Best Checkr Alternatives in 2026Seven platforms compared on real price, coverage, and ATS fit
Checkr's Essential package went from $54.99 to $59.99 this year, and Complete moved from $79.99 to $94.99. If you run three hundred checks a year, that is a five-figure swing on a line item nobody was watching. Here is what else is out there, priced from the vendors' own pages.
Published entry pricing, August 2026
BackgroundChecks.com
No minimums, court fees at cost
Certn (Canada basic)
Enhanced check at $29.99
Checkr Basic
Unchanged in 2026
GoodHire Basic
Same owner, same price
Verified First
Entry tier, rest quoted
Veremark Essential
Per candidate, global
Checkr Essential
Raised from $54.99
Checkr Complete
Raised from $79.99
Prices taken from each vendor's own pricing page in August 2026. None of these figures include court, DMV, or verification passthrough fees. Confirm current rates before you commit.
What changed at Checkr this year
Checkr renamed and repriced its packages. Basic held at $29.99 per report. Essential, which now bundles identity verification and unlimited county criminal search, sits at $59.99. Complete, which adds unlimited state criminal and federal criminal search, is $94.99. You can read the current sheet on Checkr's pricing page. Our older breakdown of what a Checkr background check costs reflects the previous tiers, so read this one for the 2026 numbers.
The product got better. Unlimited county criminal search inside Essential is a real upgrade over paying per county. But most teams did not choose Essential for county depth. They chose it because it was the middle option, and the middle option is now 90 percent more expensive than the entry one. That is the moment people start shopping.
Before you shop, know what you are legally on the hook for. The Fair Credit Reporting Act governs consent, adverse action, and dispute handling. The EEOC's guidance on arrest and conviction records limits how criminal history can factor into a decision. Every vendor below handles the paperwork. None of them absorb the liability. That stays with you.
If you are earlier in the process, start with how to run a pre-employment background check and our wider survey of background check companies for employers. This article answers a narrower question: you already use Checkr, and you want to know what else exists.
Switch signals
Five reasons teams leave, ranked by how often I hear them
Price is the loudest reason but rarely the only one. When a hiring team tells me they are evaluating screening vendors, one of these five is usually underneath it.
Essential jumped to $59.99
The package most teams use for salaried hires got materially more expensive this year.
You started hiring outside the US
Checkr's depth is US county criminal records. International coverage is not its strength.
Your ATS has no native integration
Ordering checks in a separate tab and pasting results back is where screening data goes stale.
Turnaround is blocking your offers
Verification-heavy packages can sit for days. Watch your own median, not the marketing claim.
You crossed into custom pricing
Above roughly 300 checks a year you leave self-serve, and the negotiation resets everything.
The turnaround one deserves a note. Every screening vendor advertises fast median turnaround, and every median hides a long tail. Verification-heavy packages depend on a human at a former employer answering an email. Pull your own last fifty checks and look at the 90th percentile, not the average. If a week of delay is costing you candidates, that is a bigger number than the per-check spread between any two vendors on this list. We wrote about the mechanics of that in reducing time to hire.
The shortlist
Seven Checkr alternatives, with the tradeoffs stated
Two of these publish full pricing, three publish an entry price, and two will only give you a quote. I have ordered them by how easy they are to actually buy, because for most teams under a few hundred checks a year, procurement friction costs more than the price difference.
GoodHire
Same parent company, same price sheet
$29.99 per check
Pay per check, self-serve
Best for: Teams that want a slightly friendlier candidate-facing experience and are not actually trying to cut cost.
What it does well
Where it costs you
BackgroundChecks.com
The no-contract price fighter
$24.99 per check
Pay-as-you-go, no minimums
Best for: Small US employers running under 100 checks a year who want the lowest defensible per-check number.
What it does well
Where it costs you
Certn
Built for Canada and cross-border hiring
$24.99 per Canadian criminal check
Self-serve à la carte plus bundles
Best for: Companies hiring in Canada, or US companies with Canadian entities that keep getting quoted enterprise rates elsewhere.
What it does well
Where it costs you
Veremark
Reference and employment history first
$42 per candidate
Per-candidate bundles
Best for: Teams hiring across multiple countries where employment history matters more than US county criminal records.
What it does well
Where it costs you
Verified First
Works with the ATS you already have
From $29.99 per check
Per check, integration-led
Best for: Teams on an ATS with no native screening partner who do not want to run checks in a separate tab.
What it does well
Where it costs you
Sterling
Regulated industries and enterprise volume
Quote only
Annual contract
Best for: Healthcare, financial services, and any employer whose screening program has to survive an audit.
What it does well
Where it costs you
First Advantage
Global scale, enterprise procurement
Quote only
Annual contract
Best for: Multinationals screening in dozens of countries where one vendor and one contract beats five regional ones.
What it does well
Where it costs you
Fit by profile
Which one you should shortlist
There is no best background check vendor. There is a vendor whose pricing model matches your hiring shape. Find your row.
Under 50 checks a year
BackgroundChecks.com
No platform fee and no minimum means you pay only when you actually hire.
Hiring in Canada
Certn
Domestic pricing on Canadian criminal records instead of a cross-border enterprise quote.
Multi-country, reference-heavy
Veremark
Employment history and references are the product, priced per candidate rather than per search.
