprise$719

Workable is priced as an HR platform, not as an ATS, and it should be judged that way. At $299 a month for a 20-person company it costs several times what JazzHR or Breezy charge for applicant tracking alone, and if all you want is a pipeline that is a bad trade. If you would otherwise buy an ATS and a small HRIS, the arithmetic reverses quickly: onboarding, employee records, time off, time tracking, and e-signature are included in that same fee, and unlimited users means the whole company can participate without a seat conversation. The awkward middle is a company that wants the ATS plus one or two screening tools, because that buyer is pushed either into $296 a month of add-ons or up to Premier at double the price. Above 100 employees the published price disappears and Vendr contract data suggests a median around $15,000 a year, which is still small-business reachable but is a negotiated purchase rather than a self-serve one.

Editorial verdict on each

Ashby

Ashby is the best answer in this category to a specific question: what did our hiring process actually do, and where did it lose time. Building the reporting engine and the operational system on one database was the right call, and it produces analysis that competitors need spreadsheets and a spare afternoon to approximate. The scheduling automation is the other genuine strength, and it is the feature that pays for the subscription in coordinator hours. The cost of all this is bluntly stated on the pricing page: $400 per month minimum, priced on company headcount rather than hiring volume, with no free plan, no trial, and the two most-wanted features sold as add-ons. That is the most expensive published floor in the category, and for a business making a few hires a year it is the wrong purchase regardless of quality. Buy Ashby when hiring is a continuous function with someone whose job it is, and evaluate it against JazzHR, Breezy HR, or a well-maintained Airtable base when it is not.

Read the full Ashby profile

Workable

Workable is no longer competing with cheap applicant tracking systems, and buyers who evaluate it as one will conclude it is overpriced. Since the 2024 HR expansion it is a people platform whose front door happens to be an excellent ATS: post everywhere at once, get parsed applications, involve as many interviewers as you like at no extra cost, then keep the same record through onboarding, time off, and reviews. For a company between roughly 20 and 200 people that hires continuously and has no HRIS, that combination is a strong purchase and the headcount-based pricing rewards exactly the collaborative hiring style small companies use. The honest caveats are real: there is no free plan, the $299 headline hides $296 a month of add-ons most buyers want, pricing goes dark above 20 employees, and reporting is the part of the product people outgrow first. A company hiring twice a year should take the unadvertised $99 per-job option or buy something smaller; a company that wants hiring analytics as its centre of gravity should look at Ashby instead.

Read the full Workable profile

Ashby profile last reviewed 2026-08-23; Workable last reviewed 2026-08-23. Pricing is compiled from public sources and can change without notice. See our methodology.