Which ATS offers a free trial?

Most self-serve ATS vendors offer a free trial: full access for somewhere between 7 and 30 days, started from the website without a sales call. Mid-market tools such as Workable, Recruitee and Teamtailor run open trials, and Recruitifly gives you 7 days of the full product. The notable holdouts are enterprise suites like Greenhouse, Lever, Bullhorn and SAP SuccessFactors, which generally sell through demos and guided evaluations instead. A vendor’s trial policy is data in itself: it tells you how confident they are that the product explains itself.

Which trial models do ATS vendors offer?

Three models dominate, and they test very different things.

A time-limited trial of the full product is the gold standard, because the thing you evaluate is the thing you pay for. Free plans are a different proposition: sensible if you might genuinely stay on one, misleading as a preview of the paid tier, because the capped version usually lacks the automation, multiposting and compliance tooling that justify the price. We unpack that trade-off in free ATS vs paid: what’s the catch.

Why do some vendors only offer demos?

Demo-only is rarely an accident. It usually signals one of three things. First, the product needs configuration before it is usable: workflows, permissions and integrations get built during a paid implementation, so an empty self-serve account would show badly. Second, pricing is negotiated, and a sales-led evaluation keeps the price conversation in the vendor’s hands; demo-only and quote-only almost always travel together. Third, the sales motion is built for buying committees, where a scripted demo for five stakeholders closes more reliably than five people exploring alone.

None of that makes the software bad. It does reset your expectations: budget for implementation, expect weeks rather than minutes to first value, and ask harder questions, because you will not get to verify the answers hands-on. If a vendor refuses both a trial and a sandbox, ask directly why the product cannot be experienced before purchase. The answer is always informative.

How do you run a 7-day trial well?

A short trial is plenty if you stop browsing features and run one real process end to end.

• Day 1: load real data. Import 20 to 50 real candidates, not the vendor’s polished sample data. Sample data always parses perfectly; your PDFs are the actual test. Mind GDPR: use candidates you have a lawful basis to process, and delete the account if you walk away.
• Day 1, same sitting: post one real job. A live vacancy you are actually working, pushed to the boards you actually use. Write down how long it took from signup to published.
• Days 2 to 5: run the process. Parse incoming applications, move real candidates through stages, schedule one interview, send one rejection. Do your normal Tuesday work in the new system, alongside the old one.
• Day 6: test the exit. Export everything: candidates, notes, documents. If the export is incomplete or obstructed, you have just learned the most important fact of the trial.
• Day 7: decide. You now have evidence; use it. Extending the evaluation rarely adds information.

This plan fits inside Recruitifly’s 7-day trial by design: every tier includes unlimited jobs and CV parsing, migration tooling imports candidates from other systems with a dry run and rollback, and the Fly assistant drafts and proposes changes for your confirmation rather than acting on its own, so a week of fast experimentation stays under your control. The full list of questions to put to any vendor before and during a trial is in how to choose an ATS: the checklist.

What should you measure during the trial?

Impressions fade; numbers survive. Track five:

1. Time to first job posted. From account creation to a live posting. Minutes is the modern standard. If it takes a support ticket, that is a preview of your future.
2. Parsing accuracy. Run 20 of your real CVs through and count the fields the parser got wrong. A percentage beats a feeling.
3. Daily friction. Count the clicks for your most repeated action, usually moving a candidate one stage or logging a call. You will do it thousands of times a year.
4. Search recall. Can you find the candidate you imported on day one by skill and location, not just by name?
5. Support response. Ask one real question mid-trial and time the answer. Trial-period support is the best support you will ever get.

Score everything against your current setup, not against perfection. The question is not whether the new system is flawless; it is whether it beats what you do today by enough to justify the switch.

Which billing traps should you check before starting?

Read the trial terms before creating the account. Five checks:

1. Is a card required upfront? If yes, find out exactly when the first charge lands and set a reminder two days earlier.
2. Does the trial auto-convert, and onto which plan? Some roll into a paid subscription automatically, occasionally onto a pricier tier than you would have picked. Published pricing makes this checkable; quote-only pricing does not.
3. Monthly or annual at conversion? Auto-converting onto an annual contract turns one forgotten reminder into a year of fees.
4. What happens to your trial data? If you subscribe, does the work carry over? If you leave, is the data actually deleted? Under GDPR you can demand deletion in writing.
5. How do you cancel? A button in settings is healthy. An email to an account manager is a warning.

Where does Recruitifly fit?

Recruitifly publishes its prices, from EUR 70 per month for a solo desk to EUR 599 for an agency plus a custom enterprise tier, and runs a 7-day trial of the full product, on the theory that a recruiter with one live role and a folder of real CVs knows within a week. Current numbers, including the Action allowances on each tier, live on the pricing page. One honest footnote: Recruitifly is in private beta at the moment, so trials run through the beta programme. Talk to us, bring one live role, and run the seven-day plan above; if the workflow does not fit, the trial has done its job either way.