whatchado alternative (2026): whatchado vs RecruitmentAds
whatchado is the Vienna-based video-career platform behind Austria's video job board and thousands of employee video stories, but the product on your shortlist is the whatchado Ad Manager, which turns job ads you already have into vertical Job Reels and runs them as paid social campaigns for you. RecruitmentAds starts from a vacancy link and hands you the finished ad-sets instead: video in vertical, feed, square and landscape plus matching statics, inside your locked brand template, using AI visuals, real employee photos, or approved assets only. On a shortlist the practical difference shows up before you buy. RecruitmentAds publishes its plans and 90-day pilot terms and will build a sample from your own job link. whatchado's entry number is a floor that reads EUR 490 on its English homepage and 590 EUR on its German one, and every button on both pages opens a demo booking (checked 5 August 2026).
What each tool is
whatchado
whatchado has been running since 2012 out of Vienna, and it is two things at once. The consumer side is a German-language video-career platform: thousands of employee video stories, per-profession and per-employer pages, a career-matching test and its own job board, which is why the brand carries 2,400 monthly searches in Austria and near-zero outside DACH. The B2B side is the Ad Manager, marketed as a Social Recruiting Suite. Job ads arrive from your job administration or by feed, its JobAI converts the posting text into a short vertical Job Reel on a pre-built design template, and whatchado runs that reel as a paid campaign on the channel you pick (Meta, LinkedIn, TikTok or YouTube), with media bundled into a published per-channel price. Candidates apply through a Quick-Apply flow in under a minute, knockout questions pre-screen them, and a dashboard reports the KPIs. A separate production arm has sold filmed HR video for over a decade at published day rates. It is a small company, roughly 20 to 50 people across three conflicting secondhand sources, with a recognisable Austrian and German customer list (Thalia, Tom Tailor, Vereinigte Bühnen Wien, Fertax), a June 2025 distribution partnership with job-board platform Jobiqo, and no presence on any software-review site.
RecruitmentAds
RecruitmentAds.com is recruitment ad software. Paste a vacancy URL or the job text and it pulls the title, requirements, perks, logo, fonts and brand colours into a locked template, then exports a finished creative set: video in 9:16, 4:5, 1:1 and landscape with AI voice-over, plus matching static variants for image-versus-video tests. You choose where the visuals come from, and marketing can fix that choice per template: AI-generated scenes built from the job description, real employee photos placed in on-brand layouts, or approved assets only with no AI-generated people. On-screen text and AI voice-over export in any language from the same vacancy, so one German role and its English or Dutch version come off the same template. RecruitmentAds buys no media, publishes nothing on your behalf and never touches candidates. You download the ad-sets and run them in your own Meta and LinkedIn accounts, embed them on career pages, or send them in recruiter outreach. Plans, credit volumes and the 90-day pilot are published on the pricing page.
When whatchado wins, and when RecruitmentAds wins
RecruitmentAds is also the easier of the two to evaluate upfront, and not because whatchado hides its pricing, since it publishes more than almost anyone in this category. It is that the two published entry numbers disagree by language (EUR 490 English, 590 EUR German), the campaign price still comes back through a 'Request Offer' step, and no number tells you what the creative will look like. With RecruitmentAds the plans and 90-day pilot terms are on the pricing page and a sample gets built from a vacancy link you send, so you can judge the artifact and the total before you decide whether a call is worth your time.
When whatchado wins
You want the media bought and the funnel run for you in DACH.
whatchado picks the channel, launches the campaign, pre-screens with knockout questions and takes applications through a sub-minute Quick-Apply flow. RecruitmentAds hands you files and never touches a candidate. If nobody on your side will open Meta Ads Manager or LinkedIn Campaign Manager, whatchado is the better fit.
You want an audience that already exists in Austria and Germany.
Job Reels get free placement on whatchado's own job board, which sits behind a decade of consumer-facing career content and 2,400 monthly Austrian brand searches, and a June 2025 Jobiqo partnership pushes them further across job-board and aggregator inventory. RecruitmentAds has no audience of its own; it makes ads you distribute.
