Kepler vs Tracker (TrackerRMS): which recruitment CRM should an agency choose?

What Kepler and Tracker each are

Tracker — the vendor trades as Tracker, its site is tracker-rms.com and the footer on every page of it still reads TrackerRMS — describes itself as "the ATS & CRM built for staffing and recruiting agencies", under the line "One platform. Every placement type. No workarounds." Its own summary of the product is that "your ATS, CRM, automation, back office, and reporting all live in one place, connected and in sync." The module list bears that out: applicant tracking, a sales CRM and pipeline, automation, marketing and sequences, job boards, collaboration, onboarding, back office, reporting and around forty integrations. It sells into the United Kingdom and the United States.

Kepler is a recruitment CRM built around a single assistant and a searchable database. One app-wide chat sidebar reads the whole workspace — candidates, CVs, notes and conversations — answers questions about it, ranks candidates against a job, and creates or updates records once a person approves the change. Around that sit the ordinary parts of a desk: two-axis pipelines, jobs, tasks, custom fields and saved views, Gmail and Outlook sync, a calendar with booking links, a meeting notetaker, CV parsing and formatting, a branded job board on your own domain, reporting, campaigns and an automations register.

The two overlap on the applicant tracking and CRM in the middle, and diverge at both ends: Tracker keeps going into pay and bill, Kepler keeps going into the AI over the data.

The honest headline difference: back office versus the database

Tracker’s back office is a real product, not a checkbox. Its own back-office page describes online timesheets that temporary staff submit from any device with automated checking before approval; expenses submitted by photographing a receipt; a white-labelled candidate portal that embeds in the agency’s website with one line of code, where candidates upload timesheets, declare availability and request time off; and accounting integrations with QuickBooks, Sage Online and Xero that generate invoices and payroll records and sync paid status back. On the Enterprise plan Tracker adds full timesheet and expense management with dynamic rates and gross pay, shift planning with geo-location and geo-fencing, and compliance automation that blocks a placement when a credential is missing.

Kepler has none of that. There are no timesheets, no expenses, no invoicing, no payroll and no back office in Kepler at any price, and no plan in which they appear. For an agency whose revenue is hours worked rather than a fee invoiced on a start date, that is a disqualification. The honest mitigation — and it is a mitigation, not an answer — is that Kepler ships a public REST API with scoped keys and outbound webhooks with delivery logs, inside the single edition, so a placement in Kepler can drive a pay-and-bill system that already works. If you would rather not run two systems, that is a reason to buy Tracker.

The mirror of that is what Kepler does with the data an agency already has. Kepler’s search is hybrid semantic and keyword retrieval across candidates, CVs, notes and conversations, so an answer can come out of something a candidate said on a recorded call. Tracker’s candidate search, on its own ATS features page, is Boolean and semantic across more than eighty filterable fields with radius geo-coding, over profiles built by résumé parsing — a good search over structured data, and a different thing from search over the conversations.

Does Tracker have AI, and how does it compare to Kepler’s?

Yes, and anyone comparing the two on the strength of "Tracker is the old one" has not read their site. Tracker’s home page describes TrackerAI as three layers: generative AI that scores candidates against a job spec, agents that handle background tasks, and EVA, "a conversational AI grounded in your actual data". The TrackerAI page lists what EVA does on a voice or text command: rank candidates, summarise and compare profiles, write job descriptions, generate screening questions, prepare an interview briefing, draft emails and texts, and reformat a résumé onto the agency’s template. Its ranking layer takes in a candidate’s past success in similar roles, their fit with the client, and feedback from recruiters who have worked with them.

Kepler’s assistant differs in three specific ways. The corpus: it retrieves across CVs, notes and conversations as well as structured fields. The answer: it returns record sets you can save as a list and act on, not only text, and you can @-mention records into a question. The write path: anything it would change goes through an approval step first.

On matching, the difference is auditability. Kepler’s criteria are written per job and are editable, and every requirement gets a verdict of pass or gap with the evidence from the candidate’s own record underneath it. Tracker publishes an AI ranking engine that "constantly learns from the ongoing candidate engagement and applies this in tandem with resume ranking and other data assets" — a defensible design that will often rank well, but not one that hands a consultant a reason they can read and disagree with.

One capability belongs to Tracker outright here: Tracker generates email and text copy and Kepler does not. Kepler has no AI email reply drafting and no email-thread summarisation. Its inbox proposes field updates and tasks, and its meeting and call summaries are real, but a drafted reply is not something Kepler does.

Where Tracker is the better product

This is the honest half. On breadth of staffing workflow, Tracker is ahead of Kepler in at least nine places, all documented on Tracker’s own pages.

• Back office and pay and bill. Timesheets, expenses, invoicing, dynamic rates, gross pay and payroll integrations with QuickBooks, Xero and Sage. Kepler has none of this, and it is the single biggest gap in this comparison.
• Candidate compliance. Tracker tracks certifications and required documents with automated expiry alerts and can block a candidate from progressing without them. Kepler has a privacy posture but no compliance or consent data model.
• Shift and workforce management. A shift planner and dashboard, real-time messaging with candidates, and geo-location, geo-fencing and check-in in the mobile app. Kepler has nothing here.
• Two-way SMS. Tracker gives an agency a dedicated two-way text number, and its Sequencer sends text as a step alongside email. Kepler has no SMS anywhere, at all.
• Telephony. Tracker ships click-to-call, screen-pop, automatic call logging and call recording, and integrates CloudCall. Kepler records meetings through a notetaker but integrates no diallers.
• Job multiposting. Tracker posts to more than a thousand job boards and searches more than four hundred through LogicMelon and DaXtra, and connects Broadbean, idibu and LinkedIn Recruiter System Connect. Kepler publishes to its own job board and nowhere else.
• Video interviewing. Asynchronous video interviews with unlimited question sets, star ratings and aggregate scoring, plus video résumés and video emails. Kepler has none of these, and no interview scorecards either.
• A client portal. Tracker’s client portal lets a client view shared shortlists and résumés, leave feedback and a star rating, and hire, reject or request an interview. Kepler publishes a job board but has no client review portal.
• A mobile app. Tracker OTM covers internal users and both portals. Kepler’s web app is responsive but there is no iOS or Android app.

