How does We Are Distributed actually compare with Himalayas?

We Are Distributed publishes around seven hundred live roles. Every one of them was opened by a person before it went up, which puts a hard ceiling on the board at human throughput rather than crawler capacity. New roles appear daily and dead ones come down; nothing is batch-imported and left to rot. It is a few hundred, and no framing makes that a large number.

Himalayas carries 99,806 live roles, which the homepage rounds to 100,000+. Free employer posting plus aggregation from elsewhere is what produces that. Some of it is duplication — on any aggregating board that number is never zero — but the surface area is not comparable.

Neither figure tells you how many of those roles are open to your country, your timezone or your level.

We Are Distributed states that a person confirms every role is genuinely open to remote, anywhere applicants before it publishes — no scraped postings, no dead roles left up to earn ad impressions. The board is checked daily rather than re-imported weekly, so a filled role comes down in hours rather than at the next crawl.

No vetting policy is published anywhere on Himalayas that we could find. A company completes a profile and lists; beyond that the board is aggregation. That is how a platform reaches a hundred thousand roles.

A stated policy is a promise rather than an audit — neither platform publishes a rejection rate.

On We Are Distributed an employer publishes a real band, or the platform surfaces a recommended band for that role in its place. There is no listing on the board where the money is simply absent. That is a policy with a cost attached — some employers will not post under it — and it is the position of a platform that has spent years campaigning for pay transparency in adverts.

On Himalayas compensation does not appear on listing previews. Where a source posting carries a figure it survives into the detail page; where it does not, nothing replaces it. You cannot rule out everything under your number before reading it, because the number is not in the list.

This is not a finding that Himalayas roles pay less. It is a finding that you learn what they pay later, and often only by asking.

We Are Distributed names the countries on the role. That is one of the six commitments in its Global Employer Pledge, and the wording there is blunt about why: “Remote” is not a location. A role that cannot say where it will employ you has not finished being written.

Himalayas carries region tags instead — “Remote”, or a continent, or a broad zone. There is no eligibility list on the listing, so the first place the restriction usually appears is inside the employer’s own application form, several steps and one cover letter later.

A platform that charges for placement can require a field before the role publishes. A platform that takes nothing has nothing to require it with.

Himalayas Plus is $9 a month: daily alerts, unlimited resumes and cover letters, unlimited interview practice and coaching, a hundred AI headshots a month and thirty minutes of conversational AI interviews. Max at $29 raises those to five hundred headshots and four hours of interview time.

We Are Distributed Lite is $15, and the ladder runs $15 / $30 / $60 / $99. Lite adds the AI career agent, stored resumes and job analyses on top of the free Career Manager. Every tier is monthly with no commitment, which matters against boards that lock a year in — but does not make $15 cheaper than $9.

The ladders diverge higher up. Stored analyses and a human cohort appear one tier up on We Are Distributed; more model time appears one tier up on Himalayas.

Himalayas gives one resume, one cover letter, one mock interview and one coaching session without payment, on top of a tracker and AI matching. It is deliberately enough to run a real search with — one of everything, then a wall.

We Are Distributed free gets the whole Career Manager, the board, the support groups and the weekly check-in, at $0 forever with no card. It stores no resumes, runs no job analyses, does not include the career agent, and caps the network at five connections.

Counted as features held, that is seven of eight against four of eight.

The We Are Distributed Chrome extension puts a track button on the listing itself across Greenhouse, Lever, Ashby, Workable, BambooHR, SmartRecruiters, Recruitee, Teamtailor, Rippling, Personio and more. It detects title and company automatically and syncs into six pipeline stages in real time. It works on roles found anywhere — including roles found on Himalayas.

Himalayas puts a tracker in the free tier with no upgrade needed, so every user has one from the moment they arrive. It tracks what you found on Himalayas, which for most of their users is most of what they find.

The We Are Distributed cohort tier is $20 a month, with the full Job Search Accelerator at $60. Both include Lite and a resume review the platform values at $70. It is explicitly not sold to people whose livelihood is already at risk, and it asks for steady weekly effort — a coach who says that at the point of sale is a coach worth having.

Himalayas coaching is a model, and a good one: infinitely patient, available at three in the morning, free to start. For rehearsing an answer twenty times it is straightforwardly better than a human on a schedule.

What it cannot do is notice the pattern across your last four rejections that you are too close to see, and say it to you plainly.

Himalayas shipped an iOS app in July 2026, putting alerts, matching and the tracker in a pocket. Neither platform has Android, so the win is narrower than it first looks — but one has shipped an app and one has not.

We Are Distributed runs entirely in a browser. The Chrome extension is the better desktop tool by some distance, but it is a desktop tool, and nothing in the product helps at a bus stop. There is no app and no implication one is imminent.

How much that matters depends entirely on where you search from. At a desk in the evening it is close to irrelevant. On a train it is most of the product.

Himalayas costs nothing to post on once a company profile is complete — thirty days, with an optional paid boost on top. For a founder hiring their fourth person on no budget this is simply the correct answer, and it is what produces the hundred thousand roles.

We Are Distributed charges $99 for seven days, $199 for fourteen, $299 for thirty. Flat fee, no recruiter percentage, no subscription, and placement on the board has never been for sale — a paid slot buys visibility, not position. It is still a fee, and a fee is a filter on who bothers.

Vetting, named countries and published employer standards are things a platform can require because employers are paying to be there. Volume and a free tier are things a platform can offer because they are not.

The We Are Distributed Global Employer Pledge asks for six things: a real salary band, the countries named, the actual hiring manager named before anyone applies, paid test projects, a reply to every applicant within two weeks, and the same benefits logic for contractors as for employees. None of the six costs an employer a budget line.

Zero of the pledge’s hundred founding seats are taken. A published standard with no signatories is a position, not yet a practice.

Himalayas requires a completed company profile and that is the whole obligation. No commitment on bands, on geography, on reply times or on paid test work — consistent with a free, open-posting model, and exactly what makes that model work.