ConnectIQ vs HireAra: What £180 a Month Buys, and Where HireAra Is Genuinely Ahead

The published prices, side by side

HireAra publishes four tiers. Three carry a figure; Enterprise does not. The allowances are annual candidate counts quoted against a monthly price, so the arithmetic needs doing slowly — a 12,000-candidate allowance on a £950 monthly plan is 1,000 candidates a month, not 12,000.

ConnectIQ publishes monthly CV allowances against monthly prices, so there is no conversion step. Both sets of figures are list prices. HireAra states its prices as plus VAT; treat the comparison as list-against-list rather than as a final invoice either way.

The like-for-like line is Professional against Scale

Most comparison tables in this category compare tiers that do not match, which makes the gap look either smaller or larger than it is. The honest pairing here is HireAra Professional against ConnectIQ Scale, because both deliver 1,000 candidate CVs a month.

At that volume HireAra Professional is £950 a month plus VAT and ConnectIQ Scale is £89 a month. Same unit — one candidate CV turned into your branded document — and roughly a tenfold difference in what it costs to produce.

That is the whole of the price argument, and it is worth being clear about what it is not. It is not a claim that the two products do the same set of things. The next two sections are about the things they do not share.

You cannot try HireAra, and that is deliberate

HireAra's pricing page carries the question "Can I try for free before paying?" — it was still there on 29 August 2026. As read on 4 August 2026, the answer was that HireAra does not offer free trials because it wants to provide live onboarding sessions, design support and training to everyone joining the platform, so that customers reach value quickly.

That is a coherent position for a high-touch product, and for a large agency with a formal procurement process it may well be the right one. It is also a commitment of £2,160 a year plus VAT at the entry tier before you have watched a single one of your own CVs go through the tool.

ConnectIQ takes the opposite position, because it is a self-serve product rather than an onboarded one. Your first conversion is free, with no payment card, and it is a real one: a finished PDF or DOCX export from your own candidate's CV, with the Tidy rewrite and its before-and-after diff included, and no watermark. One document, not ten — but the whole workflow on that document.

The useful test is to take the worst-formatted CV on your desk and run it through. A tool that handles a clean two-page CV proves very little.

Where HireAra is genuinely ahead

A comparison page written by one of the two vendors is worth very little if it cannot name the places the other one wins. These are real and they matter to a particular kind of buyer.

HireAra integrates with recruitment CRMs. ConnectIQ does not — Bullhorn, JobAdder and Vincere integrations are on our roadmap and are not built. If your consultants live inside a CRM and will not tolerate a second browser tab, that is a decisive difference today and no amount of unit-price advantage changes it.

HireAra includes live onboarding, design support and training with every plan. If you want somebody to build your template family for you and train a team of thirty on it, that is a service we do not sell. ConnectIQ's template builder is self-serve: you build it in the browser, and there is no setup fee and no charge for changing it later, but you do build it.

HireAra's higher tiers carry longer data storage — up to two years on Professional and Enterprise — and features we have no equivalent for, including candidate websites and custom API access on the top tier.

• CRM integrations: HireAra has them, ConnectIQ does not yet
• Live onboarding, design support and training: included by HireAra, not offered by ConnectIQ
• Candidate websites: HireAra Scale and above, no ConnectIQ equivalent
• Custom API access: HireAra Professional, not offered on ConnectIQ plans
• Data storage up to two years: HireAra Professional and Enterprise
• Published per-CV cost an order of magnitude lower: ConnectIQ
• A real free conversion before you pay: ConnectIQ

Where the two products actually differ in kind

Price aside, the design difference is what happens between the upload and the export. ConnectIQ is built around a review step: every extracted field links back to where it came from in the original document, and clicking a field opens the source page with that value highlighted. Where the parser is unsure it shows its confidence and the alternative readings it considered rather than silently choosing one.

The AI is four explicit modes rather than a slider. Format only makes no rewrite call at all, so nothing in the prose changes. Tidy is a conservative copy-edit. Polish improves phrasing. Transform is a full professional rewrite. A deterministic guard checks the result and rejects it if figures, dates or structured fields have moved, and a rejection returns the reviewed source with a notice instead of a plausible document containing an invented number.

We describe the boundary of that guard in public rather than implying it is total: it covers structured fields, figure presence and attribution, common metric-direction reversals and capitalised-entity grounding. General prose meaning in Polish and Transform is the reviewer's approval via the diff, not a machine guarantee. That distinction is the subject of a separate guide on testing a vendor's no-fabrication claim.

Which one to pick

If your desk runs inside a CRM and you need the formatting step to happen there, buy HireAra, or wait for our integrations and use something else meanwhile. If you want a supplier who will build and maintain your templates as a service, buy HireAra.

If you are a small or mid-sized agency paying for document formatting out of a margin you can feel, and you would rather verify a tool on your own CVs than commit £2,160 a year unseen, start with the free conversion here and decide from the output.

The one thing worth not doing is choosing either on a feature list alone. Both tools stand or fall on what they do to a genuinely messy CV, and that takes about four minutes to find out on one of them.

Frequently asked questions

How much does HireAra cost?

HireAra publishes three priced tiers on its own pricing page: Starter at £180 a month plus VAT for 1,500 candidates a year, Scale at £450 plus VAT for 5,000, and Professional at £950 plus VAT for 12,000. Enterprise, for 12,001 candidates a year and above, is custom-priced and not published. All tiers include unlimited user seats. Figures read 29 August 2026.

Does HireAra offer a free trial?

Not as of the wording read on its pricing page on 4 August 2026, which explained that HireAra does not offer free trials because it provides live onboarding, design support and training to every user joining the platform. The page still carries that FAQ question as of 29 August 2026. ConnectIQ gives one free conversion with no payment card, exporting a watermark-free PDF or DOCX.

Is ConnectIQ cheaper than HireAra?

On published list prices, substantially — at the matched volume of 1,000 CVs a month, ConnectIQ Scale is £89 against HireAra Professional at £950 plus VAT. That comparison holds for the formatting workflow itself. It does not account for CRM integration or the onboarding and design services HireAra includes, neither of which ConnectIQ offers.

Does ConnectIQ integrate with Bullhorn?

Not today. Bullhorn, JobAdder and Vincere integrations are on our roadmap and are not built. If CRM integration is a requirement rather than a preference, that rules ConnectIQ out for now and we would rather say so here than after you have signed up.

Can I move an existing agency template into ConnectIQ?

You can build a template that matches your branding in the browser — layout family, fonts, colours, heading treatment, density, dividers, header curve, logo slot and section order — with no setup fee and no charge for editing it later. Reproducing an existing Word or PDF design automatically is a roadmap item, not a shipped feature.

Try it on a real CV

Turn a candidate's own CV into a branded client submission you can check before it leaves the building. No card required, and every AI change is shown as a diff you approve before sending.

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