The 9 best applicant tracking systems in 2024

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When you open the floodgates that are a new job posting, you have to be ready for the wave of candidates that can follow. It's not easy to sort through hundreds or thousands of applicants to find those best fit for the job—which is why the agency I work for uses an applicant tracking system (ATS) to manage the best possible talent pipeline.

To help you pick the best solution for your organization, I researched several dozen ATS platforms, testing them whenever I could and speaking to the folks who use them day in and day out.

The good news: there are a lot of great options out there, many of which have unique features that will help you streamline your applicant tracking. With that, here are the nine best applicant tracking systems.

The 9 best applicant tracking systems

• Workable for candidate tracking
• Breezy HR for small businesses on a budget
• Pinpoint for a premium experience
• Zoho Recruit for AI features
• Greenhouse for reporting
• BambooHR for full HR integration
• JazzHR for small and mid-sized businesses
• Lever for engaging passive candidates
• Ashby for high-growth organizations

What makes the best applicant tracking system?

Whether you're a startup newly branching out from your founding members or an established company that's been managing job candidates in a spreadsheet (yikes), it's time to explore the applicant tracking systems out there. ATS offerings have drastically advanced in recent years, but there are some features that every ATS needs to be considered worthy of your (and your candidates') time.

Here's what I was looking out for:

• AI and automation tools: Recruiting and applicant tracking requires pretty repetitive processes: collecting candidates, scoring them, categorizing them in pools, and sending progression and rejection emails, to name a few. Software that automates these processes through machine learning, intelligent workflow automation rules, and template options will free up your team's time to focus on identifying the best fit for your open roles.
• Candidate tracking features: You would think that every ATS would knock tracking out of the park, but you'd be surprised. Some systems offer far more advanced candidate data management and search capabilities, with features such as advanced search, tags, hotlists/candidate pools, and more. Every platform on this list has solid tracking features that shine through the noise.
• Integrations: Your applicant tracking system should natively integrate with job boards like LinkedIn, Indeed, and ZipRecruiter, enabling you to quickly post your open positions to these boards and source candidate details from third-party sites. All the better if your system integrates with other apps you use for creating a complete recruiting, onboarding, and HR machine.
• User-friendliness: How intuitive is your system? Does its interface make sense (categorized tabs, logical placement of items), make it easy to navigate several candidates and job postings (including consolidated views of important notes), and anticipate your needs?
• Customization options: Every job at every organization is different, which means you might need custom workflows. A flexible system helps teams build processes that work for them rather than locking them into a strict workflow. Can you create multiple custom pipelines that your candidates will progress along, depending on the job they're applying for? Can you save custom views to see the candidates' most important details? Customization in these areas goes a long way.
• Reporting and analytics: Applicant tracking systems are a bit hit-or-miss when it comes to reporting. All the apps in this roundup offer reporting and analytics, but some stand out above the rest by offering custom reports and dashboards, interactive data visualizations, and several prebuilt reports that shed light on important areas of company success.

I used these criteria in addition to my experience extensively exploring and testing ATS platforms on the market to select nine apps that will facilitate an excellent recruiting and applicant tracking process.

The best applicant tracking systems at a glance

Best for

Stand-out feature

Pricing

Advanced people search

From $149/month, billed monthly

Small businesses on a budget

Free plan with essential features

From $157/month, billed annually

A premium experience

Customizable workflows for collaborative hiring

Built-in AI assistant

Free with forever free plan; from $25/user/month, billed annually

Interactive data visualizations

Full HR integration

Onboarding, payroll, and other HR features

Small and mid-sized businesses

Dynamic guide for job posting

From $75/month, billed annually

Engaging passive candidates

Personalized automated outreach campaigns

Robust and customizable reporting tools

From $360/month, billed annually

Best ATS for candidate tracking

Workable (Web, iOS, Android)

Workable pros:

• One-click AI-generated job descriptions and interview questions
• Library of 1,000+ HR templates
• Comprehensive mobile app

Workable cons:

• Candidate assessments, video interviews, and texting are only available as separate add-ons
• Reporting capabilities are somewhat basic and offer limited customization

When I first opened Workable, I was met with a guided walkthrough of its candidate sourcing feature that made it a shoo-in for this list.

The advanced People Search feature enables users to search for virtually any detail about a candidate to identify them: previous job title, location, education, you name it. As long as a member of the hiring team remembers one detail about the candidate, it should be easy to identify them with Workable. This feature is especially helpful for large organizations with a massive candidate pool. Max Shak, founder and HR officer of nerDigital, points out that People Search is also incredibly beneficial "for small to medium-sized businesses that need a straightforward and efficient hiring process without extensive customization."

Workable's search functionality is amplified by many candidate filtering and sorting options—far more than I think most teams will need—including creation and disqualification date. Like many other ATS platforms, you can also add custom tags to individuals and filter by those. I was also impressed by the candidate information overview shown before you even click on the candidate: location, pipeline stage, other jobs they've applied for, and even some work experience details.

Apart from its candidate tracking features, Workable has some other advanced features, including solid visual report generation and AI-powered capabilities. For example, it uses AI to generate full job descriptions from a job title alone, and I was honestly highly impressed with the result. Sure, it was a little boilerplate, but it's still a nice time-saving tool for the job description copy that doesn't deserve an hour of your time to write.

Generally, Workable is super easy to use. That said, I did find some tabs (like the activity stream and view of candidates for a specific job) to be a little busy and overwhelming. I'm sure teams could adapt to these views with time, but it detracted from the platform's user-friendliness.

With the help of Zapier, you can connect Workable to all your other apps, so you can do things like send messages to applicants or import applicant information from your favorite spreadsheet apps. Start with one of the examples below, or learn more about how to automate Workable.