Top Echelon Review (2026)
By Daan Haket · Researched and written with an AI assistant · who does what
Almost everything people shop for sits in Professional, not Standard: Smart-TE AI, automations, sequences, inbound email sync and API access are all one tier up, so Standard is a competent but plain ATS.
recruiting agencies and SMB staffing firms that want an applicant tracking system and CRM in one place, especially ones that would actually work split placements with other recruiters.
you are an in-house talent team hiring for your own company — this is built around agency and split-placement workflows, so you would carry a network you never use.
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Pricing (2026)
✓ Pricing re-verified 6 Oct 2026
(2026-09-10, read on their own pricing page, both billing toggles; re-verified unchanged on 2026-10-06) TE Recruit (the ATS and CRM) runs $79 per seat per month billed annually or $95 month-to-month on Standard, and $95 billed annually or $115 month-to-month on Professional. Those seat rates rose during 2026: the same cards read $75/$89 on Standard and $89/$110 on Professional when we read them on 25 August 2026.
TE Network, the split-placement network, is priced per agency rather than per seat and is unchanged: $135 per month billed annually with the $350 startup fee waived, or $150 per month billed monthly plus a $350 one-time startup fee. Plans change — always verify the live price on their site.
Category context: HR & People. Across the 13 tools in this category that we researched with a public US-dollar price, the median entry price is $14 a month (lowest paid plan as listed, per seat where the vendor prices per seat). Top Echelon’s entry price of $79 a month sits above that median. Compare pricing conditions in the Software Cost Atlas →
What the pricing page doesn’t say
The bigger thing to price honestly is that TE Recruit and TE Network are two separate subscriptions. The network is billed per agency on top of your seats, so "Top Echelon" can mean two bills. And taking the network month-to-month adds a $350 one-time startup fee that annual billing waives.
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What Top Echelon does
Recruiting software for agencies and staffing firms: TE Recruit is an ATS and CRM with resume parsing, pipeline management, hotlists and job-board integrations, while TE Network is a split-placement network for sharing roles and candidates with other recruiting firms.
What buyers report about Top Echelon
Hands-on: not tested by usReported by buyers: Capterra, GetApp, Software Advice and SelectHub, read August 2026
Themes from the buyer-review sites listed at the foot of this page, read in August 2026. We have not run Top Echelon ourselves, so this is other buyers' experience rather than ours. We summarise it here because the complaints are usually the part a vendor page leaves out.
- • Support is the standout — reviewers repeatedly call it responsive and willing to go further than expected. Sentiment rating of 92 across 1,575 reviews.
- • Value for a small agency: from around $75 per user per month on annual billing, with low start-up cost and flexible user management.
- • Email integration is the consistent weak point. Reviewers report trouble linking Outlook and Gmail, conversations not tracking, and attachments failing.
- • The interface is described as clunky by a meaningful number of reviewers.
- • Costs climb once you bundle services or add users, so price it at the headcount you expect rather than today's.
When the paid plan is worth it
Two products, two pricing models. TE Recruit is the ATS and CRM and is priced per seat: Standard at $79 a seat a month billed annually or $95 month-to-month, Professional at $95 annually or $115 monthly. Both rates rose in 2026 -- Standard was $75 annually in August -- so price today's card, not last year's quote. TE Network is the split-placement network and is priced per agency rather than per seat, at $135 a month billed annually or $150 monthly.
On TE Network the annual commitment is worth more than the headline suggests. Paying monthly costs $15 more a month, $180 across a year -- and it carries a one-time $350 start-up fee that the annual plan waives. First-year difference: about $530, not $180; from year two, the $180. On TE Recruit the step from Standard to Professional is $16 a seat a month on the annual rate, and the page spells out what it buys: Smart-TE AI, automations, sequences, inbound email sync and API access, plus ten times the storage and weekly rather than monthly backups.
Seat-priced and agency-priced products also behave differently as you hire: adding recruiters multiplies TE Recruit and leaves TE Network untouched.
