Kepler vs Bullhorn: which recruitment CRM should an agency buy in 2026?

What Kepler and Bullhorn each are

Bullhorn is the incumbent platform for staffing and recruitment. Its own site describes more than 10,000 companies using it, over 1,400 employees across 14 countries, and more than 25 years serving the staffing industry. The product is not one thing: an ATS and CRM sold in editions, with Bullhorn One layering time and expense capture, invoicing and payroll on top, Bullhorn Automation and Bullhorn Analytics sold alongside as their own editioned products, Amplify carrying the AI, and a Marketplace of 300+ pre-integrated technology partners. Bullhorn also owns Invenias, the executive-search platform it acquired in 2018.

Kepler is a recruitment CRM built around one assistant and one searchable database. The assistant sits in a sidebar on every page, has roughly fifteen tools, reads the whole workspace — candidates, CVs, notes, emails and call transcripts — and can create and update records once a person approves the change. Around it sit the ordinary parts of an agency desk: two-axis pipelines, jobs, tasks, an activity timeline, Gmail and Outlook sync, a meeting notetaker, CV parsing and CV formatting, a branded job board on your own domain, reporting on billings and consultant splits, outbound campaigns, an automations register, a public REST API with outbound webhooks, and a LinkedIn Chrome extension. There is one edition and one published price.

The honest headline difference: placements or timesheets?

The cleanest way to separate Kepler and Bullhorn is to ask how your agency makes money. If your revenue arrives as a fee on a permanent placement, everything that matters happens in the front office: finding people, ranking them against a brief, keeping records current, and getting a formatted CV in front of a client. If your revenue arrives as a margin on hours worked by contractors you employ, then half your business is time capture, invoicing, payroll and compliance, and no amount of front-office polish substitutes for it.

Bullhorn is built for the second case and does the first case as well. Bullhorn One is described on Bullhorn’s own product page as a way to “Run every aspect of your recruiting business, from intake to payroll”, with time and expense capture from all sources, an invoicing engine that attaches signed timesheets, and payroll handling garnishment sequencing, automated tax codes and contractors across multiple EINs. Kepler has none of this — no timesheets, no invoicing, no payroll, no VMS integration — so an agency that needs those would run a second system alongside Kepler and move data between them over Kepler’s API and webhooks.

Kepler is built for the first case only, and the trade for that narrowness is that the whole front office sits in one seat: no edition above the one you buy, no feature gating, no separate AI product, no add-on catalogue.

Kepler vs Bullhorn feature by feature

Every Bullhorn cell below comes from bullhorn.com or kb.bullhorn.com and was checked on 6 September 2026; the sources are listed at the foot of this post.

Two rows deserve a note rather than a cell. Bullhorn’s Marketplace page says “300+ pre-integrated technology partners” while its small-agency pricing page says “350+ partners”; both are Bullhorn’s own figures and the difference is theirs. And Bullhorn describes implementation two ways in its own material — “Self-guided implementation is included with Bullhorn Starter, Core, and Pro at no additional setup cost”, alongside “Bullhorn’s own implementation team manages the process from start to finish”. Ask which applies to the plan you are quoted.

Where Bullhorn is the better product

On breadth Bullhorn is simply ahead, and there are at least seven places where a serious agency should choose Bullhorn over Kepler without hesitation.

• Integrated back office and pay-bill. Bullhorn One captures time and expense from all sources, automates invoice creation with signed timesheets attached, and runs payroll including garnishment sequencing, automated tax codes and contractors across multiple EINs. Kepler has no timesheets, no invoicing and no payroll. For a contract or temp staffing firm this is the whole argument, and Bullhorn wins it outright.
• The partner marketplace. Bullhorn’s Marketplace lists 300+ pre-integrated technology partners across nine categories, including Pay & Bill, Onboard & Manage and Source & Attract. Kepler has a public REST API and outbound webhooks and no marketplace at all. If your stack already includes a background-check vendor, a job-board aggregator and a payroll bureau, the odds they are pre-integrated with Bullhorn are high and the odds they are pre-integrated with Kepler are zero.
• Enterprise scale and references. Bullhorn states more than 10,000 companies on its platform, over 1,400 employees across 14 countries, more than 25 years in the industry and over USD 47 million a year in R&D. Kepler has no paying customers yet and no case studies. If your buying process requires reference calls with agencies of your size, Bullhorn can supply them and Kepler cannot.
• Certifications and vendor security reviews. Bullhorn publishes a security page and stated in a 2015 press release that its infrastructure investments bring it into compliance with standards such as SOC 2 and ISO 27001. Kepler holds neither SOC 2 nor ISO 27001. If your clients run security questionnaires that require a certificate, that is an immediate reason to choose Bullhorn, and no product argument gets around it.
• SMS and multi-channel outreach. Bullhorn Automation’s Enterprise and Amplify editions include SMS campaigns and chat engagements. Kepler has no SMS anywhere in the product; WhatsApp is one-off send plus templates. High-volume temp desks that recruit by text should not buy Kepler.
• VMS, onboarding, credentialing and middle office. Bullhorn sells VMS Automation, Onboarding, Middle Office and a Credentialing and Compliance Manager. Kepler sells none of them.
• A sourcing pool and job distribution. Bullhorn’s Amplify digital workers include prospecting and enrichment skills, and its Marketplace covers job multiposting through partners. Kepler has no sourcing database of its own and no multiposting to external job boards — it publishes to its own branded job board on your domain, which is a different thing.

