Are Monster and Indeed the Same Company? Who Owns the Big Job Boards in 2026

No. Monster and Indeed are not the same company and never have been. Monster is owned by Bold Holdings, which bought it together with CareerBuilder out of Chapter 11 bankruptcy in 2025. Indeed is owned by Recruit Holdings, the Tokyo-listed company that also owns Glassdoor. They are separate businesses with separate owners, separate pricing and separate audiences.

The question gets asked constantly, though, and the reason is worth understanding: both boards recently absorbed a former rival, so employers who thought they were buying two products are increasingly buying one. That is the part that costs money. Here is who actually owns what in 2026, and where the overlaps sit.

Who owns the major US job boards in 2026

Four owners now control almost every large general job board in the United States. Ownership as of August 2026:

Job board	Owner	Since	Owner type
Indeed	Recruit Holdings	2012	Public, Tokyo Stock Exchange (6098)
Glassdoor	Recruit Holdings	2018	Same parent as Indeed
Monster	Bold Holdings	2025, via Chapter 11 auction	Private
CareerBuilder	Bold Holdings	2025, same auction	Same owner as Monster
LinkedIn	Microsoft	2016	Public, NASDAQ
ZipRecruiter	Independent	Founded 2010	Public, NYSE (ZIP)
We Work Remotely	Independent	Founded 2013	Private
Latestremote	Independent	Founded 2026	Private

Read that table by owner rather than by brand and the picture changes. Recruit Holdings controls two of the four biggest destinations for US job seekers. Bold Holdings controls two more. That is not a conspiracy, it is what happens to a maturing industry, but it does mean the phrase "let us spread the budget across a few boards" no longer means what it used to.

Are Monster and CareerBuilder the same company?

Yes, and this is the merger most employers have not registered. Monster was bought by the Dutch staffing group Randstad in 2016. CareerBuilder was majority owned by the private equity firm Apollo Global Management. In September 2024 the two were folded into a single joint venture.

It did not go well. On 24 June 2025 the merged CareerBuilder + Monster filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in Delaware, carrying roughly $392.5 million in debt after years of falling revenue. The core job board business was put up for auction. Bold Holdings won it with a bid of about $28.4 million, beating the jobs app JobGet, which had opened at $7 million as the stalking horse bidder and raised its offer to around $27 million. Bold was founded by two former Monster employees and committed to keeping at least 350 of the existing staff. The military careers site Military.com and the scholarship site FastWeb were sold separately to Valnet.

The practical consequence shows up on Monster's own pricing page, which now lists publication to Monster, CareerBuilder and a partner network on every tier. One purchase, both boards. If your hiring plan has a line for Monster and a separate line for CareerBuilder, you are budgeting for a product that no longer exists as two things. The full rate card and what the sale changed is in our breakdown of Monster job posting cost.

Are Indeed and Glassdoor the same company?

Yes, and the integration went a step further than Monster's. Recruit Holdings has owned Indeed since 2012 and bought Glassdoor in 2018, but for years they were run as separate businesses with separate products.

That ended in 2025. In July, Recruit announced roughly 1,300 job cuts, about 6% of the workforce in its HR Technology segment, and said Glassdoor's operations would be integrated into Indeed. Glassdoor's chief executive Christian Sutherland-Wong left on 1 October, replaced by Owen Humphries. It was the third consecutive year of significant cuts in that segment, following about 1,000 roles in 2024 and 2,200 in 2023, and the stated reason was a shift toward AI-driven hiring products rather than a revenue collapse: the segment's US revenue grew 4.9% in the quarter ending 31 March 2025.

For an employer, the takeaway is simple and it predates the merger. Glassdoor job postings are sold through Indeed. Glassdoor is not an independent alternative to Indeed, it is a second surface for the same inventory, and any comparison table listing them as separate options to evaluate is misleading you. It is still worth caring about your Glassdoor reviews, because candidates read them, but that is a reputation question rather than a distribution one.

So where does the confusion between Monster and Indeed come from?

Three things, mostly. The two brands occupied the same mental slot for a decade, so people who used both in 2015 remember them as interchangeable. Both now bundle a second board into one purchase, which makes "are these the same" a reasonable thing to wonder. And both have been through public restructuring in the same twelve months, so the headlines ran together.

