Manatal

What it is

Manatal is an AI-augmented ATS and recruiting CRM built in Bangkok, sold per seat to corporate hiring teams and recruitment agencies on the same platform. Western ATS vendors split those two buyers into separate products; Manatal does not, which is why agencies running client-side and internal req work out of one system end up here. The closest structural comparison is Workable — the same SMB-to-mid-market ATS scope — at a fraction of the entry cost.

Why it shows up in Recruiting stacks

• It ships a first-party MCP server. Launched 19 January 2026, hosted by Manatal, 31 tools across candidates, jobs, matches, organizations, contacts and reference data, with write access as well as read. Claude is the documented and recommended client; Gemini CLI and Microsoft Copilot Studio are also supported, and ChatGPT is experimental. An agent can search the database, create notes, update match status and draft outreach with no integration build. Among ATS vendors priced under $60/seat that is rare — Workable and Recruitee have no equivalent.
• Per-seat entry at $15/user/month on annual billing. ATS-plus-CRM scope at that number is why cost-sensitive agencies shortlist it at all.
• APAC-first defaults. Support hours, localization and roadmap priorities reflect APAC corporate and agency hiring rather than US mid-market assumptions.

Pricing

Four tiers, per user per month, annual billing first and monthly in brackets:

• Professional — $15 ($19 monthly). 15 jobs, 10,000 candidates, unlimited hiring managers. No API, no SSO, no LLM integration.
• Enterprise — $35 ($39 monthly). Unlimited jobs and candidates, plus workflow automation. Still no API, no SSO, no LLM integration.
• Enterprise Plus — $55 ($59 monthly). Manatal Open API, SSO, custom permissions and user groups, Advanced Report Builder, the MCP server at no extra charge, priority support.
• Custom — quoted. Adds a dedicated account manager, phone support and custom integrations.

A 14-day trial runs with no card. Singapore tax residents pay 9% GST on top. AI Interviewer, the branded guest portal and job-board posting contracts are add-ons with no published price — get them quoted before you model a budget.

The number that decides the deal is $55, not $15. Everything a stack builder wants — API, MCP, SSO — sits only on Enterprise Plus, so a five-recruiter agency that wants agent access pays $3,300/year annual-billed, not $900. Price the tier below it honestly: at $35 you are buying an ATS with no programmatic exit, which is the wrong purchase if any part of your plan involves Claude, a data warehouse or a custom career-site build. Monthly billing carries a 7-27% premium across the ladder, and every figure above assumes the annual commit.

Best for

Recruitment agencies and in-house TA teams in the 3-25 seat band, APAC-headquartered or APAC-hiring, that want an ATS with agent access without an enterprise contract — concretely, an agency lead who wants to ask Claude which candidates in the existing database match a new req and have the answer written back as candidate matches.

Not for you if structured interview scorecards and compliance reporting are the primary reason you are buying an ATS. Reporting is the consistent complaint in Manatal’s reviews, and buying it to fix reporting is buying the wrong tool. Also not for you if you need a bundled sourcing database — Manatal enriches profiles you already hold; it does not sell contact data.

Versus the alternatives

• Workable — flat fee scaling by headcount: Standard $299/month, Premier $599, Enterprise $719. Pick Workable when you are a US or EU employer with a small recruiting team and a lot of hiring managers, because flat pricing stops charging you per person added. Pick Manatal when seat count is low and job count is high — the agency shape.
• Greenhouse — quote-only, and the structured-hiring standard. Pick it when interview kits, scorecards and compliance reporting are the reason you are buying an ATS. Greenhouse also ships an MCP server, so Manatal’s agent-access advantage does not hold here; it holds against the rest of the $15-60/seat field.
• Ashby — the fastest-growing entrant in this segment, from about $300/month, with analytics as the actual product. Pick Ashby when you want the reporting Manatal does not have and can pay several times more for it.

Watch-outs

• Agent access is a tier, not a feature. Teams size a Manatal budget off $15 and then find the MCP server and Open API three tiers up at $55. Guard: price the pilot at Enterprise Plus from day one, or run the trial on Enterprise knowing you are evaluating a different product from the one you intend to buy.
• The MCP server authenticates by URL, not OAuth. The per-organization server URL is the credential, and it carries admin-level access to the candidate database. Guard: keep it in a secrets manager, never in a shared prompt or a checked-in MCP config, and rotate it when a recruiter leaves.
• Reporting draws the recurring review complaint. G2 4.3 and Capterra 4.6 sit alongside repeated flags on limited reporting and search. Guard: rebuild your three most-used hiring reports during the 14-day trial before signing, rather than assuming Advanced Report Builder closes the gap.
• The 100 requests/minute API limit is shared. The MCP server inherits the standard API rate limit, so an agent running bulk database sweeps competes with your own integrations for the same budget. Guard: cap agent batch sizes and schedule bulk exports outside recruiter hours.