A free, open-source Ashby alternative for your first hires
Ashby is a full recruiting suite for teams from startups to enterprises. Binderwork is the tracker a founder needs for the first hires: it's free, and the offer is signed and the new hire's papers are kept in the same place.
What you use in Ashby, in Binderwork
- Job posts and careers page
- Post a job with its pay range, and it's live on your careers page with an apply form.
- Pipeline board
- A board for each job: move candidates by dragging, by a number key, or several at once.
- Candidate emails
- Templates with each candidate's name and job filled in, and ten minutes to undo.
- Offers with e-signature
- The offer letter and the CIIAA go out together; the signed offer makes the hire.
- Retention and data requests
- Every application has a deletion date, and a candidate's request becomes a task.
Side by side
- Price
- Binderwork$0, every feature
- Ashby$400 a month for companies up to 100 people, 10% off on annual terms; larger plans by quote
- Careers page, apply form and a pipeline board
- BinderworkYes
- AshbyYes
- Listings on LinkedIn, Indeed and Google Jobs
- BinderworkGoogle Jobs; text and links to paste on the rest
- AshbyYes, posted for you
- Interview scheduling
- BinderworkYour own booking link in the email
- AshbyBuilt in, with self-booking and panels
- Sourcing, candidate search and outreach sequences
- BinderworkNo
- AshbyYes
- Offer letters with e-signature
- BinderworkYes, signed in Binderwork
- AshbyYes, through Dropbox Sign or DocuSign
- CIIAAs, pay changes and departure letters after the hire
- BinderworkYes, on Team
- AshbyThrough its HR system integrations
- Open source and self-hostable
- BinderworkYes, AGPL-3.0
- AshbyNo
Where Ashby is better
- Sourcing and a candidate CRM: candidate search, outreach sequences, referrals and a hosted job board.
- Scheduling built in: self-booking on interviewers' calendars, interviewer pools and debriefs.
- Reports across the whole hiring funnel, with dashboards and alerts in Slack or email.
- More than 250 integrations, and listings posted for you on LinkedIn, Indeed and Google Jobs.
- Built to grow from a startup to thousands of employees, with approvals and custom roles on its larger plans.
Where Binderwork is different
- Free with no seats and no plans by company size, so your first hires cost nothing to track.
- The offer is signed here, the hire becomes a person on Team, and equity promised in the offer stays on the cap table until it's granted.
- After the hire, the CIIAA, pay and title changes and departure letters come from your own templates, checked word for word.
- Ask ChatGPT or Claude where hiring stands or to email a candidate; anything that reaches a candidate waits for your approval. AI never scores, ranks or rejects anyone.
Moving from Ashby
- Keep Ashby for tracking if you like it: connect it in Hiring's settings with an Ashby API key, and its offers waiting for the candidate appear under Offers from Ashby, ready to sign in Binderwork. The connection was built from Ashby's published API and hasn't been tried against a live account yet.
- To move over, export candidates as a CSV from an Ashby report and use Import candidates on each job. Résumés don't come across in the export.
- Post each job with Post a job; Post it elsewhere gives its text and links for LinkedIn, Indeed, Wellfound and Work at a Startup.
- Upload your offer letter and CIIAA as Word files under Team, Letter templates, so Send hiring papers fills in both.
Ashby's prices and features from Ashby's pricing page, Pin, Ashby pricing (2026) and Ashby's docs on e-signature offers, checked on Oct 7, 2026. Prices change, so check Ashby's own page. Ashby is a trademark of Ashby, Inc., which has no connection with Binderwork.