You want real employees filmed.
whatchado's production arm sells shoot days at published rates: EUR 3,990 for six classic interview stories, EUR 6,990 for four premium stories, EUR 3,990 for up to ten vertical social clips. RecruitmentAds sends no crew and shoots nothing, so if the deliverable you need is footage of your people on camera, this is not a comparison we win.
When RecruitmentAds wins
Your locked template, fonts and approved photography have to be on every export, and someone in marketing decides per template whether AI-generated visuals, real employee photos, or approved assets only are allowed.
whatchado's templates are design skins that agencies can have customised; no locked brand kit, approved-asset library or approval step is documented, and the stated fallback when you have no footage is imagery from whatchado's own AI library (2026-08-05).
You need the ad-sets themselves: video in 9:16, 4:5, 1:1 and landscape plus matching statics, several variants per role, in your own Meta and LinkedIn accounts, reusable on career pages and in recruiter outreach.
whatchado's output is one vertical Job Reel plus the campaign it runs for you; no static creative and no exportable set is documented anywhere on its site.
You hire beyond DACH, or in more than one language from one brand system.
RecruitmentAds exports on-screen text and AI voice-over in any language off the same locked template and prices in EUR, GBP or USD by region. whatchado is Austria-first by its own evidence: /fr and /it are disallowed in its robots.txt, its /en/ product pages still render German copy, and its US brand demand is 20 searches a month against 2,400 in Austria (checked 2026-08-05).
Who should pick what
Sole recruiter
A sole recruiter hiring in Austria or Germany who wants one vendor to make the video, pick the channel, run the spend and pre-screen the applicants is whatchado's buyer, not ours: RecruitmentAds would hand that recruiter files and no campaign. A sole recruiter who already runs their own Meta or LinkedIn ads and just needs on-brand creative per vacancy is the reverse case.
TA team
For a TA team the split is who owns the media and the creative: whatchado if you want campaigns launched in minutes without anyone opening Ads Manager, RecruitmentAds if you need a format-complete, on-brand set per role (video and statics, several variants, any language) that your own team or agency runs and reuses.
Employer-branding-led buyer
An employer-branding-led buyer should compare the two on where the pictures come from. whatchado's design templates are skins, and its documented fallback when you supply no footage is imagery from whatchado's own AI library; RecruitmentAds makes the visual source a setting marketing controls per template: AI visuals, real employee photos, or approved assets only.
Ready to evaluate whatchado vs RecruitmentAds on your own vacancy? Try it in a 90-day pilot, or request a sample with your job link.
whatchado vs RecruitmentAds, row by row
Facts verified 2026-08-05. “—” means not published by the vendor.
| Comparison | whatchado | RecruitmentAds |
|---|---|---|
| What it is | whatchado is a Vienna-based video-career platform whose Ad Manager turns job ads you already have into vertical Job Reels and runs them as paid social campaigns, alongside its own Austrian job board and a filmed-video production arm. | RecruitmentAds is recruitment ad software that turns a vacancy URL or pasted job text into a finished creative set (video plus matching statics) inside your locked brand template, which you then run yourself. |
| What you start from | whatchado starts from job ads that already sit in your job administration or arrive by feed: step one on its homepage is 'Select from your already existing Job Ads in the Job Administration', then you choose a channel and launch. | RecruitmentAds starts from one vacancy link: paste the job URL and it extracts the title, requirements, perks, logo, fonts and brand colours into your template. |
| Video output | whatchado's core output is the Job Reel: its JobAI converts job-posting text into short vertical video on pre-built design templates, optionally extended with an intro video you supply or, if you have none, enriched with images from whatchado's own AI library. | RecruitmentAds exports recruitment video in 9:16, 4:5, 1:1 and landscape with AI voice-over from the vacancy you pasted, and generates several variants of the same role so you can test different hooks. |
| Static ads | whatchado publishes no static ad output: the Ad Manager's creative unit is the vertical Job Reel, and no image ad-set appears anywhere on its site (checked 2026-08-05). | RecruitmentAds includes matching static variants in the same creative set, which is what makes a video-versus-image test on a single vacancy possible. |
