Switching ATS? I tested what four of them let you export

Every applicant tracking system will tell you how easy it is to move in. Almost none of them tell you, on the page where you sign up, what you can take with you when you leave.

Since August I have put four of them through the same test: Breezy HR, Manatal and BambooHR, hands-on, and Recruit CRM from its own documentation while my trial is still ahead of me. (A fifth, JazzHR, never gave me an account, so it is not in the table.) The test is five questions, and every one of them is something you can check before you pay.

The short version

• Only one of the four has a free plan to fall back to, and that is Breezy HR — whose free plan turns candidates older than thirty days into random strings, and whose export I could not find after a redesign on 19 September.
• Neither product I could test end to end reads its own export back in full. Breezy HR keeps 3 of 29 columns. Manatal is far better and still cannot take back one of its own address columns.
• When a trial ended, the export went with it. Manatal became a payment page. BambooHR became a blank one.
• Recruit CRM is the only vendor that documents its exit in writing — and its help centre says the full export is for paid plans only, while its pricing page says export comes with “no strings attached”.
• Not one of the four told me, in any email or on any screen, how long my data is kept after I stop paying.

The five questions, side by side

The Breezy HR and Manatal columns come from files I exported and still have. The BambooHR column comes from the end of a seven-day trial. The Recruit CRM column is what its help centre says, quoted below, and I will replace it with what I see once I have used it.

1. Is there an export on the plan you are actually on?

This is the question that decides the rest, and the answer is usually buried.

Breezy HR had one on its free plan: More ▾ → Export Candidates on the candidate list. I used it on 22 August and again on 11 September. On 19 September, after a redesign, I looked in six places and could not find it, and the bulk-action group it used to belong to now carries the label UNLOCK BULK ACTIONS WITH STARTUP PLAN. I am not saying it was removed. I am saying I could not find it, eight days after I last used it.

Manatal gave me every column with no lock icons during the trial. There is no free plan underneath, so the export exists exactly as long as the trial does.

BambooHR I did not test. The trial was seven days and I spent them elsewhere; that is my failure, not the product’s, and it is why the cell says so.

Recruit CRM says it plainly in its help centre:

The Data Export and Full Export options available only to accounts on paid subscription plans.(Pro, Business and Enterprise).

A few lines later it adds: “The data export is only applicable for active subscriptions.” The same help centre describes a second, separate route — exporting a filtered list from a list page, with the fields you choose — and does not mention a plan restriction for that one. Whether it shows up during a trial is the first thing I will check.

The pricing page, meanwhile, answers “Can I cancel my subscription anytime?” with: “you can export your data from Recruit CRM with just a few clicks—no strings attached.” Read in context that is a promise to paying customers, and it is probably true for them. It is still two descriptions of one feature, and the one on the sales page is the one without the condition.

2. How much of the record comes out?

Once you have a file, count the empty columns. It is the fastest honest summary of what a product actually knows about your candidates.

• Breezy HR: 29 columns with everything ticked, 15 with a value. The export writes whatever the list’s Columns button shows, so the default file is narrower still.
• Manatal: 52 columns, 22 with a value across seven candidates. The default column set hides email address, first name and surname — export without opening the column editor and you get a file that looks complete and is missing the three fields you wanted. The full count is here.

A wide file is not automatically a better one. Most of Manatal’s 30 empty columns are placement fields — vendor, referrer, start and left dates — that a company hiring for itself will never fill. The number that matters is the one column you rely on. In Manatal’s case that turned out to be Years of Experience, which the screen shows and the file leaves blank.

3. Can the product read its own file back?

This is the test I would run before anything else, because it takes five minutes and it tells you what a migration out will look like from the other side.

Breezy HR: export 29 columns, feed the same file straight back into Breezy’s importer, and the mapping screen offers five choices for every column — name, email, summary, phone, remove. Three of the twenty-nine survive. The one free-text field the importer accepts, Summary, is not in any export Breezy produces, so anything you park there on the way in cannot come back out. The whole round trip is here.

