Kepler vs Recruit CRM: is the cheaper seat the cheaper system?

What Kepler and Recruit CRM each are

Recruit CRM is an applicant tracking system and CRM for recruitment agencies, sold in more than a hundred countries by Workforce Cloud Tech, Inc. Its pitch is breadth at a low per-seat price: candidates, companies, jobs, a deals pipeline, a Chrome sourcing extension, resume parsing, email and calendar sync, calling with recording, bulk texting, sequencing, reporting, timesheets, invoicing, a website builder and a mobile app, with a long list of AI features layered across them. Its pricing page describes three plans and six separately priced add-ons.

Kepler is a recruitment CRM built around one assistant and a searchable database. Rather than a feature per task, it has a single 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 a desk: pipelines and jobs, email and calendar sync, a meeting notetaker, CV parsing and formatting, campaigns, automations, reporting, a branded job board and a public API. Kepler sells one edition at one price.

The two are not aimed at the same anxiety. Recruit CRM answers "we need a proper system and we cannot spend much per head". Kepler answers "we have eight years of candidates and conversations and nobody can find anything in it".

How much does Recruit CRM cost compared to Kepler?

Recruit CRM publishes its per-seat prices on recruitcrm.io/pricing, which puts it in a minority of recruitment CRM vendors. As checked on 6 September 2026, the plans are:

The Pro and Business columns carry the footnote "Enterprise features are billed separately". Those extras are published individually: Advanced Analytics at USD 25 per user per month, LinkedIn Messages Integration at USD 12 per user per month, Workflow Automation at USD 41 a month for 1,000 tasks, Job Multiposting at USD 20 a month for seven jobs, Recruit Craft at USD 41 a month for up to five jobs, and Data Enrichment at USD 250 a year for 3,000 credits. All of them are bundled or free on Enterprise.

Kepler publishes one figure: USD 119 per user per month billed annually, which is USD 1,428 per seat per year. There is one edition and no tier above it, records and storage are unlimited with no per-record charge, and migration is free on every plan. A monthly AI allowance is included, and additional AI capacity is available on request.

The honest reading is this. Recruit CRM Pro is USD 70 per seat per month cheaper than Kepler, and the plan you would be saving that on caps AI matching at two matches, withholds open API access and keeps Recruit CRM's branding on your careers pages. Business is USD 40 cheaper. Recruit CRM Enterprise — the tier where nothing is metered — is USD 10 more than Kepler. The entry-tier gap is real and worth naming; the argument is about which line of that table describes the system you would be running in a year.

The real difference: what the AI is for

Recruit CRM has a lot of AI: its help centre documents fourteen distinct features, among them candidate matching, candidate summaries, AI Assist for notes and call logs, a call transcript generator, AI sourcing, a resume formatting agent and a candidate submission agent. The shape is consistent — each sits next to a task you are already doing and does it faster — and AI Assist carries a published limit of two million tokens per user per month.

Kepler puts the same class of technology behind one assistant instead: a sidebar on every page 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. The point of the design is that a question can span records. "Which of my Berlin candidates has shipped a payments integration, and who owns them" is one question, not a filter plus a report plus a spreadsheet.

The second-order consequence is what search reads, and this is the sharpest documented difference between the two. Recruit CRM's help centre is precise: its Boolean search looks "for specific keywords in the record's profile and uploaded CV (only the file uploaded in the default 'Resume' field)", with filter search across default and custom fields you have made visible on the list page. Kepler's search is hybrid semantic and keyword retrieval across candidates, CVs, notes and conversations — including the email threads and call transcripts on a record. For an agency whose institutional memory is a decade of email, that is not a feature difference, it is a different product.

How does each one match candidates to jobs?

Recruit CRM's AI candidate matching works from a job description or from an ideal candidate's profile and returns candidates ranked "on a scale from 0 to 100, where a higher score indicates a stronger match", using what the help centre calls bimetric scoring — "a two-way matching algorithm based on holistic profiles rather than a string of keywords". It reads skills, experience, education, location, language, job titles and industry extracted from resumes, and a candidate needs a CV in the default Resume field to be included at all. How many matches you can open is set by plan: two on Pro, fifty on Business and Enterprise.

Kepler's matching returns a ranked shortlist for a job with a verdict and a source for every requirement rather than a single number. The criteria are per-job and editable, and each is shown as pass or gap with the evidence from the candidate's own record underneath. The difference shows up the moment a consultant disagrees with a ranking: a 0–100 score gives them nothing to argue with, while a per-criterion verdict gives them a line of text to check and, if it is wrong, a criterion to fix.

The other difference is metering. Recruit CRM's help centre describes the two-match Pro cap as being there "to have an overview of the feature", which is fair enough — it is a demonstration, and fifty matches on Business and Enterprise is the working allowance. Kepler's matching is in the seat price, with additional AI capacity on request.

Which one keeps a better record of what changed?

This is the least glamorous part of any CRM comparison and the one that decides whether a database is still trustworthy in year three. Recruit CRM has an audit log, and its help centre describes it honestly: it records actions performed by you and your team, covers the last 30 days only, is limited to Account Owner and Admin roles, is a Business and Enterprise plan feature, and — the line worth reading twice — "any action performed using the Recruit CRM API will not be recorded in the audit logs".

Kepler keeps history at the level of the individual field. Every change carries who or what made it, and an AI-suggested change carries the source — the email, call or message it came from — with an undo. Kepler also uses optimistic concurrency across its resources, so when two consultants edit the same record the stale write is refused rather than silently applied; that prevents a whole class of quiet data loss and is not described in Recruit CRM's documentation either way.

