Affordable applicant tracking systems for developer screening

*Current published pricing; annual billing where applicable.

1. Manatal — my pick

Manatal is unusually inexpensive for an ATS with serious screening functionality. Its Professional plan is $15/user/month when billed annually, supports up to 15 jobs and 10,000 candidates, and includes unlimited hiring managers.support.manatal.com+1

For developer resumes specifically, the useful features are:

• AI candidate recommendations based on the job description
• Semantic search and relevance scores
• Resume parsing and extraction of skills, experience and education
• Candidate fit/gap analysis
• Compare and rank candidates
• Boolean search
• Screening/knockout questions
• Candidate scorecards
• Sourcing from platforms including GitHub via its sourcing extensionsupport.manatal.com+1

That combination makes it particularly attractive if you want recruiters/hiring managers to quickly answer: "Which of these 100 software-engineer resumes actually match our requirements?"

2. Breezy HR — easiest low-cost starting point

Breezy has a free-forever tier for one active position/pool, with unlimited users and candidates. Its Startup plan is $157/month when billed annually.breezy.hr

Its screening workflow is particularly straightforward: application questionnaires can automatically qualify candidates, while bulk actions, candidate automations, interview guides and scorecards make it easy for a small team to process applicants consistently.breezy.hr

I'd choose Breezy over Manatal if workflow simplicity and collaboration matter more than sophisticated resume matching.

3. Workable — best step-up

Workable is substantially more expensive at $299/month for companies in the 1–20 employee band, but it has a very polished recruiting workflow. Its AI screening generates candidate summaries, match scores and requirement checklists, and it supports anonymized resume screening and standardized scorecards.www.workable.com

It's also strong for developer hiring because you can integrate technical assessments directly into the hiring workflow; candidates can be sent an assessment at a defined pipeline stage and results flow back into the candidate record.www.workable.com

My recommendation

For a startup/small company:
Manatal → Breezy HR → Workable

I'd start with Manatal if you're primarily trying to make resume screening faster and cheaper. Its $15/user/month pricing combined with AI matching, skills indexing, semantic search, ranking and GitHub sourcing is hard to beat at this price point.support.manatal.com+1

One important distinction: resume screening isn't the same as technical screening. For software engineers, I'd ideally pair the ATS with a coding assessment platform so the process becomes:

Resume → AI/skills screen → knockout questions → coding assessment → structured technical interview → offer

If you tell me roughly how many people you hire per year and how many recruiters/hiring managers need access, I can narrow this down to the 2–3 best options and calculate the actual annual cost for your team.