Comparison

What AI Recruiting Software Really Costs: VoxaFox vs Workable, Manatal, HireVue and More

September 15, 2026 · 7 min read

Recruiting software is unusually hard to price-compare. The headline figure on a pricing page is almost never what an agency ends up paying, because three separate meters are running underneath it: how many people log in, how many CVs you push through, and how much AI the product burns on your behalf. Two platforms can advertise a similar monthly rate and differ by several times once a real hiring month goes through them.

This is a comparison of the pricing models rather than a table of numbers. Numbers go stale, and for a reader outside the United States a dollar figure is wrong in their own currency half the time anyway. What does not go stale is how a vendor decides to charge you.

The three meters that decide your bill

Per seat. You pay for each recruiter with a login. It reads as cheap for one user and grows every time the team does, which is the model most applicant tracking systems use.
Per CV or per candidate. You pay for volume. Honest, but it punishes exactly the month when hiring goes well.
Per AI minute. Voice interviews cost real money to run. Some vendors bundle a small allowance and sell more at a markup, and some simply will not quote it without a sales call.

How the platforms compare

What you are charged for	VoxaFox	Workable	Manatal	Zoho Recruit	Recruitee	HireVue	Paradox
Pricing model	Per plan	Per plan + seats	Per seat	Per seat	Per seat	Enterprise quote	Enterprise quote
Cost grows as the team grows	No	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes
Published price you can read without a call	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	No	No
CV parsing and scoring included	Yes	Yes	Yes	Limited by tier	Limited by tier	Yes	Yes
AI voice interviews	Every paid plan	Not included	Not included	Not included	Not included	Core product	Core product
What the interview AI costs you	Your own provider key, billed at cost	Not applicable	Not applicable	Not applicable	Not applicable	Inside the quote	Inside the quote
Transcripts and rubric scores	Yes	Partial	Partial	Partial	Partial	Yes	Yes
Pay as you go, no subscription	Yes, CV credits	No	No	No	No	No	No
Billed in rupees	Yes	No	No	No	No	No	No
Minimum commitment	None	Annual discounting	Annual discounting	Annual discounting	Annual discounting	Annual contract	Annual contract

The per-seat trap

Five of the platforms above charge by the seat. For a two-person agency that is genuinely affordable. For the same agency a year later, with six recruiters and two coordinators who only need to read a shortlist, the bill has tripled while the work has not. Plenty of agencies respond by sharing one login between several people, which is both a licence violation and the end of any useful audit trail.

VoxaFox charges by plan. Adding a teammate does not change the price, so nobody has to decide whether a colleague is worth a line item.

Where the AI cost actually sits

This is the part worth reading carefully, because it is the one place VoxaFox does not simply include everything.

CV parsing and scoring are on us. You upload CVs, the platform reads them, ranks them against the job description and writes the reasoning, and that is covered by your plan with no second bill.

AI voice interviews work the other way round: they run on your own AI provider key. You connect a Google Gemini key in settings and Google bills that usage to you directly. We think this is the honest arrangement, and it is worth saying why rather than burying it. An interview is the expensive part of the product. A vendor who bundles it either caps you at an allowance you will hit in a busy month, or prices in a margin on every minute you run. Running it on your own key means you pay the provider's own rate with nothing added, you can see exactly what it cost, and a heavy hiring month does not arrive as a surprise invoice from us.

Note: Your key is encrypted with AES-256-GCM and masked after saving. You can remove it at any time, and interviews stop rather than silently falling back to an account you did not choose.

The month you hire nobody

Most recruiting is uneven. An agency might screen four hundred CVs in March and eleven in April, and a subscription charges the same for both. That is the case for CV credits: you buy a block of parses, they last for a fixed window, and there is no monthly fee underneath. None of the other platforms in the table offers this. It is the cheapest way to run a product like this if your hiring comes in bursts, which for most agencies it does.

Being billed in your own currency

Every other platform here quotes in dollars. For an agency in Pakistan that means a bill that moves with the exchange rate, a card that sometimes declines on an international charge, and a finance person reconciling a number that was never the number they agreed to. VoxaFox prices in rupees, takes Easypaisa and JazzCash, and the figure you were quoted is the figure that leaves your account.

So where does VoxaFox win

Not on every axis, and it would be a poor comparison if it claimed to. HireVue and Paradox are built for enterprises hiring at a scale most agencies never reach, with the integrations and the procurement process to match. Workable and Manatal are mature applicant tracking systems with years of workflow built into them.

On cost, though, the comparison is not close for a small or mid-sized agency. VoxaFox is the only one here that does not charge by the seat, the only one that includes AI voice interviews on an ordinary published plan rather than an enterprise quote, the only one that lets you skip the subscription entirely and buy CV credits instead, the only one billed in rupees, and the only one that hands you the AI cost at the provider's own rate rather than marking it up. For an agency counting what a hire actually costs, that is the whole argument.

See AI Technical Recruitment pricing