Kepler vs Ezekia: which is better for executive search?

What Kepler and Ezekia each are

Ezekia describes itself on its own site as “the AI-powered all-in-one BD, CRM & ATS platform”, built for executive search firms, in-house executive recruiting teams and talent partners. It is operated from London by Executives Place Ltd and states that it has focused exclusively on executive search for more than eleven years. Its data model is built around the search itself: Lists, Opportunities and Assignments are three distinct project types, and a record converts from one to the next as business development turns into a mandate. Around that sit the things a retained firm needs and a contingency CRM usually lacks — off-limits flags with time limits and notes, organisation charts and relationship diagrams, researcher notes with voice transcripts, due-diligence checklists, GDPR consent management, a white-labelled client portal, and billing with fee splits, multi-currency and invoice templates.

Kepler is a recruitment CRM built around a single assistant and a searchable database. One agent sits in a sidebar on every page with roughly fifteen tools, reads the whole workspace — candidates, CVs, notes and conversations — and can create and update records once a person approves the change. Around that sit the ordinary parts of a recruitment desk: two-axis stage-by-status pipelines, jobs, tasks, an activity timeline, Gmail and Outlook sync, calendar and booking links, a meeting notetaker, CV parsing and formatting, campaigns, automations, a branded job board on your own domain, reporting on real placements, and a public REST API with outbound webhooks.

The two are not really competing for the same firm. Ezekia is competing for the retained search mandate. Kepler is competing for the database a firm accumulates while running them.

Which is better for retained executive search?

Ezekia. If a firm runs retained executive search or leadership advisory and the assignment is the unit of work, Ezekia is the better product and Kepler is not a close second, because several of the things that firm needs simply do not exist in Kepler.

The clearest of them is the client portal. Ezekia lets a search firm share candidate shortlists, reports, interview feedback, project updates and search activity with the client in real time, and keeps full control of what the client sees — which candidates, which shared documents, which custom fields, which confidential project information — with the portal archived when the search closes. Kepler has no client-facing portal at all. For a firm whose clients expect to log in and watch a longlist become a shortlist, that is the end of the comparison.

Off-limits handling is the second. Ezekia supports off-limits flags with time limits and notes — how a search firm encodes the promise not to approach a client’s people for a period. Kepler has no off-limits object. Organisation charts are the third: Ezekia relates any record to any other with a customisable relationship description and draws the result as a spider, vertical or horizontal diagram, or as an org chart. Kepler has no company hierarchy and no relationship diagram.

Retainer economics are the fourth. Ezekia ships a billing module with fee splits, revenue tracking, multi-currency conversion, invoice management and invoice templates. Kepler reports on billings, delivery and consultant splits read from real placements, but has no invoicing, no timesheets and no back office of any kind; the honest answer there is an integration through Kepler’s API and webhooks, not a feature.

Where Ezekia is the better product

Beyond the four above, Ezekia is ahead of Kepler in five more places that a buyer should know about before a demo.

• ISO 27001 certification. Ezekia states it is certified to ISO 27001:2022 and publishes its certificate number on its own site. Kepler holds no ISO 27001 certification and no SOC 2 report. In executive search, where the candidates are named executives and the clients run vendor security reviews, that is a real procurement obstacle for Kepler and no amount of product depth removes it.
• Consent and GDPR as a data model. Ezekia manages GDPR as data: consent notifications, renewals, right-to-be-forgotten handling and data access requests. Kepler has a privacy posture but no consent object with a purpose, a lawful basis and an expiry date. For a European firm with a compliance function, that difference is structural.
• An opportunities pipeline. Ezekia models pre-mandate business development as its own project type, converting Lists into Opportunities and Opportunities into Assignments. Kepler has no opportunities object and no weighted pipeline value.
• Client-ready reporting. Ezekia produces candidate reports in Word, PDF, PowerPoint and Excel from custom report templates, drawing on candidate profiles, evaluations, shortlist updates and search progress. Kepler formats a candidate onto your own branded template and downloads DOCX or PDF, and reports internally on billings and delivery, but it does not generate a client-facing search report. Ezekia’s reporting is the broader of the two.
• A sourcing pool and talent-intelligence partners. Ezekia offers an optional free connection to a “Not Actively Looking” database of 95,000 candidates and integrates Altrata and HelloSky for people intelligence and market mapping. Kepler sells no access to a candidate pool of its own; it searches what you already have. If part of what you are buying is names you do not currently hold, Ezekia is closer to that.

Two more things belong here in fairness. Ezekia sells monthly with no lock-in, which is a genuinely better commercial position for a firm that wants to test a platform without committing a year. And Ezekia’s own MCP server lets Claude, ChatGPT or Copilot search candidates, update records and progress assignments from outside the product, which is an unusually open position for a vendor in this category to take.

Where Kepler is the better product

Kepler’s advantages cluster in one place: what happens to the data a firm already owns, and whether you can trust what the AI did to it.