| Who runs the media | whatchado runs the media itself: the campaign is bundled into the per-channel price, its own Campaign Calculator recommends the channel and setup, and buyers do not receive ad-sets to run in their own accounts. | RecruitmentAds buys no media at all: you upload the exports into your own Meta and LinkedIn campaigns and keep the ad account, the audiences, the pixel data and control of spend. |
| Visual-source choice | whatchado documents no visual-source setting: the templates are design skins, an intro video is an optional extra you provide, and the stated fallback when you have no footage is imagery from whatchado's own AI library (2026-08-05). | RecruitmentAds makes the visual source an explicit choice per template: AI-generated scenes from the job description, real employee photos placed in on-brand layouts, or approved assets only with no AI-generated people. |
| Brand governance | whatchado has no documented brand-governance layer: agencies can have design templates customised for them, but no locked brand kit, approved-asset library or approval step appears anywhere on its site (2026-08-05). | RecruitmentAds runs on locked brand templates, marketing sets which visual modes each template allows, and user roles and governance are part of the published Scale plan. |
| Channels | whatchado's own Campaign Calculator names four channel products (Meta for blue-collar roles in healthcare, retail and hospitality, LinkedIn for senior white-collar roles, TikTok for apprenticeships and entry level, YouTube for wide reach), and pricing is per channel, so each additional channel is another campaign. | RecruitmentAds exports the formats Meta and LinkedIn Campaign Manager accept, and the same set covers Reels, career-site embeds and recruiter outreach with no per-channel fee. |
| Candidates and ATS | whatchado owns the candidate step: Quick-Apply in under a minute, knockout questions for pre-screening, and a promise to transfer application data into your existing applicant management system, with no ATS named anywhere (2026-08-05). | RecruitmentAds has no candidate flow and no native ATS integration: it reads the public job page, so it works from any ATS's vacancy URL without an integration project, and applications keep running through your existing process. |
| Languages and markets | whatchado is Austria-first on its own evidence: /fr and /it are disallowed in its robots.txt, its /en/ product pages still render German copy, and brand demand runs 2,400 searches a month in Austria against roughly 590 in Germany and 20 in the US (checked 2026-08-05). | RecruitmentAds exports on-screen text and AI voice-over in any language from one vacancy on the same locked template, and prices in EUR, GBP or USD by region. |
| Pricing transparency | whatchado publishes numbers, which is rare in this category, but it publishes two: 'Start your campaigns from EUR 490,-' in English and 'Starte deine Kampagne ab 590,- EUR' in German for the same per-channel campaign, plus an agency tier from EUR 290 per month, with the actual campaign price arriving through a 'Request Offer' step (checked 2026-08-05). | RecruitmentAds publishes its plans and 90-day pilot terms on the pricing page (Starter, Custom and Scale at 100, 250 and 500 finished creative sets a year, plus agency proof pilots and Agency Studio with pooled output), where one credit equals one finished creative set. |
| Filmed production | whatchado also sells filmed video at published day rates: EUR 3,990 per shoot day for six classic 16:9 interview stories, EUR 6,990 for four premium stories with voice-over and b-roll, and EUR 3,990 for up to ten vertical social clips. | RecruitmentAds shoots nothing and sends no crew; it works from photography you already have, which is why real employee photos are a visual mode here rather than a shoot day. |
| Best for | whatchado is best for DACH employers and recruiting agencies that want existing job ads turned into video reels with the creative, the media and the applicant funnel all run for them. | RecruitmentAds is best for employers, staffing firms and agencies that need on-brand video and static ad-sets per vacancy, in any language, and want to run, reuse and keep them themselves. |
| Third-party reviews | whatchado has no software-review profile: no G2, Capterra, GetApp, OMR Reviews or Trustpilot listing was found on 2026-08-05, and what ranks for 'whatchado erfahrungen' is kununu and Glassdoor employer reviews about working at whatchado, which say nothing about the Ad Manager. | RecruitmentAds publishes no aggregate review score either, so treat both columns as vendor-stated and ask each vendor for references in your own market and language. |
What most comparisons miss
Most write-ups of whatchado describe the company that existed before the Ad Manager, and repeat the two published numbers without checking them. Four things a shortlist actually needs are visible on whatchado's own site as of 2026-08-05, and appear nowhere else.