The two also keep profiles current differently. Recruit CRM's Self Updating Profiles emails the candidate a link to a customisable form, and whatever they fill in updates the record. Kepler reads the emails, calls and messages already on the record and turns what it finds into proposed field updates and tasks a human approves or rejects. Neither is strictly better: Recruit CRM's gets information Kepler cannot infer, and Kepler's works on the people who never answer a form.

Where Recruit CRM is the better product

This is the honest half, and against Recruit CRM it is long. On breadth of agency operations, Recruit CRM is ahead of Kepler in at least eight places.

• Timesheets, invoicing and contractor pay. Recruit CRM sells timesheets as a product line — "automate timesheets, invoicing, and contractor pay in one place" — and lists invoicing on all three plans. Kepler has no timesheets, no invoicing, no payroll and no back office at all. For a contract or temp desk that is decisive, and no amount of AI compensates for it.
• SMS. Recruit CRM ships bulk texting on Business and Enterprise and includes SMS as a channel in its outreach sequences. Kepler has no SMS anywhere in the product.
• Job multiposting. Recruit CRM's Job Multiposting add-on publishes to what it describes as 5,000+ channels and lets you connect your own job board accounts. Kepler publishes to its own branded job board on your domain and nowhere else.
• Data enrichment. Recruit CRM finds missing work and personal emails and phone numbers, with 25 free credits on all plans and 500 per user per month on Enterprise. Kepler does no contact enrichment.
• Sourcing outside your database. Recruit CRM's AI Sourcing searches "across the internet with natural language" and offers X-ray search. Kepler has no sourcing database of its own and does not search the open web; it only knows what you own.
• AI email replies. Recruit CRM lists AI Smart Email Replies among its AI features. Kepler does not draft email replies and does not summarise email threads — its inbox work is proposing field updates and tasks. Meeting and call summaries exist in Kepler; email reply drafting does not.
• Mobile apps. Recruit CRM ships Android and iOS apps and markets "access all of Recruit CRM through ONE powerful mobile app". Kepler's web app is responsive but there is no native app.
• Security certification. Recruit CRM's data security page states ISO 27001 and SOC 2 certification alongside GDPR compliance, AES encryption at rest, AWS hosting and periodic third-party penetration testing. Kepler holds no security certification. If your clients run vendor security reviews, that alone is a reason to choose Recruit CRM today.

Two narrower ones: Recruit CRM offers a hiring manager portal for collaborating with clients, which Kepler has in no form, and it is established enough to run 24/7 live chat and a help centre of several hundred articles. Kepler is new and has no customer stories yet, which is its own kind of risk.

Where Kepler is the better product

Four areas, and they all concern the database rather than the workflow around it.

• One assistant across everything. Kepler's assistant is a sidebar on every page that reads the whole workspace and can write back after approval. Recruit CRM's AI is fourteen task-level helpers; no in-app assistant spanning the whole database is documented.
• What search reads. Kepler's search covers candidates, CVs, notes, email threads and call transcripts. Recruit CRM's Boolean search covers profile fields and the CV in the default Resume field. Both products transcribe calls; only one makes the transcript findable later.
• Evidence and reversibility. Kepler gives a verdict and a source for every requirement on a brief, and keeps per-field history with undo. Recruit CRM gives a 0–100 score and a 30-day admin audit log that does not record API activity.
• One price with the migration included. Kepler is USD 119 per user per month with every feature on, unlimited records and a done-for-you migration at no cost. Recruit CRM's migration is either a free CSV import tool or a paid engagement "priced based on the amount of data you need to import".

Which one is right for your agency?

Choose Recruit CRM if you run contract or temporary desks and need timesheets, invoicing and contractor pay in the same system; if bulk SMS is part of how you reach candidates; if you multipost roles at volume; if you buy contact enrichment or source across the open internet; if your consultants work from phones and need a native app; if your clients' security reviews require ISO 27001 or SOC 2; or if the entry-tier seat price is the deciding constraint and you can live with two AI matches, fifteen custom fields and one pipeline. Recruit CRM ships all of that today and Kepler ships none of it.

Choose Kepler if your main asset is a large database nobody can search — years of CVs, notes, email threads and call transcripts that no Boolean query reaches; if you want one assistant that answers a real question across all of it and can then act on the answer; if you need to explain to a client why a candidate ranked where they did; if you want automatic profile updates proposed rather than silently applied; or if you would rather pay one price with every feature on than assemble a plan out of a tier and six add-ons.

A blunter version: Recruit CRM is the better choice for an agency that needs more of its operations inside one affordable system. Kepler is the better choice for an agency whose operations are fine and whose database is what is failing it.

Can you migrate from Recruit CRM to Kepler?

Yes, and it is free on every Kepler plan rather than quoted as a project. You send an export from Recruit CRM — their own FAQ says you can cancel at any time and should export all your data before you do — plus any loose CVs, spreadsheets and shared-inbox archives that never made it into the CRM. Kepler handles the extraction, mapping, de-duplication and validation, rebuilds your custom fields as real fields rather than flattening them into notes, and shows you fifty of your own records fully parsed before the full load. Activity, stages and history come across alongside the records, so the desk keeps its memory, and Kepler exports the whole workspace on request at any time with no exit fee.

The parsing engine doing that work is RemakeCV's, our own product, which 300+ recruitment agencies use; it has been reading real agency CVs for years and is not something written for this launch. The move in the other direction is also well supported: Recruit CRM publishes a free Excel and CSV import tool for candidates, companies and linked notes, and a paid migration service priced by data volume that its site says completes in 10 to 12 business days.