Kepler vs Loxo: buy reach, or go deep on the database you already have?

What Kepler and Loxo each are

Loxo calls itself a Talent Intelligence Platform rather than an ATS, and the distinction is doing real work. Loxo's pricing page describes replacing "your separate ATS, CRM, sourcing, outreach, and data tools with one AI-native platform," and the piece that makes that possible is Loxo Source: a proprietary graph Loxo publishes as 850M+ professionals, searched in the same motion as your own private database. Around it sit an ATS and recruiting CRM, a sales CRM, multi-channel outreach across email, SMS, calls and meetings, an AI notetaker, a hiring manager portal, and what Loxo calls an agentic workforce — Job Intake, Longlist, Shortlist, Contact Information, Outreach and three data-quality agents.

Kepler is a recruitment CRM built around one assistant and a searchable database, and it has no candidate pool to sell. What it has is retrieval over the records an agency already owns — candidates, CVs, notes, email threads and call transcripts, searched semantically and by keyword together — an assistant that can act on what it finds once a person approves, matching against per-job criteria with a verdict and evidence for every requirement, and the ordinary furniture of an agency desk: pipelines, jobs, tasks, email and calendar sync, a meeting notetaker, CV parsing and formatting, a branded job board on your own domain, reporting, campaigns and automations.

Loxo states 125,000+ recruiters on its marketing pages and publishes named customer stories. Kepler has no paying customers yet and no case studies, which is a fair thing to weigh. The one piece of outside evidence Kepler can offer is RemakeCV, a Kepler product that 300+ recruitment agencies use; Kepler's CV parsing and formatting are ported from it, same team and same code.

Does Kepler have a sourcing database like Loxo Source?

No. Kepler has no sourcing database of its own and does not sell access to a pool of candidate profiles. That is the single clearest reason to choose Loxo over Kepler, and it belongs before anything else in this comparison rather than in a footnote.

Loxo Source searches a proprietary graph Loxo publishes as 850M+ professionals together with your private database in one query, and on Loxo's Professional plan personal contact information arrives "when available" alongside a shortlist — the part that removes a separate contact-data subscription. Loxo's pricing page describes a full-market search as screening up to 10,000 candidates from that graph plus your database, then ranking a shortlist across seven dimensions. Loxo also states that it never pulls data from customers' databases and keeps customer CRM data on separate servers from its sourcing data.

Kepler's sources are all inward-facing by design: bulk CV import and old-system exports, a LinkedIn Chrome extension that tells you whether the person on screen is already in your database, applicants arriving through your own branded job board, and a public REST API. If your desk grows by contacting people you have never met, none of that substitutes for Loxo Source and this post is not going to pretend it does.

The real difference: reach into a market, or depth in your own records

The interesting question is not whether Loxo's graph is good. It is whether the graph is the thing you are short of. A ten-year-old agency with 200,000 people in its CRM, eight years of email threads and a folder of call recordings usually does not have a reach problem. It has a recall problem: the right person is already on file, was spoken to in 2023, and nothing the agency owns can find them again.

That is the problem Kepler is built for. Kepler's search is hybrid semantic and keyword retrieval across candidates, CVs, notes and conversations, so a query like "data engineers in London who have run Kafka in production and could start within a month" reaches the sentence in a CV, the line in a consultant's note and the thing someone said on a recorded call, not only the structured fields on a profile. The assistant sits in a sidebar on every page, returns results as record sets you can save as a list, and can create and update records with an approval step before anything is written.

Loxo AI Chat is the nearest equivalent and it is a good implementation: pick between Claude, GPT, Gemini and Grok per conversation, get answers over your candidates, companies, jobs, activities and notes plus Loxo's talent graph, with retrieval under the asking user's own permissions and a citation required on every claim — "or the AI tells you it doesn't know." Two differences matter. Loxo lists AI Chat on its Professional plan and prices it by usage that varies with the model and the request, so it is neither on the entry tier nor a fixed cost. And Loxo describes AI Chat as a tool that answers and cites; Kepler's assistant also writes, which is a larger surface and a larger thing to get wrong — hence the approval gate.

