Kepler vs Vincere: which recruitment CRM should an agency buy in 2026?

What Kepler and Vincere each are

Vincere is a recruitment platform for agencies with an APAC and UK weighting, acquired by The Access Group. It is sold today as Access Vincere Evo, which The Access Group describes as an "AI-powered recruitment CRM built by recruiters, for recruiters", trusted by "22,000+ recruiters worldwide". Its shape is a core CRM and ATS surrounded by modules: Vincere Core, Vincere TimeTemp for timesheets and pay and bill, Vincere Engage and Vincere Portals for candidate-facing sites, Vincere Intelligence for analytics, Vinneo for video, and a marketplace of integrations. Around it The Access Group sells its own adjacent products — Access Automate, Access Attract Evo, Access FastTrack360 Evo for payroll and billing, and Access Onboarded for screening and onboarding.

Kepler is a recruitment CRM built around one assistant and a database you can actually search, sold in a single edition. The assistant sits in a sidebar on every page, reads the whole workspace — candidates, CVs, notes, emails and call transcripts — and can create and update records once a person approves. Around it sit the ordinary parts of a desk: two-axis pipelines, jobs, tasks, custom fields and saved views; Gmail and Outlook sync; a meeting notetaker; CV parsing and formatting onto your own template; a job board on your own domain; reporting on billings and consultant splits; campaigns; an automations register; and a public REST API with webhooks.

The two are not the same shape. Vincere is wide. Kepler is narrow and deep. What follows is where each of those is the right thing to be.

The real difference: one product, or a suite you assemble

Vincere's design assumption is that agencies differ enormously, so the product is a core plus modules and you buy the ones you need. That assumption is correct, and it is why Vincere can serve a 200-consultant temp staffing business and a 12-person perm boutique from the same platform. The Access Group's UK pricing page makes the model explicit: the CRM and ATS starts "from £69 per user per month", AI arrives in four "Smart Packs" charged per agency per month, and beyond that you "extend with additional modules for screening, onboarding, payroll and billing as needed".

Kepler's assumption is the opposite: that the number of decisions between an agency and a working CRM is itself a cost. Kepler has one edition at USD 119 per user per month billed annually — USD 1,428 per seat per year — with every feature included, no tier above it, no feature gating, unlimited records and storage, and a done-for-you migration on every plan. Additional AI capacity is available on request. The practical difference is that a Vincere quote has several moving parts — per-user licence, per-agency Smart Pack, any additional modules, a one-off implementation fee — and a Kepler quote has one.

How does Vincere’s AI compare with Kepler’s?

Vincere ships AI as individually named features, each documented on its own in their help centre: an AI generator for job descriptions and adverts, AI candidate scoring, an AI support chatbot answering FAQs in English, Japanese, German and Dutch, an AI Coach performance dashboard, and integrations for AI video interviewing (Jobma), conversational automation (smartAI) and lead generation (Vente AI). Separately, Access Evo OptimAIser — "powered by Access Copilot" — rewrites emails "with clearer, sharper messaging" and polishes candidate briefs. Which of these an agency has depends on the Smart Pack it bought.

Kepler ships one assistant instead: an app-wide sidebar with roughly fifteen tools, @-mentions of specific records, results returned as record sets you can save as a list, and an approval step in front of anything it writes. Underneath it is hybrid semantic and keyword retrieval across candidates, CVs, notes and conversations. That is the part that matters most, because Vincere's documented search is Boolean — automatic AND/OR operators, a "Search Resume" option for keywords inside CVs, wildcard stem matching, a fuzzy operator. That is a good keyword search, and it is not the same tool as asking in a sentence which of your people have actually done the thing.

One thing Vincere does that Kepler does not, said plainly rather than buried: OptimAIser drafts and rewrites email copy. Kepler has no AI email reply drafting and no email-thread summarisation. Kepler's inbox work is different in kind — it reads emails, calls and messages and turns them into proposed field updates and tasks a person accepts or rejects.

Which has better candidate matching, Kepler or Vincere?