How to actually use Top Echelon
Top Echelon's own guide puts navigation first, then records, then email — and email carries the one hard prerequisite. If you are not integrating with Microsoft or Google, you must "Verify Your Domain for TE Recruit to send email on your behalf," so handle that before any outreach. With the Google integration on, sends of ten recipients or fewer leave from your Gmail account while mass emails still go from Top Echelon's servers.
Records get in four ways: typed by hand, emailed in as resumes through the parser, imported as spreadsheets through the Contact Importer, or captured with the browser extension.
Distilled from Top Echelon Help Center: Getting Started with TE Recruit, Converting Your Database From Another Software, and Google Integration (help.topechelon.com), read 20 August 2026. Re-verified 6 October 2026 against topechelon.com/pricing (both toggles, all figures unchanged) and these help-centre articles read the same day: Monthly and Yearly Billing Options https://help.topechelon.com/article/733-monthly-and-yearly-billing-options; Cancel Your Service https://help.topechelon.com/article/598-cancel-your-service; Making a User Inactive https://help.topechelon.com/article/538-making-a-user-inactive; Adding a New User to Your Account https://help.topechelon.com/article/601-adding-users; Checking Your Database Size https://help.topechelon.com/article/732-check-database-size; Exporting Records to a Spreadsheet https://help.topechelon.com/article/597-exporting-records-to-a-spreadsheet; Files and Exports https://help.topechelon.com/article/537-files-and-exports.
Common Top Echelon setup mistakes
Where Top Echelon setups actually go wrong, and what it costs you when they do. Same sources as the setup notes above — not from a walkthrough we ran ourselves.
The step people underestimate is bringing an existing database across.
- It is a paid, scheduled service — $500 on an annual plan, $1,000 month-to-month — run by a data conversion specialist through a mapping session and a DropSend transfer, typically one to two weeks, first-come.
- Then the 30-day window bites: "After 30 days, we will no longer hold your data backup from your previous ATS," and later fixes run $100 an hour against a backup you supply.
The natural comparison is Bullhorn or Recruit CRM — the agency-ATS incumbents.
Frequently asked questions
The pricing page says no contracts. Does that hold on annual billing?
Only on monthly. The pricing page promises no contracts, but Top Echelon's billing article (read 6 October 2026) says yearly billing is a one-year agreement to lock in the discounted rate, charged when you opt in, while monthly has no long-term contract and is charged on the first of each month. The annual rate saves about 17% on both plans: $79 against $95 a seat on Standard, $95 against $115 on Professional. Only the account's Main Contact can cancel, in Settings under Billing Overview, either immediately (everyone loses access at once) or at renewal, and all monthly and annual charges are non-refundable either way.
Do I stop paying for a seat when a recruiter leaves?
Not straight away. Deactivating a user removes them from your next billing cycle, but the billing article (read 6 October 2026) says a seat that is already paid for stays open until the paid-through date: the end of the month on monthly billing, the end of the year on annual. You can put a new user on that open seat in the meantime. Adding a seat on annual billing is charged at once, pro-rated to the yearly paid-through date. A deactivated user's history and activities stay in the database.
What can I take with me if I leave?
Plan the export before you cancel. After the account is deactivated, Top Echelon keeps user data for 45 days, and its billing article says you can request a backup while the account is still active. Inside TE Recruit, People, Company and Job records export to a spreadsheet with the columns you choose, and finished files wait on the Files & Exports page; exporting needs the data-export permission. Storage is part of the bill too: 10 GB on Standard and 100 GB on Professional, and going over adds blocks of 10 GB or 100 GB at $10 a month each. Read in the Top Echelon help centre on 6 October 2026.
Is this a hands-on review of Top Echelon?
This is a researched assessment, not a hands-on test — where we've used a tool ourselves, we say so explicitly. We name what each tool is good and bad at, and we earn a commission only if you sign up, at no cost to you.
- Buyer reviews on Capterra, GetApp, Software Advice and SelectHub, read August 2026.
- 2026-09-10, read on their own pricing page, both billing toggles; re-verified unchanged on 2026-10-06.
- A dated screenshot of that pricing page, kept on this site as the receipt.
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