Clockwork is built around the client portal — the longlist your client works, the status report they read, the ratings they leave. Kepler is built around what sits underneath the search: plain-English retrieval across CVs, notes, emails and call transcripts, and a shortlist that shows its evidence for every requirement. Both publish one price for one edition, which makes this a rare clean comparison.
Clockwork is executive search software organised around the client: a collaboration portal where the client reviews the longlist, comments and votes on candidates and watches coverage build, plus automated status reports, diversity reporting, and business-development, contract and cashflow tools for the firm. Kepler has no client portal and no interview scorecards, so for a boutique firm whose entire client experience is that portal, Clockwork is the better buy. Kepler is the better buy for a search firm whose bottleneck is its own database — plain-English search across CVs, notes, emails and call transcripts, a shortlist with a verdict and evidence for every requirement, a notetaker that files the call against the record, and USD 119 per user per month with the migration done for you rather than quoted by volume.
Last checked 6 Sep 2026 · Written from Clockwork's own public documentation and pricing pages. Tell us if we have something wrong and we will correct it.
Clockwork’s candidate search matches names and keywords and filters by company, school, job title, status and last update. Kepler searches in plain English across candidates, CVs, notes and conversations — semantic and keyword retrieval together, not just structured fields.
Kepler returns a ranked shortlist with a verdict on every requirement and the evidence from the candidate’s own record behind each one, so a consultant can see why someone placed where they did instead of taking a number on trust.
Kepler is USD 119 per user per month billed annually with every feature included, unlimited records and storage, and free done-for-you migration on every plan. Clockwork publishes USD 149 per user per month billed annually and prices data migration separately, by volume.
Dimensions where Kepler is the stronger product, chosen for a search firm’s own research and assessment work. Clockwork is ahead of Kepler on the client-facing half — the collaboration portal, candidate scorecards, diversity reporting, business development with contracts and cashflow, consent management, a mobile app and SOC 2 Type II — and the blog post covers all of those in full.
| Kepler | Clockwork | |
|---|---|---|
| Finding someone in your own database | ||
| How you searchWhat you have to already know before you can find anything. | Plain English, semantic and keyword together, across candidates, CVs, notes and conversations | Name and keyword search, with filters for company, school, job title, status and last update |
| How much of a record the AI readsA firm’s memory is mostly not in the fields. | CVs, notes and conversations on the record, retrieved by meaning as well as by keyword | Resume, bio, work history, contact details, the email tab, and notes from the last two years |
| Where the assistant runsInside the CRM, or in a chat app beside it. | A sidebar on every page that reads the workspace and acts on records after you approve | An MCP connector into your own ChatGPT, Claude or Copilot subscription |
| Assessing a longlist | ||
| Evidence behind a ratingWhat a partner can put in front of a client. | A verdict on every criterion, pass or gap, with the supporting evidence under the row | A rating plus a generated assessment note their docs describe as draft documentation to validate |
| What gets assessedThe shortlist you already built, or the whole database. | Every candidate in your database is ranked against the job’s criteria | Candidates you select inside a project, fifty at a time |
| Whose criteriaBriefs change, and the ranking has to change with them. | Criteria are per-job and editable, and the shortlist re-runs against them | Cai drafts five research criteria and splits the weighting evenly between them |
| Keeping the record true | ||
| Where field updates come fromProposed for review, or applied for you. | Emails, calls and messages become proposed field updates and tasks you approve or reject | Third-party enrichment refreshes people and company data on demand or on a set cadence |
| Field-level historyWhat changed, who changed it, and from what. | Per-cell history with the source of every AI-suggested change, and undo | Activity records and enrichment history; per-field history and undo are not described in their docs |
| Seeing what runs by itselfThe switch you want the day something misfires. | A register of every automation — what it reads, what it writes, when it last ran, and an off switch | Workflows and automations for tasks and reminders on candidates, deals and projects |
| Calls, CVs and the pack you send | ||
| Notes from a callWho writes the write-up. | A notetaker joins the call and files the summary, next steps and full transcript on the record | Notes and note templates; AI meeting notes come through the Quil partner integration |
| Putting a candidate on your paperWhose layout the client ends up reading. | The candidate’s own CV reformatted onto your firm’s branded template, as DOCX or PDF | Status and candidate reports as PDF or DOCX, built from record fields and visible notes |
| Getting a folder of CVs inDay one, not year one. | Bulk CV drops and old-system exports parsed into searchable structured profiles | Resume parsing, bulk resume upload and a documented data-import guide |
| Getting in, and what it costs | ||
| MigrationWho does the unglamorous half. | Done for you and free on every plan, however large or messy the export | Data Migration is a separate professional service, priced by volume and scope |
| Seat priceBoth vendors publish one number, which is rare in this category. | USD 119 per user / month billed annually, every feature included | USD 149 per user / month billed annually, or USD 179 billed monthly |
| What the AI adds to the billThe line item nobody quotes on the first call. | A monthly allowance is included; additional capacity is available on request | Cai and the MCP connector are included; the AI assistant subscription is billed by that provider |
| Getting your data back outThe question worth asking before you sign anything. | Full workspace export at any time, with no exit fee | CSV report exports, candidate export lists and a Premium API |
Clockwork’s candidate search is a name and keyword field with filters for company, school, job title, status and last update, and their route to an AI that spans records is an MCP connector into your own ChatGPT, Claude or Copilot account. Kepler’s assistant is a sidebar on every page of the CRM: it reads candidates, CVs, notes and conversations, returns records rather than text, and writes nothing until you approve it.