Switching from whatchado to RecruitmentAds
What changes
- You buy the media. whatchado bundles the campaign into its per-channel price and picks the setup for you; with RecruitmentAds you upload the exports into your own Meta and LinkedIn campaigns and control channel, pacing and spend yourself.
- There is no Quick-Apply funnel and no knockout-question screening. Applications go back to running through your own job page and ATS, exactly as they did before whatchado.
- You lose the free placement on whatchado's job board. That audience is theirs, not a feature we replicate. If a meaningful share of your applications came from it, price that in honestly.
- Creative decisions come back to you and to marketing. Instead of a design template plus whatever imagery the automation had available, you pick the template and the visual source per vacancy.
What maps to what
- The job feed becomes a vacancy URL. The same requisition text drives the ad; you paste the link instead of maintaining a feed into someone else's job administration.
- One vertical Job Reel becomes a full creative set: 9:16, 4:5, 1:1 and landscape video plus matching statics, with several variants per role.
- whatchado's design templates become your locked brand template, and the imagery question becomes an explicit setting: AI scenes from the job description, real employee photos, or approved assets only.
- The per-channel campaign price becomes your own channel budget in Meta Ads Manager or LinkedIn Campaign Manager, with the software cost separated from the media cost.
- The Campaign Calculator's channel logic maps onto your own targeting: the same formats export for Meta, LinkedIn, TikTok and Reels, so the channel choice stays yours to make per role.
What you keep
- German. On-screen text and AI voice-over export in any language from the same template, so a DACH team does not trade its language for an English-only tool.
- Your ATS, untouched. RecruitmentAds does not integrate with it, so there is nothing to re-map, and any ATS's public vacancy URL is a valid input.
- Your ad accounts, audiences, pixels and campaign history: the campaigns now live where the data already is.
- Your brand assets and approved photography, uploaded once and reused across roles instead of re-supplied per campaign.
- The exports themselves: MP4s and statics you can reuse on career pages, in recruiter outreach and in organic posts, not only inside a campaign someone else runs.
What review sites report
All review data below is secondhand.
G2 · reported 2026-08-05
No G2 profile for whatchado was found in a domain-restricted search on 2026-08-05: no rating, no review count, no alternatives page.
Capterra · reported 2026-08-05
No Capterra profile for whatchado was found on 2026-08-05. GetApp, OMR Reviews and Trustpilot returned nothing either.
kununu / Glassdoor (employer reviews, not software reviews) · reported 2026-08-05
kununu ranks first and Glassdoor third for 'whatchado erfahrungen' in Austria, with 26 employee reviews on kununu as of 2026-08-05. These are reviews of whatchado as a workplace and say nothing about the Ad Manager, which is useful to know so you do not mistake them for product feedback.
Evaluate RecruitmentAds on your own vacancy
Send one live vacancy link and look at what comes back: vertical, feed, square and landscape video with AI voice-over, matching statics in the same set, inside your template, using the visual source your brand policy allows (in German, English or both). Plans, credit volumes and the 90-day pilot terms are published, so you can work out the total before you decide whether a call is worth your time.
Questions buyers actually ask
What does whatchado actually do, and is it a career platform or an ad tool?
Both, and the distinction matters when you shortlist. The consumer side is a German-language video-career platform with employee video stories, a career-matching test and its own Austrian job board. The B2B product is the whatchado Ad Manager: it takes job ads already in your job administration or arriving by feed, converts the posting text into a vertical Job Reel with its JobAI, and runs that reel as a paid campaign on Meta, LinkedIn, TikTok or YouTube, with media included in a per-channel price. Most third-party descriptions, including CB Insights and the Google knowledge panel, still describe only the career platform.