They remain genuinely different products. Indeed is the largest job site in the US by traffic, runs a pay per click auction with a small free tier, and publishes a $5 per day or $150 per month minimum on sponsored jobs. Monster charges from the first job, starting at $8 a day, and sells a resume database on its $299 a month tier that Indeed's basic product does not match. Different owners, different economics, different reasons to buy.

What consolidation means for your hiring budget

The useful question is not who owns what, it is how much of your spend reaches the same people twice. Two rules follow directly from the ownership map.

Do not budget separately for boards that share an owner and a network. Monster and CareerBuilder are one purchase. Indeed and Glassdoor are one purchase. If you were planning to run four campaigns across those four brands to widen the funnel, you are running two campaigns and paying for four. This is the same quiet overlap that builds up everywhere else in a company's recurring software, which is why it is worth periodically auditing what your subscription spend actually covers rather than assuming a line item still buys what it bought two years ago.

Distinguish overlapping audiences from complementary ones. Adding a second general board mostly reaches people already reached by the first, because most active job seekers use several. Adding a board with a genuinely different audience adds new people. A remote-only board is complementary to a general one in a way that a second general board is not, because its readers self-selected for a working arrangement rather than a location. The same logic applies to industry-specific boards.

There is also a diligence point that is easy to miss. When a board changes hands, everything written about it beforehand describes a different company. Reviews of Monster's account management from 2023 predate both the CareerBuilder merger and the bankruptcy sale. Assessments of Glassdoor's product roadmap from early 2025 predate its absorption into Indeed. Weight recent, first-hand experience heavily and discount the archive.

Which job boards are still independent?

Fewer than most people assume, among the large general boards. ZipRecruiter is the significant one: it is publicly traded on the NYSE, has no parent company, and reported $118.1 million of revenue in the second quarter of 2026 across 70,721 paying employers, which works out to roughly $556 per employer per month. Our full breakdown of ZipRecruiter pricing derives that from its SEC filings.

LinkedIn sits in a category of its own. Microsoft has owned it since 2016 and reports its revenue in its Form 10-K: $17,812 million in the fiscal year ended 30 June 2025, up 9%, with growth accelerating to 12% in the quarter ended 30 June 2026. It is the only one of these where recruiting is a minority of the business, which is why its pricing behaves differently. The mechanics are in LinkedIn job posting cost.

Below the majors, most niche and remote-focused boards are independently owned and run flat-fee pricing. That is a structural difference rather than a marketing one: a flat fee is only sustainable when the audience is specific enough that a listing does not need an auction to find the right readers.

How to check for overlap before you buy

Four questions, in order, before adding a board to the plan:

• Who owns it, and what else do they own? If the answer includes a board already in your budget, treat them as one line item and negotiate accordingly.
• Does my posting syndicate there already? Many boards ingest listings automatically from applicant tracking systems and careers sites. You may already be present, at reduced visibility, without paying.
• Is the audience additive or overlapping? Ask what makes this board's readers different from the readers of the board you already use. If the honest answer is nothing, it is a bigger buy of the same thing.
• What is the pricing model, and what happens if the search drags? A flat fee costs the same at 39 days and at 75. An auction or a subscription bills through every one of those days.

That last one decides more budgets than the ownership question does. Median time to fill in 2026 is about 39 days for a nonexecutive role according to SHRM, and Ashby puts technical roles at 75 days to first fill. Run the arithmetic across the options with our cost to post a job comparison, see the alternatives side by side in Indeed alternatives for employers, or read the head to head in ZipRecruiter vs Indeed for employers.

The short version

Monster and Indeed are separate companies with separate owners. Monster and CareerBuilder are the same company, owned by Bold Holdings since a 2025 bankruptcy auction. Indeed and Glassdoor are the same company, owned by Recruit Holdings, with Glassdoor's operations merged into Indeed in 2025. LinkedIn belongs to Microsoft. ZipRecruiter is independent. Budget by owner rather than by brand, and you will stop paying twice to reach the same candidates.