You have narrowed the sourcing tool decision to two names, and until this year both of them hid their prices behind a sales call. Both now publish an entry seat, and the answer that changed is which one is cheaper to try. SeekOut and hireEZ show up on the same shortlists, get compared in the same Reddit threads, and pull candidate data from a lot of the same places. So the real question is not which one is better. It is which one fits the roles you hire, the way you buy, and the budget you actually have.
This is a neutral read, not a pitch for either. The pricing comes from procurement data and buyers who signed in 2025 and 2026, not from the vendors' own marketing. At the end there is an honest note about what neither tool does well, and a lighter third option worth knowing about. If you are still mapping the whole field, our guide to LinkedIn Recruiter alternatives lines both of these up against the rest.
The short answer
SeekOut is the deeper platform, and it is now also the cheaper way in. A self-serve Recruit Core seat is $149 a month billed annually, or $179 month to month, with a 14-day trial that does not ask for a card. Above that seat it reaches technical and hard-to-find talent other tools miss (GitHub, patents, publications), has the strongest diversity and compliance reporting in the category, and charges enterprise prices for it: roughly $10,000 to $30,000 per seat per year on annual contracts.
hireEZ leans on automation rather than depth. It sources across 40-plus open-web sources, pushes hard into outbound automation and agentic AI, and publishes one price: a solo seat at $494 a month, with the median real contract landing near $13,000 a year. Everything above that seat behaves like a negotiated enterprise deal.
If your hiring is technical, regulated, or diversity-mandated, SeekOut usually earns its premium. If your bottleneck is outbound volume and cadence, hireEZ is built for that. What is no longer true is that hireEZ is the cheaper entry: like for like on monthly billing, its seat is 2.8 times SeekOut's. The rest of this article is the detail behind that split.
Pricing, side by side
Both companies now publish a self-serve entry price, and neither publishes what a team actually pays, so the contract figures below come from third-party procurement data and signed deals.
SeekOut now sells one seat self-serve and quotes the rest. Recruit Core is $149 a month billed annually, which is $1,788 for the year, or $179 month to month, and the three tiers above it are annual and custom. The $833 a month figure that still circulates for SeekOut is not on its pricing page. Real transactional data covers the quoted tiers: the procurement marketplace Vendr and MindHunt AI's 2026 review both put the realistic band at $10,000 to $30,000 per seat per year, and JuiceBox's contract analysis puts the average customer around $27,000, with enterprise deals running past $90,000. We broke the full picture down in SeekOut pricing in 2026.
hireEZ no longer starts lower. Its published solo seat is $494 a month, and the Starter and Professional tiers at $169 and $199 that circulate in third-party roundups appear on no hireEZ page. Vendr's dataset puts the median hireEZ contract at $13,000 a year, with a normal range of $6,600 to $25,000. The full breakdown, including the implementation and credit-overage fees that inflate the sticker, is in hireEZ pricing in 2026.
The practical read has flipped at the entry and held at the top. SeekOut is now cheaper to try, at $149 a month against $494. At team scale SeekOut still sits higher and climbs fastest, with contracts in the $10,000 to $30,000 band against a $13,000 hireEZ median. Both raise prices at renewal, and both negotiate, so a competitor quote in hand is worth real money on either contract.
The full comparison
| Dimension | SeekOut | hireEZ |
|---|---|---|
| Starting price | $149/seat/mo on annual billing (Recruit Core), $179 monthly; quoted tiers $10K–$30K/seat/yr | $494/seat/mo (Solo), published; median contract ~$13K/yr |
| Billing | Recruit Core annual or monthly; the tiers above it annual only | Solo monthly; annual above it |
| Profile reach | ~1B profiles, deep public web (GitHub, patents, publications) | 800M+ profiles across 40+ open-web sources |
| Core strength | Technical depth + diversity/compliance reporting | Outbound automation + multi-channel sequencing |
| AI | Agentic sourcing (added 2026) on top of the database; scorecard-based matching | Agentic AI embedded across sourcing, outreach, and screening |
| Diversity / compliance | Best-in-class DEI filters (OFCCP/EEOC reporting) | Available, less depth than SeekOut |
| Outreach | Mostly automated email campaigns | Multi-touch email, SMS, and InMail from inside the tool |
| Free trial | 14 days on Recruit Core, no card required | 7 days on the Solo plan |
| Best for | Enterprise, technical, regulated, or diversity-mandated hiring | Mid-market outbound sourcing at volume |
Where SeekOut pulls ahead
SeekOut's advantage is depth. It reaches candidates other tools cannot see because it reads public signal beyond a resume: GitHub contribution patterns, patent inventors, conference paper authors. For roles that live in that data, a machine-learning engineer with a specific publication record, a security researcher, a niche infrastructure specialist, that depth is the whole reason to pay the price.
