Superposition vs Paraform
One sends your role to a network of recruiters. The other runs the search itself.
Two different bets on who does the work
- Posting a role and waiting.
- Chasing recruiters for updates.
- Percentage fees on equity.
- Losing the candidate thread.
Paraform is a marketplace. You post a role, recruiters in their network opt in, and the ones who like the brief start sourcing. When one of them places a candidate, you pay a percentage of first-year salary. The pitch is access: you reach a pool of specialist recruiters without signing a retainer with any of them.
Superposition is not a marketplace. There is no recruiter on the other end deciding whether your role is worth their week. An agent takes the brief, reads the internet for people who fit it, writes to them from your mailbox, handles the replies, and books the interviews. You see every candidate and every message.
The practical difference shows up in the middle of a search. On a marketplace, a role that is hard, niche or slow to close gets quietly deprioritised in favour of easier ones. An agent has no other clients to move to.
Where each one actually wins
Paraform wins on human judgement in a niche
If your role lives in a world where a specific recruiter has spent ten years building relationships, that person's network beats any crawler. Marketplaces are how you rent that.
Superposition wins on coverage and consistency
The agent reads personal sites, GitHub, papers and talks, not just the recruiters' own lists, and it works the same way on week six as it did on day one.
You keep the thread either way, but only one of them is yours
Outreach goes from your own mailbox, replies land in your inbox, and the relationship with the candidate belongs to your company rather than an intermediary.
Cost lands differently
A marketplace fee is a percentage on placement. Superposition is a flat monthly fee per agent plus a success fee on base salary only, so the cost of a long search is predictable rather than a surprise at the end.
Side-by-side
Compare the workflow, not just the feature list.
Pricing and features checked 21 September 2026. Tell us if something is out of date.
Questions.
Answered.
Yes, and some teams do. A common split is to run the agent on roles where the candidate pool is wide and findable, and hand genuinely relationship-driven roles to a specialist recruiter.
You are the human in the loop. The agent escalates anything the brief cannot answer, and every outreach can be held for your approval before it sends.
You stop the search and the monthly fee stops with it. There is no success fee unless someone is hired.
Yes. Outreach goes from your address, replies land in your mailbox, and the full history stays in your account.
Superposition vs Dover
One gives you a recruiting system to operate. The other operates it for you.
A Paraform alternative for startups
If you like the idea but not the handoff, this is the other shape of the same job.
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