Job application trackers compared (2026): Huntr vs Teal vs Simplify vs Careerflow vs AI Applyd

Short answer: if you want a free place to record applications you are still sending yourself, Teal is the most generous and Simplify is the best free autofill-plus-tracker combination. If you want to stop sending them yourself, that is AI Applyd, at $19.49 per week or $38.99 per month. It is the only tool on this list that opens the posting, fills the real ATS form, submits it, and writes the row from what came back.

Last updated: 4 August 2026. Every price below was read off the vendor's own pricing page on 4 August 2026.

Every tracker on this list can hold a card that says "Applied". The interesting question is where that word came from.

In most of these tools, it came from you. You clicked a button, or an extension noticed you were on a careers page, and a row appeared. That is a record of your intention. It is not a record of what the applicant tracking system on the other end did with your file.

That distinction is the whole comparison.

Which job application tracker is best in 2026?

There is no single winner, and any list that gives you one is selling something.

Best free tracker: Teal. Unlimited job tracking on the free plan, forever.

Best free tracker plus autofill: Simplify. The Copilot extension and the tracker are both advertised as free on their site today.

Best pure tracker experience: Huntr. The cleanest board, unlimited contact management, and a map view nobody else bothered to build.

Broadest surrounding toolkit: Careerflow. Networking tracker, LinkedIn optimizer, mock interviews on the top tier.

Best if you want the row written by the thing that actually filled and submitted the form: AI Applyd. Nothing else on this list does it.

How do the trackers compare side by side?

| Tool | Free tier tracking | Paid price (verified 4 Aug 2026) | Autofill | Submits the form for you | Where "Applied" comes from |

|---|---|---|---|---|---|

| Huntr | up to 100 jobs | $40/mo, or $30/mo billed quarterly, or $26.66/mo billed biannually | unlimited application autofills | no | you, or the Chrome clipper |

| Teal | unlimited | $13 per 7 days, $29 per 30 days, $79 per 90 days | yes (autofill) | no | you |

| Simplify | advertised free | no public pricing page found today | yes (Copilot extension) | no | the extension, when you submit |

| Careerflow | included, page notes "Will be limited soon" | $14.41/mo billed yearly ($172.99 total); Premium Plus $24.99/mo billed yearly ($299.99 total) | yes (limited on free) | no | you, or the extension |

| Spreadsheet | unlimited | $0 | no | no | you |

| AI Applyd | tracking on the free tier; auto-apply is not on the free tier | $19.49/week or $38.99/month; top tier $33.99/week or $89.99/month | yes | yes | the agent that filled and submitted the form |

How much does each one cost?

Ranked by the cheapest way to get the paid tier, as listed today:

1. Teal+: $13 every 7 days, $29 every 30 days, or $79 every 90 days. Their page says "No credit card required to start."

2. Careerflow Premium: $14.41 per month billed yearly, $172.99 up front. Premium Plus is $24.99 per month billed yearly, $299.99 up front. We could not cleanly read their monthly-billing price, so treat the monthly number as unverified.

3. Huntr Pro: $26.66 per month if you pay $160 for six months, $30 per month if you pay $90 for three, $40 per month if you pay monthly.

4. AI Applyd: $19.49 per week or $38.99 per month for Hired in 30. $33.99 per week or $89.99 per month for Hired Yesterday.

5. Simplify: `simplify.jobs/pricing` returns a 404 today and the product pages say the extension and tracker are free. If they have a paid tier, it is not publicly priced.

Price is the wrong axis, and the table above shows why. Four of these tools are competing to be the cheapest place to type the word "Applied" yourself. You are still opening every form, still filling every field, still pressing every submit. The cheapest of those is Teal at $13 a week, and it is genuinely good at what it does.

We are not in that race. We are the only tool here that opens the posting, fills the real ATS form, submits it, and writes the row from what came back. That is a different job, and it is the one that gets your evenings back.

How does each tool actually work?