The second advantage is compliance. SeekOut's diversity and DEI filters are widely cited as the strongest in the category, which is why federal contractors and enterprises with OFCCP or EEOC reporting requirements pay enterprise rates for it. No other sourcing platform matches that reporting depth today. If you are under that regulatory pressure, this is not a nice-to-have, it is the reason to buy.
The tradeoff is that you pay for all of it whether you use it or not. A recruiter with no diversity mandate and no patent-depth roles is buying capability that sits idle while the invoice stays the same.
Where hireEZ pulls ahead
hireEZ's advantage is speed and reach at a lower entry price. It aggregates across 40-plus sources and, more importantly, puts multi-channel outreach inside the platform: email, SMS, and InMail sequences that run without a second tool. For a team whose bottleneck is "we find people but lose them in slow, manual follow-up," that automation is the point.
It also embeds agentic AI across the workflow rather than bolting it onto search alone. The agents assist with sequencing and candidate engagement end to end, which fits high-volume outbound better than SeekOut's more search-centric design. What the published seat no longer does is get a small team in cheaply: $494 a month is $5,928 a year for one seat, so the entry saving that used to be hireEZ's argument has gone.
The tradeoff is depth. hireEZ is built for reach and cadence, not for the deep-technical or compliance-heavy searches where SeekOut earns its keep. One note on names: hireEZ was called Hiretual until early 2022, so older reviews under that name describe the same product.
The honest part: the raw data is mostly the same
Here is what neither vendor leads with. As one recruiter put it bluntly in an r/recruiting thread comparing the two, "they all get their email and phone numbers from the same sources." That is largely true. SeekOut, hireEZ, and most of the category enrich contact data from an overlapping set of public and third-party providers. The list of names you can pull is not where these tools actually differ.
Where they differ is what they do on top of that data: SeekOut on depth and compliance, hireEZ on outreach and speed. Which means the buying decision is less about "who has the candidates" and more about which layer of intelligence and workflow matches how you actually hire. That reframing matters for the third option below, because it competes on exactly that layer, not on the size of the database.
A third option worth a look: Glozo
If the reason you are comparing SeekOut and hireEZ is that both feel like heavy, annual, custom-quote commitments for what you actually do, it is worth putting a lighter tool next to them.
Glozo is a talent intelligence platform built around intent-based search rather than keyword matching. Instead of a bigger database, it competes on the intelligence layer: a matching summary built from a Skill Graph that weights candidates against what the role actually needs, a Market Compensation Estimate that puts a live salary range on each person, and an "Open to Offers" signal that surfaces who is likely to be receptive before you spend a credit. It runs on 10M+ market signals a month, and pricing is transparent and usage-based rather than a five-figure annual lock-in.
The honest framing: Glozo is a newer product with less brand recognition than SeekOut, and it does not try to match SeekOut's compliance reporting or hireEZ's full outbound-automation suite. What it does is close the gap that both leave open for a lot of desks, finding the right people when their titles do not match your search string, and not burning reveals on candidates who are out of budget or not moving. For solo recruiters and agencies especially, that combination at a transparent price is the case for a look.
How to choose
Pick SeekOut if your hiring is technical, regulated, or diversity-mandated, you have a per-seat tooling budget in the $20,000 range, and you can commit to a 12-month contract. The depth and compliance reporting are what you are paying for, so make sure you will actually use them.
Pick hireEZ if your bottleneck is outbound volume, you want multi-channel sequencing inside one tool, and you are mid-market rather than enterprise. Start on the trial, load enough credits to run one real campaign end to end, and confirm the automation converts before you sign annual.
Look at a lighter tool like Glozo if both feel like too much commitment for your actual sourcing, or if your real problem is missing good people to a synonym gap and wasting reveals on the wrong ones. Before any of these, get an actual quote and run a short pilot. The difference between "this feels expensive" and a real number in front of you is the difference between debating and deciding. For the wider category, see our guide to the best AI sourcing agents and AI recruiting tools by category. For other head-to-head picks, see SeekOut vs Gem and Loxo vs hireEZ.