Kepler vs Clockwork: which executive search software should a boutique firm choose?

What Kepler and Clockwork each are

Clockwork is executive search software for retained search firms, in-house executive recruiting teams and institutional investors, and it describes itself as “the only Executive Search software that improves how executive recruiters and their clients work together.” Its product is organised around the client’s view of the assignment. The Clockwork client collaboration portal lets a client upvote, downvote and comment on candidate profiles, work a collaborative longlist and shortlist, read automated search and research-coverage reports and view diversity metrics for the whole talent pool, with visibility controls deciding what the client sees and when. Around that sit a recruiting CRM with unlimited contact and company records, resume parsing, custom fields and enrichment; Cai, Clockwork’s generative AI; process management with scorecards, analytics and Microsoft 365 and Google email integrations; and business-development tools covering deals, contracts, forecasting and cashflow.

Kepler is a recruitment CRM built around a single assistant and a searchable database. Its centre is the firm’s own data: plain-English search that reads candidates, CVs, notes and conversations rather than structured fields alone, AI matching that returns a ranked shortlist with a verdict and a source for every requirement, and an app-wide assistant that acts across records once a person approves the change. Around that sit the ordinary parts of a desk — pipelines, jobs, tasks, custom fields and saved views, Gmail and Outlook two-way sync, calendar and booking links, a meeting notetaker, CV parsing and CV formatting onto your own branded template, reporting on billings and consultant splits, campaigns, automations, a branded job board on your own domain, and a public REST API with outbound webhooks.

Both products are sold to the same kind of firm, and a demo of either will look competent. The choice between them is not a feature count; it is a judgement about which half of an executive search assignment your firm is currently losing time on.

The real difference: the client’s view versus your own database

Clockwork’s bet is that a retained search is won and kept by what the client can see. Its portal, its automated status reports, its research-coverage reporting and its diversity metrics all exist so that a boutique firm can demonstrate progress continuously rather than at three checkpoints. That is a coherent product thesis and it is unusual in this category: most recruitment CRMs treat the client as a contact record, and Clockwork treats the client as a user.

Kepler’s bet is that the expensive part of executive search is finding and assessing the right forty people out of a database the firm has been filling for a decade, and that most of what a firm knows about those people is not in a field. It is in a CV attachment, a note from 2021, an email thread, and a screening call nobody wrote up. Kepler indexes that material and retrieves across it with semantic and keyword search together, and its assistant sits in a sidebar on every page of the CRM with roughly fifteen tools, @-mentions of specific records, results returned as record sets you can save as a list, and an approval step before anything is written.

Clockwork’s answer to the same cross-record problem is architecturally different: an MCP server that connects your own ChatGPT, Claude or Copilot to your live Clockwork data, with read and write capability. The connector is included in a Clockwork subscription at no additional cost, and Clockwork’s own FAQ states that Clockwork does not send any data to a large language model — the customer’s assistant retrieves it through the API — and that a paid subscription to the AI provider is typically required and billed by that provider.

Neither approach is wrong. Clockwork’s is cheap to run and rides whatever frontier model a firm already pays for; the cost is that the cross-record work happens in a chat app where the rest of the firm is not working, on a subscription Clockwork does not control. Kepler keeps the assistant, the records and the approval step in one place, at the cost of a narrower product overall.

Where Clockwork is the better product

This is the honest half and it is substantial. For a boutique retained firm, Clockwork is ahead of Kepler in at least seven named places, and several of them are structural rather than a matter of catching up.

