Willo alternative that conducts the interview instead of recording it

The difference is who is in the room. Willo is asynchronous video interviewing: you write a fixed set of questions, candidates record their answers whenever suits them, and your team reviews the videos afterward. An AI interview agent conducts the interview in real time, asking the next question based on what the candidate just said.

That distinction matters most on the answers that are almost good. A candidate who gives a vague response to a question about handling an escalation might have a strong story sitting one follow-up away. A recorder never asks for it. The agent does, and then scores what it hears. If you want the full picture of how the async model works and where it fits, we go through it on our one-way video interview software page.

Willo repackaged its plans in early August 2026, so any figure you read in an older comparison article is now wrong. As of August 21, 2026 it publishes two options. Willo Enterprise is an annual contract published as a floor price from 3,799 dollars a year on a one year term, dropping to 3,419 on two years and 3,229 on three, with users and live roles included. Willo Lite is pay as you go at 59 dollars per live role a month, capped at 5 live roles, 150 assessed candidates per role and 5 users. The previous Growth and Scale tiers, which sat at 209 and 307 dollars a month billed yearly, no longer appear on the pricing page.

InterviewAgent.ai starts at 149 dollars a month, with 399 and 999 dollar tiers for higher interview volumes, billed month to month. The comparison that matters is not the headline number but the commitment behind it: Willo's cheapest published route is per open role, which suits occasional hiring, while its Enterprise plan is an annual contract working out at about 317 dollars a month equivalent. One detail worth knowing before you budget: Willo publishes the same Enterprise contract in four currencies, so a US buyer sees 3,799 dollars where a UK buyer sees 2,999 pounds. It is one price, quoted locally, not a discount. Prices move, as this vendor keeps demonstrating, so check both pricing pages before you decide. We keep a verified breakdown of what everyone in this category charges on our AI interview software pricing page, and the wider platform comparison sits on video interview software. If you are weighing Willo against the other two names that come up most often, we put them side by side in HireVue vs Spark Hire vs Willo.

Not in the sense of conducting the interview. Willo Intelligence is an AI layer on top of asynchronous video: it transcribes what candidates recorded, summarizes it, benchmarks candidates against each other, and can suggest follow-up questions for a later round. The interview itself is still a candidate talking to a camera with a preset question on screen.

This is a real distinction worth checking with any vendor you evaluate, because a lot of async video products now market themselves with the word AI. The question to ask on a demo is simple: does the software ask the second question because of what the candidate said in the first one? If the answer is no, it is scoring recordings, not interviewing.

Because Willo is a UK company and its pricing page defaults to GBP, with a currency selector most visitors never notice. This catches US buyers constantly: you read 2,999 pounds for Enterprise and 49 pounds per live role for Lite, then find 3,799 dollars and 59 dollars quoted somewhere else and assume one of the two is out of date. They are the same plans. Switch the selector to USD before you put a number in a budget.

We know this one from the inside, because we got it wrong ourselves. A previous version of this page saw the pound figure, concluded our recorded dollar price was stale, and corrected it across a dozen pages when nothing had changed. Since this site sells to US buyers, every competitor price we publish is now read in US dollars, on a date we state.

Lite is 59 dollars per live role a month with no contract, and the caps are the part worth reading before you pick it: a maximum of 5 live roles at any time, 150 assessed candidates per live role, and up to 5 users. For a company running two or three openings at a time that is a genuinely cheap way to collect recorded answers.

The shape matters more than the number as you scale. Per-live-role pricing means your bill tracks how many requisitions are open, not how many candidates you screen, so a single high-volume req is cheap and twelve simultaneous openings is not. Enterprise starts from 3,799 dollars a year on a one-year term, with roughly 10 to 15 percent off for two and three-year commitments, and the word "from" means the real figure arrives after a demo.

No, and the naming makes this genuinely confusing. Willo Intelligence applies AI after the recording exists: it transcribes what the candidate said, summarizes it and benchmarks answers against each other. It does not take part in the interview. Every question is one you wrote in advance, and no follow-up is ever asked, because there is nobody in the conversation to ask one.

An AI interviewer changes what happens during the interview rather than after it. When a candidate says they managed a team, the agent asks how many people and for how long, then scores the answer that comes back. That distinction decides whether your reviewer is reading a summary of a monologue or a record of an actual conversation, and it is the single question worth settling before you compare feature lists. Nine vendors are compared on that basis on HireVue competitors.

Candidate reaction to one-way video is the well-documented weak spot of the format. Talking to a camera with no one on the other end feels like being processed, and the complaint that follows is always the same: there was no chance to clarify, ask anything back, or recover from a bad first sentence. Drop-off is the cost.

A conducted interview reads as a conversation, which is why we run it that way, with clear disclosure that the interviewer is AI and consent before anyone starts. Candidates can ask the agent to repeat or rephrase a question, and they get follow-ups instead of silence. Neither format beats a human recruiter on warmth, but a two-way exchange is a materially better experience than a recording light.