Comparison pages love feature grids. Feature grids are useless when you are five people and hiring two roles this year, because every tool has enough features and the only question that matters is what it costs against how often you will open it.
So here is a specific scenario, priced out. Five-person company. Two hires over the next twelve months, one in spring and one in autumn. Each search runs about four weeks from posting to offer. No dedicated recruiter. The founder and one manager review candidates.
JazzHR: $900 a Year at the Entry Tier
JazzHR is built for small and mid-sized businesses and prices as a flat monthly subscription rather than per employee, which is friendly if your headcount grows.
- Hero: $75 per month billed annually, or $99 month to month. Up to three active jobs. Additional jobs run about $9 each per month.
- Plus: $269 per month billed annually, or $325 month to month. Up to 200 open jobs, custom workflows, team collaboration.
- Pro: $420 per month billed annually, or $499 month to month. Adds eSignatures, advanced reporting, and Zoom integration.
Unlimited users on every plan, which genuinely matters when several people interview. There is a 21-day trial but no permanent free tier.
For our scenario, Hero at annual billing is the honest number: $900 for the year. Three active jobs is plenty for two hires. Month-to-month billing would be $1,188 if you wanted the flexibility to cancel between searches, and you would still be paying during the eight months you are not hiring.
Breezy HR: Free If You Hire One Role at a Time, Otherwise $1,884
Breezy is the design-forward option, with a visual drag-and-drop pipeline that people genuinely enjoy using. It also has the most interesting free tier in this comparison.
- Bootstrap: free, permanently, limited to one active position.
- Startup: $157 per month billed annually.
- Growth: $273 per month billed annually.
- Business: $439 per month billed annually.
- Pro: custom quote.
Flat pricing with unlimited users at every tier, which is a real advantage over per-seat tools when you have several hiring managers. Add-ons stack on top: SMS around $41 per month, onboarding around $49 per month, AI credits priced separately.
Our scenario has a loophole in it. Two hires, but spring and autumn, never at the same time. If you only ever have one job open at once, Bootstrap covers you at $0. That is the best deal in this article, and you should take it if your hiring genuinely stays sequential.
The moment you need two roles open at once, you jump to Startup at $157 per month, which is $1,884 for the year. There is no middle step. That cliff is the most common complaint about Breezy pricing, and it is why people go looking for alternatives.
ApplyHere: $18 for the Year
ApplyHere is not an ATS in the pipeline-and-scorecards sense. It is a job post plus a shareable application form plus a dashboard of applicants, priced per post instead of per month.
- First post free.
- $9 per job post after that, paid once.
- Each post stays live four weeks, which matches a typical search.
- Unlimited applicants, resumes and custom questions included.
- Applicant data stays in your dashboard after the post expires.
- New applicants are emailed to you in a digest every six hours.
For our scenario: first post free, second post $9. Round up and call it $18 for the year if you do not use the free post. You pay when you hire and nothing in the months between.
The Twelve-Month Comparison
- JazzHR Hero (annual): $900 per year. Roughly $450 per hire.
- Breezy Bootstrap: $0 per year, if you never need two jobs open at once.
- Breezy Startup (annual): $1,884 per year. Roughly $942 per hire.
- ApplyHere: $9 to $18 per year. Roughly $9 per hire.
That is a spread of $0 to $1,884 for the same two hires. Quality of software barely enters into it. What separates those numbers is how much you are renting during the ten months when nobody is applying.
What the Money Actually Buys
Price alone is a bad way to choose, so here is what the paid tools give you that the cheap options do not.
Pipeline stages and collaboration
JazzHR and Breezy both give you a candidate pipeline with stages, team comments, and scorecards. If three people interview every candidate and you need structured feedback in one place, that is worth paying for. If it is you and one colleague talking in the kitchen, it is not.
Job board syndication
JazzHR posts out to free job boards for you. Breezy does too, with more integrations at higher tiers. ApplyHere does not distribute at all: it gives you a link and you share it yourself on LinkedIn, in communities, or wherever your candidates actually are. If you rely on board traffic to find applicants, that gap matters. If your best candidates come from your own network and posts, it does not.
Interview scheduling and offers
Calendar integration, self-scheduling, and eSignature offers are real time savers at volume. At two hires a year, you can schedule five interviews by email and not notice the difference.
Picking One
Breezy is the pick if you want a proper pipeline with collaboration and can genuinely keep to one open role at a time. The free tier is excellent, and the jump to $157 is steep enough that staying under it is worth some scheduling discipline.
Go with JazzHR when you post to job boards constantly and want syndication plus several concurrent roles for a predictable flat fee. ApplyHere makes sense at the other end, where you hire occasionally, share the link yourself, and would rather pay $9 when you need it than $75 to $157 every month whether you need it or not.
What You Are Really Deciding
Underneath the feature comparison, the question is whether a subscription is justified at your hiring pace. Hire more than six times a year, or run several roles at once, and the workflow savings cover the fee comfortably. Below that line you are paying for availability rather than use.
Work out your own number before you commit. Read the full job posting cost comparison for the board-side costs, and look at simpler ATS options for startups if the enterprise tools feel oversized. If you want to test the cheapest path first, posting a job costs nothing on your first role.