We don't like to compare ourselves to other recruitment technology platforms: Vincere is unique. But customers and competitors do like to compare.
So it's time for some fundamental expert guides on how we stack up against other rec tech. First up: a Vincere and Manatal comparison.
Are you wondering, “How can Vincere give an honest take on how they measure up to a competitor?” You’re right: we are slightly biased in our own favor. Once we go over the facts, we hope you’ll see why.
On Team Vinny, we’re not obsessed with “Vincere vs. Manatal” or “vs.” any competitor. We’re obsessed with making recruiters’ lives better.
The truth is we’re not the right choice for every agency. Neither is Manatal.
Are you a price-conscious new agency with a lean team? Manatal’s attractive price point and simplified platform might be for you.
Are you a multinational, multi-desk recruitment business? Or a mid-sized agency planning to scale, but not ready yet for a big investment? Maybe Vincere's your pick.
Round by round, we'll go through the strengths and weaknesses of each platform. We’ll wrap it up with a features guide and final factors that might make or break your decision.
Far be it from us to make your rec tech choices for you. Take a side-by-side tour of both platforms to set your priorities and decide.
Manatal’s Pros & Cons
What is Manatal?
Manatal is a cloud-based applicant tracking system and recruitment software, founded in 2019 and based in Thailand. It’s designed to streamline and simplify hiring processes. Some of its main features include job posting, candidate management, interview scheduling, and reporting. Manatal can also enrich candidate profiles by scraping data from 20+ social media platforms.
Manatal’s software lets recruiters work from one platform, saving time and resources on extra tech spend. Their platform also has AI to automate some tasks and tag candidate profiles for job suitability.
Manatal: The Benefits
Price point
No doubt about it: price is a key selling point for Manatal. With costs starting at $15 per user per month, this is a platform that stands out for its affordability.
And their pricing’s not just reasonable: it’s public. It’s easy to take a quick look at their pricing page to find a plan, its features, and calculate business costs.
But “the price starts at $15” is different from “the price is $15.” $15 is the starting point for Manatal’s Professional Plan. From there it's $35 per user for the Enterprise Plan. Their Custom Plan doesn’t have pricing listed.
Why would this be an issue when you can just stick with the $15 plan? Because different plan levels affect features and usage. Plans can have limits on records you can add, or whether you can use integrations like Zapier.
Also, “price per user” is a minor red flag. It should be no problem for a small team to work with a $15 per month charge for each consultant. But this might make an enterprise agency think twice.
Free training
In Manatal’s words, it’s a platform that takes “15 minutes to master.” Their free platform training is a major benefit that should make it easy to start using. And there's no limit to the number of training sessions, so you won’t be surprised by a cutoff later.
But like with the price point, this is a “benefit” that won’t benefit everyone equally. Free training is excellent for tech-savvy recruiters who just want to get up and running. In that case we say: go for it.
But some agencies might need extra support on training. Remote teams, large agencies, or consultants working across time zones could all use a helping hand.
Custom or advanced platform training can get expensive for sure. But that’s the nature of running a large business: getting on to a new system won’t be simple. However, the cost of getting it wrong will be much higher in lost productivity and revenue.
So Manatal’s free training is a double-edged sword. If your agency is light and fast, it’ll be a major weight off your shoulders to have training covered. If you’re running a more complex operation, you might get nervous that there won’t be enough support for all your teams.
Free 14-day trial
Manatal differentiates itself by offering a try-before-you-buy rec tech model. Anyone can get a free 14-day platform trial fast by signing up with a credit card.
Getting a test drive of a tech platform before you invest is a major benefit. If Manatal’s product works well for your agency, sampling the platform makes it an easy sell to get it live and start onboarding.
The only con for you as a recruitment leader is the time and money lost if you don’t end up using the system. But the gains from getting it right will likely be big enough that it’s a safe bet to try.
Manatal: The Drawbacks
“Only Admins can do this.” 😑
Manatal's platform has user roles. This setup, also called "permissioning," defines platform access and limits per person.
