TestGorilla alternative: starting with a correction.
Nearly every page ranking for this search says TestGorilla charges by employee headcount. It did. It stopped in July 2025. Here is what the pricing actually is now, what is worth staying for, and six alternatives with published prices where they exist.
The short answer
Stay put if you hire across many kinds of role. Around 350 tests covering cognitive, personality and situational judgment in one assessment is hard to replace.
Start looking if the annual commitment is the problem, your credits keep expiring at renewal, or you are only ever running one kind of test.
What TestGorilla is genuinely good at
We compete with TestGorilla, which is why this comes before the criticism. If we only told you the bad parts you would be right not to trust the rest.
The breadth is the product. Around 350 skills tests spanning programming, role skills, software, language proficiency, cognitive ability, situational judgment and personality, combinable into a single assessment. That last part is what reviewers name most often. Very few tools let you ask about attention to detail, spoken English and SQL in one sitting.
People find it easy to use, and the free plan is real. Capterra puts it at roughly 4.1 out of 5 across 266 reviews, with ease of use scoring higher than the overall. The free plan gives ten credits every month with no card, which is ten real candidates through a real assessment, forever. Only our own free tier is comparably usable without paying.
Integrations and anti-cheating tooling. Nineteen applicant tracking connections. They publish webcam snapshots taken with consent, full-screen exit tracking, tab-switch detection, IP logging and disabled copy and paste. Whatever you think of that approach, it is documented rather than implied, which is more than most of this category manages.
Why people go looking for TestGorilla alternatives
Sources are TestGorilla’s own pricing, integrations and help centre pages as they read on 2 August 2026, plus dated Capterra reviews.
Every paid plan carries an annual commitment
Core is shown as $142 a month with the words annual commitment beside it and $1,704 billed annually underneath. Plus starts from $400 a month. There is no monthly-only option. A two star reviewer in October 2025 called the model misleading. Value for money scores about 3.8 out of 5 while ease of use scores 4.4, and that gap is the story.
testgorilla.com pricing page, checked 2 August 2026; Capterra review, October 2025
Credits do not roll over and expire when your plan renews
Confirmed in their own help centre. Unused credits expire at renewal, and on the free plan the ten monthly credits reset rather than accumulate. If your hiring is seasonal you pay flat for a year and burn the quarters where you hire nobody.
TestGorilla help centre articles on credits, read 2 August 2026
The plans changed underneath existing customers in July 2025
This is the fact nearly every other page on this query gets wrong. TestGorilla used to price Starter and Pro on full time employee count, which is why so many comparison pages still say it charges by headcount. Those plans were retired in July 2025 and replaced by credit-based Core and Plus. The headcount criticism is history. The real complaint is that the model you signed up to was replaced, and their own integrations page still names Pro and Starter.
TestGorilla help centre and integrations page, read 2 August 2026
The useful customisation sits on the expensive plan
Core allows five custom questions per assessment. Plus takes that to twenty and is where custom coding challenges, job simulations, branding removal, the applicant tracking integrations and API access live. Two reviewers in February 2025 raised related limits: one found four tests was the maximum in one assessment, another said some questions could not be modified.
testgorilla.com pricing page, checked 2 August 2026; Capterra reviews, February 2025
Refunds, cancellations, and a trial that does not show you everything
A one star reviewer in September 2024, writing as a chief executive, described poor support and used the word scammy about the billing. Related themes include auto-renewal charges after a cancellation request, and a pause offered instead of a refund. A May 2025 reviewer said the free trial never gave full access to the personality or technical assessments.
Capterra reviews, September 2024 and May 2025
Candidates find the assessments long and unclear
We are flagging the sourcing rather than dressing it up. Trustpilot, where candidates rather than buyers write, blocked access, so we could read summaries but could not date individual entries. Candidates find the tests time consuming and unclear. Treat it as a soft signal, not evidence.
Trustpilot, could not be fetched directly, read 2 August 2026
One claim we went looking for and did not find: the argument that these assessments amount to unpaid work for candidates circulates widely, but we could not source it to a dated review anywhere we could reach. So it is not on this page.
TestGorilla alternatives, compared
Six options, each fixing a different thing on the list above. Nothing here matches TestGorilla’s range, and a page telling you otherwise would be lying to make a sale. Every price was read off the vendor’s own pricing page on 2 August 2026.
| Option | Who it suits | Published price | One thing it does better than TestGorilla |
|---|---|---|---|
| Equip | Teams hiring in bursts who pay per candidate and sign nothing | ₹95 per candidate per test. No subscription. Credits never expire | No annual commitment at all, and unused credit keeps its value |
| TestDome | Small engineering teams wanting prepaid invites, no renewal date | $20 a candidate for a pack of 5, down to $7 for 600. Packs never expire | Buy once, use whenever. Nothing expires and there is no contract |
| Adaface | Engineering hiring where candidate drop-off is the problem | $180 a year for 12 credits, up to $5,500 for 1,000. Annual only | A conversational format reviewers tie to completion rates |
| Willo | Teams who would rather watch an answer than read a score | Growth from £199 a month, or £149 on annual. Scale from £299 | You can pay month to month without an annual commitment |
| Journey UncommonOurs | A first knowledge screen on programming languages, billed monthly | Free tier, then ₹499 or ₹1,999 a month. Monthly billing, rupees | Monthly billing with no contract, and public questions and rubrics |
| Mercer Mettl | Campus drives and certification exams that must hold up | Not published. Quote only, by phone or form | Live human proctoring and a secure browser |
The options in more detail
Equip
First because it answers the top three complaints directly. ₹95 per candidate per test, printed on the page. No subscription. Credits never expire. What you give up is range: no personality inventory, no situational judgment battery, nothing like 350 tests. If you were using a tenth of TestGorilla and paying for all of it, this is the sharpest trade here.
