What AI recruiting software actually charges for: seats, headcount and job slots
Two of the best-known AI recruiting platforms meter completely different things. One counts the recruiters using it. The other counts everyone your company employs, whether they ever open it or not. For a small team that difference is roughly ten times the bill.
- Manatal bills per recruiter seat at $15, $35 or $55 per user per month. Workable bills on your company's employee count, from $299 a month at 1 to 20 employees.
- For two recruiters at a 15-person company that is $30 versus $299. Same work, roughly ten times the price, decided by which axis the vendor picked.
- Manatal's entry plan caps jobs per ACCOUNT, not per seat. 15 jobs and 10,000 candidates, and adding recruiters does not add slots.
- Hiring managers are unlimited and free on every Manatal tier, so the people who review candidates never appear on the bill. That is the most useful fact on its pricing page.
- Workable's "unlimited active jobs" is qualified as subject to fair usage limits, which are not published as a number.
Two vendors, two things being counted
The prices are not comparable because the units are not. Before comparing any two figures in this category, check what each one is a price of.
× recruiters using it
cap: 15 jobs per ACCOUNT
Your bill tracks how many people run requisitions. A company of any size with two recruiters pays for two.
at 1 to 20 employees
bands up to 1000+
Your bill tracks how many people you employ. Two recruiters at a 400-person company pay the 400-person rate.
Read from manatal.com/pricing and workable.com/pricing on 26 August 2026, excluding tax. Workable figures are its smallest band, 1 to 20 employees.
The worked example
One concrete team, priced both ways, using only published figures.
A two-recruiter team at a 15-person company, monthly, excluding tax. Bar length is proportional to cost. Manatal figures are per-user rates multiplied by two seats; Workable's is its published band rate.
Manatal's most expensive tier, bought for two people, still costs about a third of Workable's cheapest plan for the same company. That gap is not a discount or a promotion. It is the arithmetic of two different meters landing on one small team, and it inverts as the company grows: a 400-person company with twenty recruiters pays Manatal for twenty seats while Workable's band rate rises far more slowly than a headcount multiple would suggest.
Why this page does not extend the comparison to larger companies
Because Workable's larger bands were not read. Its pricing page presents company size as a selector, and the figures reproduced here are the ones displayed at the default 1 to 20 employee band. The bands above it exist and are listed on the page (21 to 50, 51 to 100, 101 to 200, 201 to 400, 401 to 600, 601 to 800, 801 to 1000, and 1000+), but their prices were not captured and are therefore not published here.
That limits the honest claim to the small-team case, which is the one where the gap is widest and the decision is most often made badly. If you are above about a hundred employees, get the band price from Workable directly and run the same two-line arithmetic against your actual recruiter count.
The cap is on the account, not the seat
This is the detail that decides whether Manatal's entry plan works for you, and it is easy to read past.
| Manatal plan | Per user / month | Jobs | Candidates | Hiring managers |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Professional | $15 | 15 per account | Up to 10,000 | Unlimited |
| Enterprise | $35 | Unlimited | Unlimited | Unlimited |
| Enterprise Plus | $55 | Unlimited | Unlimited | Unlimited |
| Custom | Not published | Not published | Not published | Not published |
The upgrade from Professional to Enterprise removes both caps at once, jobs and candidates, and adds workflow automation. Enterprise Plus adds an advanced report builder, LLM integrations, the open API and a candidate portal. Those are feature upgrades rather than limit removals, which means the honest sequence is: buy Professional if you fit inside 15 jobs, buy Enterprise the moment you do not, and buy Enterprise Plus only if you specifically want the API or the reporting.
Who counts as a user
The most valuable line on Manatal's pricing page is one that costs nothing.
Billable
per month
Free
on Enterprise
on Enterprise Plus
In most hiring processes the reviewers outnumber the recruiters several times over. A per-seat tool that billed for every person who ever opens a candidate profile would be a materially different and far more expensive product, and plenty of software in adjacent categories does exactly that. Checking where a vendor draws the line between a billable user and a free collaborator tells you more about the real cost than the advertised rate does.
What "unlimited" is doing here
Both vendors use the word, and only one of them qualifies it in the same breath.
Workable lists unlimited active jobs and immediately adds subject to fair usage limits. That qualification is honest and it is also unquantified: no number appears beside it, so the practical meaning is no published ceiling rather than no ceiling. Manatal's unlimited jobs on Enterprise and above carries no such rider on the pricing page.
Which one, in one line
Cheapest sensible option under 15 concurrent jobs. Count your open roles, not your employees, before choosing it.
The job cap, not the feature list, is what moves you here. Still per seat, so a small team stays cheap.
Headcount pricing stops punishing you as the recruiting team grows, because the team is not what it counts.
What is not priced here
Two vendors were read in full: Manatal and Workable. Recruitee and Breezy HR are not priced here; Breezy returned an HTTP 403 to an automated request and no figure was read for either. They belong in a wider comparison and are not judged in this one.
Workable's figures are its 1 to 20 employee band only. Its larger bands are listed on the page but their prices were not captured, so no figure is published for them.
On Workable's annual pricing: the page displays $299 a month and $3,588 a year for Standard, and $3,588 is exactly twelve months at $299. The same holds for Premier ($599 / $7,188) and Enterprise ($719 / $8,628). The 20 percent saving the page advertises is attached to bundling recruiting with HR, not to paying annually. A monthly-versus-annual toggle exists and was not exercised.
How this was checked, and when it expires
Every figure above was read from each vendor's own published pricing page on that date and excludes tax. The multiplications in the worked example are ours and are shown so you can check them: two seats at the published per-user rate. Nothing here is estimated or carried forward from an earlier version of this article.
Caps move more quietly than prices. A job limit falling from 15 to 10 raises the real cost of the entry plan without changing a single advertised number. If a figure here no longer matches the vendor's own page, the vendor's page is right and this one is stale.
Nesyona participates in Manatal's affiliate programme, so a link to Manatal on this page may earn us a commission. It changes nothing about the figures, which come from the vendor's own page, or about the recommendation, which sends small teams to the cheapest tier that fits them. We have no commercial relationship with Workable.