• The client collaboration portal. Clockwork invites your client into the search: upvotes, downvotes and comments on candidate profiles in real time, a collaborative longlist and shortlist, target company lists, research-coverage reporting, compensation data and per-field visibility controls over what the client sees and when. Kepler has no client-facing portal where a client comments on and rates a shortlist. If that portal is how your firm proves its value between checkpoints, this single line decides the comparison.
• Interview scorecards and candidate ratings. Clockwork ships rating and candidate scorecards, core competencies, benchmarking and criteria scoring shared with the client. Kepler has no interview scorecards at all.
• Diversity reporting to the client. Clockwork reports diversity metrics across the whole talent pool as a client-facing deliverable. Kepler has no equivalent report.
• Business development as a modelled process. Clockwork has a BD CRM with deal and pipeline tracking, contracts, forecasting and cashflow management. Kepler has no opportunities or business-development pipeline object, no weighted deal value and no revenue forecasting; its reporting reads billings, delivery and consultant splits from real placements after the fact.
• Consent and GDPR as a data model. Clockwork ships GDPR data compliance and consent management, a candidate portal with self-identification tools, and participates in the EU-US and Swiss-US Data Privacy Frameworks. Kepler has a privacy posture but no consent object with purpose, lawful basis and expiry, which matters for a European firm with a compliance function.
• A mobile app. Clockwork ships a mobile app, published in the Apple and Google app stores, that lets clients give feedback on the go and lets consultants search people and update records away from a desk. Kepler’s web app is responsive but there is no iOS or Android app.
• SOC 2 Type II. Clockwork states it has remained in compliance with SOC 2 Type II since 2022, and offers SSO through Okta and Microsoft Azure. Kepler holds no SOC 2 report and no ISO 27001 certification. For a firm placing board and C-suite roles whose clients run vendor security reviews, that is a straightforward reason to choose Clockwork, and no amount of product depth substitutes for it.

Clockwork is also a considerably older company with a large installed base of retained search firms, and it publishes an eight-stage retained search methodology that the software is shaped around. A firm that wants its process opinionated rather than configurable will find that a feature and not a constraint.

Which one is better at searching your own database?

This is the clearest difference between Kepler and Clockwork, and it is easy to check in Clockwork’s own documentation rather than taking either vendor’s word for it.

Clockwork’s candidate search is documented as name and keyword matching plus a filter panel: candidate status, colour category, client visibility, company (with current, past, all or undated), school, job title (with the same time frames) and last update. Quick Search matches against the People database as you type and takes you to a record. That is a competent, fast, structured search, and for a firm whose data is well tagged it is often enough.

Kepler’s search is hybrid semantic and keyword retrieval across candidates, CVs, notes and conversations — not just structured fields. The practical difference is what happens when the thing you remember was never entered as data: a partner recalls that somebody, somewhere, ran a carve-out of a payments business in the Nordics, and there is no field for that. It is a line in a CV, or a sentence in a screening note, or something said on a call. Kepler retrieves against that text. A keyword filter on job title and company does not.

The two products also read different amounts of a record when their AI is asked to assess someone. Clockwork’s knowledge base states that Cai searches the person record — resume, bio, work history, contact details, notes limited to two years, and the email tab where the Microsoft 365 or Google integration is connected — to produce its results. That email coverage is real and worth crediting; Clockwork documents its own boundaries unusually clearly. Kepler’s notetaker additionally files the summary, next steps and full transcript of a call against the record, and that transcript is retrievable afterwards along with everything else. Clockwork’s knowledge base documents notes, note types and note templates, and routes AI meeting notes through its Quil partner integration rather than a native notetaker.

How each one assesses a longlist

Both products will rate candidates against a brief, and a demo will not separate them. The mechanics differ in three ways that show up on a real assignment.

Where the criteria come from. Clockwork’s Cai generates a job description, job requirements and then five research criteria from project data, splitting the weighting evenly between them, and requires the project to carry a specialty, seniority, location and the client company’s revenue range, employee range, stage and industry before it will run. The generated text is editable and is accepted or declined by a user. Kepler’s matching criteria are per-job and editable, and the shortlist re-runs against them when they change.

What gets assessed. Clockwork’s Cai ratings and assessment notes run on candidates you select inside a project, and its documentation states they are limited to fifty candidates at a time. Kepler ranks every candidate in the database against a job’s criteria and returns the shortlist.

What you get back. Clockwork returns a rating and a generated assessment note in a fixed format, which its own documentation describes as draft documentation to be reviewed, edited and validated by a user — a sensible framing more vendors should copy. Kepler returns a verdict for every individual requirement, pass or gap, with the line from the candidate’s own record that supports it. For a retained search the difference is not accuracy but defensibility: when a client asks why one candidate is on the longlist and another is not, a partner needs the evidence, not the number.

