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SmartRecruiters vs iCIMS Recruit comparison

 

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
6th
Average Rating
8.0
Number of Reviews
2
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 (10th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of July 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 2.9%, down from 6.6% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Applicant Tracking and Recruiting Software Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
SmartRecruiters2.9%
iCIMS Recruit1.4%
Other95.7%
Applicant Tracking and Recruiting Software
 

Featured Reviews

John Dittmer - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Policy and Process Functional Lead /Cybersecurity/Information Assurance (CS/IA) at a consultancy with 51-200 employees
Consistent application workflow has reduced my submission time and made repetitive forms manageable
The best features iCIMS Recruit offers make it straightforward, and since I have seen many of the same questions between different companies, it makes filling out the job application quite quick. The process is especially easy and user-friendly in the way it uploads resumes, along with some of the standardized questions about demographics, gender, race, veteran status, and disability. iCIMS Recruit has positively impacted my experience as a job applicant by making it faster and less stressful. Sometimes you go through other types of job applications and are left wondering what they are looking for, and when I see it is iCIMS Recruit, it makes things pretty simple because I can anticipate the questions. It saves me at least a good half hour compared to other application systems.
Anudeep Kamuni - PeerSpot reviewer
Global Lead - TA ops & Analytics | Strategy Growth & Leadership at a recreational facilities/services company with 10,001+ employees
Efficiently automates tasks but lacks certain features in terms of usability
There are a couple of areas of improvement. SmartRecruiter lacks certain features in terms of usability. For instance, we cannot move candidate profiles, interview feedback, notes, and activities related to one candidate when transitioning from one job to another. We have to manually copy and paste everything for that specific candidate. This is a significant drawback. Additionally, the filters are not accurate. The results are inaccurate when filtering multiple criteria, such as country and hiring manager. This level of inaccuracy is unexpected for an application, especially for smaller organizations. It should have been corrected easily. Moreover, the CRM module lacks video reporting capabilities. These are some the biggest improvement I would like to see.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"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."
"The solution offers good customization and good dashboards."
"iCIMS Recruit has positively impacted my experience as a job applicant by making it faster and less stressful."
"SmartRecruiters is much better than its competitors, and considering the type of features and services it provides, it is probably one of the best solutions in the market."
"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."
"If you're a pretty massive company, this is the one that you would want to look into because it has so much functionality built in."
"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."
"What I really like about SmartRecruiters is communication and collaboration between candidates and internal clients or managers."
"The candidate experience was better because the whole process was there."
"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."
"With this solution, I was able to add diversity to my recruiting. I was able to source from multiple locations, and I could show where applicants came from. The reporting tools that are on offer, allowed us to expand our reach. We were able to add meaningful diversity into recruiting."
 

Cons

"If reporting could be more robust, that would be phenomenal."
"iCIMS Recruit could be improved by adding a block to explain certain things."
"The solution's reporting feature could be improved because it is not very strong."
"There were limitations with the system that we would have liked, not in the time, but the company in Germany really dictated that. So we couldn't do everything in the system we would have liked to it."
"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."
"One thing that has been a bit of a struggle is getting tech support."
"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."
"There were problems with integrations around other systems and each one had to be custom-built, which took a little while to get set up and running."
"We require greater flexibility for customization with our employer branding. Currently, it is very much driven by the SmartRecruiters design. We are using a SaaS solution, so we are powered by what is in the core product itself. A disadvantage of being a SaaS solution is that there aren't many customization options because you are literally buying it out of the box. You use whatever is offered to you in a box as much as you can, and that might be a problem sometimes because customizations are not achievable. They should definitely improve and provide more flexibility for customizations. For a large organization like ours, they can provide more flexibility on the authorization side of things. They could create a much more flexible way of access and separate the IT or help desk access when they need to go into the system and do some fixes. Currently, it is set up in a way that that you have access for everything or nothing, which is not useful in terms of the separation of duty that we have. There are also other things like matrix, where we can have a better and deeper kind of analysis."
"We ran into some serious issues related to language barriers."
 

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."
"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."
"I wasn't involved in its acquisition, but I would assume that SmartRecruiters is pretty pricey."
"SmartRecruiters is an expensive solution."
"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."
"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."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
No data available
Comms Service Provider
10%
Construction Company
8%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Healthcare Company
8%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
No data available
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business4
Midsize Enterprise4
Large Enterprise8
 

Questions from the Community

What needs improvement with iCIMS Recruit?
iCIMS Recruit could be improved by adding a block to explain certain things. For example, there are some years where I was a Navy Reservist and held multiple jobs at the same time. This makes the c...
What is your primary use case for iCIMS Recruit?
My main use case for iCIMS Recruit is as a job applicant with various IT companies. I normally access iCIMS Recruit through a web browser as an applicant. There was no cost for me as an applicant r...
What advice do you have for others considering iCIMS Recruit?
A quick specific example of how I have used iCIMS Recruit as a job applicant is when I applied for Booz Allen and also when I was applying for SAIC. Basically, what they do is they upload your resu...
Ask a question
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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 Zoho, Bullhorn, SmartRecruiters and others in Applicant Tracking and Recruiting Software. Updated: June 2026.
902,894 professionals have used our research since 2012.