Kepler vs Carerix: which recruitment CRM should a Benelux agency choose?

What Kepler and Carerix each are

Carerix is a Rotterdam-based ATS and CRM for staffing intermediaries, founded in 2004. Its own About page, checked on 6 Sep 2026, puts the company at just under 80 staff with 1,050 customers and 29,000 users across 19 countries. It sells into four shapes of business: werving & selectie (permanent recruitment), uitzenden (temp), detachering (secondment) and corporate recruitment. It now describes itself as an "AI-gedreven ATS & CRM platform", and its recent product work — CX Sense, Carerix Private AI, the Carerix Notetaker, Recruitment Marketing Automation — is squarely AI-shaped.

Kepler is a recruitment CRM built around a single assistant and a searchable database. Rather than a module per workflow, it has one agent in a sidebar on every page that reads the whole workspace — candidates, CVs, notes, emails and call transcripts — and can create and update records once a person approves the change. Around that sit the ordinary parts of an agency desk: pipelines, jobs, tasks, email and calendar sync, a meeting notetaker, CV parsing and CV formatting, a branded job board, reporting, campaigns and automations.

The two products meet less often than the category suggests. Carerix is a Benelux staffing platform with a back office attached; Kepler is a database-first CRM with no back office at all. Where they do meet is a permanent or contingency agency in the Netherlands or Belgium that does not bill hours, and that is the only place this comparison is genuinely close.

The honest headline difference: hours versus questions

Carerix answers the question "how does this placement turn into money?". Its detachering page for software packages describes the secondment edition in one sentence: from a single system you recruit, select and place, but also generate contracts, handle timesheet registration and drive the invoicing process — in the original, "contracten genereren, urenregistraties verzorgen en het facturatieproces aansturen". The same page calls Carerix a complete system, "inclusief een online urenregistratie en facturatie mogelijkheden". Their Client Portal lets a customer approve a professional's hours online, their Professional Portal lets the professional register those hours, and their detachering feature list ends with "Integratie met backoffice/verloningssoftware" — integration with back-office and payroll software, delivered through named connectors including AFAS, Exact, Twinfield, Youforce, Easyflex, HelloFlex and Plan4Flex.

Kepler answers a different question: "what is already in my database, and how do I find it?". Kepler has no timesheets, no invoicing, no payroll and no back office. That is a deliberate boundary rather than a roadmap item, and the integration story — a public REST API with scoped keys, read and write rate limits and idempotency, plus outbound webhooks with delivery logs and redelivery — is what Kepler offers instead of a module.

An agency that bills hours therefore has a straightforward decision, and it is not in Kepler's favour. An agency that bills placements has a different one, and that is where the rest of this post lives.

Where Carerix is the better product

This section is long because the list is long. Carerix is ahead of Kepler in at least eight places, several of them decisive.

• Back office and secondment administration. Contracts, timesheet registration and invoicing inside the same system as the recruiting, with online approval of hours by the client. Kepler has none of it — this is the decisive one.
• Benelux back-office and payroll integrations. Carerix publishes integration pages for AFAS, Exact, Twinfield, Youforce, Easyflex, HelloFlex, Plan4Flex and Nixz. This is exactly the plumbing a Dutch or Belgian staffing firm has to have, and Kepler has no equivalent list.
• AVG/GDPR as a data model. Carerix stores a "wettelijke grondslag" — a lawful basis — per person, with configurable retention terms, triggers that fire when a basis is about to expire or has expired, automated renewal-request emails, and anonymisation that strips identifying data while keeping the record. Kepler has a privacy posture but no consent object with purpose, lawful basis and expiry. For an agency with a compliance officer, that gap is not academic.
• ISO 27001. Carerix states on its compliance page that it is ISO 27001 certified. Kepler holds no ISO 27001 and no SOC 2. If your clients run vendor security reviews that require a certification, this decides the question on its own.
• Portals. Carerix ships a Client Portal (talent pool access, vacancy creation, approving or rejecting candidates with a reason, timesheet approval), a Professional Portal for candidates, a Corporate HR Portal for hiring managers, and a Supplier Portal. Kepler publishes a job board and has no client review portal.
• Channels. Carerix supports email, WhatsApp, SMS and VoIP with automatic logging against the file. Kepler has email and calendar sync and one-off WhatsApp sends with templates, no SMS anywhere, and no VoIP dialler integrations.
• Multiposting and a bought careers site. Carerix distributes vacancies to job boards and social channels through multiposting partners including Broadbean, and works with website partners on the careers site itself. Kepler publishes to its own branded job board on your domain and nowhere else.
• A mobile app. Carerix for Mobile gives recruiters their calendar, files, notes and the Notetaker on a phone, including recording an in-person conversation. Kepler's web app is responsive; there is no native app.

