Almost every “X vs Y” comparison of applicant tracking systems is assembled from the two vendors’ own feature pages. That produces a table where both products have every row ticked, because both marketing teams describe the same functions with different nouns.

So I did the other thing. I took one candidate CSV, two résumés, and one job description, and I put the identical files through Breezy HR (affiliate link) and Manatal (affiliate link). Then I turned on every available column in both products, exported everything, and compared the files rather than the screens. That is 29 export columns out of Breezy and 52 out of Manatal, for the same seven candidate records.

What came back:

• The price crossover is about ten seats. Breezy is flat at $157 a month for unlimited users; Manatal is $15 per seat. Below ten people Manatal is cheaper, above it Breezy is.
• Manatal maps 24 fields on import. Breezy maps four. If you are migrating a spreadsheet, this is the difference that will cost you a weekend.
• Both products lose data on the round trip, and in both, the export columns are whatever happens to be ticked in the candidate list.
• Breezy stored a wrong figure for years of experience. Manatal displayed a right one and saved no copy of it — the column is empty for all seven rows.
• A first and last name that is not in the résumé arrived in Manatal three times, with the identical value each time.
• Neither product will let you keep the reasoning behind an AI score.

I reviewed Breezy HR and Manatal on their own separately; this article is only the comparison. I ran the same signup at JazzHR a fortnight later and never got in; that comparison is about access and price rather than features, because it has to be.

The candidates are test data I generated. The job was created but left unpublished, so nothing was distributed to a job board and no real applicant was involved. I used Breezy from 11 to 22 August 2026 — first on the paid trial, then on the free Bootstrap plan — and Manatal from 22 to 27 August 2026 on its fourteen-day trial.

One caveat before anything else, because it shapes everything below. Manatal’s trial appears to run on the Enterprise tier rather than the $15 Professional plan most small teams would actually buy. There is no “you are on the Enterprise trial” label anywhere, but the subscription screen shows Enterprise pre-selected, features that the pricing page places above Professional are switched on, and a note reads “By selecting Enterprise you will not have access to Enterprise Plus features such as Groups, SSO and API” — which is the phrasing you use for something a person currently has. Breezy’s trial was likewise a full-feature trial. In both cases, what you evaluate during the trial is probably not the plan you will buy. Treat every capability below as “seen on the trial tier”.

The price crossover sits at about ten seats

The two products do not just charge different amounts. They charge along different axes, which means neither is “cheaper” in general. Every price below was on the vendors’ own pricing pages on 27 August 2026.

Breezy’s Startup plan is $157 per month billed annually, or $189 month to month, for an unlimited number of users. Manatal charges per seat: Professional is $15 per seat per month annually or $19 monthly, Enterprise is $35 or $39, and Enterprise Plus is $55 or $59.

That crossover assumes an employer. For an agency the arithmetic and the feature set both change, which I have written up separately.

Divide one by the other and you get the only number in this article that will decide most purchases:

For a single recruiter running for a year, Manatal Enterprise costs $420 and Breezy Startup costs $1,884. At twelve people on Professional, the order reverses.

The obvious caution: the plans do not contain the same things, so this is a starting point for a decision, not the decision. Scorecards are a good illustration. In Breezy they sit on Growth, at $273 per month annually or $329 monthly. In Manatal they are included in the Enterprise tier that costs $35 a seat. Whether that matters depends entirely on whether you use scorecards.

Two smaller things are worth knowing before you compare the sticker prices.

The billing axes are inverted. Breezy sells seats flat and meters the AI: its AI screening is an add-on you buy credits for, outside the plan. Manatal meters the seats and includes the AI. So the product with the predictable invoice is Breezy if your headcount moves and Manatal if your AI usage moves.

Only one of them has a floor. Breezy has a free Bootstrap plan; Manatal has none. That sounds like a footnote until a trial ends. It also cuts the other way: when I downgraded Breezy to that free plan, the AI screening kept running and kept spending credits with no prompt and no paywall.

And two details that say something about each company’s habits. Breezy asked for a credit card to put an account on a $0 plan; Manatal’s trial asks for no card at all. Breezy prints the trial’s end date on screen — Aug 25, 2026 — while Manatal shows only Free trial 14 days left and never states the date. Manatal’s annual toggle is badged Annually (10% OFF), but the actual discounts are 21%, 10% and 7% depending on tier.

What a CSV can carry into each product

This is where the gap is widest, and it is the gap least visible on a feature page, because both products say they import CSVs and both do.

