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Staffer vs Ashby
Ashby prices its entry tier on total company headcount, $300 a month at ten employees and $900 at a hundred, then switches to per-seat. Staffer prices on usage: no seats and no licenses. The bigger difference is what each product does with how much of the work is left to the recruiter.
Bendik Fausko-Johansen
It is Monday and 340 applications came in over the weekend across four roles. Ashby has already read every one against criteria you wrote, and marked each Meets, Does not meet or Undecided with the reasoning attached.
That is good, and it saved you a morning.
Then you start clicking. Advance, advance, reject. The outreach that still needs drafting. Four interviewers whose calendars do not overlap. The candidate from last week who went quiet.
The reading got automated. The work did not.
What Ashby does well
Analytics is Ashby’s original strength and the deepest in this category. Custom report builders, calculated fields, conditional alerts, and a recruiting planner that works backwards from headcount targets through your own passthrough rates. They sell it as a standalone product that sits on top of other ATSs.
Scheduling is the second. Interviewer pools, load limits, secondary calendars for on-call rotations, calendar holds, automatic replacement when an interviewer declines, and a coordinator request queue.
Where Ashby is thin
Sourcing. Ashby has no external candidate database. Sourcing is a Chrome extension for capturing people you found elsewhere, plus search across your own past applicants. For candidates outside your pipeline, Ashby points you at a partner.
Tier gating. The scheduling automation people praise sits behind an add-on only Plus customers can buy. Custom reports and dashboards start at Plus. Warehouse export and a careers page on your own domain are Enterprise only.
Autonomy. Ashby’s own documentation states that agents cannot run on a schedule or when an event happens. Every run starts with a person mentioning the agent in a chat, and every action waits for a confirmation click.
How Staffer works
You describe the role once. Sourcing runs across 1B+ profiles and returns candidates already scored against the brief, with the evidence on each criterion. The same screening applies to inbound applicants, so sourced and applied candidates are measured the same way. Steps you assign to a hiring manager go to them, and Staffer runs the coordination around it. The candidate’s stage is derived from what actually happened rather than from someone remembering to move a card.
Both products keep the hiring decision with a named human. The difference is everything on either side of it.
| Pricing | |
|---|---|
Staffer · Yes Usage only, and unused credits roll over. No seats or licences. | Ashby · No Headcount bands under 100 employees, per-seat above. SSO is $100/mo extra at entry. |
| Team seats | |
Staffer · Yes Unlimited seats included in every plan. | Ashby · No Paid per Elevated Access and Admin seat. Limited Access seats are free. |
| Free plan | |
Staffer · Yes $100 of usage, no card. | Ashby · No No free plan. Cheapest entry is $300/mo. |
| AI chat workspace | |
Staffer · Yes Every page has its own chat, with the tools for that page. | Ashby · Yes An assistant and custom agents over your Ashby data, plus an MCP server. |
| Candidate sourcing | |
Staffer · Yes 1B+ profiles, searched in plain language. | Ashby · No No external candidate database. A Chrome extension plus your own CRM, with Juicebox for net-new. |
| Outreach | |
Staffer · Yes Contact discovery, then a personalised draft per person. | Ashby · Yes Multi-touch sequences. 200 email lookups a month, more is a paid add-on. |
| AI screening | |
Staffer · Yes Every applicant against required and preferred criteria, with evidence per criterion and a score that updates. | Ashby · Yes Against criteria you define. Meets, Does not meet or Undecided, metered by AI credits that do not roll over. |
| AI interviews | |
Staffer · Yes Async in chat, voice and video, plus automated reference checks. | Ashby · No Announced, waitlist only, not yet in early access. |
| Interview scheduling | |
Staffer · Yes Aggregated panel availability, candidate self-books in their local time. | Ashby · Yes Deep. Pools, load limits, holds, auto-replace. The automation layer is a Plus add-on or Enterprise. |
| Process builder | |
Staffer · Yes Per job, in plain language. Assigned steps wait, unassigned steps run. | Ashby · Yes Interview plans with stage-triggered activities. |
| Automations | |
Staffer · Yes The next action is computed per candidate and drafted for you. | Ashby · Yes Stage-triggered emails and activities. Agents cannot run on a schedule or an event. |
| Pipeline management | |
Staffer · Yes Stage derived from what actually happened. No board to drag. | Ashby · Yes Stage columns you move candidates through, with automation on entry and exit. |
| Job listings | |
Staffer · Yes Drafted from the brief, edited in plain language, translated per listing. | Ashby · Yes AI-drafted descriptions. No published support for translated job posts. |
| Career page | |
Staffer · Yes Branded and hosted. Not a drag-and-drop site builder. | Ashby · Yes Hosted job board. Your own domain is Enterprise only. |
| Custom reporting | |
Staffer · No No custom report builder. Summary KPIs and a usage view today. | Ashby · Yes Deepest in the category. Calculated fields, alerts and a recruiting planner, on Plus and above. |
| Onboarding | |
Staffer · No Not shipped. Staffer hands off at the hire. | Ashby · No No general release. People Workflows is early access only. |
| Candidate portal | |
Staffer · Yes Free portable profile that follows the candidate across every company on Staffer. | Ashby · No No candidate account. A careers page and email status updates. |
| EU data residency | |
Staffer · Yes EU by default, application in Frankfurt. | Ashby · No No EU region published. Hosted in AWS US-East-1, Northern Virginia. |
| Human decision control | |
Staffer · Yes A named person decides every advance, reject and offer. Nothing is ever rejected automatically. | Ashby · No A rule-based auto-reject can archive a candidate and email them at submission, with no human involved. |
Yes and No describe whether a product does the thing named, not how well it does it. Everything here was read from each vendor’s public pricing, documentation and reviews on , and those change. Tell us if we have something wrong and we will correct it.
Choose Staffer if:
- You source as well as post, and want it in one workspace, not a partner tool.
- The work between decisions should run without someone starting it each time.
- Your hiring managers should be making decisions, not learning another system.
- You want async AI interviews running now, not a waitlist.
- You want a bill that tracks hiring, not headcount, seats or tier upgrades.
Choose Ashby if:
- Reporting is the deciding factor and you want the deepest in the category.
- Your coordinators run complex panels every day and live in the scheduling tools.
- You have a wide existing stack and need ready-made integrations for all of it.
- You are a large company hiring occasionally, where per-seat works out cheaper.
- You want AI strictly assistive, with nothing running unless a person starts it.
Questions, answered straight.
Not yet. Ashby has announced one, but as of 16 September 2026 it is a waitlist for early access and does not appear on their pricing or feature matrix. Staffer’s async interviews are shipped and run in chat, voice or video, with the transcript and evaluation landing on the candidate record and updating the score.
See it on your own pipeline.
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