Two more things belong here because comparison pages usually pretend otherwise. The Carerix Notetaker does what Kepler's does: it hangs off your calendar, records digital meetings and live conversations, summarises them and files the result against the right candidate, contact, vacancy, match or placement. And Carerix's LinkedIn integration tells you whether a profile is known to your database and lets you add or update it in one click, which is the same job Kepler's Chrome extension does. Neither is a reason to choose between the two.

Where Kepler is the better product

Four areas, and they all sit on the same side of the product: what you can do with the data you already have.

• The reach of the assistant. Carerix's own Private AI page states that the system is fully fenced to candidate, vacancy and matching-related support — "volledig afgekaderd op kandidaat-, vacature- en matching-gerelateerde ondersteuning" — and that general questions are therefore not possible. Inside that fence it does real work: answering questions about a candidate's data, generating summaries and interview questions, drafting an offer letter, rewriting vacancy text. Kepler's assistant is a sidebar on every page with roughly fifteen tools, @-mentions of specific records, and results returned as record sets you can save as a list. It reads the whole workspace, and it can create and update records — behind an approval step, with runs that can be paused and resumed.
• What a search reads. Carerix's Global Search covers candidates, matches, vacancies, companies and contacts, talent pools, leads and opportunities from one bar, and its vacancy-side search covers keywords in a CV, skills and education. Kepler's search is a hybrid of semantic and keyword retrieval across candidates, CVs, notes and conversations — including the email threads and call transcripts attached to a record. For an agency whose institutional memory is years of email and a folder of transcripts, that is the difference between holding the data and being able to reach it.
• Matching you can audit. Carerix proposes matches continuously: the Search & Match assistant watches for new candidates and vacancies and puts results in a screening overview a recruiter judges, and theMatchBox supplies a deeper AI matching layer as a partner integration. Kepler ranks against criteria you wrote for that specific job and shows, for every requirement, a pass or gap verdict with the line from the candidate's record that supports it. Carerix publishes no per-criterion reasoning view, and a recruiter arguing a shortlist with a client needs the reasons rather than the ranking.
• Provenance and reversibility. Kepler keeps history at the level of the individual field, records the source of every AI-suggested change, and supports undo; it also uses optimistic concurrency, so when two consultants edit one record the stale write is refused rather than silently applied. Carerix logs activity automatically against the file, which is one of the features they lead with, but per-field history and undo are not described in their public material. Relatedly, Kepler turns emails, calls and messages into proposed field updates and tasks that a person accepts or rejects, with the source attached. Carerix's CX Sense prepares a next step you check, adjust and send, while its WhatsApp Conversational AI enriches the file automatically as a candidate replies. Both keep a human in the loop; they put the human at different points.

How much does Carerix cost, and how much does Kepler cost?

Kepler publishes one price: USD 119 per user per month billed annually, which is USD 1,428 per seat per year. 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, and migration is free on every plan. Additional AI capacity is available on request; a monthly AI allowance is included without it.