Tracker also has around twenty years of operating history behind it. Kepler has no paying customers yet and no case studies; the only outside evidence it can offer is that its CV parsing and formatting are ported from RemakeCV, a Kepler product that 300+ recruitment agencies use. That is a real engine with real mileage, and it is not a track record for Kepler itself.

Where Kepler is the better product

Four areas, and they cluster around trusting what is in the database rather than adding another module beside it.

• What the assistant reads, and what it does with an answer. Kepler searches CVs, notes and conversations together, returns record sets you can save as a list, and puts an approval step in front of every write.
• 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 uses optimistic concurrency, so when two consultants edit one record the stale write is refused rather than silently applied. Neither is described on Tracker’s published feature pages — which is not proof they are absent, but is a question worth asking on a demo.
• Proposed rather than typed in. Tracker’s Outlook and Gmail add-ins sit in the mail sidebar, summarise what Tracker holds on the sender, and let a consultant create the record, note or task from there. Kepler reads the thread, the call or the message and comes back with the change already written — a proposed field update or task, with the source attached, that a person accepts or rejects. Kepler’s notetaker also joins the call itself and files the summary, the next steps and the full transcript against the right record.
• One edition, and no quote to reach the API. Every Kepler feature is in the single edition, including the public REST API and outbound webhooks. In Tracker, REST API access begins at Professional, which is contact-sales, and unlimited API calls at Enterprise — as do the Sequencer, timesheets, the candidate portal, AutoAction and Watchdogs, and full custom reporting. Working out what Tracker will cost requires knowing which of those you need first.

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

Tracker publishes two of its four plan prices on its plans page, checked 6 September 2026. Launch is listed at USD 79 per user per month, billed monthly, for up to five recruiters, and the page notes it is "only available in USD and GBP"; the purchase flow states that Launch is provided by LogicMelon, Tracker’s partner for smaller agencies. Core is listed at USD 99 per user per month, billed monthly. Professional and Enterprise both read "Contact Sales — Custom pricing". Tracker’s pricing FAQ states that a six-month minimum commitment is required and that annual subscriptions receive a discount, without publishing what that discount is. All plans include unlimited candidates, jobs and records.

Which plan you need matters more than the two published figures. On Tracker’s comparison table, the AI Content Suite, the client portal, invoicing, e-signature, custom reporting, the mobile app and the mail add-ins begin at Core; timesheets, payroll integrations, multi-channel sequences, the candidate portal, AutoAction, Watchdogs and REST API access begin at Professional; full back office and payroll, shift management and compliance automation begin at Enterprise. Two of those three tiers are a phone call.

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 and migration is free on every plan. A monthly AI allowance is included, and additional AI capacity is available on request. Fifty seats or more gets volume pricing on request.

Neither model is obviously better, and the comparison is not simply 69 against 79. Tracker’s tiering lets a five-person agency start cheaply and lets a large staffing firm buy a back office Kepler cannot sell at any price. Kepler’s single edition means nothing to unlock, at the cost of a shorter feature list. What is fair to say is that Kepler’s total is knowable from a web page and Tracker’s, above Core, is not.

Which one is right for your agency?

Choose Tracker if you place temporary, contract or shift workers and you want timesheets, expenses, invoicing and payroll inside the same system as the ATS; if candidate compliance — certifications, expiry alerts, blocking a placement when a document is missing — is part of how you stay in business; if you need two-way SMS, a dialler, video interviewing, a client review portal, multiposting to a thousand job boards, or a mobile app with shift check-in; or if you would rather buy from a vendor with twenty years of history than from one launching now.

Choose Kepler if your desk is permanent, retained or direct-hire work and your invoicing already lives in an accounting system you are happy with; if your main asset is a large database you cannot currently 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 behind an approval step; if you need to explain why a candidate ranked where they did; if you care that automatic profile updates are proposed rather than applied, and that every field keeps its own history and an undo; or if you want one published price with everything switched on and the migration done for you.

A blunter version: Tracker is the better choice for an agency whose problem is running the business around the placement. Kepler is the better choice for an agency whose problem is the database underneath it. An agency with both problems should buy Tracker, because a back office you do not have cannot be worked around and a search you do not have can be — slowly, badly, but it can be.

Can you migrate from Tracker 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 Tracker plus any loose CVs and spreadsheets that never made it into the system; Kepler handles 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 — 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. Migration is free however large or messy the export, and Kepler exports the whole workspace on request with no exit fee. The parsing engine 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.

The move in the other direction is supported too: Tracker’s pricing FAQ states that its team assists with data migration from Bullhorn, JobAdder and other platforms, and its plans table lists white-glove onboarding on the Professional and Enterprise plans. Both products have a REST API, though Tracker’s begins at Professional.