Manatal 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 assessedManatal compared with Workable
Workable is the safer, more polished in-house choice, with a stronger sourcing database, built-in assessments, and a more mature hiring-manager experience, at a materially higher price and with plan structures keyed to active jobs. Manatal costs a fraction per seat, adds a client-side CRM that Workable does not attempt, and is friendlier to agency work. Companies hiring for themselves and valuing sourcing and assessments usually land on Workable; agencies and cost-led teams land on Manatal.
Workable compared with Manatal
Manatal is priced far below Workable and, unlike it, is built to serve recruitment agencies as well as internal teams, with client and placement management in the data model. Its AI candidate scoring and social enrichment are good for the money. Workable is the more polished internal-hiring product with a stronger careers page, better compliance tooling, and the HR platform behind it. Agencies should look at Manatal; internal teams weighing them on price alone should be honest that they are comparing an ATS to a people system.
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 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 | Manatal | Workable |
|---|---|---|
| Category | Hiring | Hiring |
| Starting price | $15 per user per month billed annually ($19 monthly) on the Professional plan (14 days trial) | $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 | 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. | 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 | 14 days, no credit card required | 15 days, full Standard feature set, no credit card required |
| 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. | 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 | 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 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 | 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 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, iOS app, Android app, Chrome sourcing extension | Web application, iOS app, Android app, Chrome sourcing extension, Embeddable careers page widget |
| Compliance | GDPR, CCPA, SOC 2, ISO 27001 | GDPR, CCPA, EEOC reporting, OFCCP reporting, SOC 2 Type II, ISO 27001, EU AI Act alignment for Workable Agent |
| Founded | 2019 | 2012 |
| Headquarters | Bangkok, Thailand | Boston, Massachusetts, United States (engineering base in Athens, Greece; offices in London and Singapore) |
| Ownership | Independent, venture-backed | Independent, venture-backed |
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.
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
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.
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
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 profileWorkable
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 profileManatal 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.