Breezy will accept a spreadsheet with any number of columns and let you map exactly four of them: name, email, summary and phone. I tested this with a 29-column file — the product’s own full export, fed back into its own importer — and it still offered the same four fields.

Manatal offers 24. Six times as many. Employment status, salary expectations, notice period, nationality, diploma, university, GDPR consent and so on all have a mapping target. If you are migrating from a spreadsheet that people have actually been maintaining, this difference is worth more than any AI feature either product advertises.

It is not clean, though. Candidate Location is not among the 24 importable fields, yet it exists as a column in the candidate list and in the export. So the address you can take out is an address you cannot put back — a point I will come back to.

Manatal also loses one round outright: its importer gives you no way to choose which job or which pipeline stage the imported candidates land in. Breezy lets you pick. For a migration of any size, that is real work you will do by hand afterwards.

Neither product does anything meaningful about duplicates or junk. Both cheerfully accepted rows that no human would call a candidate.

Both products lose something on the round trip

Here is the finding I could not have got from either product alone.

Breezy leaks in both directions: the summary you map on the way in is absent from all 29 export columns, and the headline field that appears in the export has no import target. Manatal leaks in one direction only. That is a genuine point for Manatal, but the shape is the same in both products, and one company doing this is an implementation quirk while two doing it starts to look like how the category is built.

There is a second structural similarity, and it is the one that will actually cost you data.

In both products the export columns are the list’s display columns, and in both products the default selection hides fields you need. Breezy’s column menu has 28 entries; Manatal’s has 52. In each case, what you get in the CSV is whatever is currently ticked in the candidate list.

I want to be blunt about how easy this is to miss: I fell for it three times during this review. Twice in Breezy — once concluding that columns had disappeared, once concluding that the free plan had stripped them — and once in Manatal, where I decided email addresses could not be exported. All three were the same mistake. Nothing had been removed; a checkbox was off.

Manatal’s default is the more surprising of the two. Its ten default columns include Notice Period, Current Salary and Expected Salary — all three of which were empty for all seven of my candidates — while email address, first name and last name are not there at all. The default view is not a selection of the most useful columns. If you export without opening the column editor, you will get a file that looks complete and is missing the fields you came for.

One product saved a wrong number. The other saved none.

Both products read a résumé and tell you how many years of experience the person has. I fed each of them the same two documents.

Read the second row before drawing conclusions. Manatal is not simply the more accurate of the two. It was exactly right once and wrong by four years once — a larger absolute error than either of Breezy’s. Breezy was wrong both times, but wrong by less, and always in the same direction. Two documents is not a benchmark, and I am not presenting it as one.

The difference that survives the small sample is structural, and it is not about accuracy at all.

Breezy’s 14.4 years is a stored value. It is written to the candidate record, it appears in the AI’s prose — “14.4 years total sales experience with 9.7 years in management” — and it comes out in the export. It is wrong, and I could not reproduce it from any arithmetic on the document, but it is durable: I can point at it, quote it, and hand you the file. I wrote about that number separately.

Manatal’s 12 years is not stored anywhere. On the evening of 27 August I exported all seven candidates with all 52 columns switched on. The Years of Experience column is empty for every row. The candidate detail screen shows N/A. And at the same time, on the same account, the AI Recommendations panel displayed 12 years of experience under the candidate’s name.

So the comparison is not “which one gets the number right”. It is:

• Breezy saves a wrong number, and will hand it to you.
• Manatal displays a right number, and keeps no copy of it.

The practical consequence is the same in both products, which is why it belongs in a comparison rather than in either review: do not reject a candidate on the strength of a figure you read on a screen. In one product the figure may be arithmetic nobody can reconstruct. In the other it may not exist five seconds after you close the tab, which also means it will not be there if you ever need to explain the decision.

A name that was not in the document

I uploaded the same generic résumé to Manatal three times, on the same account, minutes apart. Each time, a first name and a surname appeared in the resulting candidate record. Neither is in the document.

I checked that properly before writing it down. The PDF is 2,939 bytes, contains no compressed streams, and carries no author or producer metadata. A raw byte search of the file for either name returns nothing. The name the document does contain is the test name I put there, and that name went into a different field.

All three uploads produced the identical value. That matters, because my first instinct — that I was seeing another account’s data — is not well supported by a value that repeats exactly. I am not going to tell you what caused this, because I do not know. What I can tell you is what the screens and the export file show: a first and last name that is not in the source file arrived in the record, three times, identically.

I am withholding the name itself. It reads like a real person’s name, and I have no way to establish that it is not.

