A solo recruiter working one job at a time can start on Zoho Recruit’s free plan. OpenCATS is another option if you can host and maintain it yourself. Compare the limits against your workload, including the time spent entering CVs and following up by hand. Longlist publishes this guide and offers a fourteen-day trial, but no free plan.
Free plans that actually exist
These are free indefinitely, as published on each vendor’s own site in October 2026.
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| Tool | What’s free | Limits that matter to an agency | Best use |
|---|---|---|---|
| Zoho Recruit Free | Candidates, clients, contacts, jobs, interviews and a career site | 1 active job, 5,000 records in total (1,000 per module), 256MB, no resume parser, no client portal, no mass email | Solo recruiter learning the ropes |
| OpenCATS | The whole open-source ATS | You install, host, secure, update and back it up yourself | Technical founders who want control |
| HubSpot free CRM | Companies, contacts, deals, tasks, email templates | Up to 2 users and 1,000 contacts; no candidate or job pipeline | Client-side BD only |
| Breezy HR Bootstrap | A basic hiring pipeline | 1 active position or pool; full access only to candidates added in the last 30 days | Built for in-house hiring, not agencies |
Sources: Zoho Recruit plan comparison, OpenCATS on GitHub, HubSpot CRM, Breezy HR pricing.
Zoho Recruit Free
Website ↗- Best for
- A solo recruiter working one job at a time
- Pricing
- $0
The only free plan in this list built for staffing agencies. You get candidate, client and contact records, a basic career site and job requisitions. The catches are the ones that bite first: one active job, 1,000 records per module, 256MB of storage, one-way email sync, five email templates and no resume parsing, so every CV is typed in. When you outgrow it, paid plans start at $25 annual / $30 monthly per recruiter per month, with a 15-day trial. See how it compares in Zoho Recruit vs Longlist.
OpenCATS
Website ↗- Best for
- Founders comfortable running a PHP web app
- Pricing
- Free, open source
OpenCATS is an open-source applicant tracking system that is still maintained; its latest release on GitHub at the time of writing is v0.11.1, from September 2026. It is free to use, but “free” means you run the server, apply updates, back up the database and secure candidate data. Under GDPR in the UK and EU, or state privacy laws in the US, that responsibility is yours. Budget for hosting and your own time.
HubSpot free CRM
Website ↗- Best for
- Tracking client companies and BD deals
- Pricing
- Free for up to 2 users and 1,000 contacts
A good free tool for the client side of an agency: companies, contacts, a deal pipeline, tasks and email templates. It has no idea what a candidate, CV or job pipeline is, so you’ll run candidates somewhere else. That split is the main problem with free stacks, which our CRM vs ATS guide explains.
Free trials: what you get and for how long
Most agency platforms offer a trial rather than a free plan. Trial lengths as published in October 2026:
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| Platform | Free trial | Card needed | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|
| Longlist (our pick) | 14 days, full product | No | Then $59/user/month; 30-day refund; free migration |
| Recruit CRM | 30 days on Pro and Business | Not stated | Longest trial in this list |
| Zoho Recruit | 15 days with Enterprise features | Not stated | Then a 45-day money-back guarantee on paid plans, plus the free plan |
| Manatal | 14 days | No | Excludes job board posting, mass email and email automations |
| Atlas | 14 days on Basic and Premium | Not stated | Paid plans carry a 12-month commitment |
| Breezy HR | 14 days, full feature | No | In-house hiring tool |
| Loxo | 7 days of Professional | No | Paid plans are annual and paid up front |
| Crelate | Yes, length not published | Not stated | |
| Bullhorn, JobAdder, Recruiterflow, Firefish, Vincere | No trial listed; demos only | n/a |
Free contact-finder allowances
Contact data is the other place recruiters look for free tools. Each allowance below is from the vendor’s own pricing page in October 2026. Our list of Chrome extensions for recruiters covers more.
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| Tool | Free allowance | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Hunter | 50 credits a month | Email finder, verifier and domain search; unlimited team members |
| Lusha | Up to 40 credits a month | An email reveal costs 1 credit, a phone number 5 |
| SignalHire | 5 credits a month, 10 with the browser extension installed | The site’s FAQ also describes the free tier as 5 contact details in total, so check your account |
| Apollo | Free plan for “very light usage” | Credits aren’t listed on the pricing page; Gmail accounts only on free |
| ContactOut | Free sign-up | Limits aren’t shown on the pricing page |
Do the arithmetic before you rely on these. Forty Lusha credits is 40 email addresses or 8 phone numbers a month. A BD push to 100 hiring managers burns through every free allowance above in a week.
A starter stack using free plans
This setup keeps software subscriptions low while you work one live job. It assumes you already have a mailbox, website and document editor; include their costs if you need to buy them:
- Candidates and the job. Zoho Recruit Free for one live job at a time. Keep CV files in a well-named folder as a backup.
- Clients. HubSpot’s free CRM for target companies, hiring contacts and deals. Our guide to finding clients for a recruitment agency covers the BD process to run in it.
- Contact details. Hunter for emails, Lusha or SignalHire for the occasional phone number.
- Job ads. A careers page on your website with JobPosting structured data, which makes jobs eligible for Google’s job search results at no cost. Add free board slots where the rules allow. See our free job boards guide.
- Outreach. Your normal mailbox with saved templates. Borrow wording from these recruitment email sequence templates and set calendar reminders for follow-ups.
- Submissions. A Word template for client CVs, built from our candidate submission template.
When free stops being free
The free stack’s costs are real, just not on an invoice. Here is the arithmetic with fictional but realistic numbers.
Typing CVs. Without a parser, entering a CV’s name, contact details, current role and skills takes, say, 6 minutes. At 30 CVs a week, that’s 3 hours a week, or about 138 hours over 46 working weeks.
Formatting CVs. Reformatting each submission in Word takes, say, 10 minutes. At 8 submissions a week, that’s 80 minutes a week, about 61 hours a year.
Double entry. Copying a hiring manager from HubSpot into the ATS when a job lands, or a candidate from the ATS into an email, adds a few minutes many times a week.
Together that is roughly 200 hours a year for one recruiter in this example, or about 17 hours a month. Set that against a Longlist Growth seat at $59 a month, which includes AI CV parsing with no per-CV charge, branded CV packs and email sequences, then check how much of that manual work the paid system removes in your trial. Our recruitment software cost guide lays out the full calculation.
How to leave a free tool cleanly
Before relying on a free tool, test how you will export your records and files. Zoho’s free plan, for example, has no monthly data backup.
- Before you start, check how the free tool exports candidates, contacts and notes, and in what format.
- Keep original CV files in a dated folder outside the tool.
- Use consistent tags and stage names from day one, so they map cleanly later.
- Record where each contact came from (source and date) for GDPR.
- Export a full copy every month, even if nothing is wrong.
- When you choose a paid tool, ask whether migration is included and test-import a sample first.
The CRM migration checklist walks through mapping, test imports and cutover week.
Outgrown free? Start here
Move from your free stack to one CRM and ATS: Longlist migrates spreadsheets, Zoho exports and CV folders for free, and you can try it for 14 days without a card.