Kepler also has no mobile app, no interview scorecards, no client-facing shortlist portal, no opportunities or business-development pipeline object, no consent and GDPR records as a data model, no VoIP dialler integrations and no revenue forecasting. An agency evaluating an enterprise platform will expect several of those, and Kepler does not have them.

Where Kepler is the better product

Kepler’s advantages cluster in one place: what a single seat buys, and what the AI does with a database you already own.

• One edition with no feature gating. Bullhorn’s own ATS editions matrix puts custom fields and workflows and unlimited data storage on the Bullhorn ATS edition rather than the entry ATS Growth edition, and puts custom REST API integrations on Front Office Growth. It also marks Shift Scheduling “NA only” and the Credentialing and Compliance Manager “NA/UKI only”. Kepler has one edition: every feature included, records and storage unlimited, API and webhooks on the same plan as everything else.
• The AI is in the seat price. Bullhorn’s AI product page lists AI Assistant Premium, Bullhorn Search and Match, and every Amplify skill — chat, enriching, matching, screening, outreach, present, analytics — as separate purchases requiring the Amplify edition on top of a Growth, Enterprise or Industry package, with the standard AI Assistant offered on a bring-your-own-LLM basis. Bullhorn’s knowledge base for Bullhorn Recruitment Cloud says that assistant “currently only supports Azure’s GPT 3.5 Turbo” and that “Bullhorn doesn’t host, train or control the AI model. This is completely owned and controlled by the customer.” Kepler includes a monthly AI allowance in the USD 119 seat and sells additional capacity available on request — no model to procure and no second contract to sign.
• Search that reads unstructured content. Kepler’s search is hybrid semantic and keyword retrieval across candidates, CVs, notes and conversations rather than structured fields alone, so a question like “who has actually run a payments migration in production” reaches the sentence in a CV or a call transcript that says so. Bullhorn’s AI Search and Match ranks best-fit candidates for a specific job and is sold as its own product on top of the ATS.
• Matching you can defend to a client. Kepler’s matching runs against criteria written for that specific job, which a consultant can edit and re-run, and every requirement expands into a pass or gap verdict with the supporting text from the candidate’s record. Bullhorn describes its ranking as grounded in twenty-six years of recruitment expertise; per-requirement evidence is not described on its public product pages as of 6 September 2026.
• Proposed, not applied. Kepler turns the emails, calls and messages on a record into proposed field updates and tasks that a person approves or rejects, with the message that produced each one attached. Every field keeps its own history, including the source of any AI-suggested change, and changes can be undone. Kepler also uses optimistic concurrency, so when two consultants edit the same record the stale write is refused rather than silently applied.
• Migration done for you, free, on every plan. Kepler does the extraction, mapping, de-duplication and validation itself; you review fifty of your own records fully parsed before the full load; custom fields are recreated as fields rather than flattened into notes; activity, stages and history come across, not just names and email addresses. Bullhorn describes self-guided implementation as included with Starter, Core and Pro at no additional setup cost, which is a good offer and a different one.

One piece of outside evidence is worth stating plainly, because Kepler has no customers to point at: Kepler’s CV parsing and CV formatting are ported from RemakeCV, a Kepler product that 300+ recruitment agencies use. That is our own product rather than third-party validation, but it does mean the parser that reads your archive on day one has been reading real agency CVs for years.

How much does Bullhorn cost compared with Kepler?

