Manatal is an applicant tracking system. NiceHire runs the first round. If you are comparing them side by side, you are probably trying to answer one question: where does my hiring actually break? This page tries to answer that rather than declare a winner.
What Manatal is
Manatal is an ATS built in Bangkok and sold across APAC. It is priced per user, and it publishes its prices — which, in a category where most vendors do not, tells you something useful about who it is built for.
As published on Manatal's pricing page:
| Plan | Annual | Monthly | Included |
|---|---|---|---|
| Professional | $15/user/mo | $19/user/mo | Up to 15 jobs, up to 10,000 candidates, unlimited hiring managers |
| Enterprise | $35/user/mo | $39/user/mo | Unlimited jobs and candidates, workflow automation |
| Enterprise Plus | $55/user/mo | $59/user/mo | Report builder, LLM integration, Open API, SSO, candidate portal |
| Custom | On demand | Manatal assigns a dedicated account manager; custom integrations | |
There is a 14-day free trial with no credit card. Manatal notes that GST applies to Singaporean tax residents. Source: Manatal pricing.
What Manatal does well, said plainly: it stores, tracks and organises applicants. It gives you a pipeline view, a candidate database, and a place for your hiring managers to leave feedback. It is APAC-native, it is inexpensive at small seat counts, and it is a mature product. For a team that has no system of record at all, an ATS is the correct first purchase — and Manatal is a reasonable one.
What NiceHire is
NiceHire does not store your applicants for the next three years. It runs the part of hiring that an ATS deliberately leaves to humans: the judging.
An applicant arrives. NiceHire vets the resume against the role and returns a score with a structured summary. It then runs a first-round interview from a defined question set, asked in a fixed order, and returns a transcript alongside a structured evaluation — technical, communication and cultural-fit scores, each out of 100, plus recorded strengths and gaps. What you get back is a ranked shortlist, with the reasoning attached to each name.
What happens to candidates below the threshold
This is worth being exact about, because the category is not.
Each screening stage has a passing threshold and two switches: progression mode and auto-reject. In manual progression mode, every candidate — above and below the threshold — is held for a human decision. In automatic mode, candidates above the threshold advance, and what happens below it depends on the auto-reject switch: with it on, the application is rejected without a human in the loop; with it off, the candidate is held in pending review for a person to decide.
Auto-reject is off by default. Out of the box, every below-threshold candidate is held in pending review for a person to decide; auto-reject is something you switch on per stage, not a default you inherit. We would rather tell you that here than have you find out from your pipeline. Whatever you choose, the transcript and the scores are recorded either way — the record does not depend on the switch.
The actual difference
An ATS solves "I have lost track of my applicants."
NiceHire solves "I have 300 applicants, four days, and no defensible way to get to a shortlist of ten."
These are different problems and a team can genuinely have both. Manatal's keyword and workflow tooling will organise the pile. It will not read the pile. When you shortlist inside an ATS, the judgment is still yours, done at speed, under pressure, and — this is the part that gets uncomfortable later — without a record of why.
That last point is the whole argument. If a rejected candidate, a regulator, or your own CHRO asks why applicant #147 did not progress, an ATS can tell you that they did not progress. NiceHire can tell you what they were asked, what they said, and how they scored against the same rubric as everyone else.
Pricing: two models that do not compare cleanly
Manatal charges per user, per month. Every recruiter you add costs more, whether or not they screen anyone that month.
NiceHire charges a flat monthly platform fee with AI-interview minutes included, and meters usage beyond the allowance:
| Plan | Price | AI-interview minutes | Video overage | Voice overage |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Team | $99/mo | 60 included | $0.59/min | $0.295/min |
| Business | $299/mo | 200 included | $0.53/min | $0.265/min |
| Enterprise | $999/mo | 600 included | $0.41/min | $0.205/min |
Voice interviews are billed at half the video rate at every tier. There is no per-user or per-seat component on any plan — adding recruiters, hiring managers or observers does not change the platform fee. Current plans are always on the pricing page.
We should be straight about what this means next to Manatal's $15/user/mo.
NiceHire's entry price is $99/month flat. Manatal's is $15 per user per month on the annual plan. Those cross at seven seats ($105 of Manatal against $99 of NiceHire); on Manatal's monthly rate of $19 they cross at six. Below that — which is most small teams — Manatal costs less, and often a lot less. A four-person recruiting team pays Manatal $60/month. There is no arithmetic in which $99 beats that, and we are not going to construct one.