How each one ranks candidates against a job

Loxo's Shortlist agent ranks candidates across seven dimensions and, per Loxo's pricing page, shows "evidence for every call." That is a real evidence trail and it is better than the bare 0–100 score most products in this category return. Loxo's help centre is also candid about what its matching leans on: asked what data the AI uses to suggest candidates, Loxo names job title, hiring company, job description, educational institutions and experience level as "the most important data points," with social and networking URLs helping enrich the result.

Kepler's matching differs in whose rubric decides the order. The criteria are the requirements on that particular brief, editable per job, and each one comes back as a pass or a gap with the supporting evidence from the candidate's record underneath it. The fourth requirement on a Series B fintech role is not the fourth requirement on a public-sector one, and a fixed seven-dimension rubric cannot express that difference. Kepler also ranks over the whole record — CV text, notes, email threads and call transcripts — rather than the structured profile fields alone.

Neither approach is obviously right. A fixed rubric applied consistently is easier to compare across roles and easier to train a team on; per-job criteria are more faithful to an unusual brief and harder to keep consistent. Both products give you something to point at when a client asks why.

Where Loxo is the better product

This is the honest half and it is not short. Loxo is ahead of Kepler in at least seven places, several of them decisive on their own.

• The sourcing graph. Covered above. Loxo publishes 850M+ professionals with contact information delivered alongside shortlists on Professional. Kepler has nothing comparable and no plan described here to build one.
• SMS and voice in sequences. Loxo Outreach runs multi-stage email and SMS sequences with A/B testing and brings calls and meetings into the same platform. Kepler has campaigns — multi-step email sequences with audiences, delivery windows, exit criteria and reply classification — but Kepler has no SMS at all, anywhere, and no dialler integrations. For a high-volume outbound desk that gap is the whole decision.
• A hiring manager portal. Loxo ships a portal for sharing updates and collecting real-time client feedback, and a Candidate Submittal Agent that writes the summary. Kepler publishes a job board but has no client-facing portal where a hiring manager comments on or rates a shortlist.
• Job multiposting. Loxo's help centre documents integrations with CareerBuilder, Monster, SimplyHired, Indeed, Glassdoor, ZipRecruiter, Talentify, Seek in Australia, The Scoop and Reed in the UK, and CV Library, connected by XML feed, the integrations page or an API key. Kepler publishes to its own branded job board and nowhere else — it has no multiposting at all.
• A sales CRM and business development pipeline. Loxo ships account-based prospecting, BD outreach and a sales CRM with deals. Kepler has no opportunities object and no weighted pipeline value.
• Data-quality agents against a canonical graph. Loxo's Data Hygiene Agent standardises company records against its own company graph including parent and subsidiary structure, and its Deduplication Agent flags likely duplicates and recommends merges — never merging without a recruiter's confirmation, with every merge logged and reversible. Resolving against a canonical external graph is a genuinely different capability from cleaning data in place, and Kepler does not have it.
• Maturity and proof. Loxo has been building recruitment AI since 2012, publishes named customer stories, and states 125,000+ recruiters on its marketing pages. Kepler has no paying customers yet. If you need references from firms like yours, Loxo can produce them today and Kepler cannot.

Loxo also puts SSO and SAML on its Enterprise tier and publishes GDPR and CCPA policies. Kepler holds no ISO 27001 and no SOC 2 certification. For an agency whose clients run vendor security reviews, that is a straightforward reason to look at Loxo first.

Where Kepler is the better product

Four areas, and they cluster around trusting and using the database you already have rather than adding a market to it.

