Is Manatal or Zoho CRM cheaper?

Manatal starts at $15 per user per month billed annually ($19 monthly) on the Professional plan (14 days trial). Zoho CRM starts at $0 for up to 3 users, then $14 per user per month on annual billing (Standard) (free plan available).

Manatal vs Zoho CRM

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

Editorial assessment

Manatal compared with Zoho CRM

Small agencies frequently try to run candidate and client pipelines out of a general CRM, and Zoho CRM is the usual candidate: cheap, flexible, and already in the stack. It handles the client side well and the candidate side badly, since it has no resume parsing, no job board syndication, and no career page. Manatal's recruitment CRM covers both, and a team using Zoho for sales can keep it there and connect the two rather than force one tool to do both jobs.

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 Zoho CRM if

Cost-conscious small and mid-sized businesses that need real configurability (custom modules, process enforcement, approvals, territory management) and have at least one person willing to own the administration, especially companies already using or considering other Zoho applications.

Side by side

13 attributes

Attribute	Manatal	Zoho CRM
Category	Hiring	CRM
Starting price	$15 per user per month billed annually ($19 monthly) on the Professional plan (14 days trial)	$0 for up to 3 users, then $14 per user per month on annual billing (Standard) (free plan available)
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.	Per-user subscription across a free edition and four paid editions, billed monthly or annually, with API capacity metered as daily credits and the wider Zoho suite available as a separate per-employee bundle.
Free plan	No	Free edition for up to 3 users with contact, lead, account, and deal management, basic workflow automation, standard reports, mobile apps, and 5,000 API credits a day.
Free trial	14 days, no credit card required	Free trials are offered on every paid edition, and the free 3-user edition serves as an open-ended evaluation path
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.	Cost-conscious small and mid-sized businesses that need real configurability (custom modules, process enforcement, approvals, territory management) and have at least one person willing to own the administration, especially companies already using or considering other Zoho applications.
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 basic instance in a day: import records, set pipeline stages, connect email. A properly configured deployment with custom modules, Blueprint processes, assignment rules, approvals, and reports is a 2 to 6 week project, and larger businesses usually engage a Zoho partner.
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.	Moderate for reps because the interface is dense, and high for administrators because the configuration surface is enormous. The upside is that almost any requirement can be met without leaving the product; the downside is that meeting it requires reading documentation.
Platforms	Web application, iOS app, Android app, Chrome sourcing extension	Web app, iOS, Android, Gmail and Outlook plugins, Browser extensions
Compliance	GDPR, CCPA, SOC 2, ISO 27001	SOC 2 Type 2, ISO 27001, GDPR, HIPAA support on eligible editions
Founded	2019	1996
Headquarters	Bangkok, Thailand	Chennai, India, with a US base in Austin, Texas
Ownership	Independent, venture-backed	Bootstrapped and privately held with no outside investors

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.

Zoho CRM

Strengths

Unmatched capability per dollar: custom modules from $14, Blueprint process enforcement and unlimited reports from $23, approvals and sandboxes from $40.
Genuine configurability including custom object types, Canvas layout design, Deluge scripting, and territory management, which lets one CRM serve very different businesses.
Built-in telephony, web forms, SMS, and omnichannel capture included from the entry paid edition rather than sold as add-ons.
A free 3-user edition that is a real product, not a demo, so the smallest teams can start at zero cost.

Limitations

The interface is dense and utilitarian; it works, but it does not delight, and rep adoption suffers if nobody uses Canvas to clean it up.
Nearly everything good needs configuring, so a deployment without an owner drifts into a cluttered, half-used system.
Support quality on lower editions is a persistent complaint, and genuinely responsive support usually means buying a paid support plan.
Marketing automation, BI, and ticketing are separate Zoho products, so the CRM alone is narrower than HubSpot's single platform.

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.

Zoho CRM

Per-user subscription across a free edition and four paid editions, billed monthly or annually, with API capacity metered as daily credits and the wider Zoho suite available as a separate per-employee bundle.

Free$0
Standard$14
Professional$23
Enterprise$40
Ultimate$52

On raw capability per dollar, Zoho CRM has no serious rival. Custom modules at $14, Blueprint process enforcement and unlimited reports at $23, and approval chains, sandboxes, and field-level encryption at $40 would cost three to six times as much from HubSpot and are simply unavailable at any price from Pipedrive or Capsule. The cost is not in the invoice, it is in the configuration and the interface. Budget for an administrator, whether that is an internal ops person or a Zoho partner for a few thousand pounds, and Zoho becomes the best-value CRM a small business can buy. Skip that budget and you have paid $14 for something your reps will not use.

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

Zoho CRM

Best Value

Zoho CRM is the best-value CRM a small business can buy, provided somebody owns it. Custom modules at $14 a user, Blueprint process enforcement and unlimited reports at $23, approvals, sandboxes, and field-level encryption at $40: nothing else in this category comes close on capability per dollar, and the company behind it is a bootstrapped, profitable, thirty-year-old private business that has never had a reason to reprice aggressively. The catch is stated plainly by everyone who has deployed it: the interface is dense and the power is latent until configured. Budget a fortnight of admin time or a partner engagement. If you cannot, buy Pipedrive instead and be happy. If you can, Zoho will do things at $23 a seat that HubSpot charges $90 for.

Read the full Zoho CRM profile

Manatal profile last reviewed 2026-08-23; Zoho CRM last reviewed 2026-08-22. Pricing is compiled from public sources and can change without notice. See our methodology.