No more typing reviews! Try our Samantha, our new voice AI agent.

SmartRecruiters vs iCIMS Recruit comparison

Why PeerSpot?
 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive Summary

Review summaries and opinions

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Categories and Ranking

iCIMS Recruit
Ranking in Applicant Tracking and Recruiting Software
1st
Average Rating
7.6
Number of Reviews
24
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
SmartRecruiters
Ranking in Applicant Tracking and Recruiting Software
3rd
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
7.0
Number of Reviews
15
Ranking in other categories
Talent Acquisition (9th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of September 2026, in the Applicant Tracking and Recruiting Software category, the mindshare of iCIMS Recruit is 1.4%, down from 2.2% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of SmartRecruiters is 2.6%, down from 5.2% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Applicant Tracking and Recruiting Software Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
iCIMS Recruit1.4%
SmartRecruiters2.6%
Other96.0%
Applicant Tracking and Recruiting Software
 

Featured Reviews

ManishGupta9 - PeerSpot reviewer
Managing Director & CEO at Talenton Global
Centralized hiring workflows have cut time to fill and now need better automation and AI features
Implementation can be a bit lengthy and complicated, which is an area where iCIMS Recruit needs improvement. Customer support and automation are areas where iCIMS Recruit is less impressive, and they need to improve more on automation processes. Configurability could be a bit higher because some competitors might have an edge in terms of UX, recruiting workflow, modern recruiter experiences, and sourcing or CRM-oriented experiences. A native HCM is important because many times I have to integrate with different HCMs like Workday or SAP. Pricing is not very transparent, as sometimes I have to keep adding things and they keep adding more prices in terms of lower cost and faster implementation. Some user functionality can require too many steps. Customer support can be inconsistent sometimes, and I have seen some delays. The iCIMS Recruit support team does not always provide very proactive support. Implementations are usually very lengthy and they really need to improve their implementation strategy to cut down a substantial amount of time.
SUMANTA  GHOSH - PeerSpot reviewer
Regional Recruitment Lead at IQ-EQ
A user-friendly tool that functions without any glitches
With SmartRecruiters, compatibility with other HRIS systems is an area with certain shortcomings that require improvement. SmartRecruiters is a tool that we use as an ATS platform in our company, but we manage the employee lifecycle with the help of SAP, and I don't see the integration of SmartRecruiters with SAP happening quite seamlessly, making it an area where improvements are required.

Quotes from Members

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Pros

"Within a very short period, we had many job opportunities to fill with a distributed HR team, switching from emails and a fixed job board to iCIMS Recruit, which was a vastly improved and user-friendly experience."
"The best feature that iCIMS Recruit offers is its customization."
"The best features iCIMS Recruit offers are that it reduces manual labor and allows me to create jobs and maintain a job library."
"Over time, I've seen them build on their platform, make improvements, enhance the user experience, and continue to gather feedback for improvement from end users."
"I could finally place all the positions successfully using iCIMS Recruit."
"iCIMS Recruit has impacted the organization positively because it has provided us with additional support and consistency with every recruiting process that we handle in the company, and this provides great transparency and great candidate experience in order for us to hire the best talent for the business."
"The solution offers good customization and good dashboards."
"The good features of iCIMS Recruit were that it was very easy to use."
"It is a really user-friendly tool, and its implementation is quite wide. It is very easy to manage users and build your workflows. Overall, it works very well for the customization of the workflows for us. The recruitment team has generally found the whole platform useful. We were looking to kind of expand it by using the CRM functions that it has. However, with COVID and recruitment being on the freeze, we weren't really able to make the most of the tool. They are, however, finding it useful to actually build up their talent pools and client candidates to be able to contact them when we kind of have this freeze off."
"SmartRecruiters' ease of use, experience, and data compliance with GDPR were the main reasons for switching to this."
"It is a really user-friendly tool, and its implementation is quite wide."
"What I really like about it is that it feels minimal, but is also dynamic. There aren't a lot of ways to get lost, which is good."
"The most valuable feature of the solution stems from the fact that amongst all the other ATS platforms that I have used, SmartRecruiters is the most user-friendly tool."
"What I really like about SmartRecruiters is communication and collaboration between candidates and internal clients or managers."
"We absolutely saw ROI, and it was massive."
"The most valuable feature is the way that they've set it up for collaboration."
 

