Indeed vs Glassdoor for Employers Compared on Cost, Ownership and Hiring Results

Short answer: this is no longer a comparison. Glassdoor LLC merged into Indeed, Inc. on 1 July 2026, and Glassdoor does not sell job postings any more. You buy an Indeed listing, and Glassdoor is one of the places a paid Indeed listing is displayed. The choice an employer actually faces in 2026 is not Indeed against Glassdoor, it is a pay-per-click auction against a flat fee.

That distinction matters because almost every page still answering this question compares two rate cards, and one of those rate cards has been withdrawn. We requested Glassdoor's employer URLs on 21 September 2026: the pricing, products, job-slots, enhanced-profile and post-job pages all return 404, while the pages about brand and reviews return 200. The full status-by-status audit, with what replaced each page, is on our breakdown of what it costs to post a job on Glassdoor.

Are Glassdoor and Indeed the same company?

Yes, and they have been converging for six years. Recruit Holdings has owned both since 2018. A sales partnership in 2020 put shared job postings and joint employer tools in place. In November 2025 Glassdoor's CEO left and new users began having to sign in with an Indeed account; existing Glassdoor account holders had until 20 April 2026 to connect theirs or lose access. On 1 July 2026 the legal entity merged, and Glassdoor moved onto Indeed's terms of use and privacy policy.

What survived the merger is the part candidates use: the Glassdoor brand, the site and apps, the anonymous reviews and the salary data. What did not survive is the employer-side commerce. If you have a hiring plan or an agency media plan with a line item called Glassdoor job slots, that line no longer has a supplier behind it.

Is Indeed or Glassdoor better for employers?

Indeed, on the narrow grounds that it is the only one of the two selling job advertising. Glassdoor's own post-job page reads "Ready to post a job? Get started with Indeed, where you can post an open role in minutes", and its primary button goes to indeed.com/hire. There is no version of this question where Glassdoor wins on distribution, because Glassdoor is not competing for it.

Glassdoor is still worth your attention for a different job. Candidates read your company page between finding an advert and deciding whether to apply, and the free employer account is what lets you respond to reviews, add photos and benefits, and see ratings broken down by job title and location. That is reputation work, and it changes how many of the people who saw your ad go on to apply. It does not change how many see it.

Does Glassdoor cost more than Indeed?

Neither costs more, because only one of them charges. The useful version of the question is what the surviving route costs, and there the published minimums are misleading in a specific way: they tell you the smallest amount Indeed will accept, not what a hire takes.

Run it per application instead, using the $15 to $50 per application that employers commonly report. Indeed's self-serve floor of $150 a month buys somewhere between three and ten applications. The ATS and programmatic floor of $25 a day per job, which is $750 over a 30 day run, buys between fifteen and fifty. Those are wide bands because an auction is a wide instrument, and the width is the actual problem: the same budget fills a warehouse role and barely starts a senior engineering search.

The row that changes decisions is the third one. If your jobs reach Indeed through an applicant tracking system rather than by being typed in by hand, your floor is not $150, it is $25 a day for each individual role. That minimum rose from $10 on 1 July 2025 and applies per job rather than to the campaign average, so a feed of ten roles carries ten separate minimums. Plenty of employers discover this on the invoice. The tier structure and the billing triggers behind it are set out on Indeed job posting cost.

Is there a free way to post a job on Glassdoor?

No, and the wording on Glassdoor's own page is worth reading closely: "Jobs you pay to post on Indeed will also appear on Glassdoor." The syndication promise attaches to paid posts. Glassdoor publishes no matching statement about unpaid Indeed listings, and most articles paraphrase the sentence with those three words removed.

We are quoting rather than concluding here, because Glassdoor has not said that free posts are excluded. But if Glassdoor visibility is the reason you are advertising at all, the free tier is not the route Glassdoor commits to, and the honest entry price is $150 a month rather than nothing. Where Indeed's free tier does and does not work on its own merits is a separate question, and we answered it in Indeed sponsored jobs vs free posts.

What this means for a remote role specifically

Remote hiring is the case where the merged Indeed and Glassdoor audience is least useful per dollar, and it is worth being precise about why rather than just asserting it.

A remote listing competes nationally. That is the exact condition that raises auction prices, because you are bidding against every other employer who will also take someone from anywhere. It also means the applications arrive from a general audience rather than from people who specifically wanted remote work, so you pay per click for a pool you then have to sort by hand. At $15 to $50 an application, the sorting is where the money goes.

A remote-only board reverses the order. The filtering happens before the click, because everyone reading already wants what you are offering. A listing here is $199 a month, published, with a salary range required, no commission on the hire and no budget that renews quietly. It costs $49 more than Indeed's cheapest sponsored month and $551 less than an ATS-fed role over the same 30 days, and it is the same number next month either way.

The sequence that costs least is to post on the pre-filtered audience first and sponsor on Indeed only if two weeks produce thin results. That also tells you something an auction never will: if applications are weak from people who wanted exactly this role, the problem is the offer rather than the reach. Some of what you are trying to hire for may not need an employee at all, and short specialist projects are usually faster to fill through a marketplace for contract technical work than through any job board. For everything that genuinely is a hire, the full price comparison across every option, including the ones that beat us, is on cost to post a job, and the board-by-board rundown is in Indeed alternatives for employers.

The short version

Indeed and Glassdoor stopped being alternatives on 1 July 2026. Buy the Indeed listing if you want the largest general audience in US hiring and can live with a price that moves. Claim the free Glassdoor profile regardless, because it is read by people deciding whether to apply to you. And if the role is remote, start with an audience that is already filtered, because on a national listing the expensive part was never the advert.