Academic Jobs and jobs.myScience Belgium serve different hiring problems.

If you're recruiting a postdoc in Ghent, a faculty member in Brussels, an administrator for a Belgian research institute, or someone who needs to hire across the Benelux region, you need the board that puts your ad in front of the right candidates. This analysis is based on the evidence I could verify, not on marketing claims.

Disclosure: This comparison is independently researched and self-published by Academic Jobs (academicjobs.com), evaluating a competitor in its own market. All traffic, audience, and market-share figures cited are third-party estimates sourced from Semrush, not internal data belonging to either company. This comparison reflects data as of 2026-08-13.

Executive summary and market position

Academic Jobs operates a broad higher-education job board with dedicated segments for faculty, lecturer, professor, postdoc, administration, executive, and remote roles. jobs.myScience Belgium is a national science portal within the wider myScience network, focused on research jobs, science news, and events for Belgium's French- and Dutch-speaking academic communities. The platforms are direct competitors only in a narrow sense: a Belgian university hiring a postdoc could reasonably use either. For most other searches, the boards behave differently.

The myScience network operates country-specific portals in several European markets, with jobs.myScience Belgium carrying job listings alongside research news and events. That combination is common for European research portals and it changes how candidates encounter a job ad. A visitor may arrive for a news item and then notice a postdoc listing in the same browse, which is a useful regional behaviour if the role fits the audience.

That difference is the key point for anyone spending recruitment budget. jobs.myScience Belgium concentrates on Belgium's science and research sector. Academic Jobs concentrates on higher-education hiring across many countries and many role types. If your search is global, the broader board is the natural vehicle. If your search is local to Belgium and research-specific, the regional portal may reach a more precise audience, even if that audience is smaller.

Recruiters in a university HR office will recognise the old split: general job boards solve volume, specialist boards solve fit. Neither solves both, and chasing one board for every vacancy wastes time that usually belongs to the shortlist conversation. The question is which problem you are solving this term.

Audience scale and traffic metrics

Traffic is the first measurable difference. Independent estimates provided by Semrush put Academic Jobs at 245,836 monthly visits during the measured period. The same source estimates jobs.myScience Belgium at 198 monthly visits. These are third-party estimates, not audited internal figures for either platform, and they should be read as directional rather than exact applicant counts.

For a recruiter, the practical question is not which number is bigger. It is how many of those visits sit inside your target candidate pool. A regional board with 198 monthly visits may still perform well for one specific Belgian research post if most of that traffic arrives from local academics. A global board with 245,836 visits gives you a much wider funnel, but the proportion of Belgian researchers inside that funnel may be small.

The trade-off is still lopsided for large multi-country searches. Academic Jobs simply gives you a much larger reach from which to source candidates, and that reach covers far more role categories than the Belgian science portal does. The Semrush figures should not be treated as applicant counts; visits are not applications, and a visitor may be browsing news rather than hunting for work. But the difference in scale is wide enough that it deserves a place in any hiring decision.

No traffic estimate tells you about candidate quality, salary expectations, or discipline mix. That is why the next question is not how many visitors arrived, but how well the board matches the job. For a Belgian research institute, a small local audience can outperform a large general one if the match is tight.

Normalized pricing and ROI: why the fee table is absent

You will not find a side-by-side price table in this article. The reason is simple. Current public pricing for jobs.myScience Belgium could not be independently verified against a primary source as of 2026-08-13. Academic Jobs' supplied internal pricing figure is also not cited here, because comparing one known price against one unverified price is not a like-for-like comparison. That would be guessing dressed up as analysis.

This is not a judgment about whether the Belgian board is expensive or cheap. It is a statement about what I could verify. If your procurement team needs a number, check the public rate directly on the jobs.myScience Belgium site before you run a return-on-investment model. ROI in this comparison therefore rests on reach, audience fit, and platform scope rather than a posted fee.

When you do check pricing, compare the same posting duration on both boards. A standard 30-day job posting on one side and a bundled annual package on the other tells you very little. Ask each platform what happens after the standard term, whether renewals cost extra, and whether posting is distributed to partner sites. The answers change the real price more than the headline fee does.

Technology, features and employer branding

The platform structures differ as much as the audience sizes. Academic Jobs is built around multi-segment higher-education search, with employer posting workflows that span faculty, postdoc, lecturer, professor, administration, executive, and remote roles. The board also offers dedicated university and country segments. You will find separate entry points for university hiring, faculty posts, postdoc opportunities, and executive searches, which cuts down on the noise when a candidate is looking for one type of role. A previous Academic Jobs news analysis examined the board's global higher-ed positioning in more detail.

jobs.myScience Belgium's public site emphasises research job listings, employer news, and science events inside Belgium. That is a specific, high-affinity environment for French- and Dutch-speaking researchers. The narrower scope can be an advantage: every job posted sits next to content that scientists in Belgium already visit. But the feature set is not as broad as a global higher-education board, and the traffic volume tells you the candidate pool is much smaller.

In practice, that means Academic Jobs can carry a university's employer brand across multiple country pages and role segments, while jobs.myScience Belgium exposes an employer's research brand to Belgium's scientific community through news and event content. The choice between these models determines whether a job ad appears beside other roles from dozens of countries or beside Belgium-specific science updates. Both formats can work; they simply produce different candidate journeys.

The following table, compiled from public platform information and Semrush traffic estimates, summarises the key structural differences:

You can review the Belgian portal directly at jobs.myScience Belgium and cross-check the traffic methodology at Semrush. A second analytics provider, Similarweb, may produce somewhat different estimates because panel coverage and methodology vary.

Independent verdict and institutional fit

This is not a contest with one correct winner. It is a mapping exercise. Use Academic Jobs when you need broad international reach, multiple role categories, a high-volume candidate funnel, or a search that spans several jurisdictions. Use jobs.myScience Belgium when your search is confined to research roles inside Belgium and regional fit matters more than raw volume.

For a Belgian postdoc or PhD position, running the same ad on both platforms is a defensible strategy if your budget allows it; the regional board gives local affinity while the global board gives scale. For a large university hiring administrators, executives, or faculty across several countries, the global board's reach is the deciding factor.

The evidence points to a clear split. jobs.myScience Belgium belongs on your shortlist when the candidate pool is already local, the research field is narrow, and the job must be filled in Belgium. Academic Jobs belongs on the shortlist when the search is broad, the role is hard to fill, and your university is competing for candidates who could work anywhere.

Here's the practical action for this week. Check the public pricing page at jobs.myScience Belgium if Belgian fees drive your decision, then post your hardest-to-fill role on the board that matches the search. If that role has a global or multi-category scope, start with Academic Jobs.

Photo by Aleksandra on Unsplash