Hirestack and Greenhouse / BambooHR solve the same problem from opposite directions: one is source-available software you can own outright for $49, the other is a subscription at $100s/mo run entirely on someone else's servers.
Head to head
| Hirestack | Greenhouse / BambooHR | |
|---|---|---|
| Price | $49 once | $100s/mo |
| Careers page + application form | Yes | Yes |
| Kanban pipeline | Yes | Yes |
| Resume storage | Yes (your disk) | Their cloud |
| Interview scorecards | Yes (simple rubric) | Yes (more complex) |
| Approval chains, HRIS, payroll | No | Yes |
| Candidate data ownership | Yes (SQLite file you can cp) | Vendor export |
| Self-hosted / offline | Yes | No |
What Hirestack does well
- Job postings — Title, description, location and type; each gets a clean public URL the moment you publish.
- Public careers page — Auto-generated at /careers, brandable, server-rendered and fully HTML-escaped.
- Application form — Name, email, phone, cover letter and a resume upload with a 10MB cap and file-type validation.
- Pipeline kanban — Drag candidate cards between applied, screening, interview, offer, hired and rejected.
What Greenhouse / BambooHR still does better
There's a real reason Greenhouse / BambooHR costs what it does: a bigger team, broader integrations and dedicated support behind it. If that ecosystem is genuinely what you need, it's worth paying for.
Which one should you pick
If your workflow depends on Greenhouse / BambooHR's specific integrations or you'd rather not run anything yourself, stay put — that's a legitimate call. If you're comfortable owning the tool and want to stop paying $100s/mo for a job your own hardware can do, Hirestack pays for itself and then some: one month of a big-name ATS add-on buys Hirestack outright, contract-free.
Try Hirestack — $49, once
Self-hosted ATS: careers page, kanban pipeline and resumes stored on your own disk.