Is Manatal or Recruitee cheaper?

Manatal starts at $15 per user per month billed annually ($19 monthly) on the Professional plan (14 days trial). Recruitee starts at Quote only; no public price list. Third-party 2026 reports put the practical entry point in the low hundreds of dollars or euros per month for a small team (18 days trial).

Manatal vs Recruitee

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

Manatal compared with Recruitee

Both target the small in-house team, and both do collaborative hiring well. Recruitee's strengths are its career-site editor, its collaboration model, and a European product feel with EU data handling; Manatal's are price, the agency CRM, and a deeper AI layer. Recruitee prices by active job slots, Manatal by seat with job caps only on the entry tier, so the cheaper option depends on whether your constraint is recruiters or open roles.

Recruitee compared with Manatal

Manatal is cheaper, publishes its prices per user per month, and serves both in-house teams and staffing agencies with an AI-heavy candidate matching and enrichment story. Recruitee is more expensive, quoted rather than listed, and clearly aimed at in-house hiring in Europe, where its careers site, GDPR automations, and EU-only hosting matter more than raw price. Small teams that want to start today at a known cost will find Manatal easier to buy; companies with data protection obligations or an employer-brand agenda usually end up on Recruitee despite the sales call.

Choose Manatal if

Recruitment agencies, headhunters, and in-house HR teams of roughly 2 to 50 people that want a complete applicant tracking system plus a client-side CRM for a per-seat price closer to a CRM than to a talent suite, and that value breadth of workflow over depth of analytics.

Choose Recruitee if

In-house hiring teams at companies of roughly 20 to 500 employees, especially in Europe, that hire steadily across departments, care about how the careers site looks, and need non-recruiters to participate in hiring decisions without training.

Side by side

13 attributes

Attribute	Manatal	Recruitee
Category	Hiring	Hiring
Starting price	$15 per user per month billed annually ($19 monthly) on the Professional plan (14 days trial)	Quote only; no public price list. Third-party 2026 reports put the practical entry point in the low hundreds of dollars or euros per month for a small team (18 days trial)
Pricing model	Per user per month, billed monthly or annually, with annual billing discounted. Hiring managers are unlimited and free on every plan, so cost scales with recruiters rather than with everyone who touches a hire. Job and candidate limits apply per account, not per seat, and the entry tier is capped on both. Paid job board contracts, the branded guest portal, and the AI Interviewer are separate purchases.	Annual subscription across three tiers (Start, Advance, and Optimize), quoted rather than published. The quote depends on the plan, the number of employees at the organization, and the billing period. Start caps active job posts at five; Advance and Optimize allow unlimited active jobs. AI features are metered in credits and searches, with the caps loosening on higher tiers. Paying annually rather than monthly saves 20 percent.
Free plan	No	No
Free trial	14 days, no credit card required	18 days on the Advance plan, no credit card required, no automatic conversion
Best for	Recruitment agencies, headhunters, and in-house HR teams of roughly 2 to 50 people that want a complete applicant tracking system plus a client-side CRM for a per-seat price closer to a CRM than to a talent suite, and that value breadth of workflow over depth of analytics.	In-house hiring teams at companies of roughly 20 to 500 employees, especially in Europe, that hire steadily across departments, care about how the careers site looks, and need non-recruiters to participate in hiring decisions without training.
Setup time	A single recruiter can be posting a job the same afternoon: account creation, mailbox and calendar connection, and a first job take under an hour. A migration from an existing database is the longer piece, typically a few days for bulk import, field mapping, and duplicate cleanup.	A working setup in one to two weeks: the careers site and first job in a day, then pipeline templates, evaluation forms, email templates, and automations over the following week. Migrating historical candidate data and connecting an HRIS extends this to three or four weeks.
Learning curve	Low. The interface follows the Kanban conventions most recruiters already know, and hiring managers need no training to review and comment. The parts that take longer are configuring workflow automations (on plans that have them) and getting the reporting you want out of a suite that is not especially deep.	Low for hiring managers, who mostly review and evaluate, and moderate for the administrator who owns workflow templates, automations, and permissions. The concepts that take longest are the difference between pipelines and workflow templates, and getting retention rules right so GDPR automation deletes the correct records at the correct time.
Platforms	Web application, iOS app, Android app, Chrome sourcing extension	Web app, iOS app, Android app, Embeddable jobs widget, Hosted careers site
Compliance	GDPR, CCPA, SOC 2, ISO 27001	GDPR, ISO 27001, SOC 2 Type II, EU data residency
Founded	2019	2015
Headquarters	Bangkok, Thailand	Amsterdam, Netherlands
Ownership	Independent, venture-backed	Product unit of Tellent, backed by PSG Equity (Providence Strategic Growth)

Strengths and limitations

Manatal

Strengths

Entry pricing that is genuinely small-business accessible, with a 14-day trial and no card required, in a category where quote-only pricing is common.
Unlimited free hiring-manager seats on every plan, which removes the usual per-seat penalty for involving the rest of the company in hiring.
A real recruitment CRM alongside the ATS, so agencies track clients, placements, and fees without buying a second system.
AI features shipped earlier and more broadly than most SMB-priced competitors, including scoring, enrichment, an asynchronous video interviewer, and an MCP server for ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini.