The system relies heavily on the Admin user role. The Admin, i.e. the person with the highest level of access, can view, manage, or edit any data.
But what if you’re not a Manatal Admin?
The lowest user role, Recruiter, can only create candidate records. What if a Recruiter wants to post a new open role? Not possible in Manatal.
If you’re not at the top in Manatal, you’re missing out on a lot.
Compare that to Vincere’s permissions system. User roles don’t permanently box a person in to what they can or can’t do in the platform. That’s decided on a granular level.
For example, a Vincere Admin wants Person A to have access to all Candidate records plus advanced analytics reports, but for Person B to only have the Candidate data. The Admin can set both users to the user role called “Consultant.” But then they tick off a few boxes to manage exactly which records each person can access.
A Manatal Admin can always assign more people to higher user roles. But none of these roles can be adjusted.
If you don’t have that flexibility, the system decides what’s best.
Basic features
There are two ways to look at this one.
You might think, “Great – Manatal’s cheap and covers all the simple features that I need. Sign me up.”
It’s true that Manatal’s platform will offer all the basic features that can help any recruitment agency. From pipeline tracking to Boolean search for candidates to GDPR compliance, they’ll have your back on what you need to get your recruitment operations running.
But there’s another angle, too. What happens when you don’t want your rec tech to be basic anymore?
Nobody starts a recruitment business to stay small. When you bring on five or fifty consultants, or when you want bespoke reporting, basic isn’t enough.
If your intention is to scale your business, a short-term perspective won’t help. It makes more sense in the long term to buy into a system that grows with you.
Platform limits
Let’s return to one of Manatal’s main plus points: its affordability.
Remember that main line, “$15 per user per month”? If you do decide on this price, it comes with some limits. With this plan, each user can only list 15 vacancies.
Sticking to just 15 job vacancies at a time can feel pretty limiting for any consultant or agency that wants to grow their billings.
But all right: maybe you’re coming from the small-to-mid-sized agency perspective. 15 live job vacancies per consultant might be doable.
Think again. The 15-vacancies limit doesn’t just refer to live jobs, but to all jobs. So to open up a new vacancy for Job No. 16, a Manatal user has to delete one of the old job records. This is a massive loss to the business, as you’ll miss out on tracking and reporting from past jobs data.
And you’ll potentially have an audit trail issue when it comes to compliance. You can’t prove anything from records that have been removed.
It turns out that you get what you pay for.
Vincere’s Pros & Cons
What is Vincere?
Vincere makes the Recruitment Operating System, a modern OS designed for recruitment and staffing agencies worldwide.
Our cloud-based platform has two-way data sync across all its modules. Together they help streamline processes across front, middle, and back offices. Its features include a CRM/ATS, advanced recruitment analytics, video interviewing and outreach, no-code candidate & client portals, and a comms hub.
Vincere is part of the Access Group. We’ve teamed up with other Access family products to offer features like advanced payroll integration (FastTrack360) and CRM/ATS integration with your recruitment website (Volcanic).
Vincere: The Benefits
Grows with you without deciding for you
With Vincere, configurability is the name of the game. We have several modules with dozens upon dozens of different features. When you’re setting up with Vinny, you’re making a choice about what really works for your business.
Let’s look at a practical example. Say you’re running a mid-sized recruitment agency focused on Perm placements. But you’ve done a little homework and decided to open a Temp desk.
With other rec tech platforms, getting your Temp operations set up might require several integrations, or even adding a whole new software to your tech stack.
But our software is built with toggles to start up a new feature. With Vinny, you could start that Temp desk just by switching on Shift Scheduler to make managing shift work easy.
If you don’t need it, leave the toggle off. When you want to grow, just switch a feature on. This saves you as a recruitment business owner time and money that would’ve been spent on software development.
Automated advanced reporting
We love data so much at Vincere that we’ve included 50+ reporting dashboards for you to use.
