Pin's 2026 ATS Market Share Report Finds No System Above 16.5% Among Recruiting Teams

Pin, an AI sourcing platform, published a free ATS market share report on July 20, 2026, authored by Conor Kline, measuring which applicant tracking systems recruiting teams actually connect to. Rather than surveying buyers or modeling vendor revenue, Pin counted live integrations across 600+ recruiting teams on its own platform as of June 2026. The report positions itself as an open alternative to paid analyst research and says the underlying index will refresh quarterly. Pin says every figure reflects observed connections rather than self-reported or extrapolated data.

Which ATS Has the Most Market Share, According to Pin?

Pin found 23 distinct systems in use with no single platform above 16.5% of connections, and the top four holding 58.7% combined. Ashby led the named systems at 15.6%, followed by Crelate at 13.6%, Bullhorn at 6.0%, and Greenhouse at 5.2%. Two agency-focused recruiting CRMs holding 16.5% and 13.0% were reported only as a combined 29.5% line, unnamed. Pin calculated a Herfindahl-Hirschman Index near 1,000, below the 1,500 threshold economists use to define an unconcentrated market, and noted every team in the dataset runs exactly one ATS.

How Does Recruiting Team Size Change ATS Choice?

The size-band finding is the report’s most substantive contribution. Pin observed that Ashby’s share more than triples from 8.4% among solo recruiters to 27.0% at teams with six or more seats. Bullhorn climbs from 3.0% to 17.6% across the same bands and Greenhouse from 3.4% to 12.2%, while the two unnamed agency CRMs move the opposite way, falling from a combined 36.3% of solo teams to 14.9% of larger ones. Pin’s reading is that headcount, not industry, predicts ATS selection.

How Does This Compare to the Fortune 500 ATS Market?

The contrast is stark and the report treats it as the central insight. Citing Jobscan’s 2025 data, Pin notes that 97.8% of Fortune 500 companies run a detectable ATS, with Workday above 39% of installs and SAP SuccessFactors second at 13.2%, meaning two vendors hold 52.4% of that segment. Across Jobscan’s broader 12,000-company dataset the ordering inverts, with Greenhouse leading at 19.3%, Lever at 16.6%, and Workday falling to 15.9%. Pin’s conclusion is that “most popular ATS” is unanswerable without specifying the segment.

Why Do ATS Market Size Estimates Disagree So Widely?

Pin devoted a section to the unreliability of published market sizing, noting that Apps Run The World valued the ATS software market at $2.5 billion while Fortune Business Insights put a comparable year at $17.22 billion, a 6.9x divergence between reports that each cost four figures. The spread reflects definitional choices about whether to count standalone ATS revenue, bundled HCM recruiting modules, or total recruitment software spend. Pin also observed that most sizing research is built from vendor disclosures and surveys rather than observed installations.

What Are the Limits of Pin’s Methodology?

Three things constrain how far the findings travel, and Pin discloses all of them. The sample is Pin’s own customer base, which skews toward agency, staffing, and sourcing-led teams, so this measures share among that population rather than the market overall. Roughly 65.7% of connections are agency and staffing CRMs against 25.0% in-house corporate systems. And the top-ranked system plus the third-ranked system are both unnamed, which means the single largest share block in the index cannot be independently verified or acted on by a buyer.

Where Does Greenhouse Sit in This Data?

Pin’s own report flags that Greenhouse’s 5.2% understates its footprint, attributing the gap to sample composition rather than market position. Greenhouse’s concentration is mid-market and enterprise in-house hiring, a population thinly represented in an agency-heavy, sourcing-first dataset, and its share in Pin’s data rises to 12.2% at teams with six or more seats. In Jobscan’s broader 12,000-company census, Greenhouse ranks first at 19.3%. The company reports more than 7,500 customers and swept G2’s Winter 2026 ATS rankings.

What Should Buyers Take From It?

Pin’s practical advice is to match the segment before weighing any percentage, to ask vendors what share of customers signed in the trailing twelve months rather than relying on installed base, and to weight integration depth heavily given that fewer than half of companies report satisfaction with their current ATS. Worth noting that the report concludes by positioning Pin’s own product as the sourcing layer above whichever ATS a team selects. It is useful research and it is also marketing; both readings are correct.