• What search reads. Kepler indexes CVs, notes, email threads and call transcripts alongside the structured fields and retrieves over all of it, semantic and keyword together. Loxo's AI Chat answers over candidates, companies, jobs, activities and notes plus its talent graph, and Loxo's AI FAQ names title, company, job description, education and experience level as the fields its matching leans on. For an agency whose institutional memory is mostly free text, that difference is the product.
• 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 the same record the stale write is refused rather than silently applied. Loxo documents an audit trail for merges — who approved one, when, what changed, and that it can be reversed — but no per-field history or undo is described in its public help centre.
• Proposed rather than applied, and from your own conversations. Loxo's Self-Updating CRM Agent refreshes candidate records in the background from Loxo's graph: locations, titles, companies, education, certifications and skills, "without a keystroke." Kepler works from the other direction — the email a candidate sent, the recorded call, the message on Thursday — turning each into a proposed field update or task that a person accepts or rejects, with the source attached. Loxo's own vendor checklist asks whether anything changes "without human control, provenance, and reversibility"; Kepler's answer for AI-derived field changes is that nothing lands unapproved.
• Your careers page on your own domain. Kepler publishes jobs to a branded careers site on your domain, server-rendered and indexable, with structured data per role and applicants parsed and scored on arrival. Loxo's careers page is hosted at app.loxo.co/your-agency-name, and its help centre offers a redirect, an iframe embed, or rebuilding the listing on your own site with the Open API. If you want your roles to accumulate search authority for your brand rather than the vendor's, that compounds over years.

How much do Kepler and Loxo cost?

Both vendors publish, which makes this section unusually easy to check. All figures below were read from loxo.co/pricing and keplercrm.com on 6 September 2026. Loxo's Core and Professional cards each carried a "new customer limited time offer" label on that date, so treat those two figures as current rather than permanent and confirm them with Loxo.

Credits meter the agents' output — a full-market search, outreach, AI Chat — and Loxo states they pool across the whole team and refresh in full at the start of every monthly cycle, which also means unused credits do not carry forward. Boost multiplies a seat to 5,000 or 12,500 credits a month and its price is sized with your account team rather than published. Loxo's pricing page also carries the fair caveat that "all capacity figures shown on this page are figurative; standard usage may vary."

Kepler's model is the opposite trade. One edition means nothing is gated — the API, the assistant, matching, the job board and the notetaker are all inside the USD 119 — with a monthly AI allowance included and additional capacity available on request. The cost is less granular control: an agency that uses very little AI cannot pay less for it. Migration differs the same way: Loxo publishes free migration for Core teams of three seats or more and fixed-price scoped packages above and below that, while Kepler's is free on every plan regardless of seat count or how messy the export is.

Which one is right for your agency?

Choose Loxo if your growth depends on reaching people who are not in your database — a new vertical, a geography you have no coverage in, a desk that lives on cold outreach — or if you want to retire a separate sourcing and contact-data subscription. Choose Loxo if you need SMS and voice inside your sequences, if your clients expect a portal where they review and comment on a shortlist, if you post roles to Indeed and ZipRecruiter, if you want a sales CRM and BD pipeline in the same system, or if you need customer references and a vendor with a decade of track record. Loxo ships all of that today and Kepler ships none of it.

Choose Kepler if your main asset is a database you cannot currently search — years of CVs, notes, email threads and call transcripts that no keyword search reaches. Choose Kepler if you want one assistant that answers a real question across all of it and can act on the answer behind an approval step; if you need matching that ranks against the criteria you wrote for that brief, with a pass-or-gap verdict and the evidence underneath; if you want automatic field changes proposed rather than applied, per-field history and undo, and a careers page on your own domain; or if you would rather pay one published price with the API, the AI allowance and the migration inside it than assemble a plan out of tiers, credits and Boosts.

Bluntly: Loxo is the better choice for an agency that needs to meet more people, and Kepler for an agency that already knows enough people and cannot find them. Firms that need both will find Loxo the more complete single purchase today, and should weigh USD 149–199 per seat against what their separate sourcing tool costs now.

Can you migrate from Loxo to Kepler?

Yes, and Kepler runs the migration for you on every plan rather than handing it over as a spreadsheet and a login. You send an export from Loxo, plus any loose CVs, spreadsheets and shared-inbox archives that never made it into the CRM in the first place. 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 — and anything wrong is corrected and re-run. Activity, stages and history come across alongside the records, so the desk keeps its memory. The parsing engine doing that work is RemakeCV's, a Kepler product that 300+ recruitment agencies use, so it has been reading real agency CVs for years rather than being written for this launch. Kepler exports the whole workspace on request at any time, with no exit fee.

The move in the other direction is documented too: Loxo publishes free migration for Core teams of three seats or more, guided self-serve tooling below that, and fixed-price scoped packages for complex, Professional and Enterprise migrations. Both products have a public API, so neither database is a one-way door.