Active data engineers in London who have used Kafka in production, available within a month
Found 4 candidates. Three mention Kafka on their CV; one said it on a recorded call last week.
| Candidate | Current employer | Notice | Why it matched |
|---|---|---|---|
| Sophia Bennett | Monarch Analytics | 1 month | Kafka streaming for card transactions at Halcyon CV |
| Amir Hassan | Northwind Capital | 2 weeks | Kafka feed for the risk platform CV |
| James Okafor | Juniper Systems | 3 months | Rebuilt the Kafka clickstream pipeline CV |
| Oliver Chen | Northwind Capital | Immediate | Mentioned running Kafka on the 2 Sep call Call note · 2 Sep |
Clockwork’s Cai rates and scores candidates inside a project, fifty at a time, and writes an assessment note their own documentation calls draft documentation for a user to review and validate. Kepler ranks your whole database against the job’s criteria and expands under any row into a verdict on every requirement with the line from the candidate’s record that supports it — which is the thing a partner needs when a client pushes back on a longlist.
| Candidate | Match | Role title | Current employer | Skills | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Sophia Bennett | 92Strong | Senior Data Engineer | Monarch Analytics | Python, Spark, AWS, Terraform, dbt | |
| Amir Hassan | 81Good | Data Engineer | Northwind Capital | Python, Spark, EMR, SQL, Airflow | |
| James Okafor | 74Good | Senior Data Engineer | Juniper Systems | Spark, Azure, Databricks, Kafka, Scala | |
| Mei Tan | 68Weak | Engineering Manager, Data | Atlas Cloud | AWS, Leadership, Python, Snowflake | |
| Elena Rossi | 55Weak | Analytics Engineer | Forma | dbt, SQL, Python, Looker | |
| Oliver Chen | 49Off spec | Platform Engineer | Northwind Capital | AWS, Kubernetes, Terraform, Go |
Assessment
A strong fit for the brief. Sophia has run a production Spark platform on AWS and has managed a team through a migration. Financial services exposure is via a payments client rather than a bank.
Criteria · 3 of 4
Decision
↑ ↓ next candidate · Esc close
Executive search runs on conversations that never reach the CRM. Kepler’s notetaker joins the call, then files the summary, the next steps and the full transcript against the candidate or client it belongs to — and that transcript is searchable afterwards along with everything else. Clockwork gives you notes, note types and note templates, and adds AI meeting notes through its Quil partner integration.
Screening call for the Senior Data Engineer role at Northwind Capital. James is interested and available.
Kepler's CV parsing and formatting are ported from RemakeCV, our own product, which 300+ recruitment agencies use. The migration that fills your database on day one runs on an engine that has been reading real agency CVs for years, not on something written for this launch.
RemakeCV is a Kepler product. It is the same team and the same code, which is why we are willing to point at it — and it is the only outside evidence on this page, because Kepler itself is new and has no customer stories yet.
Whatever your current system gives you, plus any loose CVs and spreadsheets sitting in folders. If you are not sure how to get the export out, we will walk you through it.