Carerix does not publish pricing. As of 6 Sep 2026 its Next Editions page lists four packages and what each one adds, but no figure appears anywhere on it and every route on the site ends at a demo request. What the page does publish is the shape of the ladder:

Three observations, none of them criticism. "Taken" is Carerix's own word and is left untranslated here on purpose: it means tasks, and the ladder from 1,000 to 50,000 is clearly a volume allowance, but Carerix publishes no definition of what counts as one, so neither will this post. The features a comparison shopper is most likely to want — automated CV parsing, the Data Connector, the portals, the back-office integration — are not in the entry edition, so the edition you would price is probably not the cheapest one. And the Dutch and English versions of that page disagree about the top edition: the Dutch page calls it ARF (Adaptive Recruitment Framework) and lists mid- and back-office integration, the English page calls it Enterprise and lists the portals. Both were live on 6 Sep 2026, so ask Carerix which list applies to your quote.

Quoting per customer is a normal way to sell an editioned staffing platform, particularly where the back-office integration is half the implementation. The practical consequence is simply that Carerix cannot be compared on price without a sales call, and Kepler can.

Which one is right for your agency?

Choose Carerix if you run detachering, uitzenden or ZZP bemiddeling in the Netherlands or Belgium; if contracts, hours and invoicing have to come out of the same system as the recruiting; if you need AFAS, Exact, Youforce, Easyflex or HelloFlex on the other end of a placement; if a client has to approve timesheets in a portal; if your compliance officer wants lawful basis stored as a field with an expiry date and an anonymisation path; if procurement asks for ISO 27001; or if SMS, VoIP and multiposting are part of how your desk works. Carerix does every one of those today and Kepler does none of them.

Choose Kepler if you place permanent or contingency roles and bill on placement rather than on hours; if your real asset is a large database nobody can search — years of CVs, notes, emails and call transcripts that keyword search does not reach; if you want one assistant that answers a question across all of it and can act on the answer after you approve; if you need to explain to a client why a candidate ranked where they did; if you want per-field history with undo and the source of every AI-suggested change; or if you would rather read one price on a website than run a procurement to find out.

A blunter version. Carerix is a Benelux staffing platform that has added a good deal of AI; Kepler is an AI-native CRM that has deliberately not built a back office. If your problem is administrative, Carerix wins and it is not close. If your problem is that you cannot find anything in a decade of accumulated data, Kepler wins and that is not close either.

Can you migrate from Carerix to Kepler?

Yes, and the migration is done for you on every Kepler plan rather than handed over as an importer and a login. You send an export from Carerix, plus any loose CVs, spreadsheets and shared-inbox archives that never made it into the CRM. Kepler handles 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. Activity, stages and history come across alongside the records themselves, and Kepler exports the whole workspace on request at any time with no exit fee.

The parsing engine doing that work is RemakeCV's. RemakeCV is a Kepler product — our own CV parsing and reformatting tool, which 300+ recruitment agencies use — so it is not third-party validation of Kepler, but it does mean the engine reading your export has been reading real agency CVs for years. The only timing claim Kepler makes is that a migration lands in days.

Two honest caveats. If any part of your Carerix setup is generating contracts, registering hours or driving invoicing, that part has nowhere to land in Kepler. And if you have been maintaining AVG/GDPR lawful basis per person in Carerix, Kepler has no field to receive it, because Kepler has no consent data model. Both are reasons to stay on Carerix rather than problems to solve during a migration. Going the other way, Carerix publishes a public API with a fair-usage policy and is rolling out webhooks, so the plumbing exists at both ends.

Is Kepler suitable for a Dutch or Belgian agency at all?

For a permanent or contingency agency, yes — with the boundaries above understood. Kepler syncs Gmail and Outlook two-way, publishes a careers site on your own domain, handles pipelines and reporting, and is used in English. What it does not do is the specifically Benelux part of the job, and it is worth being exact about which part that is: no timesheets or invoicing for detachering and uitzend work, no back-office or payroll connectors to the Dutch systems, no AVG/GDPR lawful-basis object, no ISO 27001 certification, and no local job-board multiposting.

Carerix's advantage in that market is not only feature coverage; it is twenty-two years of knowing which fields a Dutch staffing firm needs and which integrations it has to have on day one. An agency that has run on Carerix for a decade and is frustrated by search should be careful before treating that frustration as a reason to replace the whole platform: the search problem is narrower than the platform is.