Cons

"iCIMS Recruit can be improved by adding additional features related to looking for attrition rate and seeing how many people actually stay within roles, especially for those high-volume roles that have high turnover."
"Recruiters have to spend too much time updating some of the information there."
"Customer support and automation are areas where iCIMS Recruit is less impressive, and they need to improve more on automation processes."
"I did not give a higher rating because I always see potential improvements, particularly regarding reporting functionalities that were not easy to customize at that time."
"ICIMS Recruit could be improved with better functionality, the visualization of the data functionality, the data program, the ability to see additional insights, and the interface of the data configurations could be more updated."
"Eventually, the company moved away from iCIMS Recruit simply because it did not provide all the options to filter, keyword search, or navigate applicants."
"iCIMS Recruit could be improved by adding a block to explain certain things."
"The only challenge is that it can be difficult to make managers aware that they need to follow positions in the platform and learn how to use it so we can work together."
"The solution needs to work on a single sign-on."
"The major improvement area is how it integrates with other systems. That's where we've had some sort of pain points. They've done a lot of work with their development team in setting up integrations with other types of software like SuccessFactors, which we use, but we have found some glitches there. This is probably where they need to do some work. Sometimes, when it refreshes or there is any sort of update in SmartRecruiters, it has a direct impact on the integrations that we have with other tools. We are not always notified when that takes place. We have had HR say to us, "We've just hired this guy. He is not there in our end board at all. What's going on?" That's when we realized that the integration is actually broken. When we have other solutions like SuccessFactors, it would be very helpful to have knowledge articles for such integrations. We have found some of the templates that we want to use and some of the customizations that we do around the offer letters and the contract letters to be a little bit more difficult, which hasn't made this process any more efficient than it was. We still have to do a bit of manual intervention there. I don't know if it is just our company, but we need to have different clauses and things in place. We have stopped using DocuSign as well, and we are trying to look at other ways of doing that. They are aware of this."
"One of the areas that we would like them to improve is the self-scheduling feature. They have a self-scheduling feature that can be made a little bit more automated when it comes to scheduling. We are trying to use it, but it doesn't feel very user-friendly. This is something that could be improved. They have launched WhatsApp connections in the system, where instead of sending emails, you can WhatsApp candidates directly from the system, but currently, it mainly works in a few countries. Spain, where I'm based, is not one of them. If we use the system, the phone number for the candidates would be from the UK, and we don't think that would be the best. This feature is good for some countries, but not for all at the moment. It was first launched in the USA and then in a couple of countries in Europe. It is not yet launched fully in Europe. Reporting is always something that can be improved. Even though it is working well for us, its reporting can be better. Currently, it is a little bit complicated when it comes to reporting. It has a few pre-made reports that are easy to access, but if you want more details, you need to build your own reports. In order to do that, it is a bit tricky to learn and understand how it works. Even though you have help agents and support for help, it takes some time to learn, but it is not impossible. We have very recently made some integrations with Tableau. We are building dashboards in Tableau where we can get daily updated reports, and they are definitely helpful. That's something we would recommend. SmartRecruiters has recently implemented an inbox. You can have an inbox where you can see all your conversations, but currently, it is not filtering between the recruiters, so you see everyone's emails in there. They have already announced that they are working on the filtering feature for a specific inbox to make it more personalized per recruiter. This way the recruiters can have an overview of their own work."
"We ran into some serious issues related to language barriers."
"Some features are not as straightforward or user friendly to implement."
"I don't see the integration of SmartRecruiters with SAP happening quite seamlessly, making it an area where improvements are required."
"One thing that has been a bit of a struggle is getting tech support. It is a little more difficult to get support from SmartRecruiters. They want you to have your own in-house person to help you with any issues, whereas with both Lever and Greenhouse, you can just click a button at the bottom of the screen and chat with someone almost instantly."
"Reporting is always something that can be improved. Currently, it is a little bit complicated when it comes to reporting."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

Information not available
"SmartRecruiters is much better than its competitors. Considering the type of features and services it provides, it is probably one of the best solutions in the market. Others may offer a similar price, but their services won't be that good or the user-friendliness won't be that great. The licensing works based on how many users are there in a company. If you are using other functionalities, like CRM and HRS, the price increases."
"They are pretty competitive. As the product matures, it has much more functionality and different pricing models. It can relatively cost a lot more if you want to use additional features, but, in general, it is competitive in the industry. We work on a yearly license agreement based on the company size. There are the support costs, which are a part of the additional cost based on the percentage of the licensing fee. So, it has a license plus support cost. Then, of course, there are other add-on options that we can purchase and procure whenever we want to based on certain negotiated arrangements."
"I haven't been so involved with pricing, so I don't have all details, but I know that we are paying per head when it comes to different countries. There is an additional fee for new features that they release. If it is something that we would like to use, we need to pay some extra for it."
"I wasn't involved in its acquisition, but I would assume that SmartRecruiters is pretty pricey."
"There were implementation costs in the first year to get everything set up and running, and then they have various modules on top, which are optional and available at an extra charge."
"SmartRecruiters is an expensive solution."
"Back in 2018, when I engaged with their sales, they wanted to charge around $10,000 for an annual subscription. Depending on your organization, that either could or couldn't be expensive. I personally think it's a fair price. However, I engaged them and negotiated a lower price with them. I think I got closer to $6,000. It came with a commitment of three years."
report
Use our free recommendation engine to learn which Applicant Tracking and Recruiting Software solutions are best for your needs.
914,394 professionals have used our research since 2012.
 

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Outsourcing Company
16%
Government
13%
Comms Service Provider
13%
University
9%
Outsourcing Company
11%
Comms Service Provider
10%
Healthcare Company
10%
Financial Services Firm
9%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business6
Midsize Enterprise6
Large Enterprise17
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business4
Midsize Enterprise4
Large Enterprise8
 

Questions from the Community

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for iCIMS Recruit?
iCIMS is very expensive. As a smaller company, we are a small fish in a big pond to them, and all of our inquiries seem to be ignored.
What needs improvement with iCIMS Recruit?
iCIMS Recruit can be improved by adding more features in the UI. The UI is going to be very important, such as more large toggle switches. The main thing would be navigation, the UI, and how to nav...
What is your primary use case for iCIMS Recruit?
My main use case for iCIMS Recruit includes conducting background checks and eligibility checks. I do not have anything else to add about my main use case with iCIMS Recruit; it is basically just f...
Ask a question
Earn 20 points
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

NorthStar Anesthesia, Southeastern Grocers, AmTrust Financial, RPM Pizza, Hackensack Meridian Health, Esurance, Peet’s Coffee, Regis Corporation, Cedar Fair
Atlassian, Aol, IBM, Napa, Skechers
Find out what your peers are saying about SmartRecruiters vs. iCIMS Recruit and other solutions. Updated: September 2026.
914,394 professionals have used our research since 2012.