Limitations

Reporting is the most consistently criticised area in verified G2 and Capterra reviews: standard recruiter-performance metrics are thin, and the custom report builder is locked to the $55 Enterprise Plus tier.
Search and filtering across a large candidate database frustrates power users, with limited ability to filter on custom criteria drawn from CV or application content.
Mass email is metered by credits, so outbound nurture at any real volume runs into a cap rather than a soft limit.
No built-in sourcing database or verified contact data; enrichment works on profiles you already found, so a separate sourcing tool is often still needed.

Recruitee

Strengths

One of the best careers site builders in any ATS at this level, with page layouts, a content library, an embeddable jobs widget, and job alerts.
Collaboration designed for people who are not recruiters: mentions, notes, quick evaluations, and a mobile app that hiring managers will actually open.
Strong European data posture, with ISO 27001 and SOC 2 Type II, EU-only hosting in Germany and Ireland, and GDPR consent, retention, and erasure handled as product features.
Automation covers the tedious middle of the process: stage-triggered tasks, evaluation requests, templated emails, and questionnaires.

Limitations

Pricing is quote only. The published tiers carry no prices, the quote is based on total employee count, and a one-year minimum applies even on monthly payment, so a small business cannot self-serve or price-compare without contacting sales.
No free plan, unlike several direct competitors, which removes the option of running a single role through the product before committing.
The Start tier caps concurrent active jobs at five, and because that counts open roles rather than annual hires it is a cap growing companies hit sooner than they expect.
AI metering is tight on the lower tiers: 100 screening credits and only 3 Matching searches per month, with 65 Matching searches reserved for Optimize.

Pricing compared

Manatal

Per user per month, billed monthly or annually, with annual billing discounted. Hiring managers are unlimited and free on every plan, so cost scales with recruiters rather than with everyone who touches a hire. Job and candidate limits apply per account, not per seat, and the entry tier is capped on both. Paid job board contracts, the branded guest portal, and the AI Interviewer are separate purchases.

Professional$15
Enterprise$35
Enterprise Plus$55
CustomQuote

On raw capability per dollar Manatal is close to unbeatable in this category: $15 a seat buys multi-board posting, parsing, a full pipeline, a career page, AI scoring, and an agency CRM, where several Western competitors start above $150 a month for a comparable list. Two caveats shape the real figure. Feature gating is steeper than the headline suggests, with automation at $35 and SSO, API access, and custom reporting at $55, and the entry tier's account-wide caps are easy to outgrow. Judged honestly, a small agency that stays inside 15 open jobs gets one of the best-value purchases on this list, while a team that needs API access and real reporting is comparing $55 a seat against mid-market vendors rather than against the $15 headline.

Recruitee

Annual subscription across three tiers (Start, Advance, and Optimize), quoted rather than published. The quote depends on the plan, the number of employees at the organization, and the billing period. Start caps active job posts at five; Advance and Optimize allow unlimited active jobs. AI features are metered in credits and searches, with the caps loosening on higher tiers. Paying annually rather than monthly saves 20 percent.

StartQuote only
AdvanceQuote only
OptimizeQuote only

Recruitee is priced as a mid-market European HR purchase rather than a self-serve tool, and the removal of public pricing is the clearest signal of that positioning. What you get for the money is a genuinely complete hiring system: careers site, distribution, pipeline, scheduling, offers, onboarding, and GDPR handling, with none of it bolted on from a partner. For a company hiring ten to fifty people a year that value holds up well, and the careers site alone displaces a web project. For a company hiring three people a year, an annual contract quoted against total headcount is poor value regardless of the number, and a monthly self-serve ATS will do the job. The unavoidable friction is that you cannot answer the question of whether it fits your budget without booking a call.

Editorial verdict on each

Manatal

Manatal is the clearest value argument in small-business recruiting software. Fifteen dollars a seat buys a complete applicant tracking system, a genuine agency CRM, multi-board posting, multilingual parsing, a branded career page, and an AI layer that several far more expensive vendors have only recently matched, with a 14-day trial and no card required to check. The honest caveats are gating and depth: automation starts at $35, and SSO, API access, and custom reporting all sit at $55, so the price a growing team actually pays is not the headline. Reporting and candidate search are the real functional weaknesses, and if analytics is the reason you are shopping for an ATS, buy something else. For an agency, a headhunter, or an HR team of a few people that needs breadth quickly and cheaply, it is among the highest-return purchases in the category.

Read the full Manatal profile

Recruitee

Recruitee is one of the better applicant tracking systems for a European company of 20 to 500 people that hires steadily and wants hiring managers involved without training them. The careers site builder is genuinely strong, the collaboration model fits teams where the recruiter is not the only participant, and the EU hosting with GDPR handling built into the product answers a question many competitors deflect to a policy page. The reservations are commercial as much as functional: there is no free plan, no published price, and a one-year minimum quoted against total headcount, which makes it a purchase that starts with a sales call rather than a credit card. Reporting is thinner than the rest of the product, the AI allowances on lower tiers are small, and bulk data export is awkward enough to plan for in advance. Take the 18-day trial, test the reports and an export during it, and negotiate the renewal uplift at signature.

Read the full Recruitee profile

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