TestDome
The purest version of buy once, use whenever. Five invites for $100, a hundred for $1,000, and $7 each at six hundred, with no expiration date per their FAQ. Much narrower and unapologetic about it: this is technical screening, not a talent platform.
Adaface
The one to look at if your problem is candidates abandoning the assessment rather than the bill. It runs the test as a conversation with a bot, and reviewers tie that to completion rates. It publishes its full price list, $180 to $5,500 a year. Note it does not solve the commitment problem: annual billing only, in dollars, and credits expire after twelve months.
Willo
A different instrument. Willo is asynchronous video interviewing: candidates record answers in their own time and you watch them. If you want a sense of how somebody communicates, a test score was never going to give you that. It is here for one commercial reason: it publishes genuine monthly rates, £199 a month for Growth or £149 on annual. No free tier, but you are not signing for a year.
Journey Uncommon
Ours, fifth of six, and by a distance the smallest thing here. The next section is the honest version and you should weigh it before anything else here.
Mercer Mettl
Included because it is the honest answer for one situation: you need a proctored exam whose result will be challenged. Mettl publishes automated and human proctoring, a secure browser and proctoring as a managed service. It is a step in the opposite commercial direction though, with no published price at all.
Where Journey Uncommon fits, and where it does not
We are fifth of six. We compete with TestGorilla, so it would be easy to put ourselves first, and it would also be nonsense: they have around 350 tests and we have one kind of test.
Where TestGorilla beats us, plainly. Range, by a mile. Personality, cognitive ability, situational judgment, language proficiency and software skills, none of which we have. Nineteen applicant tracking integrations against our zero. Coding challenges and job simulations. Custom branding. Twelve platform languages. If more than one of those matters, this is not a real decision.
Where we are actually different. You can read our questions before you pay. The practice half of our bank is on public URLs with worked explanations and the exact grading rubric, so you can judge the standard and walk away for free if it looks shallow. TestGorilla does not publish its bank and nor does anyone else here. The half your candidates sit is sealed and drawn differently per person. And the billing is the opposite shape: rupees, monthly, no contract, with a free tier of five tests a month and unlimited candidates, then ₹499 and ₹1,999. No credit balance, so nothing expires at renewal.
The gaps, stated once. Multiple choice only. No coding sandbox. No AI-graded written answers. No applicant tracking integrations. No custom branding. Rupee card billing only. One test at a time in the dashboard for now. Seventeen programming languages and nothing beyond programming knowledge. This is an early product and our recruiter page says so. And no proctoring, ever: no webcam, no screen recording, no browser lockdown, no cheating score.
Including every row where we lose, which is most of them.
Questions people ask before switching
Does TestGorilla still charge based on how many employees you have?
No, and most pages answering this are out of date. The old Starter and Pro plans were priced on full time employee count, which is where that reputation comes from. They were retired in July 2025 and replaced with credit-based Core and Plus. We searched the live pricing page on 2 August 2026 for employees, headcount and company size and found none of them.
What does TestGorilla cost in 2026?
As read off their pricing page on 2 August 2026: Free is $0 with ten credits a month and no card. Core is $142 a month, billed as $1,704 for the year, with 400 credits and two seats. Plus starts from $400 a month. Credits are charged when a candidate starts: one for a skills test, two for an AI interview. Figures on comparison blogs differ, so check the page yourself.
Can I pay TestGorilla monthly instead of annually?
Not on Core or Plus as the pricing page reads today. Both say annual commitment. The free plan has no commitment but caps you at ten credits a month. If monthly billing is your requirement, Willo publishes genuine monthly rates, Equip and TestDome charge per candidate with no subscription, and our plans bill monthly in rupees.
Why is Equip at the top of this list instead of Journey Uncommon?
Because it deserves to be. Equip fixes the exact thing most people leaving TestGorilla are annoyed about: ₹95 per candidate per test, no subscription, no annual commitment, credits that never expire, all published. It also runs coding assessments and AI interviews we do not. The case for us is narrow: our questions and rubrics are public, and a flat ₹1,999 a month beats ₹95 a head above about twenty candidates.
Will I lose my anti-cheating features if I switch?
Probably, and you should decide how much that matters. TestGorilla publishes webcam snapshots taken with consent, full-screen exit tracking, tab-switch detection, IP logging and disabled copy and paste. Adaface and Testlify publish similar tooling. Journey Uncommon has none of it and never will. We record an answer timeline and how often the page lost focus, and show those numbers without turning them into a cheating score.
Before you cancel anything
Count how many of TestGorilla’s test categories you used last year. If the answer is four or five, stay: rebuilding that from three cheaper tools costs more in time than you save in fees. If the answer is one, you have been paying for a talent platform to run a skills quiz.
Free, no account. Run this check on every vendor here, including us.
Last verified 2 August 2026
TestGorilla's pricing and integrations pages and their help centre articles on credits and legacy plans were read on this date, along with the pricing page of every alternative listed. Review quotes carry their own dates. Trustpilot, G2, TrustRadius, Reddit and the Wayback Machine blocked access, which is why the candidate item is marked a soft signal.
If something here has gone stale, tell us and we will fix it or take the claim down.
Other vendors we have written this up for
There are four of these and there will stay four.