Vincere's help centre documents AI candidate scoring as a beta feature that rates candidates "on a 1-5 star scale based on their suitability for the role", runs on "up to 25 candidates at once", and returns key candidate highlights, noted gaps or missing requirements, and suggested interview questions. The same article notes a constraint worth knowing before you demo it: "once a candidate is scored, they cannot be rescored for the same job".

Kepler's matching runs the other way round. Rather than scoring a batch you have already shortlisted, it ranks candidates in the database against the job's criteria, which are per-job and editable, and re-runs when the brief changes. Opening a row gives a verdict on every individual requirement — pass or gap — with the evidence from the candidate's own record behind each one, rather than a single number to trust or distrust.

Credit where it is due: strengths, gaps and suggested interview questions are more than most CRMs return, and Vincere documents the beta status and the rescoring limitation openly rather than hiding them. An agency comparing the two should read Vincere's help centre directly and ask in a demo how the 25-candidate batch behaves against a database of forty thousand people, because that question decides which of these two tools is doing the work you actually need.

Where Vincere is the better product

This is the honest half, and against Vincere it is not short. Vincere is ahead of Kepler in at least eight places, several of which Kepler has no plan to close.

• Pay and bill, timesheets and invoicing. Vincere TimeTemp covers timesheet submission and approval, leave requests, shift scheduling, pay rules and overtime, and sales, purchase and self-bill invoicing, and The Access Group sells Access FastTrack360 Evo for payroll and billing alongside it. Kepler has no timesheets, no invoicing and no payroll. For an agency with a temp or contract book, this line alone decides the comparison.
• Job multiposting. Vincere posts jobs to multiple boards through Broadbean and idibu, with applicants flowing back into the database; both need an active subscription with those vendors. Kepler publishes to its own job board on your domain and nowhere else — a different thing, not a substitute.
• Screening and onboarding. The Access Group sells Access Onboarded for automated screening and onboarding next to Vincere, and Vincere's pricing page lists both among the modules you can extend with. Kepler has neither, and no interview scorecards either.
• SMS. Vincere has SMS. Kepler has none, anywhere; its only messaging outside email is one-off WhatsApp sends with templates.
• Native mobile apps. Vincere is "available now on both iOS and Android", with push notifications, candidate rating and stage movement, VinnyChat messaging and video, and voice-to-text comments. Kepler's web app is responsive but there is no native app.
• Video interviewing. Vinneo handles recorded video interviews, candidate feedback, testimonials and references, with templates and a Chrome extension for outreach videos; Jobma adds automated scoring, proctoring and transcription. Kepler does no asynchronous video interviewing.
• A client-facing shortlist. Vincere's LiveList lets a client contact see the candidates you have sent, open the documents you chose to share, message you and confirm interviews. Kepler publishes a job board but has no client review portal.
• The rest of the Access Group. Vincere sits inside a large software group with adjacent recruitment, payroll and finance products and a shared implementation organisation. For an agency wanting one vendor across front and back office, that beats a new single-product company.

Two more for completeness. The Access Group puts Vincere's base at 22,000+ recruiters; Kepler has no paying customers yet and no case studies, and says so. And Kepler holds no ISO 27001 certification and no SOC 2. If your clients run vendor security reviews that require a certification, that is a reason to choose an established vendor today.

Where Kepler is the better product

Four areas, and they cluster around the database rather than the module list.

• One assistant across everything you own. Kepler's assistant is on every page, reads candidates, CVs, notes and conversations with hybrid semantic and keyword retrieval, returns the records it used, and can create records, update fields and build shortlists once you approve. Vincere's AI is a set of task-shaped features packaged into Smart Packs, and its documented search is Boolean with a resume-keyword option.
• Calls and meetings that write themselves up. Kepler sends a notetaker to the call and files the summary, the next steps and the full transcript against the right record, where the transcript becomes searchable alongside the CVs. Vincere's documented flow for meetings and calls is manual: pick the activity type, add the participants, type the notes into a description field. Vincere does transcribe video interviews through Jobma, which is a different surface from a live client or candidate call.
• 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 one record the stale write is refused rather than silently applied. Vincere's Consolidated Activities dashboard gives an audit trail of edits and deletions with user details and timestamps across candidates, jobs, job leads, contacts, companies and deals — but no undo or revert is documented.
• Proposed rather than applied, and migration done for you. Kepler turns emails, calls and messages into proposed field updates and tasks a person approves or rejects, with the message they came from attached. Kepler's migration is free on every plan; Vincere's own Australian pricing page lists the implementation fee as a separate line from the licence fee.