And yes, it’s automated.
Just about anything you’d want to know is trackable in a Vincere report.
Recruitment metrics, targets and KPIs? We’ve got it.
Revenue forecasting, redeployment rates, and other reports to improve your agency’s bottom line? It’s all there.
We even have recruitment dashboard gamification if your teams are competitive.
We also have custom reporting dashboards. This is especially useful for enterprise agencies that need to dig into hidden data that comes from complex operations.
But the result for all our customers is the same: better metrics, better outcomes.
Recruiter-driven product development
Rec tech is always changing, and we wanted to build and update the Vincere platform to meet recruiters’ needs.
To manage this, we arrived at two solutions: the #VinnyLovesYou Sprint and our Product Portal.
Our #VinnyLovesYou Sprints are a product development model that uses direct customer feedback. Recruiters ask, and we listen.
The Product Portal does the same thing. It’s another tool for our customers to request and vote on the features that work best for them.
So when we tell recruiters, “we couldn’t do this without you,” we really mean it.
Part of the wider Access Group universe
We would never claim that Vincere can do it all. That’s why we teamed up with Access.
The Recruitment Operating System is vast, but there’s always something that we could improve. When our customers needed a more advanced payroll integration, we went full speed ahead.
Meet the FastTrack360 x Vincere integration. Now back-office teams don’t have to sweat over payroll and invoicing. With smooth automations syncing payroll data between Vincere and FastTrack360, admin goes down and productivity goes up.
We also heard that recruiters were clamoring for more website-CRM-ATS connection. So we put our heads together and worked out the Volcanic x Vincere integration. Relevant data travels across from agency websites to candidate and client tracking systems, providing even better insights.
We’re proud that working with the Access Group has brought all this firepower under one roof. Teamwork makes the dream work.
Vincere: The Drawbacks
No free trial
We get asked often why there’s no free trial for our platform. As pointed out earlier, a free trial can be a nice way to get your toes wet before diving full-on into a new tech platform.
This is a fair point. However, we do have our reasons for doing it differently.
The scale of the Recruitment Operating System is what stops us from offering free trials. Our platform has many modules and oodles of features to learn. The complications of even getting it set up represent a huge time, admin, and monetary investment for large rec firms.
And then you might not even use it.
We don’t want to waste your time. For most businesses, 14 days isn’t enough time to get up to speed on all your new rec tech features. We reserve setup and training resources for agencies serious about committing to their new tech.
This is controversial for some recruiters. We can’t make everyone happy, but we can stand by this decision.
What we can also do is offer live demos, answer all your questions, refer you to other happy customers who use Vincere, and let you choose to move forward or not.
Pricing transparency
A bit of advice we hear a lot is that we should list our prices publicly.
Here’s why we don’t do that.
First is the most obvious reason: we don’t want our competitors seeing what we charge.
The hard truth is that recruitment software is a competitive niche. If you’re reading this and have ever worked as a recruiter, worrying about someone else undercutting you on price: we feel the same.
We’re confident that we can demonstrate the value of the Recruitment Operating System. But some things we leave a little mysterious to help ourselves as a business.
Another reason we don’t post our prices online is that they vary. At Vincere we’re proud to work with recruitment and staffing agencies from all around the world, of all sizes and specialisms.
But to reverse a cliché, what’s good for the goose is not always good for the gander.
We do offer different prices depending on which modules an agency signs up for, the scale of their data migration, whether they need custom work, and other factors.
If we list out a table of prices, it’s going to cause sticker shock for agencies that might have totally different (and simpler) requirements.
We don’t want any agency to feel turned away because of a perceived price issue; we want to work with you. Team Vinny are happy to talk price one-on-one, but we’re reluctant to post numbers without context.
“Too many clicks 😡”
Our goal is to make the Recruitment Operating System intuitive and reliable.
So when we got feedback on the platform being difficult to navigate and “too clicky,” we were determined to change.
