Greenhouse pricing explained: what SMEs really pay in 2026

Greenhouse is one of the best-regarded applicant tracking systems on the market, and one of the least transparent about what it costs. If you are an SME trying to budget for it, this article walks through how the pricing actually works, where the additional costs sit, and how to decide whether it is the right spend for a team your size.

A note on sourcing before anything else: Greenhouse does not publish prices. Everything below is drawn from public pricing information, buyer-reported figures and third-party procurement guides, checked June 2026. Treat the numbers as ranges to plan around, not quotes. Your own quote is the only figure that binds anyone.

How Greenhouse pricing is structured

Greenhouse sells through a sales process, not a pricing page. The structure that emerges from public information looks like this:

• Three tiers. Essential, Advanced and Expert, with the higher tiers adding reporting depth, scaled workflows, developer API access and advanced data configuration.
• Priced by employee count, billed annually. Quotes are based on the size of your organisation rather than the number of recruiters using the system, and contracts are typically annual commitments paid up front.
• Quote-only. There is no self-serve option and no published rate card. Budgeting requires a sales conversation, and comparing quotes between buyers is difficult by design.

Buyer-reported figures put smaller organisations in the low-to-mid thousands of pounds per year for the entry tier, with mid-market deployments commonly reported in the range of five figures annually once tier, employee count and add-ons are settled. Implementation and onboarding fees are commonly reported as a separate line on top of the subscription.

The costs that are not in the quote

The subscription is only part of the total. Three other lines deserve a place in your budget before you sign.

Implementation. Greenhouse deployments are structured projects. Data migration, workflow design and training take real calendar time, and onboarding packages are commonly reported as a paid add-on rather than a bundled service.

Skills assessment. This is the structural one. Greenhouse has no native skills testing. If you want to verify what candidates can actually do, you integrate a separate assessment vendor, with its own subscription, its own per-candidate pricing and its own procurement process. For an SME, the assessment tool can cost a meaningful fraction of the ATS itself.

The integrations you will actually use. The integrations marketplace is genuinely one of Greenhouse's strengths, with hundreds of connected tools. But several of the tools an SME ends up wanting, including assessments, background checks and some sourcing add-ons, are paid products in their own right. The marketplace makes connecting them easy; it does not make them free.

What Greenhouse does well

This article is not a hit piece, so credit where it is due. Greenhouse pioneered structured hiring, and its interview kits, scorecards and pipeline discipline remain excellent. Reporting on the higher tiers is deep. The ecosystem is mature, the product is stable, and large talent teams running many simultaneous searches across departments are well served by it.

If you have a dedicated talent function, a six-figure recruitment tooling budget and complex multi-team workflows, Greenhouse earns its place on your shortlist.

The SME question

The harder question is whether any of that fits a company hiring five to a hundred roles a year without a dedicated talent team. Three mismatches come up repeatedly.

First, the pricing model. Employee-count pricing means you pay for the size of your company, not the size of your hiring. A 150-person company filling eight roles a year pays like a 150-person company.

Second, the procurement overhead. Quote-only pricing, annual commitments and a sales cycle make sense for enterprise buyers with procurement teams. For a founder or an office manager running hiring alongside another job, they are friction without benefit.

Third, the two-tool problem. Because there is no native assessment, the real comparison for an SME is never "Greenhouse versus an alternative". It is "Greenhouse plus an assessment tool versus a platform that includes both". That second budget line, and the second contract, and the second data processing agreement, belong in every comparison you run.

How the totals compare

For transparency about our own interest: KimonRecruit competes for exactly this buyer, and our pricing is published. The Free tier is £0 with the full ATS included, Pro is £79 per month, Growth is £179 per month and Scale is £399 per month, all plus VAT, with CV-personalised skills assessment built in on every tier. A year of the Pro tier costs less than a thousand pounds, which is below the bottom of the commonly reported range for an entry Greenhouse subscription alone, before an assessment tool is added.

The deeper difference is the kind of assessment you get. A separate assessment vendor bolted onto an ATS tests candidates from shared question banks. KimonRecruit generates each assessment from the candidate's own CV, so the evidence ties directly to the claims you are hiring against, and a human reviewer makes every progression decision with that evidence in front of them.

How to decide

If you run a talent team and your bottleneck is coordinating many interviewers across many searches, get a Greenhouse quote and negotiate it properly; it is a strong product for that shape of buyer. If you are an SME whose bottleneck is knowing which candidates can actually do the job, price the full stack honestly: ATS plus assessment plus implementation, against a flat published price with assessment included.

Whatever you choose, insist on the number in writing, ask explicitly about implementation fees and renewal uplifts, and date every figure you collect. Pricing moves; sourced June 2026, the picture above is the fairest one we can draw from public information.