The one-paragraph answer
If you have a recruiter on staff and you're hiring 20+ roles a year, use Ashby. It's the better ATS at that scale and the per-seat cost (around ₹15-25K/seat/month) amortizes fast over your recruiter's calendar. The AI scoring they ship is competent.
If you're the founder doing the screening yourself for 3-6 roles a year, use Lucida. The ATS feature surface Ashby spent years building is overhead you'll never use, and the per-seat economics break for solo-admin workflows.
Feature comparison
| Lucida | Ashby | |
|---|---|---|
| Price (entry) | ₹2,499 / month | ~₹15-25K / seat / mo |
| Multi-user | Single admin | Unlimited collaborators |
| AI rubric scoring | Cited evidence, every score | Yes (newer feature) |
| JD clarification pre-pass | Yes — asks before scoring | Scores against raw JD |
| Candidate feedback report | Every applicant, free | Manual / templated |
| ATS pipeline stages | Submitted → Scored → Shortlist → R2 → Hired | Full customization |
| Onboarding time | ~10 minutes, self-serve | Sales call → implementation |
| India-specific | DPDPA-built, INR billing, GST invoice | Global, USD-billed |
| Best fit | 5-30 person Indian SMB, founder screening | 50+ person company with recruiter on staff |
The honest math
Ashby's minimum tier sits north of ₹15K/seat/month even for the smallest plan. Across a year, that's ₹1.8L+ for one seat. Lucida monthly is ₹2,499 — about ₹30K/year, all-in. For a team hiring 3 roles a year, that's the difference between hiring a junior engineer with the savings or not.
Where Ashby wins
- Pipeline depth. If you need 6+ pipeline stages, agency portals, requisition approvals, multi-recruiter collaboration — Ashby has all of it. Lucida doesn't, and won't.
- Integration ecosystem. Slack, Calendly, DocuSign, every assessment tool you can name. Lucida ships with Cal.com booking and Resend email; that's the integration surface.
- Reporting. Ashby's analytics module is genuinely good. Lucida shows you scoring on a per-role basis; we don't ship hiring-funnel dashboards.
Where Lucida wins
- Price. 92% cheaper at the entry tier.
- Time to first scored candidate. Sign up → paste JD → publish → first candidate scored: usually under 30 minutes. Ashby requires implementation.
- The clarification step. Lucida asks you the three questions a senior recruiter would ask before drafting the rubric. Ashby scores against whatever JD you upload. The downstream score quality difference is meaningful.
- Candidate feedback report. Every applicant gets a private feedback URL with strengths, gaps, and cited evidence. We've never seen another hiring tool ship this by default.
If you're switching to Lucida from Ashby
You're probably here because your hiring volume dropped and the per-seat math stopped making sense. That's a real scenario. We don't have an Ashby data importer (Year 2+ if we ever build one), but you can export candidates from Ashby and bulk-paste résumés into Lucida via /admin/jobs/<slug>/bulk-import. Five minutes per role to migrate.