• What plain-English search reads. Kepler’s search is hybrid semantic and keyword retrieval across candidates, CVs, notes and conversations, not structured fields alone, so an ordinary English question can surface someone because of a line buried in a CV, a researcher’s note, an email thread or something they said on a recorded call. Ezekia offers vector search, a Query Builder and a “People like this” similarity feature over its own records, with Microsoft 365 mail, files and chats reachable through Sidekick connectors — a different shape of the same idea, and the stronger one if your firm’s memory lives in SharePoint rather than in the CRM.
• The notetaker is in the product. Kepler’s notetaker joins the call and files the summary, the next steps and the full transcript against the right record, which is what puts spoken conversation into the search corpus at all. Ezekia integrates third-party AI notetakers instead — Metaview, Carv, CoRecruit and HireLogic are all on its integrations page — and offers voice transcripts on researcher notes. Those are good tools and integration is a defensible choice; it is also a second vendor and a second place for the transcript to live.
• Matching that shows its evidence. Kepler ranks a database against a job and returns, for every criterion on the brief, a verdict — met, partial, missing or not stated — and the line from the profile that supports it; the criteria live on the job, stay editable, and the shortlist re-runs when the brief changes. Ezekia matches against a job spec with must-have, important and exclude filters and returns candidates by relevance; per-criterion evidence is not described in its published material. For a research-led firm defending a longlist to a client, a rank and a reason are two different conversations.
• Provenance, reversibility and review. 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 the same record the stale write is refused rather than silently applied. And it routes derived changes through a proposal: Kepler reads emails, calls and messages and turns them into proposed field updates and tasks a person accepts or rejects, with the message they came from attached. Ezekia’s Journal View gives a unified activity timeline on a record, and Ezekia syncs Outlook mail, meetings, contacts and tasks automatically and augments incomplete data with machine learning — but per-field history, undo and concurrent-edit handling are not described in its published material. For a database researchers have hand-corrected for a decade, a review step before anything overwrites a field is worth having.
• Google Workspace, and a careers site. Kepler syncs two-way with both Gmail and Outlook. Ezekia’s published material describes Microsoft throughout and does not name Google Workspace anywhere. Separately, Kepler publishes a branded job board on your own domain, SEO-indexed, with applicants parsed and scored on arrival; no careers site appears in Ezekia’s feature list. Neither point matters to a purely retained firm; both matter to an in-house talent team or a leadership-advisory practice that also hires.

How much do Kepler and Ezekia 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 — there is 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. A monthly AI allowance is included, and additional AI capacity is available on request. A monthly billing option exists; annual saves 20%. Volume pricing is available for 50 seats or more, and a full workspace export is available at any time with no exit fee.

Ezekia does not publish a seat price. As of 6 September 2026, Ezekia’s pricing page shows two options: a 30-day free trial at £0 with dedicated onboarding support, and one paid tier displayed as CUSTOM and described as “Per user. Monthly. No annual commitment”. Alongside them Ezekia states “No fixed plans. No per-search fees. No hidden charges” and “All plans are scoped and quoted individually”, and elsewhere on its site advertises monthly contracts with no lock-in. Any specific Ezekia seat price you find on a review-aggregator or comparison site did not come from Ezekia, and this post will not repeat one.

Neither commercial model is obviously better. Ezekia’s monthly, no-lock-in position is easier to say yes to and easier to leave. Kepler’s published price means a firm can budget the platform before it ever speaks to a salesperson, and there is no edition above the one it bought. What is fair to say is that the two require different amounts of work to evaluate, and that only one of them can be compared on a spreadsheet today.

Which one is right for your firm?

Choose Ezekia if your firm runs retained executive search or leadership advisory and the assignment is the unit of work; if your clients expect a portal they log into to follow a shortlist; if you need off-limits flags with an expiry, organisation charts, or relationship mapping across a market; if you invoice retainers in instalments with fee splits and multiple currencies; if you have a compliance function that wants consent modelled as data with a lawful basis and a renewal date; if your clients’ security reviews require ISO 27001; or if part of what you are buying is a pool of names you do not currently hold. Ezekia ships all of that today and Kepler ships none of it.

Choose Kepler if your desk is mixed — retained work alongside contingency, interim or in-house hiring — and no single one of those workflows justifies a specialist platform; if your genuine asset is a database you cannot currently search, years of CVs, notes, email threads and call recordings that keyword search does not reach; if you want one assistant that answers a real question across all of it and can then act on the answer after you approve it; if you need to defend to a client why a candidate ranked where they did, criterion by criterion; if you care that an automatic profile update is proposed rather than silently applied, and that you can see what a field used to say; if you run on Google Workspace; or if you want one published price with everything switched on and the migration done for you.

A blunter version: Ezekia is the better choice for a firm whose problem is running the search. Kepler is the better choice for a firm whose problem is that it cannot find what it already knows.

Can you migrate from Ezekia to Kepler?

Yes, and Kepler runs the migration for you on every plan rather than handing over a template and a login. You send an export from Ezekia, plus any loose CVs, spreadsheets and shared-inbox archives that never made it into the platform. Kepler handles extraction, mapping, de-duplication and validation, and rebuilds your custom fields as real fields rather than flattening them into notes — which matters when a search firm has fifteen years of bespoke fields on its people records.

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 themselves. The engine doing that parsing is RemakeCV’s, Kepler’s own product, used by 300+ recruitment agencies, so the code reading your CVs on day one has been reading real agency CVs for years rather than being written for the migration.

One thing to weigh honestly first: anything held in Ezekia’s portal, off-limits flags, org charts, consent records or invoices has no equivalent field in Kepler to land in. If those objects carry real information for your firm, a move is not like-for-like, and that is a reason to stay rather than a detail to sort out later. Ezekia publishes an open API with webhooks and integrates Zapier and Integrately, so a partial integration is a legitimate third option.