It was thanks to the direct feedback we got through the #VinnyLovesYou Sprints and Product Board that we could make these changes.
For example, in one of our releases we added a switch to go from records Quick View to Full view in one click.
How about the time we added the ability to add attachments to email templates easily?
We heard that Temp recruiters needed the ability to one-click cancel instead of delete a shift, so we added that.
The examples could keep piling up, but the point stands. We’re determined to make our product sleeker, navigable, and useful. As the industry keeps evolving, Vincere will do the same.
Vincere vs. Manatal Comparison: Features & Capabilities
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Features |
Manatal |
Vincere |
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CRM |
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ATS |
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AI & Automation |
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Analytics & Reporting |
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Integrations |
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Job Boards |
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Careers Pages |
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Candidate Portals |
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Client Portals |
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Customer Support |
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How to choose between Vincere and Manatal?
So which really is the best rec tech: Vincere or Manatal?
Choose Manatal for:
- Quick-and-easy streamlined setup
- Features for small teams
- To get started billing quickly
- A low-budget, reliable option
But Vincere is better for:
- Running a complex operation
- Multinational recruitment agencies
- Features for different recruitment desks (Temp / Perm / Exec)
- Flexibility to scale
Why recruiters love Vinny
Don’t just take it from us. You might want to know how actual Vincere users are experiencing the Recruitment Operating System in the day-to-day.
Peek at what they have to say.
“You’re never more than one click away from what you’re looking for. It’s adaptable, highly customizable, the analytics that are embedded within Vincere are very good in pure recruitment terms, it’s a fantastically, easy to use system, that without fault everyone in the company really likes.”
George Zitko
Zitko
“One thing we love about the Vincere platform is its user-friendly interface, which makes it easy for us and our stakeholders to access their data from any device, at any time. Due to this and the ease of usability, we recently added the Pay & Bill feature to further streamline our payroll process and provide our candidates and clients with easier access to data.
The Vincere team’s industry expertise and knowledge has been unparalleled.”
TSR
“I'm impressed with the capabilities of Vincere’s ATS. It's made my job so much easier and has streamlined our entire recruitment process.
What really sets Vincere apart is their incredible customer success team. They’ve provided us with expert advice, support and training, and have gone above and beyond to help us get the most out of the system.
I would highly recommend Vincere to anyone in the recruitment industry looking for a reliable, user-friendly ATS.”
Babur Khan Durrani
Diamond Crossing Recruitment Ltd.
“The thing I love about Vincere is the ability to get data and analytics out of the tool. From a management point of view, being able to have a strong look at the business in a quarter, segment some of that data, make good decisions…I would say it’s a great tool, highly intuitive, but mostly great people.
It’s a tool built by recruiters, for recruiters. So they really understand your point of view.”
Lincoln Benbow
Halcyon Knights
Final thoughts
Ultimately, Manatal and Vincere have a lot in common. Both are cloud-based recruitment technology platforms that go beyond ATS/CRM software. Our goal is the same too: letting recruiters have an easier time of it through technology.
Manatal has some great selling points. It’s reasonably priced with a free trial and free training. Its reporting, ATS search, and pipeline management features work well for essential rec ops.
But Manatal's cons are records and user permissions limits. It lacks the high-powered analytics that agencies running complex operations might want.
Vincere’s platform also has its strengths. The platform is more configurable, with more advanced reporting. We constantly incorporate customer feedback into our product. We’ve also got close integrations with more products to find extra efficiencies.
We’ve gotten criticism for not posting prices publicly and not offering free trials. Our product has also been seen as too difficult to navigate for some in the past.
Hopefully we’ve made a good case why we don’t give our goodies away for free. We’ve also been intentional to adapt new product development models that will adapt as recruiters' needs change.
Here's our opinion. Manatal’s like a box wine and Vinny’s like a vintage Cabernet Sauvignon. Nothing wrong with either one, and they mostly do the same thing. But your selection depends on budget and taste.
Cheers 🥂