Free vs Pro
A feature-by-feature comparison of free Vakanssi and Vakanssi Pro, how the two builds differ, how Pro reaches your site, and what happens to Pro data if a licence ends.
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The free plugin is a complete applicant tracking system, not a trial. It posts jobs, runs your careers page, collects applications with protected CV storage, moves candidates through your hiring stages on the Applications board, schedules interviews, sends the candidate emails, and handles GDPR consent, export, erasure, and retention.
There are no caps on jobs or applications. If one or two people do your hiring, free may be all you ever need.
Pro adds the layer for teams hiring together at scale: scorecards, candidate self-booking, a candidates database, team collaboration, screening questions, email automation, analytics, integrations, and advanced spam protection. Pro is a separate build of the same plugin and is not on sale yet; How you will get Pro below explains how it will work.
Vakanssi is built from modules, and the split is clean: ten modules are free, ten are Pro. Presence and Collaboration share one licence feature, so the ten Pro modules make up nine paid features.
The comparison
| Feature | Free | Pro |
|---|---|---|
| Jobs & careers | ||
| Job postings with location, salary, employment type, and closing dates | ✓ | ✓ |
| Careers page and job listing shortcode, ready on install | ✓ | ✓ |
| Google for Jobs structured data with an in-editor eligibility banner | ✓ | ✓ |
| Application intake | ||
| Application form with secure CV upload | ✓ | ✓ |
| Baseline spam protection (honeypot, rate limiting, Cloudflare Turnstile) | ✓ | ✓ |
| Advanced anti-spam: hCaptcha and reCAPTCHA v3 | No | ✓ |
| Screening questions: extra questions per job, with auto-flagging of applicants who miss a must-have | No | ✓ |
| Applications | ||
| Applications inbox and board with drag-and-drop stages and bulk actions | ✓ | ✓ |
| Export applications to CSV, and print or save any application as a PDF | ✓ | ✓ |
| Hiring roles: Recruiter, Hiring Manager, HR / Compliance | ✓ | ✓ |
| Notes & collaboration | ||
| Internal notes on a candidate | ✓ | ✓ |
| Collaboration: @mentions, assignment (one at a time or in bulk from the list), and per-recruiter visibility | No | ✓ |
| Presence: see which teammates are viewing the pipeline right now, with the board and list updating live | No | ✓ |
| Interviews | ||
| Recruiter-scheduled interviews with calendar invites | ✓ | ✓ |
| Candidate self-booking (Scheduling): the candidate picks a slot | No | ✓ |
| Emails | ||
| Candidate and team emails: editable templates, merge tags, send log | ✓ | ✓ |
| Email automation: a template library, and a chosen email sent automatically when a candidate reaches a stage | No | ✓ |
| Privacy | ||
| Consent, export, erasure, and the retention purge | ✓ | ✓ |
| Import | ||
| One-click import of jobs and applications from other hiring plugins | ✓ | ✓ |
| Create jobs in bulk from a CSV file | ✓ | ✓ |
| Candidates | ||
| Candidates database: profiles, tags, manual sourcing, duplicate merge | No | ✓ |
| Scorecards | ||
| Scorecards: shared rubric, recommendations, team summary | No | ✓ |
| Analytics | ||
| Analytics: funnel, source effectiveness, time to hire | No | ✓ |
| Integrations | ||
| Webhooks, Slack, and Teams with a delivery log | No | ✓ |
Three features that are split across the tiers
A few capabilities live in both tiers, with the everyday version free and the team version in Pro. It helps to know which is which:
- Notes are free; Collaboration is Pro. You can always leave internal notes on a candidate. Turning a note into an @mention that emails a teammate, assigning an application to an owner, and limiting who sees which candidates are part of Collaboration Pro feature, requires a Vakanssi Pro license.
- Recruiter-scheduled interviews are free; candidate self-booking is Pro. You can book an interview and send a calendar invite for free. Letting the candidate pick a time from a private link, with no account on their side, is Scheduling Pro feature, requires a Vakanssi Pro license.
- The spam baseline is free; advanced anti-spam is Pro. Every application form ships with a honeypot, rate limiting, and optional Cloudflare Turnstile. Adding hCaptcha or reCAPTCHA is the Advanced anti-spam module Pro feature, requires a Vakanssi Pro license.
Two builds of one plugin
Free Vakanssi and Vakanssi Pro come from the same code, packaged two ways. The free plugin you install from the WordPress.org plugin directory has the Pro code removed entirely: no Pro modules, no licence checks, and no locked previews or upgrade buttons anywhere in wp-admin.
So on a free site, the Features tab, the Settings tabs, Hiring HQ, and the candidate panel show only what the free plugin does. Nothing is greyed out or waiting to be unlocked. You find out about Pro on vakanssi.com, not inside your admin area.
The free plugin also creates only the database tables it uses, ten of them. The Pro build creates four more, one each for scorecards, candidate tags, the integrations delivery log, and presence.
How you will get Pro
Vakanssi Pro is not on sale yet. When it launches, it will be the premium build of the same plugin, sold through Freemius, a licensing and payments service that will handle payment, tax, invoices, and renewals. Buying it will update your site to the premium build, and that will be the first moment any Pro code reaches your site.
Until then, the free plugin is the whole product, and the pages marked Pro feature, requires a Vakanssi Pro license describe what the premium build does once it is installed.
Once installed, the premium build checks your licence as it runs. With a valid licence, the Pro modules become available, and you switch each one on or off under Hiring, then Tools, then Features like any free module. A module that is switched off never boots: no REST routes, no panels, no scripts, and no scheduled tasks.
If your licence ends, or you move back to free
When a licence expires, the site falls back to free behaviour on its own. Pro modules stop starting, the Features tab marks them Not available, and their Settings tabs and screens disappear. Everything in the free plugin keeps working exactly as before.
Your Pro data is not deleted. The four Pro tables stay in your database with everything in them, whether the licence lapsed or you replaced the premium build with the free plugin from WordPress.org.
The free plugin carries no Pro code at all, so its GDPR export no longer includes screening answers, scorecard evaluations, or candidate tags left from your time on Pro. Erasure still deletes an application’s evaluations and stored answers, but no longer removes candidate tags or scrubs webhook delivery history. Choosing Delete all data on uninstall still removes all four Pro tables. See Privacy.
The bottom line
Free Vakanssi is a full hiring workflow you can run end to end, for as many roles as you like. Pro is what you reach for when a team needs to compare candidates fairly, hand work off cleanly, and see the numbers behind the hiring.