Legacy ATS, no partner
Verified First
The browser extension works where a real API integration does not exist.
Regulated industry
Sterling
Credentialing and continuous monitoring hold up under audit. You will pay for it.
Enterprise, 200+ countries
First Advantage
One contract instead of five regional vendors, if you have the volume to justify it.
The part nobody quotes
Switching vendors does not solve passthrough fees
Every price on this page is the vendor's cut. It does not include what the county clerk charges to pull a file, what the state DMV charges for a driving record, or what a verification source charges to confirm a degree. Those fees are set by third parties and land on the same invoice regardless of whose logo is at the top.
The variance is brutal. Some counties publish records online for nothing. Others charge a clerk to retrieve files by hand and pass $80 or $90 straight through. A candidate who has lived in four counties can trigger four separate fees on a single report. There is no way to predict that from a resume, which is why fixed per-check budgeting fails for screening and why our guide to background check costs recommends planning at a multiple of list price.
What you can control is markup. BackgroundChecks.com states it bills court fees at cost with no markup. Checkr passes third-party access fees through at cost. Some vendors do not say either way, which is itself informative. Ask for a redacted sample invoice with the fee lines broken out before you sign. A vendor who will not produce one is telling you something.
One more thing worth checking: the FTC's guidance for employers using consumer reports sets out the notice and disclosure steps you owe candidates. Whichever vendor you pick has to support that workflow cleanly, including the pre-adverse and adverse action sequence. If a cheaper vendor makes you handle adverse action manually, the savings evaporate the first time someone forgets a step.
The bigger lever
Cutting the number of checks beats cutting the price of one
Say you run 300 checks a year on Checkr Essential. Moving to a $24.99 vendor saves you around $10,500 before fees. Real money. Now say your process orders checks on every finalist rather than every accepted offer, and you have two finalists per role. Fixing that saves you half your volume, which is the same money again, and it takes a workflow change rather than a migration.
This is where the ATS matters more than the screening vendor. If your pipeline stages are loose, checks get ordered early "to save time" and you pay for candidates who were never going to get an offer. If the check is wired to the offer stage and nothing else, the volume takes care of itself. Our post on ATS integrations covers how to wire that up, and cost per hire puts screening spend in context against the rest of the budget.
The same logic applies upstream. If AI screening and structured interviews narrow a hundred applicants to two serious finalists before anyone orders a report, your screening bill is a rounding error. If they narrow it to eight, it is not. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics JOLTS data, US hires run in the millions each month, and the employers who keep screening costs flat through that volume are the ones with tight stage discipline, not the ones with the best per-check rate.
My honest view: run the vendor comparison, take the better price if one exists, but do not expect the switch to be transformative. The teams I have seen cut screening spend meaningfully did it by ordering fewer checks, not cheaper ones.
Frequently Asked Questions
Why are employers looking for Checkr alternatives in 2026?
Price. Checkr's published rates moved this year: Basic held at $29.99 per report, but Essential now sits at $59.99 and Complete at $94.99. Essential used to be the default package for salaried hires, and a jump of that size lands hard on a team running a few hundred checks a year. The second reason is coverage. Checkr is excellent at US criminal records and weaker anywhere else, so companies hiring internationally end up wanting a second vendor anyway.
Is GoodHire actually a Checkr alternative?
Not really, and this is the part most comparison articles get wrong. Checkr acquired GoodHire, and the published pricing on both sites is now identical: $29.99 for Basic, $59.99 for Essential, $94.99 for Complete. You can prefer GoodHire's candidate experience, and that is a legitimate reason to pick it. But if your goal is lower cost or reduced vendor concentration, moving from Checkr to GoodHire achieves neither.
What is the cheapest Checkr alternative for a small business?
For US-only hiring, BackgroundChecks.com at $24.99 with no setup fee, no platform fee, and no contract minimum is the cleanest entry point. Court fees are billed at cost rather than marked up, which matters more than the headline rate once you run volume. For Canadian hiring, Certn starts at $24.99 for a basic criminal record check. Both undercut Checkr's Basic package before passthrough fees enter the picture.
Do passthrough court fees disappear if I switch vendors?
No, and any vendor that implies otherwise is selling you something. County courts, DMVs, and verification sources set their own fees and every screening provider passes them through. What varies is whether the vendor marks them up. BackgroundChecks.com states it bills court fees at cost. Checkr passes third-party access fees through at cost as well. Ask for a sample invoice with the fee lines broken out before you sign anything.
Which Checkr alternative works best with my ATS?
If you are on Greenhouse, Lever, JazzHR, Jobvite, or Workable, BackgroundChecks.com has native integrations. If your ATS has no screening partner, Verified First's browser extension launches a check from inside any web-based system, which is a genuine workaround for older platforms. If you run an AI-native ATS, the better question is where screening sits in the pipeline. Ordering a check only after AI screening and interviews have narrowed the field cuts spend more than any per-check discount will.
How much should I budget per background check in total?
Take the package price and add 40 to 70 percent as a planning number. A candidate who has lived in four counties can trigger four separate court fees on one report, and some counties charge nothing while others charge $80 or more. For driving roles, add state DMV fees on top. My working rule with teams building a screening budget: plan at 1.5x the list price, and treat anything under that as a good month.
Resources & Further Reading
From the Prepzo blog
Order fewer background checks, not cheaper ones
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