There is a detail here that connects to the section above it. In the candidate list, all three of these records display as No Name — while Candidate First Name and Candidate Last Name in the same rows of the export contain values. The product’s own list is telling you the record has no name, and the record has a name. You cannot see this in the default view, because first and last name are not among the default columns. It took switching all 52 columns on to notice.

Neither product lets you keep the reasoning

Both products score candidates against a job. Both show you something on screen and let you take almost none of it with you — but they are generous and stingy in opposite places, which is worth knowing before you decide which one you can live with.

Breezy shows more on screen. Its ai-score comes with a five-category breakdown — one candidate scored 7.2 overall, from category scores of 7.5, 8.5, 4 and 6.5 — and each category carries a sentence explaining itself. The 4 above was Educational and Formal Qualifications, justified with “No education information or certifications provided”. That sentence is checkable, and in this case it was wrong: the résumé does list a degree, so a parsing miss had turned directly into a deduction. You could only catch that because Breezy showed its work.

Manatal shows less. Its score is a percentage with two badges: 50%, Required: 1/2, Preferred: 0/0. There is no prose at all, and clicking or hovering the score expands nothing. You are told how many boxes were ticked, never which ones or why.

Neither will let you keep any of it. Breezy’s number is exportable — I verified that the 7.2 on screen was the 7.2 in the CSV — but the category scores and the sentences are not among its 29 columns. Manatal exports nothing at all: there is no score, no breakdown and no reasoning anywhere in its 52 columns, which I confirmed by searching the header row. So Breezy gives you the verdict without the argument, and Manatal gives you neither.

Manatal does one thing here that Breezy does not do at all, and it deserves credit. It publishes its threshold in plain language, on the candidate’s own Recommendation tab:

For a job to be recommended it must have more than 2 skills and more than 1 other criteria (e.g. education, title, …) matching. Additionally it must reach a suitability score of at least 15 %.

That is more than most vendors in this category will commit to in writing, and it is more than Breezy discloses anywhere I could find.

Which makes the next thing odd. For the same single pair — one job, one candidate — the two screens disagree. Opened from the job, Manatal’s AI Recommendations lists the candidate at 50%. Opened from that same candidate, the Recommendation tab reads No Jobs found, above the paragraph quoted above. Fifty is comfortably more than fifteen.

I do not know why, and I want to be careful here rather than dramatic: the job-side badge reads Required: 1/2, so it is entirely possible the two screens apply different criteria and both are behaving as designed. What I can report is that a user looking at one screen and a user looking at the other would come away with opposite answers about the same pair.

So the two of them split the honours in a way no feature table would show you. Manatal documents the rule and hides the working. Breezy shows the working — enough of it that I caught a parsing error inside a score — and documents nothing. If you ever have to reconstruct why a candidate was ranked where they were, Breezy will at least hand you the number, and Manatal’s answer lives entirely inside Manatal.

You cannot tell from the screen whether an export worked

This one cost me a working session in each product, in opposite directions, and it is the most practically useful thing in this article.

In Breezy, I clicked export and the screen did nothing at all. No banner, no spinner, no change. I recorded it as broken. It was not: all four attempts had succeeded and four files were sitting in my downloads folder the whole time.

In Manatal, the opposite. I clicked export and got a banner reading “We are working on exporting your candidates in the background”, followed shortly by “Your export of candidates has been successfully completed. Please use the following link to download it here.” No file existed. Manatal’s export is asynchronous, and the completion notice is not the file — you have to click the here link inside the notification, and if the banner has gone, so has your download.

A screen that says “successfully completed” is not evidence that a file exists. In one product the silence was a lie and in the other the confirmation was, and there is no way to tell from inside either product which kind you are looking at.

So: open the file. Every time, before you close the tab. This matters more in Manatal than in Breezy for a reason that has nothing to do with export design — Manatal has no free plan, so when a trial ends there is no reduced tier for your data to fall back to.

So which one should you take?

If you want the short version: Manatal is the better product for getting your existing data in and the better value below roughly ten seats. Breezy is the better product for getting your data back out, and the only one of the two you can still be using next year without paying.

Neither of them can currently tell you, in writing you can keep, why it scored a candidate the way it did.

One thing I cannot answer yet. Manatal’s trial ends on 5 September, and because there is no free plan underneath it, there is no obvious place for an account to land. Whether the data stays readable, stays exportable, or stops being either is the sort of thing vendors do not document and reviewers do not test. I have now written that up: what happened when the trial ended. The product was replaced by a single payment page, and the export went with it.

Disclosure: the Breezy HR and Manatal 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.