How much does whatchado cost?
whatchado publishes entry numbers, which is unusual in this category, but two of them for the same offer: 'Start your campaigns from EUR 490,-' on the English homepage and 'ab 590,- EUR' on the German one (both checked 2026-08-05), plus an agency tier from EUR 290 per month and filmed production from EUR 3,990 per shoot day. What is not published is whether the campaign fee is one-off or recurring, or how much media budget it includes; the Campaign Calculator returns Budget, Recommended and Premium options behind a 'Request Offer' button. That is the sharpest practical difference from RecruitmentAds, where the plans and 90-day pilot terms are published on the pricing page and a sample gets built from a vacancy link you send, so you can judge the total and the creative before a sales call.
Does whatchado make static ads as well as video?
No. The Ad Manager's creative unit is the vertical Job Reel, and no static ad output appears anywhere on whatchado's site as of 2026-08-05. RecruitmentAds exports matching statics alongside the video in the same creative set, which is what lets you test image against video on a single vacancy.
Can we keep our own template, fonts and employee photos?
Partly with whatchado: design templates are pre-built, agencies can have one customised, and you may supply an intro video, but no locked brand kit, approved-asset library or approval step is documented, and the stated fallback when you have no footage is imagery from whatchado's own AI library. RecruitmentAds is built the other way round: a locked template per brand, and a visual source you choose (AI scenes from the job description, real employee photos in on-brand layouts, or approved assets only with no AI-generated people), with marketing deciding which modes each template allows.
Does whatchado work outside Austria and Germany?
It is marketed to DACH and its own evidence points that way: /fr and /it are disallowed in its robots.txt, the /en/ product pages still render German copy, and brand demand runs about 2,400 searches a month in Austria against 590 in Germany and 20 in the US (checked 2026-08-05). Switzerland is claimed through the DACH framing with no country-specific evidence found. If you hire across several countries or languages, ask what is genuinely localised before you plan around it; RecruitmentAds exports on-screen text and AI voice-over in any language from the same template.
Does RecruitmentAds run the campaigns and pre-screen candidates like whatchado does?
No. RecruitmentAds produces the ad-sets and stops there: no media buying, no job board of its own, no Quick-Apply flow, no knockout questions, no native ATS integration. You download video and statics and run them in your own Meta and LinkedIn accounts, and applications keep flowing through your existing process. If you want one vendor to own the creative, the spend and the applicant funnel in DACH, whatchado is the closer fit.
How we compared these two tools
Every whatchado capability, price and product claim on this page was read from whatchado.com on 5 August 2026 (the English and German homepages, /en/business, /en/business/agencies, /en/business/videoformate, the Campaign Calculator and robots.txt) and is reported as whatchado's published claim, not as a tested result. We do not have a whatchado account and have not seen a demo. Company size, funding and the Jobiqo partnership are secondhand and labelled where they appear. Where whatchado publishes nothing about a capability, this page says so and dates it, rather than treating silence as proof of absence. RecruitmentAds facts come from our own published product and pricing pages.
- Ask which entry number applies to you. The same homepage banner reads 'Start your campaigns from EUR 490,-' in English and 'Starte deine Kampagne ab 590,- EUR' in German (both checked 2026-08-05). Get the figure, the currency and the scope in writing.
- Ask what is inside the per-channel price. Media is described as bundled, but no media budget, duration or impression floor is published, and it is not stated whether the fee is one-off or recurring.
- Ask where the visuals come from on your reels. An intro video you supply, imagery from whatchado's AI library and a design template are three different answers, and only one of them involves your own people.
- Ask what you can export and keep. When creative exists to run inside a vendor's own campaigns, ownership and export terms are usually unwritten, including which aspect ratios you get back when the campaign ends.
- Ask which applicant tracking system they have actually connected. The site promises transfer into your existing applicant management system and names no system anywhere (2026-08-05).
- Ask both vendors to show output for a role like yours before comparing numbers. Neither price list tells you what the creative will look like.