What you are buying at $99 is not a cheaper seat. It is a price that stops moving when your team grows. Add a fifth recruiter, add ten hiring managers who only read shortlists, add a whole second department — the platform fee is the same number. Per-seat pricing taxes you for putting more people near the hiring process; flat pricing does not. That trade is good for you above roughly seven seats and bad for you below it, and which side you are on is not something we can tell you.
Also worth pricing before you compare stickers: the 60 minutes included on Team is a real allowance, not a trial credit, but it is 60 minutes. Six ten-minute interviews and it is spent. Past that you are paying $0.59 per video minute on Team, and Business at $299 is the tier where 200 minutes stops being the binding constraint for most teams. Work it out on your own interview length and volume rather than on ours.
Where Manatal is the better choice
Genuinely, and without hedging:
- You have a small team and a tight budget. Under about seven seats Manatal is cheaper than NiceHire's $99/month entry plan, and under about four seats it is dramatically cheaper. If budget is the binding constraint, that is the whole answer and the rest of this page is academic.
- You want to try before you buy. Manatal has a 14-day free trial with no card. NiceHire's employer plans have no free trial — the 14-day trial on our site applies to individual job-seeker plans, not organisation plans. That is a real gap, and it is ours.
- You need a system of record and don't have one. NiceHire is not an ATS. If your applicants currently live in a shared inbox and a spreadsheet, buy the ATS first. That is the more urgent problem.
- You are a recruitment agency managing many clients. Manatal's multi-client structure is built for that; NiceHire is not.
- You need long-term candidate database management — nurturing a talent pool over years, re-engaging past applicants at scale. That is ATS territory.
- Your bottleneck is organisation, not volume. If you get twelve applicants per role and read all twelve, an AI first round is solving a problem you do not have. Buy the ATS, skip us, and come back when the pile gets unreadable.
Where NiceHire is the better choice
- Applicant volume has outgrown your screening capacity. The first round is where the hours go, and adding headcount to fix it is the expensive answer.
- You need to be able to explain your screening decisions. Every candidate for a role gets the same question set, and a completed screening stores the transcript and a structured score against the application — with the limits set out below.
- Your recruiters should be interviewing, not triaging. The first round runs without them; they spend their time on the shortlist.
A note on compliance, stated carefully
Regulatory attention on AI in hiring is rising, and vendors in this category are not always careful about what they promise. So, precisely:
NiceHire cannot make you compliant with any bias-audit law, and no vendor can. Where an independent bias audit is required — New York City Local Law 144 is the clearest example — the audit must be performed by an independent auditor. A vendor's own assertion is not a substitute and never has been.
What a structured first round leaves behind is a record, and we would rather describe ours accurately than call it something grander. A completed screening stores the interview transcript against the application, along with the scores, the recommendation, and the recorded strengths and gaps. Every applicant to a role is asked from the same question set, in the same order.
Three limits on that record, because they matter to anyone actually planning to rely on it. The transcript is whatever the interview provider returns, so a session that ends early can be stored without one. Re-running a screening clears the previous attempt's transcript rather than keeping both. And the interview template is stored as a live reference rather than a snapshot, so editing a template changes what the record says about interviews that already happened.
Those are real gaps and they are on our list. We are not going to describe this as an audit trail until they are closed.
What it is good for today is the ordinary version of the question: when someone asks why a candidate did not progress, there is something to look at other than a recollection.
The short version
| Manatal | NiceHire | |
|---|---|---|
| Product | Applicant tracking system | AI first-round screening + ranked shortlist |
| Pricing basis | Per user/month, published | Flat monthly, published + metered AI minutes |
| Published entry price | $15/user/mo annual | $99/mo flat (Team), 60 AI minutes included |
| Cheaper below ~7 seats | Manatal | — |
| Cost of adding a seat | +$15/user/mo | $0 |
| Core output | An organised pipeline | A ranked shortlist with transcript + score per candidate |
| Free trial | 14 days, no card | None on employer plans |
| Best for | Teams needing a system of record | Teams whose first round has stopped scaling |
They are complements more often than they are competitors. If you have Manatal and your problem is that nobody has time to read 300 resumes, the answer is not a different ATS.
For why we refuse to put a dollar figure next to HireVue, Greenhouse or Sapia, see our comparison of AI interview tools for Hong Kong and APAC.