Indeed vs Glassdoor for Employers in 2026, Now That Glassdoor and Indeed Are the Same Company

Yes. They are owned by the same parent, Recruit Holdings, and since 1 July 2026 they are also the same legal entity, because Glassdoor merged into Indeed, Inc. on that date. The Glassdoor brand, the anonymous reviews and the salary pages carry on, but they now run under Indeed's terms of use and privacy policy.

The timeline matters if you are reading older advice, because most of what ranks for this question was written before the last two steps. Recruit acquired Glassdoor in 2018 and ran it as a separate business. In July 2025 it announced the integration, alongside about 1,300 job cuts in its HR Technology segment. In November 2025 new Glassdoor users started signing in with an Indeed account, and existing users had until 20 April 2026 to link theirs. On 1 July 2026 the entities merged.

For an employer, the practical consequence arrived earlier than the legal one. Job distribution between the two sites has run through Indeed's ad products since 2020. What the merger did was remove any remaining reason to treat them as two suppliers. If a media plan in front of you lists Indeed and Glassdoor on separate lines with separate budgets, it is describing a company structure that no longer exists.

Exactly what your Indeed job costs, and nothing more. There is no separate Glassdoor posting price to look up, because there is no separate Glassdoor posting to buy.

You start on Indeed. Inside Indeed's free allowance, which is three job posts per calendar month live for up to 30 days each, the listing costs $0 and can appear on Glassdoor as an organic result. Once you sponsor it, you are on Indeed's Sponsored Jobs pricing: a published minimum of $5 a day or $150 a month for a job you post by hand, with the actual cost per click set by title, metro and how many other employers want the same people. Indeed's own help article on the partnership puts it plainly: you still set up campaigns and pay through Indeed, and your ads can appear on Indeed and Glassdoor when eligible.

The number that catches people is the other floor. For jobs arriving through a campaign, an agency or a programmatic feed rather than typed in by hand, Indeed's minimum is $25 a day per role, raised from $10 with effect from 1 July 2025, and it applies to each individual job rather than to a campaign average. Over a 30 day month that is $750 per role instead of $150. Same listing, same two sites, five times the floor, decided by nothing except how the job reached Indeed. We work through the whole schedule on Indeed job posting cost.

What Glassdoor does still sell separately is employer branding rather than job ads: profile control, review response tooling, brand analytics. Those are quoted by a salesperson against company size and appear in procurement data in the five and six figure range annually. That is a marketing line, not a recruiting media line, and it buys you no additional job distribution at all.

This is the part almost nothing in the search results has caught up with, and it hits exactly the employers who are most likely to be reading a comparison page.

Under Indeed's single-source feed policy, effective 31 March 2026, jobs sent to Indeed through a single-source feed are visible only when sponsored, where the underlying applicant tracking system already has an Indeed integration. A second deadline on 30 June 2026 removed visibility for sponsored-only single-source feeds coming from ad agencies in the same circumstances. Employers on a non-integrated or homegrown system are not affected.

Read that against the previous section and the consequence is specific. Glassdoor visibility is inherited from the Indeed listing. If your listing can no longer be organic, then neither can your Glassdoor appearance. So for a company that bought recruiting software, the free path onto both sites has closed, and the price of reopening it is the sponsored floor.

Here is the arithmetic, which is worth doing with your own role count before your next budget conversation. One role through a feed at the $25 a day floor is $750 over a 30 day month. Ten open roles is $7,500 a month for visibility that, before 31 March, a feed-fed organic listing was giving you at no charge. Nothing about the listings changed, nothing about the audience changed, and nobody sent you an invoice explaining it, because the old amount was zero and zero does not generate a line item.

The uncomfortable point for a hiring plan is the direction of travel. The consolidation of Glassdoor into Indeed and the closing of the free feed route are the same movement: distribution that used to be spread across two brands and two price points is now one brand, one auction and one floor. Depending on a channel that keeps narrowing is a strategic risk long before it is a budget problem.

Wrong axis. They are not two boards to choose between, they are two stages of the same hire, and treating them as rivals is what leads employers to budget for a channel they already own.

Indeed is where the reach is. It is the broadest active job seeker audience in US hiring, it covers hourly through professional, and if your role has a title people type into a search box, Indeed will find them.

Glassdoor is where the decision happens. Reviews, salary reports, interview accounts and CEO ratings are what a candidate reads after they have seen your listing and before they apply, or before they accept. That is a real and measurable function, and it is not a distribution function. You do not buy it with a job ad and you cannot substitute one for the other.

So the useful version of the question is: are you short of applicants, or short of good ones who say yes? If you are short of applicants, more Indeed budget is the lever, and Glassdoor will do nothing for you. If applicants arrive and then go quiet after they research you, no amount of Indeed spend fixes that, and the work is on the Glassdoor profile, the review responses and the salary range in the listing. Publishing the range is the cheapest of those by a distance, and it does more to shape an applicant pool than the choice of platform does. We cover the mechanics in how to write a remote job description and the legal side in pay transparency laws by state.

One detail worth knowing before you go looking for a single dashboard, because it is genuinely counterintuitive and Indeed states it outright.

Indeed's employer help article on the partnership answers the account question with a flat no: accounts and permissions stay separate, and you should keep using each site's employer login. Job seekers were consolidated onto Indeed sign-in during 2025 and 2026. Employers were not.

In practice that means your ad campaigns, your billing and your reporting all live on the Indeed side, while your company profile, your reviews and your responses to them live in the Glassdoor Employer Center under a different credential. The merger consolidated the seller and the ad inventory. It did not consolidate the administrative work, so whoever owns employer brand at your company still needs an account nobody else uses.

The same asymmetry is why the two sides fail differently. A billing problem is an Indeed problem. A defamatory review is a Glassdoor problem. Support paths that used to be separate companies are now separate teams inside one, which is an improvement in theory and not always one in practice.

Most hiring plans we see list four or five channels, and Indeed and Glassdoor are usually two of them. After the merger that plan has one fewer channel than it says it does. The reach is not doubled, the audiences are not additive, and a single Indeed budget decides how both perform. If one of those channels underdelivers, so does the other, at the same time, for the same reason.

That is an argument for putting something genuinely independent in the empty slot rather than for spending more on the one that is left. What independent means here is concrete: a different audience, a different billing model, and a different company, so that a policy change at Recruit Holdings does not move both lines on your plan at once.

For a fully remote role, this board is one option and the trade is a fair one to state plainly. It is much smaller than Indeed and it always will be, and for an hourly local role it would be the wrong choice. What it is instead is $199 a month, live until you cancel, with a salary range required on every listing, employers verified by hand, and an audience that reads a remote-only board because it wants nothing but remote work. No auction, no application cap, no cost that moves with the metro you are hiring in. Against a $750 a month feed floor for a single sponsored role, the flat fee is both cheaper and knowable in advance.

If you want the wider field before you decide, Indeed alternatives for employers compares the general and remote-only sites side by side, Indeed vs LinkedIn for employers covers the head to head most employers are actually weighing, ZipRecruiter vs Indeed for employers takes the other big paid option, and are Monster and Indeed the same company answers the identical question about the other brand employers double-count. For a genuinely separate second channel, see Glassdoor alternatives for employers. The flat-fee options across every major board are on cost to post a job, and our own rates are on remote job posting pricing.