List of Applicant Tracking Systems: 12 Compared by Who They Suit

An applicant tracking system is the database and workflow layer that holds requisitions, candidates and hiring stages. The twelve below cover the systems most teams actually shortlist, grouped by who runs them rather than by feature count — because ATS choice is decided far more by company shape than by any single capability. The Cognitive is not an ATS; it connects to all twelve, which is why this list exists.

The twelve, and who each one suits

System	Typically run by	What it is built around
Greenhouse	Tech companies and scale-ups	Structured hiring — scorecards and interview kits are first-class objects
Lever	Mid-market and startup teams	ATS and CRM in one, built around relationship history
Ashby	Fast-growing startups	Analytics-led, with reporting usually bought separately elsewhere
Workday	Enterprise and global employers	Part of a wider HCM suite rather than a standalone ATS
SmartRecruiters	Mid-market to enterprise	Marketplace-oriented, with a large third-party integration catalogue
iCIMS	Large regulated employers	Deep compliance and configurability, longer implementations
Bullhorn	Staffing and recruiting agencies	Agency-shaped: submissions, clients and placements, not just requisitions
Avionté	Staffing firms, high-volume and light industrial	Built around redeployment and shift work
JobDiva	IT and professional staffing agencies	Resume-database depth and candidate harvesting
Ceipal	Staffing agencies, IT-heavy	Automation-first with integrated sourcing
Zoho Recruit	SMBs and small agencies	Lowest barrier to entry, part of the wider Zoho suite
BambooHR	SMBs treating hiring as part of HR	Hiring inside an HRIS rather than a dedicated ATS

How to narrow the list

Agency or in-house decides most of it. Bullhorn, Avionté, JobDiva and Ceipal are agency-shaped — submissions, clients and placements. Greenhouse, Lever and Ashby assume you are hiring for yourself.
Company size decides the next cut. Zoho Recruit and BambooHR suit teams where hiring is one part of an HR role; Workday and iCIMS assume a dedicated function and a long implementation.
Ask what happens at the screening stage. Every system on this list holds candidates well. None of them evaluates candidates for you — that gap is why most teams end up buying a second tool.

How to source candidates when the ATS is empty

Sourcing method	Reaches	What it costs	Where it breaks down
Re-advertising the role	People actively looking who see the advert	Job board spend	Misses everyone employed and content
Manual boolean search	Passive candidates, one query at a time	Recruiter hours per search	Nothing is recorded and nothing keeps running after the tab closes
Re-engaging past applicants	People already in the ATS from previous roles	Almost nothing — usually the cheapest pipeline a team has	Only as good as the database, and contact details rot
Employee referrals	Networks adjacent to your current team	Referral bonuses	Narrow, and it reproduces the team shape you already have
Candidate sourcing software	Profiles matched against a whole brief, with contacts enriched	Credits per candidate returned and per successful reveal	Says nothing about ability — a sourced candidate is still unassessed

Candidate sourcing is the outbound half of recruitment: searching for people who have not applied, checking them against the role, revealing contact details and opening the first conversation. Every system in the table above is inbound — it holds people who found your job post and chose to apply — so on a scarce skill, where most of the qualified market is employed and not looking, the applicant tracking system reports an empty pipeline it has no way to fill.

Sourcing is done one of three ways, and most teams use all three without deciding to. A recruiter runs boolean searches on a professional network by hand, which works and costs whatever the hours cost. The team re-advertises, which reaches only people already looking. Or the work moves to candidate sourcing software: a written brief searched across a profile database, contacts enriched, and the results pushed into the ATS as candidates with a rationale attached.

The Cognitive covers the third: a plain-English brief searched across ~900M profiles with contact details enriched from 30+ sources, at 1 credit per candidate a search returns, 5 credits for a verified email and 10 for a direct phone number, charged only on a successful reveal. It is not an ATS and does not replace one — sourced candidates land in whichever of the twelve systems above you already run.

What an ATS does not do

An ATS is a system of record. It stores candidates, moves them through stages and reports on the pipeline. It does not find candidates who have not applied, and it does not tell you which applicants are worth interviewing — those are separate jobs that teams either do manually or buy separately.

The Cognitive fills the second and third of those: candidate sourcing across ~900M profiles with contacts enriched from 30+ sources, and a live two-way AI video interview that returns a scorecard where every rating ties to a quote and a timestamp. Results sync back into whichever of the twelve systems above you already run.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is an applicant tracking system?

An applicant tracking system is software that stores candidates, moves them through hiring stages and reports on the pipeline. It is the system of record for a hiring process, not an evaluation tool.

Which ATS is best for a staffing agency?

Agency-shaped systems — Bullhorn, Avionté, JobDiva and Ceipal — are built around submissions, clients and placements rather than internal requisitions, which is the distinction that matters most for an agency.

Do applicant tracking systems screen candidates?

No. An ATS stores and moves candidates but does not evaluate them. Screening is either done manually by the hiring team or handled by a separate tool that writes results back into the ATS.

Do applicant tracking systems source candidates?

No. Every system on this list is inbound: it holds people who applied to a job post. Sourcing — finding candidates who have not applied, verifying fit and revealing contact details — is a separate job, done by a recruiter searching profiles by hand or by candidate sourcing software that pushes the results into the ATS.

What is candidate tracking software?

Candidate tracking software is the same category as an applicant tracking system under a different name: a database and workflow that holds candidates, records their stage and reports on the pipeline. The phrase is sometimes used more loosely to include recruiting CRMs, which hold candidates who have not applied — that is a genuinely different product and worth checking before buying.