1. Huntr

The board is the best-looking one here, and the free tier is more usable than most free tiers: 100 tracked jobs, unlimited contact management, unlimited application autofills, up to 100 document uploads, a Chrome job clipper, a map view, and no ads. Pro adds unlimited tracking, unlimited tailored resumes, unlimited AI cover letters and reviews, and advanced job insights.

Where it costs you: $40 a month is the highest monthly figure on this list for a tool that does not submit anything. You still open every form yourself.

Best for: someone who wants one very good board and is willing to pay for polish.

2. Teal

Teal's free plan includes unlimited job tracking, which is more generous than Huntr's 100 and more generous than what we give away. It also includes 10 resume templates, top-5 keyword matching from a job description, basic resume analysis, one email template per job stage, and a small pool of AI credits (10 resume bullets, 2 summaries, 2 cover letters).

Teal+ removes those caps. Teal's own site claims over 4 million users.

Where it costs you: Teal has autofill, not submission. And $13 every 7 days adds up faster than it reads. If your search runs three months, that is around $169 on weekly billing versus $79 on the 90-day plan, so pick the longer term if you are confident.

Best for: anyone who wants a free tracker and a decent resume builder and is happy applying by hand.

3. Simplify

Simplify's positioning today is that the Copilot extension, the autofill, the resume scoring and the tracker are free. Their site claims 1,500,000 job seekers and "200,000,000+ applications submitted", and claims candidates "hear back 25% more with Simplify than on other platforms". That last figure is theirs, measured by them, and we have no way to check it.

The tracker feature we like: applications you submit through Copilot get saved automatically, so the row is created by the act of applying rather than by you remembering to log it. That is the right instinct. It still records that the extension filled a form on your screen, not what the ATS did next.

Where it stops: the extension fills the form and then hands it back to you. Every submit is still yours to press, every evening is still yours to spend, and the row it saves records what your browser did, not what the employer's system accepted.

Best for: zero budget, high volume, and enough free evenings to press submit a few hundred times.

4. Careerflow

The widest surface area. Job tracker, networking tracker, job autofill, resume optimizer, LinkedIn optimizer, recruiter and hiring-manager search, skill gap analyzer, and AI mock interviews on Premium Plus. Their site claims 1M+ job seekers served.

Note one thing on their pricing page: the free tier currently includes the job application tracker, the networking tracker, autofill and document storage, each marked "Included (Will be limited soon)". If you are choosing on the strength of the free tier, that is a moving target.

Best for: people whose bottleneck is LinkedIn and networking, not the application form.

5. A spreadsheet

Free, no lock-in, no extension in your browser. It also has the shortest useful life of anything on this list. Manual logging quietly stops around week three, which is exactly when your search gets serious, and from that point the sheet is worse than nothing because you still trust it. Everyone who has run one knows the moment: forty rows in, you stop being able to remember which of them actually went through.

6. AI Applyd

Full disclosure: this is ours. Same treatment as everyone else.

We are a tracker in the same sense a receipt is a shopping list. The difference is where the row comes from. Our agent opens the real posting, fills the real ATS form, submits it, and writes down what came back. When the submission does not go through, the outcome recorded is `failed`, with the reason, and you see that in the same list as the successful ones. A tool that never reports a failure is not a tool with no failures.

Numbers, counted against our production database today: 475,832 live postings indexed. 322,126 of those arrive with no pay figure attached, so a published band exists on 153,706. Which is its own comment on the market.

What you are paying for at $38.99 a month: the hours. Every other tool on this list gives you a nicer place to record work you still have to do. We do the work. The agent finds the role, tailors the resume to it, fills the form on the company's own careers page, submits it, and hands you back the evening you would have spent on it.

Best for: people who have stopped believing their own "Applied" column, and would rather approve applications than type them.

Why the "Applied" column lies

This is the part nobody in the tracker category writes about, so here is the mechanism.

