Comparison
Dust or Balt: the platform or the trade
Dust is an agent platform for the whole company, billed per seat. Balt is a colleague for one trade, staffing and recruitment, billed on the work done.
€50 in credits when you sign up
Last updated: September 2026
- Dust is a platform you build on: you assemble agents, give them your knowledge and your tools, and a person in your team keeps them running. Balt is one agent that arrives knowing the trade.
- Dust bills a seat: 30 EUR per user per month on Pro and 150 EUR on Max, each seat carrying its own monthly credits. Balt bills the work, with one balance shared by the whole team and no per-user licence.
- On the tools of the trade the lists diverge. Dust lists Ashby and the StackOne gateway under Recruiting and HR; Balt connects to BoondManager, VSA and LinkedIn among the 70 it carries.
- Both run in Microsoft Teams and Slack, both refuse to train on customer data, and Dust holds a SOC 2 Type II certification that Balt does not claim.
Scope
Staffing and recruitment
Balt · the ATS and CRM of the trade included
Dust Every function, one platform
Billing
Shared credits
Balt · one balance for the team, no per-user licence
Dust 30 EUR to 150 EUR per seat per month
Tools of the trade
BoondManager, VSA
Balt · among the 70 it connects to
Dust Ashby and StackOne
Choose Balt if…
Your trade is staffing, the work happens in BoondManager or VSA, and nobody in the team wants to spend their week maintaining agents. What you want is a colleague who already knows what a skills dossier is.
What Balt does not cover
The need runs across the company rather than through one trade, you have someone to build and maintain agents, you want to pick among twenty models, or a client requires a SOC 2 Type II certificate. On all four, Dust is the better answer.
What each one does
Dust
Dust is a Paris company founded in 2022 by Gabriel Hubert and Stanislas Polu, which raised a 40 million dollar Series B in May 2026 led by Sequoia and Abstract. Its platform lets a company build agents, connect them to Notion, Google Drive, Salesforce, GitHub or Slack, and run them from the web app, from Slack, from Microsoft Teams, from a Chrome extension or through the API. It announces more than 3,000 client organisations and over 300,000 agents deployed, across every department.
Balt
Balt is a single agent for one trade. It lives in Teams and Slack, answers by email and by phone, and works inside the ATS and CRM already in place, BoondManager and VSA included, with no migration. It arrives knowing what a skills dossier is, that an announced availability is optimistic, and that a submission refused on price sets a rule that holds for months. Credits are shared by the whole workspace and no seat is licensed.
Comparison
Balt and Dust, point by point
| Criterion | Dust | Balt |
|---|---|---|
| Shape | A platform: you build the agents | One colleague who arrives knowing the trade |
| Scope | Every department, 70 integrations by category | Staffing and recruitment, in depth |
| Tools of the trade | Ashby and StackOne. No BoondManager, no VSA | BoondManager, VSA, LinkedIn, among 70 wired |
| Surfaces | Web, Slack, Teams, Chrome extension, API | Teams, Slack, email, phone |
| Billing | Per seat: Pro 30 EUR, Max 150 EUR a month, credits bundled per seat | Credits shared by the team, from 50 EUR a month, no seat |
| Hosting | EU or United States, your choice | France and the European Union |
| Certification | SOC 2 Type II, GDPR | GDPR. No SOC 2 certificate claimed |
| Models | More than 20, you choose | Chosen for you, not a setting |
A platform is built, a colleague arrives
Dust sells the ability to make your own agents: you pick the model, you connect Notion, Drive or Salesforce, you write what the agent must do, and you keep it current as the company changes. Companies that get a lot out of it have someone whose job includes exactly that, and Dust names the role on its own site.
That is a real strength when the need is spread across departments. It is a cost when it is not. An agent you built has to be told what a skills dossier is, which client looks at certifications first, and what never goes into a submission. You explain it once to a person, and you explain it on every task to a platform, because that explanation is sent back to the model each time.
Balt carries the trade in its procedures rather than in your prompt. That is the whole difference in one sentence, and it is the one to test rather than to believe.
The seat against the shared balance
Dust bills per seat with credits bundled into each one: a Free seat carries 500 credits for its lifetime, a Pro seat costs 30 EUR a month and carries 8,000 credits, a Max seat costs 150 EUR a month and carries 40,000. Enterprise pools credits across the workspace and is quoted rather than published.
For a staffing agency the shape matters more than the amount. Business managers, recruiters, an administrative manager, a director who asks for a figure twice a month: each of them is a seat. The person who uses the agent twice a month costs the same as the one who lives in it, and the natural reflex becomes to limit who gets an account.
Balt has no seat. One balance is shared by the whole Slack or Teams workspace, from 50 EUR a month for 20,000 credits, and everyone draws on it. Nobody is left out of the tool to save a licence, and what you pay follows the work rather than the headcount.
The tools of the trade decide
Dust lists around seventy integrations sorted by category. Under Recruiting and HR there are two: Ashby, an American applicant tracking system, and StackOne, a gateway that reaches several HR systems at once. Nothing in the list is aimed at a French staffing agency.
That is the fact to weigh, because a French firm runs its assignments, its consultants and its margin in BoondManager or in VSA. Balt connects to both, along with LinkedIn and the rest of the 70 tools it carries. What is not wired can be reached through MCP on the Dust side, and that is a project with an owner and a maintenance cost rather than a connection.
What Dust does better, plainly
Dust is larger, older and better certified. It announces more than 3,000 client organisations, it holds a SOC 2 Type II certificate where Balt holds none, it lets you choose among more than twenty models, and it offers hosting in the European Union or in the United States. On the security questionnaire of a large account, those lines are answered rather than argued.
It also reaches where Balt does not go. Support, finance, product and engineering are inside its scope and outside ours, deliberately. A group that wants one platform for every department is asking a question Balt does not answer.
Where the two agree is worth stating too: neither trains a model on your data, both isolate one workspace from another, and both are explicit about it in writing.
How to settle it in a week
Take thirty real requests from your last three months, the ugly ones included: the client record missing half its fields, the consultant whose availability moved twice, the requirement written in three lines by a salesperson in a hurry. Write the right answer beside each one before the first run, otherwise you will be judging fluency rather than accuracy.
Then count what no demonstration shows: how many times you have to re-explain your own trade, what each does when the record is empty instead of complete, how long it takes before someone other than you can use it, and the real spend on your volumes with every person who should have access counted in.
Frequently asked questions
Does Dust work in Microsoft Teams?
Yes. An administrator installs the Teams application, then anyone mentions an agent in a channel or a direct message. Its documentation states that interactions are text only and that meeting integration is not supported. It is a point of convergence with Balt rather than a difference.
Does Dust connect to BoondManager?
Not in its published list, where Recruiting and HR holds Ashby and StackOne. It can be reached through an MCP server, which someone has to build and keep running. Balt connects to BoondManager and VSA directly.
Is Balt cheaper than Dust?
It depends on how many people touch it, because the two bill different things. Five business managers on Pro seats cost 150 EUR a month at Dust before anyone has done any work; Balt starts at 50 EUR a month for a balance the whole team shares. Above heavy daily use by a small number of people, the comparison narrows and the right answer is to measure on your own volumes.