How much does Clockwork cost?

Clockwork publishes its pricing, which most vendors in this category do not. As of September 2026 its pricing page shows one plan at USD 149 per user per month paying annually, or USD 179 per user per month paying monthly, under the heading “One plan. All the features.” That plan covers the recruiting CRM, the client collaboration portal, Cai and the automations, executive search process management and the business-development tools, with unlimited contact and company records.

Two costs sit outside that seat price and are worth putting in a budget. Clockwork’s data migration is a separate professional service, listed as “Priced By Volume” with custom pricing based on size and scope; standard onboarding, with checklists, email support five days a week and two live 60-minute training sessions, is included. Clockwork also publishes Premium Support at USD 3,500 per year and an Elite onboarding, advisory and consulting engagement at USD 25,000. And the MCP connector, though included at no additional cost, is used with ChatGPT, Claude or Copilot, whose subscription Clockwork’s FAQ says is separate and billed by that provider.

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 — with unlimited records and storage and no per-record or per-contact charge. Migration is free on every plan. A monthly AI allowance is included, and additional AI capacity is available on request. Fifty or more seats gets volume pricing on request, and a full workspace export is available at any time with no exit fee.

On the seat line alone Kepler is roughly half of Clockwork’s annual rate, and the gap widens once a migration quote is added. That is a fair comparison of published numbers and an unfair comparison of products: Clockwork’s price buys a client portal, scorecards, a BD pipeline with cashflow, a mobile app and a SOC 2 Type II report, none of which Kepler sells at any price.

Which one is right for your search firm?

Choose Clockwork if the client portal is your product. If you win and keep retained mandates by giving the client a live view of the longlist they can rate and comment on, if you send research-coverage and diversity reporting as a matter of course, if you need interview scorecards shared against benchmark competencies, if you run business development as a tracked pipeline with contracts and cashflow, if your compliance function wants consent held as data with a purpose and an expiry, if your consultants need a mobile app, or if your clients’ procurement teams require a SOC 2 Type II report — Clockwork ships all of that today and Kepler ships none of it. That is not a hedge at the end of a comparison post; it is the correct recommendation for a large share of boutique retained firms.

Choose Kepler if your firm’s real asset is a database it can no longer search. Ten years of CVs, screening notes, email threads and call recordings that a name-and-filter search does not reach; a partner who remembers a person but not a keyword; longlists rebuilt from scratch because nobody can find the last one. Kepler searches all of that in plain English, ranks your whole database against a brief and shows the evidence for every requirement, files call transcripts against the right record automatically, proposes field updates from emails and calls that a person approves or rejects, keeps per-field history with the source of every AI-suggested change and an undo, and reformats a candidate’s CV onto your firm’s own branded template as DOCX or PDF.

A blunter version: Clockwork is the better product for showing a client the search. Kepler is the better product for doing it. A firm that needs both today should buy Clockwork, because a portal is much harder to work around than a search box.

Can you migrate from Clockwork to Kepler?

Yes, and Kepler runs the migration for you, free, on every plan rather than quoting it as a project. You send an export from Clockwork plus the material that never made it into a project — loose CVs, spreadsheets, shared-inbox archives. Kepler does 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, not a demo set, and anything wrong is corrected and re-run. Activity, stages and history come across alongside the records themselves, so the desk keeps its memory. The only timing claim Kepler makes about this is that it happens in days.

The parsing engine behind that migration is RemakeCV’s. RemakeCV is Kepler’s own product — the same team and the same code — and 300+ recruitment agencies use it, so the parser reading your CVs has been reading real agency CVs for years rather than being written for a launch. That is Kepler’s own product being cited, not third-party validation of Kepler, and it is worth stating plainly which it is.

Moving the other way, Clockwork prices data migration into its platform as a professional service by volume and scope, includes standard onboarding with two live training sessions, and publishes a Premium API and CSV report and candidate exports for getting data out. Kepler exports the entire workspace on request at any time with no exit fee, which is the same courtesy in the other direction and a fair thing to ask both vendors about before signing.