Bullhorn publishes a per-user price for two plans. On its small-agency pricing page, checked 6 September 2026, Bullhorn Starter is listed at “$99/user/month” — applicant tracking, resume parsing, client management, job posting with a career portal, expert support and free implementation — and Bullhorn Core at “$165/user/month”, adding the app marketplace, custom fields and workflows, LinkedIn integrations (RSC and Apply Connect) and the Bullhorn email sidebar. The page states “No setup fees. No hidden costs. All prices exclude VAT.”

Everything above that is quoted rather than published. Bullhorn Pro and Bullhorn Max both say “Talk to us”. So do Front Office Growth, Front Office Enterprise, Bullhorn One, and all eight add-ons named on bullhorn.com/pricing: Amplify Digital Workers, Amplify Search & Match, Recruitment Automation, VMS Automation, Middle Office, Onboarding, Messaging and Analytics. That is fifteen named plans and add-ons with two published prices. That is a normal way to sell enterprise staffing software; it also means the number that matters to most agencies — a Bullhorn Pro seat with the Amplify skills their desk would actually use — cannot be worked out from Bullhorn’s website.

Kepler publishes one price. USD 119 per user per month billed annually, which is USD 1,428 per seat per year. A monthly option exists and annual saves 20%. There is one edition and every feature is included: no tier above it and no feature gating. Records and storage are unlimited with no per-record or per-contact charge. Migration is free on every plan, however large or messy the export. A monthly AI allowance is included, and additional AI capacity is available on request. Agencies at 50+ seats or across multiple offices get volume pricing on request, and a full workspace export is available at any time with no exit fee.

A straight comparison at the entry point: Kepler at USD 119 includes custom fields, unlimited storage, the public API, the assistant and the migration. By Bullhorn’s own editions matrix, Bullhorn Starter at USD 99 includes none of custom fields, unlimited data storage or custom API integrations; Bullhorn Core at USD 165 adds custom fields and the marketplace. What Bullhorn Core buys that Kepler cannot is the marketplace itself, and for many agencies that is worth the difference.

Which one is right for your agency?

Choose Bullhorn if you place contractors and need time capture, invoicing and payroll in the same system as the ATS; if you have a VMS relationship to automate; if you need onboarding or credentialing; if your stack depends on integrations that already exist in a marketplace of 300+ partners; if you recruit by SMS at volume; or if procurement requires reference customers of your size and a supplier with a security certificate. Bullhorn is the incumbent for good reasons.

Choose Kepler if your agency bills placements rather than hours; if your real asset is a large old database — CVs, notes, email threads, call transcripts — that no keyword search reaches, and you want one assistant that can answer a question across all of it and then act on the answer; if you want to see the evidence behind why a candidate ranked where they did; if you would rather every automatic change be proposed for approval than applied silently; if you want the API, the custom fields, the storage and the AI in the price rather than in a quote; or if you simply want to know what the software costs before you book a call.

A blunter version: Bullhorn is the better choice for an agency whose problem is that its business has more moving parts than one system can hold. Kepler is the better choice for an agency whose problem is that it already owns the answer and cannot find it.

Can you migrate from Bullhorn to Kepler?

Yes, and Kepler runs the migration for you on every plan at no cost rather than handing you an import tool and a login. You send a Bullhorn export — candidates, contacts, companies, jobs, notes and documents — plus any loose CVs, spreadsheets and shared-inbox archives that never made it into the ATS. Kepler handles the extraction, mapping, de-duplication and validation, and rebuilds your custom fields as real fields rather than flattening them into notes.

Before the full load you review fifty of your own records fully parsed — your people, not a demo set — and anything wrong is corrected and re-run. Activity, stages and history come across alongside the records, so a desk that has been running for eight years keeps its memory, and it is done in days. Kepler also exports the entire workspace on request at any time with no exit fee, which is the same courtesy in the other direction.

The reverse move is available too. Bullhorn’s own blog states that its implementation team manages the process from start to finish, that candidate records, contacts, companies, job history, notes and documents all move across, and that most small staffing firms can go live in as little as two weeks, with two to six weeks for larger agencies depending on data complexity.

One caveat before anyone moves: if any part of your business runs on Bullhorn One’s time capture, invoicing or payroll, that part cannot move to Kepler, because Kepler has no back office. The realistic shape of a migration in that case is Kepler for the front office and a separate system for pay and bill, connected over Kepler’s REST API and outbound webhooks.