Head to head · Recruiting candidates · October 2026 research run

Greenhouse vs SmartRecruiters

Greenhouse scores 64.8 (B) on agent readiness against SmartRecruiters's 60.4 (C), and leads in 4 of 7 scored categories. SmartRecruiters leads on reliability and payments & pricing. Both do recruiting candidates.

Which one, for what

Greenhouse B

Good for An agent working inside a company that already runs hiring on Greenhouse and needs to read pipelines, move applications, schedule interviews or draft offer records under scoped OAuth.

Ahead on

  • Agent ergonomics, 63 against 51
  • Security & auth, 85 against 65
  • Maintenance & community, 65 against 58

Watch for

No public price, free tier or trial. Pricing is customised through sales, and the sandbox is a Pro-tier feature

SmartRecruiters C

Good for An agent working inside a company that already runs SmartRecruiters, for reading jobs and candidates, adding candidates, moving applications between stages, creating interviews and pulling reports.

Ahead on

  • Reliability, 78 against 71
  • Payments & pricing, 8 against 0

Watch for

No free tier, trial or self-serve signup found. The Essential plan starts at $14,995 and the other three plans are quoted on request

Score by category

CategoryWeight this runGreenhouseSmartRecruitersEdge
Reliability16%207178SmartRecruiters +7
Performance10%pendingpendingpendingnot scored in this run
Schema & documentation13%16.27975Greenhouse +4
Agent ergonomics13%16.26351Greenhouse +12
Security & auth14%17.58565Greenhouse +20
Payments & pricing10%12.508SmartRecruiters +8
Task success10%pendingpendingpendingnot scored in this run
Maintenance & community7%8.86558Greenhouse +7
Transparency & trust7%8.87979even
Negative events≤1500
Total64.8 · B60.4 · C

Facts side by side

FactGreenhouseSmartRecruiters
KindHTTP APIHTTP API
VendorGreenhouse Software, Inc.SmartRecruiters, Inc. (an SAP company)
Hosted endpointhttps://harvest.greenhouse.io/v3https://api.smartrecruiters.com
TransportsHTTPHTTP
AuthOAuthOAuth or key
PricingPaidPaid
x402nono
LicenceProprietary service under Greenhouse's Master Subscription Agreement. The docs repository for the older APIs on GitHub is Apache-2.0Proprietary service under the SmartRecruiters Master Subscription Agreement
Read-only variant documentednono
llms.txtyesyes
Last release2026-10-072026-10-05
Terms last updated2026-02-01no date given
Privacy policy last updated2026-05-28no date given
Customer content may train modelsyesnot found in the text
Terms restrict automated accessnot found in the textyes
Terms restrict benchmarkingyesyes
Terms or service can change without noticenot found in the textnot found in the text
Arbitration or class-action waivernot found in the textnot found in the text

Verdicts

Greenhouse

Harvest v3 pairs per-endpoint OAuth scopes with Markdown docs that embed an OpenAPI 3.1 definition for each call, and the beta MCP server blocks every DELETE. Access needs a paying customer account, with no public price, trial or self-serve sandbox, and no numeric rate limit or idempotency key was found in the reviewed documentation.

SmartRecruiters

OAuth client credentials limited by 49 scopes, a system role and an access group, with per-operation OpenAPI definitions, llms.txt and a dated changelog. Access needs a paid SmartRecruiters account, with the lowest plan starting at $14,995, and no free tier, official SDK or idempotency key was found.

Before you call either

Greenhouse

  1. Request a token from https://auth.greenhouse.io/token with client credentials, then send it as a Bearer token to https://harvest.greenhouse.io/v3. Tokens expire, so repeat on 401
  2. Put filters and per_page on the first list request only. A cursor must be the only query parameter, or the call returns 422
  3. Send the current stage as from_stage_id when moving an application. It guards against stale moves. Other writes have no idempotency key, so check before retrying
  4. Read X-RateLimit-Remaining on every response and wait for Retry-After on 429. The window is 30 seconds
  5. Expect empty list results or 403 unless the token's user is a Site Admin with the needed permissions

SmartRecruiters

  1. Ask the customer's admin for an OAuth client ID with only the scopes needed. An API key reads and writes all company data and never expires
  2. Exchange the client ID and secret at https://api.smartrecruiters.com/identity/oauth/token and refresh every 30 minutes
  3. Stay under 10 requests a second and 8 concurrent. GET /candidates allows 1 concurrent request, and job publication 2 a second
  4. Move a candidate with PUT /candidates/{id}/jobs/{jobId}/status. The variants without jobId act on the most recently updated application
  5. Page with limit (maximum 100, default 10) and pageId from nextPageId. Use the Reporting API for bulk reads, which returns CSV

Questions

Which is better for AI agents, Greenhouse or SmartRecruiters?

Greenhouse scores 64.8 (B) on agent readiness against SmartRecruiters's 60.4 (C), and leads in 4 of 7 scored categories. SmartRecruiters leads on reliability and payments & pricing.

Do Greenhouse and SmartRecruiters need an API key?

Greenhouse uses an OAuth sign-in. SmartRecruiters takes an API key or an OAuth sign-in.

Can an agent call Greenhouse and SmartRecruiters without installing anything?

Yes. Greenhouse has a hosted endpoint at https://harvest.greenhouse.io/v3 and SmartRecruiters at https://api.smartrecruiters.com.

Other comparisons with Greenhouse or SmartRecruiters

Machine-readable

For companies

Do agents find, use and choose your tools?

An agent-readiness audit runs our probes, task suite and eight reviewer agents against your public and internal tools, and comes back with a scorecard, the transcripts of what failed, and a fix list in priority order. From $2,500, re-run included. We never take payment to move a rank. We do help companies earn one.