5 Best Gem Alternatives & Competitors in 2025

Gem has built a reputation for its AI-driven recruiting automation, but for many teams, it’s not the right fit. High costs, simple interview features, and slow support often push teams to look elsewhere.

The good news is that there are strong alternatives available—platforms that directly address these gaps. In this blog, I’ll take you through the top 5 Gem alternatives to check out in 2025.

⏰30-Seconds Summary

Here are the best Gem alternatives to support your comprehensive and modern hiring needs in 2025:

1. Kula: Offers advanced AI-driven automation, customizable workflows, and conversational analytics for faster, bias-free hiring.
   
   
2. Greenhouse: For technical-savvy teams focusing on deep customizations with extensive integrations.
   
   
3. Ashby: Small to mid-sized companies seeking deep workflow customization and frequent product updates.
   
   
4. Workable: For teams who need a user-friendly, mobile-accessible ATS with AI-powered sourcing and collaborative hiring tools.
   
   
5. BambooHR: Small to medium-sized businesses looking for a holistic HR management platform with intuitive dashboards and a simple UI.

What is Gem?

Gem ATS is an AI-powered applicant tracking system that integrates HRIS and provides end-to-end features to support your hiring needs at all stages. 

It helps recruiters review applications faster with intelligent filtering, streamlines team collaboration, automates administrative tasks, and simplifies offer management, all in one platform.

Key features

• AI-Powered Application Review: Review applications using advanced filters to rank candidates and focus on qualified applicants

• AI Outbound Sourcing: Automatically search LinkedIn Profiles to deliver top talent matches and add profiles from LinkedIn and over 20+ sites with just a single click. Use AI to personalize outreach messages to increase response rates.

• Job Distribution: Publishes job listings across 25,000+ boards, including LinkedIn, Monster, and ZipRecruiter, with minimal effort.

• Scheduling: Automates interview scheduling by coordinating across time zones, syncing calendars, and sending reminders, or allowing candidates to self-schedule.

• Interview Intelligence: Auto-generates interview feedback summaries from notes, logging them into candidate profiles for centralized access.

• Analytics and reporting: Gem provides comprehensive full-funnel analytics and visual dashboards, including customizable reporting templates, insights into diversity and cost, and predictive models to inform future hiring needs. 

Pricing

Startups- $900/month for 100 or fewer employees

For Growth or Enterprise plans, Gem offers custom quotes based on the size of your organization at the point of purchase.

Why might you need a Gem alternative?

1. No advanced interview intelligence: While Gem provides automated scheduling for interviews and allows you to add scorecards for each interview at their various stages, Gem does not offer automated transcripts or notetaking for interviews, nor does it auto-fill scorecards. You’ll need to purchase a separate notetaking tool as an add-on, and interviewers must manually fill out scorecards. With Gem, you can only send automated reminder emails and use AI to summarize scorecard reviews.

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2. Slower support and response times: Many users have reported that the support team response times have dropped significantly. While some attribute this to recent downsizing, users are finding it particularly challenging to get assistance with new integration requests and navigate the complex user interface.

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3. Expensive for smaller companies: Gem pricing is $900 per month for 100 employees or fewer. However, they offer 10% off on a yearly plan, but the pricing still remains high for startups and only makes sense for mid-size to larger organizations.

5 top Gem alternatives in 2025 for your hiring needs

1. Kula

Kula is an all-in-one AI-powered ATS platform best suited for companies of all sizes. It helps companies hire up to 5x faster without traditional systems' add-ons, gaps, or compromises.    

Kula offers AI and automation support for candidate sourcing, application screening, interview management, and reporting.

Key Features

• Sourcing Automation & CRM: Automate outreach via LinkedIn (InMails & connection requests) and email, add candidates from LinkedIn or GitHub to multiple-step flows, and sync everything with Kula ATS to grow a strong talent pipeline.

• AI-interview intelligence: Offers AI-assisted notetaking, automated transcripts, and intelligent summaries to enhance debriefs and facilitate faster decision-making. It also auto-fills interview scorecards based on your selected criteria. 

• AI candidate scoring: Use AI scoring to score and rank applicants using a combination of skills, education, experience, and more. It helps recruiters focus on top talent without spending manual time screening candidates. 

• Built-in Scheduling: Schedule interviews manually or provide self-schedule links to candidates. Kula considers interviewer load, availability across teammates, and more to make booking easy.

• Advanced reporting: Kula Conversational AI enables hiring managers to access in-depth recruiting insights in seconds through natural language chat. You can also access nine out-of-the-box reports or create custom hiring reports. 

Pricing:

Starter- $399 per month for up to 50 employees

Plus- Custom pricing for up to 1000 employees

Enterprise- Custom pricing for more than 1000 employees

Advantages 

• Kula comes with an intuitive UI and is fairly easy to use
• Kula performs monthly audits for its AI, making it suitable for those who care about responsible AI practices
• Provides generative AI for writing job descriptions, outreach flows, and more. 

Limitation:

• One of the newer players in the ATS space (founded in 2021)
• Not suitable for staffing agencies or those looking for specific point solutions

Want to see how Kula fits your workflow? Set up a demo made just for you.

2. Greenhouse

Greenhouse is an all-in-one ATS founded in 2012 and is a popular choice for hiring teams due to its modern solutions and consistent performance. Greenhouse is best suited for companies of all sizes.

Key features

• Talent Sourcing: Post jobs across 1,000+ large and niche job boards‍ and launch bulk, personalized outreach campaigns to engage top talent at scale.

• Reporting: Access real-time dashboards, 40+ pre-built reports, and customizable reporting tools to monitor and optimize hiring performance.

• Workflows: Automate hiring workflows and task reminders to keep recruiting teams aligned, efficient, and on schedule.