Extraction, mapping, de-duplication and validation — the unglamorous half most vendors leave on your desk. Your custom fields are recreated rather than flattened into notes.
Fifty of your own records, fully parsed — your people, not a demo set. Tell us what we got wrong and we fix it and re-run, as many times as it takes.
The full database goes in, mailboxes and calendars connect, and history backfills onto the right records. We stay on it until your team is working in Kepler.
£89 per user / month, billed annually
$149 per user / month, billed annually
Clockwork publishes its price, which most of the vendors on these pages do not: USD 149 per user per month paying annually, or USD 179 per user per month paying monthly, for one plan its pricing page describes as “One plan. All the features.” That covers the recruiting CRM, the client collaboration portal, Cai and the automations, search process management and the business-development tools, with unlimited contact and company records.
Two things sit outside the seat price. Data migration is a separate professional service, listed as “Priced By Volume” with custom pricing based on size and scope; Kepler’s migration is free on every plan. And Clockwork’s MCP connector, its route to an agentic assistant, is included at no extra cost but is used with ChatGPT, Claude or Copilot, whose subscription their own FAQ says is separate and billed by that provider.
Clockwork also publishes two optional service tiers — Premium Support at USD 3,500 per year, and an Elite onboarding, advisory and consulting engagement at USD 25,000. Standard onboarding, with two live training sessions, is included.
It depends on which half of the search is hurting. Clockwork is built around the client: a collaboration portal where the client works the longlist, votes and comments on candidates, reads automated status and research-coverage reports and sees diversity metrics, plus scorecards, business-development deals, contracts and cashflow tools. Kepler has no client portal and no interview scorecards, so a firm that wins retained work on the strength of that client experience should buy Clockwork. Kepler is the stronger product on the research half — plain-English search across CVs, notes, emails and call transcripts, a shortlist with a verdict and evidence for every requirement, a notetaker that files the call against the record, and per-field history with undo.
Clockwork publishes USD 149 per user per month paying annually, or USD 179 per user per month paying monthly, for a single plan with all features and unlimited contact and company records. Kepler publishes USD 119 per user per month billed annually — USD 1,428 per seat per year — also for a single edition with every feature included and unlimited records and storage. Both are rare in this category for publishing a number at all. Two costs sit outside Clockwork’s seat price: data migration, which is a professional service priced by volume, and the AI assistant subscription their MCP connector is used with, which their own FAQ says is billed by that provider. Kepler includes migration free on every plan and includes a monthly AI allowance, with an additional AI capacity available on request.
No. Kepler has no client-facing portal where a client comments on and rates a shortlist, and it has no interview scorecards. Clockwork’s client collaboration portal is the centre of its product — client feedback with upvotes, downvotes and comments on candidate profiles, collaborative longlists and shortlists, transparency and visibility controls over what the client sees and when, automated search and research-coverage reports, and diversity metric reporting. If that is how you run a search, Clockwork is the better fit and we would rather say so here than let you find out in a demo.
Clockwork has Cai, its generative AI, which drafts job descriptions, requirements and five weighted research criteria on a project, and rates and writes assessment notes for candidates inside a project, fifty at a time. For work that spans records, Clockwork publishes an MCP server that connects your own ChatGPT, Claude or Copilot to your Clockwork data; the connector is included in the subscription and the AI provider’s own subscription is separate. Kepler takes the other approach: the assistant is a sidebar inside the CRM 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.
Yes. Kepler’s search is hybrid semantic and keyword retrieval across candidates, CVs, notes and conversations rather than structured fields alone, and Kepler’s notetaker files the summary, next steps and full transcript of a call against the right record, where it is searchable afterwards. Clockwork connects Gmail and Outlook and captures correspondence, and its Cai assessment reads the person record’s resume, bio, work history, contact details, the email tab and notes from the last two years; its candidate search itself is name and keyword matching with filters for company, school, job title, status and last update.
Kepler runs the migration for you, free, on every plan. You send an export from Clockwork plus any loose CVs, spreadsheets and shared-inbox archives that never made it into a project; 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, and anything wrong is corrected and re-run. Activity, stages and history come across, not just names and email addresses. Clockwork prices its own data migration service by volume and scope, and publishes a Premium API and CSV exports for getting data out.
Bring your hardest search to a 15-minute call. We will run it live, on real records, and talk through what a migration would look like.