Manatal: far better. The importer offers 24 fields, says how many columns it is dropping before it runs, and does not turn your header row into a candidate. Two catches: Candidate Location is one of the 52 export columns and not one of the 24 import fields, so an address that leaves cannot return; and mapping a single name column overwrote the surname with the first name for everyone I imported. The review has the details.

Recruit CRM, on paper: columns it does not have can still come in — “you first need to create custom fields to map those columns into the system” — up to 10,000 records per upload, as CSV or XLS (an XLSX file has to be converted first). Its help centre also warns that the characters <, >, & and ; in a file “crash the code for import” — worth knowing before you hand it an export from anywhere else. It sells a separate, paid migration service, quoted by record count.

4. What is on the screen when the trial or plan ends?

Here the four products fail in four different ways.

• Manatal turns into a checkout. The login page becomes a plan picker and a card form, with three links at the foot: Pricing, Need help?, Logout. No export, no delete. I wrote it up on the day. To be fair to Manatal, it has no free plan and it said so; the trial did exactly what it was described as doing.
• BambooHR ends as a blank page at /settings/account/expired.php — Powered by bambooHR and nothing else. The account’s own address redirects to the sales site. That is here.
• Breezy HR keeps you in, which is genuinely the best outcome of the three I saw — the free plan keeps the interface and the rows. But candidates older than thirty days come back as random strings that change on every page load, and on 11 September they came out of the export that way too: same row count, same columns, wrong contents.
• Recruit CRM’s help centre says “The system will automatically trigger a full data export when you proceed to deactivate your account” — for a paying account. What happens when a trial ends is not written down anywhere I found, and it is the second thing I will check.

5. Does anyone tell you how long your data is kept?

No. I searched fifteen BambooHR emails for delete, retain, data, export and download your data, and none of them appears in connection with my account. Manatal’s trial-end page says nothing about retention either. Breezy HR describes its thirty-day limit in three different ways on three different screens, and I found no page that says how long anything is kept. Recruit CRM documents the export thoroughly, and none of the help pages I read says how long a cancelled account’s records stay.

I am not saying anything was deleted. I have no evidence either way — which is the point.

It is not an impossible thing to write down. CareerPlug, an ATS I have not used, puts it on the cancellation screen itself: its help centre says you tick a box confirming that “your account’s data will be purged after 60 days”, and adds, “If you return after 60 days, all of your data will be lost. We recommend exporting any reports or data before canceling your account.” I cannot tell you whether the product does exactly that. I can tell you it is one sentence, and none of the four products above has written it where I could find it.

What I have not tested

• BambooHR’s export and import. Seven days, and I did not get to them.
• Recruit CRM, at all. Every Recruit CRM cell above is its documentation. I will replace each one with what the product does once I have a trial running, and date the change.
• Anything beyond candidates. Jobs, notes, emails and attachments are a larger and messier question; I kept this to the candidate record because it is the one every product has.

Before you pay: a ten-minute check

1. Find the export on the plan you are going to be on, not the trial. Ask the vendor in writing if you cannot find it.
2. Put three real-looking candidates in and export them. Open the file and count the empty columns.
3. Import that same file back into the same product. Whatever does not survive is what the next product will not receive either.
4. Ask what happens on the last day, and what happens to the data after it. If nobody can answer the second part, export again before the end and keep the file.
5. Keep your original spreadsheet. Every product above drops something on the way in, the way out, or both.

Which tool handles this better?

On this one axis, the answer depends on where you expect to be in six months.

If you might stop paying, Breezy HR (affiliate link) is the only one of the four with a free plan to fall back to — export early, because anything older than thirty days stops being readable. If you are moving a spreadsheet in and intend to stay, Manatal (affiliate link) has the best importer I have used, and you should take a full export while the trial is still running. BambooHR I cannot recommend or rule out on this question. Recruit CRM has written the clearest exit rules of the four, and I will know shortly whether the product matches them.

Everything above was checked between 22 August and 30 September 2026. If any of these products has changed its export since, tell me and I will date the correction.

Disclosure: the Manatal and Breezy HR links in this post pay me a commission if you sign up through them, and each is marked where they appear above. It costs you nothing extra, it did not change a word of what this post says, and I do not accept payment in exchange for favourable coverage. Every other link here is an ordinary one.