• Interviews: Use structured interview kits that include question templates, evaluation criteria, and candidate scorecards. Promote fair hiring practices with anonymized assessments and bias-reduction tools.

• Talent Filtering and Rediscovery: Utilize AI-generated keywords and advanced filters to sort applications and re-engage promising past candidates using intelligent filters and saved searches, eliminating the need for external sourcing tools.

• Integrations: Connect seamlessly with 500+ pre-built integrations or use the open API to centralize all hiring data within Greenhouse.

Pricing

Greenhouse offers custom pricing based on your company’s size and hiring needs, with tiered plans—Essential, Advanced, and Expert—to scale as your business grows.

Advantages

• Being a highly technical tool, Greenhouse provides users with a greater degree of customization. 
• Greenhouse is built to support your scaling needs, making it a better alternative for growing companies. 

Limitations

• The Greenhouse “Essential Plan” for smaller companies lacks several important features, including bulk actions, candidate self-scheduling, and custom reporting.
• Many users have mentioned that Greenhouse's onboarding process is overwhelming, and its system is complex to adapt to, particularly for non-technical users.

3. Ashby

Ashby ATS is a modern, AI-powered recruiting solution designed to help small to mid-sized companies hire better and faster. It combines AI sourcing, scheduling, analytics, and automated workflows into one integrated system with easy onboarding and responsive support. 

Key features

• AI Candidate Assistant: Easily find candidate details, such as interview notes, feedback, or compensation, by simply asking questions within the candidate's profile.

• Advanced Scheduling Automation: Perform AI-powered auto-scheduling, interviewer training, and automatic replacement of declined interviewers.

• Integrations: Connect with Gmail, Google Calendar, Slack, job boards, and other tools to centralize hiring data and automate key workflows.

• Customizable visual pipelines: Visualize and manage candidates across all job openings with customizable pipelines and track the status of candidates at every stage.

• Analytics dashboard: Provide instant access to three pre-built actionable dashboards and multiple reports per job, enabling recruiters to make fast, data-driven hiring decisions without any setup.

Pricing

Ashby’s pricing starts at $400 per month for startups (up to 100 employees) and scales with tailored plans for growing and enterprise companies.

Advantages

• Ashby frequently rolls out new feature updates, which keep the tool relevant and efficient for modern hiring needs
• Ashby's customer support is highly appreciated by several users across online platforms. 

Limitations

• Ashby is not for agency recruiting needs, as it offers no specific solutions for handling multiple aliases or email domains. 
• Ashby is a technically rich tool, which makes it overwhelming for non-technical recruiters to navigate

4. Workable

Workable is a modern HR platform that simplifies and automates the entire employee lifecycle from hiring and onboarding to time tracking and payroll. Its intuitive applicant tracking system, employee referral programs, and performance review tools ensure a smooth recruitment and management process. 

Key features

• AI-Powered Sourcing: Use AI to proactively scan candidate profiles, resurface qualified past applicants, and target ideal matches on social media.

• Centralized Onboarding: Welcome new hires with a portal for e-signatures, videos, documents, and role-specific tasks—all trackable via a progress dashboard.

• Automated Interview Coordination: Let candidates self-schedule interviews and sync details with team calendars, time zones, and conferencing tools like Zoom and Teams.

• Performance Management: Run customizable review cycles, gather multi-level feedback, and track performance analytics to identify growth and development areas.

• Payroll integration: Generate payroll reports, automate calculations, and sync with major providers like ADP and Xero for multi-state and country payroll needs.

Pricing

Starter- $249/month (up to 20 employees)

Standard- $349/month (up to or more than 500)

Premium- $679/month (up to or more than 500)

Advantages

• Workable comes with a user-friendly interface that has a minimal learning curve, making it ideal for teams that need to hit the ground running.
• Provides mobile apps for both iOS and Android.

Limitations

• Many users have noted that its AI features are still underdeveloped. The AI-driven candidate selection often overlooks relevant profiles, and the model needs improvement to deliver more accurate candidate ratings.
• Workable is not efficient in supporting companies' scaling hiring needs due to its simple system nature. 

5. BambooHR

BambooHR is an all-in-one HR software platform designed to help businesses manage every stage of the employee lifecycle. From hiring and onboarding to payroll, time tracking, benefits administration, and performance management, BambooHR centralizes core HR functions into one easy-to-use system. 

Key features

• Custom Hiring Pipelines: Build role-specific hiring workflows with unique stages and automation tailored to your team’s recruitment process.

• HR Data & Reporting: Gain actionable insights with a unified data model that combines workforce trends, predictive analytics, peer feedback, and compensation benchmarks.

• Job Posting & Distribution: Post your job listings to 200+ free and premium job boards at once for maximum visibility.

• AI Candidate Screening: Speed up shortlisting with AI-generated summaries and match scores for each applicant, helping your team focus on top candidates faster.

• Integrations: Connect with over 150 tools and embedded partners through a unified interface to streamline HR operations, eliminate disjointed workflows, and reduce manual data entry.

• Payroll: Automate payroll processing and stay compliant while ensuring accurate, on-time payments that integrate seamlessly with your HR data.

Pricing

Contact the team for pricing

Advantages

• BambooHR is simple to use and comes with an intuitive UI
• Offers a mobile app for managing hiring needs

Limitations

• Pricing is not transparent
• Multiple users mentioned that BambooHR has limited reporting capabilities

A final comparison table of Gem alternatives in 2025

Final thoughts

Gem is a modern ATS tool with AI and automation capabilities for every hiring stage, but it lacks advanced interview support features and is not affordable for smaller companies.

Some Gem alternatives like Kula, Greenhouse, and Ashby offer more responsive support and better interview intelligence.  Meanwhile, Workable and BambooHR are user-friendly and more affordable for smaller teams.