Compared on outreach and data quality, not on headline price

Recruit CRM's compiled pricing is $85 Pro, $125 Business and $165 Enterprise per user per month, with AI available from Pro. Surhires's provisional pricing is $39 Starter, $49 Professional and $99 Enterprise, with annual billing at $32, $41 and $82, a three-seat minimum and a fourteen-day trial with no credit card. Enterprise also carries a $2,000 per month platform fee.

A price gap of this size usually means the packages are not equivalent, and often they are not. Starter at $39 is capped at five hundred candidates, carries one job board connector and manual resume upload only. The plan that compares fairly with a Pro tier is Professional at $49, which carries AI matching with one hundred credits per user per month, resume parsing, bulk import, duplicate detection and the full WhatsApp Business API.

Surhires pricing is provisional pending buyer validation, and that label stays on the pricing page until buyers have validated it. A price that might move is more honest than a price that quietly moves.

Surhires ships WhatsApp Business API messaging as a first-class channel rather than a bolt-on: templates, opt-in capture, and every message written to the candidate activity stream so a desk handover does not lose the conversation. For agencies working the UK, India, Europe, Latin America or the Gulf, that is where candidate replies actually happen.

Email cadences and general candidate communication are shipping and being extended. Candidate nurture sequences are in build for Wave 1. Multi-channel sequencing that runs email, WhatsApp and SMS inside one flow with shared suppression is planned, not live. If you need a single orchestrated multi-channel sequence today, neither our roadmap nor a demo should be read as a yes.

The Outreach Personaliser and Reply Handler agents are live. The first drafts from a candidate's actual history rather than merge fields; the second classifies inbound replies and moves the record or raises a task, which is the part that stops a good cadence from drowning a recruiter in triage.

Every agency database degrades the same way. The same person arrives from a job board, a LinkedIn export, a referral and a colleague's spreadsheet, and eighteen months later a search returns four versions of one candidate with the notes split across all four. Deduplication is not a feature buyers get excited about until the first time it costs them a placement.

Surhires matches in layers. Exact matches on a normalised email address or a phone number reduced to E.164 are treated as near-certain. Below that, a fuzzy comparison of name variants, current and previous employer, education and a shingled fingerprint of the resume text produces a confidence score, and the merge is proposed rather than performed silently. Detection runs during an import, not as a clean-up job afterwards.

This is marked as shipping and being extended rather than finished. Bulk merge tooling and cross-tenant rules are part of the extension work, and the feature page says so.

Surhires is not an HRIS, a payroll system, a background-check provider or an assessment platform. Background screening, testing and e-signature run through integrations. There is no pay-and-bill module and none is planned for Wave 1. Placement invoicing raises the first invoice against a placement and is not a billing engine for a large contractor book.

On the AI side, ten of the twelve named agents are live. The AI Notetaker and the AI Sourcing Agent are planned and are written in the future tense on every page that mentions them. Talent pools, the client portal, consent and retention tooling, the Chrome extension and structured data import are in build for Wave 1 rather than shipping today.

We publish that list because a comparison page that only lists strengths is a sales document. Anything you cannot verify in a trial should be treated as a claim, on this site or any other.

If you are already on Recruit CRM and it is working, stay. It is a mature product with a straightforward price ladder, a long record of steady releases and a user base that generally likes it. Migration always costs more than the licence difference, and the first six weeks after a move are the least productive weeks a desk will have that year.

It is also the safer choice if you want a longer operating history behind the vendor before you commit your database to it, or if your buying process requires references from firms that have run the product for several years. Surhires is early, and no amount of copy changes that.

Surhires is the better fit if WhatsApp-native candidate communication matters to how your desk actually works, if a three-seat minimum and a lower per-seat price change what you can afford across the team, or if you want a vendor that publishes what is not built yet.