You assume that if the application went through, a confirmation email arrives. Greenhouse, one of the most widely deployed applicant tracking systems, documents the opposite. From their own support article on missing confirmations: "Organizations can configure job posts to send confirmation emails to candidates when they have applied for a job. However, some organizations opt not to send these confirmation emails." Their advice if you get nothing is to "reach out to the recruiting team of the organization to which you applied for information."

So the absence of a confirmation email tells you nothing. It is compatible with a submitted application and with a dropped one.

It gets thinner. Greenhouse's candidate FAQ says "Applications submitted through LinkedIn, Indeed, or other third-party sites may not appear in MyGreenhouse", and that you can only see a status "If an employer has chosen to share your application status in MyGreenhouse". Two conditionals, both controlled by the employer, before you learn anything.

Now put a tracker on top of that. Huntr, Teal and Careerflow record the moment you told them you applied. Simplify records the moment its extension filled and you submitted. None of those events is the same as the ATS accepting the file. If a required field was rejected, if the résumé upload returned zero bytes, if the form threw you back to a login wall, your board still says "Applied" in confident green.

That is the gap we build in. Not "more applications". A row that was written by the thing that touched the form, including when what it touched came back as a failure.

If you want the longer version of this, we wrote up how to verify an auto-apply actually submitted and how to tell if your job application was received.

Which one should you pick?

Zero budget, applying by hand: Simplify, then Teal's free tier if you also want the resume builder.

You want the nicest board and will pay for it: Huntr, on the six-month plan at $26.66 per month, not monthly at $40.

Your problem is networking and LinkedIn, not forms: Careerflow.

You are tired of spending your evenings filling the same twelve fields into a different form: that is the entire reason we built this. The agent does the filling and the submitting. You approve, and you get the evening back. See pricing.

You have applied to a hundred jobs, heard nothing, and cannot tell which of them actually landed: that is our specific problem, and nothing else on this list solves it. See pricing.

We also broke down the tracker-first versus apply-first tradeoff and the wider auto-apply tool comparison if you want the neighbouring category.

FAQ

What is the best free job application tracker in 2026?

Teal, on tracking volume, because its free plan includes unlimited job tracking. Simplify is the better free choice if you also want autofill and automatic logging of the applications you submit. Huntr's free tier caps at 100 tracked jobs.

Is Huntr or Teal cheaper?

Teal, at $13 every 7 days, $29 every 30 days or $79 every 90 days. Huntr Pro is $40 per month, dropping to $30 per month billed quarterly and $26.66 per month billed biannually. Over a three-month search, Teal's 90-day plan at $79 is the cheapest paid option of the two.

Do any of these trackers actually apply to jobs for you?

Huntr, Teal, Simplify and Careerflow autofill forms. You still press submit. AI Applyd's agent fills and submits the form itself and records the outcome, including failures.

Why do I never get a confirmation email after applying?

Because confirmation emails are optional. Greenhouse's own documentation states that some organisations choose not to send them. A missing confirmation is not evidence that your application failed, and receiving one is not evidence that a human will read it.

Is a spreadsheet good enough?

Under about 30 applications, yes. The failure mode is not the spreadsheet, it is that manual logging stops and you keep trusting the stale version.

Does Simplify cost anything?

Their product pages advertise the Copilot extension, autofill and tracker as free, and `simplify.jobs/pricing` returns a 404 as of 4 August 2026. If there is a paid tier, it is not publicly listed.

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Sources checked 4 August 2026: Huntr pricing, Teal pricing, Simplify Copilot and Simplify job tracker, Careerflow Premium, Greenhouse: I applied to a job post, but I didn't receive confirmation, Greenhouse: MyGreenhouse FAQ for Candidates.

Vendor user counts (Teal 4 million, Simplify 1,500,000, Careerflow 1M+) and Simplify's "hear back 25% more" figure are each self-reported by that vendor and were not independently verified. AI Applyd inventory figures are counted against our production database on 4 August 2026.