How much does Vincere cost?

Vincere's published pricing depends on which country's page you read, and this post reports both. The Access Group's UK Vincere pricing page, checked 6 Sep 2026, publishes the CRM and ATS "starting from £69 per user per month", plus four AI Smart Packs charged per agency per month: Base from £25 (job creation, CV scoring, foundational analytics, the Copilot assistant), Present from £139 (AI-generated candidate presentations and summaries), Automate from £235 (chatbots and workflow automation) and Elite from £349, described as the complete suite with advanced analytics, expanded storage and external data connectors. The same page says you "extend with additional modules for screening, onboarding, payroll and billing as needed", and lists advanced or custom analytics and a third-party data connector as add-ons across all packages.

The Access Group's Australian Vincere pricing page, checked the same day, publishes no figures at all. It offers "bespoke pricing plans tailored to fit the size and unique needs of your recruitment agency", describes the bill as a monthly licence fee covering Vincere Core and any additional modules, a separate implementation fee and tiered Customer Success Plans, and asks you to submit a form. It does list items included at no extra charge, among them business analytics dashboards, a built-in shift scheduler, a CV builder with branding options, an interactive client portal, and email and calendar sync marked beta.

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%. One edition, every feature included, no tier above it and no feature gating. Records and storage are unlimited, migration is free on every plan, an 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.

Reading the two fairly: the per-seat starting points are close, and the totals diverge with how many modules you need. A ten-seat perm agency wanting the AI adds a Smart Pack to the seat cost under Vincere; a fifty-seat temp agency needing pay and bill adds several modules and would find nothing equivalent to buy from Kepler at any price.

Which one is right for your agency?

Choose Vincere if you place temps or contractors and need timesheets, pay rates, shift scheduling and invoicing in the same system as the placements; if you rely on job multiposting through Broadbean or idibu; if SMS is part of how your consultants reach candidates; if you need native iOS and Android apps; if asynchronous video interviewing is part of your screening; if your clients expect a shared list where they see and confirm the candidates you have sent; or if you want one vendor relationship spanning front office, back office and payroll.

Choose Kepler if your main asset is a database you cannot currently search — years of CVs, notes, email threads and call transcripts a Boolean query does not reach; if you want one assistant that answers a real question across all of it and can then act on the answer with your approval; if you need to see the evidence behind a candidate's rank rather than a star rating; if you want the transcript of every call filed against the right record automatically; or if you would rather pay one published price with everything switched on than assemble a licence, a Smart Pack and two more modules.

A blunter version: Vincere is the better choice for an agency whose problem is that too much of the work happens outside the CRM. Kepler is the better choice for a perm or search agency whose problem is that too much of the value is already inside the CRM and nobody can find it.

Can you migrate from Vincere to Kepler?

Yes, and Kepler runs the migration for you on every plan at no charge rather than handing over a template and a login. You send an export from Vincere — which also publishes a REST API with requestable API keys at api.vincere.io if a direct pull is easier — plus any loose CVs, spreadsheets and shared-inbox archives that never made it into the CRM. 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. 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; it has been reading real agency CVs for years and is not something written for this launch. Kepler also exports the whole workspace on request with no exit fee.

One thing a migration cannot bring with it: if you run Vincere TimeTemp for timesheets and invoicing, there is nothing in Kepler for that data to land in. An agency in that position should either stay on Vincere or plan to run a separate back-office system integrated over Kepler's public REST API and webhooks. That is a real cost of switching and it belongs in the decision.