Crelate is a broad US recruiting platform whose agents source from an external pool of around a billion profiles and keep records enriched automatically. Kepler puts one assistant over the database you already have — the CVs, notes, email threads and call transcripts nobody can currently search — and sells it as one edition with every feature switched on.
Crelate is the more complete staffing platform. It ships an optional back office for assignments, timekeeping and invoicing, sources from an external database of around a billion profiles, and has text messaging and a mobile app — and Kepler has none of those. Kepler is the better product when the problem is the database you already own: one assistant that reads your CVs, notes, emails and call transcripts and can act on what it finds after you approve it, matching that shows a verdict and the evidence behind every requirement, and history at the level of the individual field. Kepler publishes one price at USD 119 per user per month billed annually with every feature included; Crelate publishes four tiers, with the AI Assistant from USD 119 and automation, sequences and the full API on a custom-priced Business Plus.
Last checked 6 Sep 2026 · Written from Crelate's own public documentation and pricing pages. Tell us if we have something wrong and we will correct it.
Crelate’s Co-Pilot is a chat whose available Skills change with the area of the app you are in and the data on the screen. Kepler’s assistant is a sidebar on every page with roughly fifteen tools: it searches the whole workspace, returns record sets you can save as a list, and creates or updates records once you approve the change.
Crelate’s search is full-text Boolean over résumé text, notes and tags, scored by Elasticsearch — their own August 2026 post describes the model writing the Boolean underneath. Kepler retrieves semantically and by keyword together, across candidates, CVs, notes, emails and call transcripts.
Kepler is USD 119 per user per month billed annually with every feature included, unlimited records and storage, and migration done for you on every plan. Crelate publishes Essentials at USD 85, Business at USD 119, and two higher tiers priced on request.
Dimensions where Kepler is the stronger product. Crelate is ahead of us on several others — the back office, external sourcing, texting, a mobile app and a certification route on their top tier — and the blog post covers those in full rather than leaving the omission to speak for itself.
| Kepler | Crelate | |
|---|---|---|
| The assistant | ||
| Scope of the AI assistantWhether it can answer a question that spans records. | App-wide sidebar with roughly fifteen tools, reading the whole workspace | Co-Pilot chat whose Skills vary by the area of the app and the data on screen |
| Acting on an answerReading is half the job. | Creates and updates records, builds shortlists, saves a result as a list — behind an approval step | Generates summaries, emails, job descriptions and interview questions |
| Which plan the assistant is onWhat the entry price actually buys. | Included. One edition, no feature gating | AI Assistant from Business ($119); Advanced AI Assistant on Business Plus, priced on request |
| Finding people you already have | ||
| What search readsThe corpus, not the ranking. | Candidates, CVs, notes, emails and call transcripts — semantic and keyword together | Full-text Boolean over résumé text, notes and tags |
| How a result is rankedWhy that person came back third. | Hybrid retrieval, then a per-criterion verdict against the job’s own brief | Elasticsearch relevance — records scored by how closely they match your keywords |
| Evidence behind a shortlistCan a consultant see the reasoning? | A pass-or-gap verdict for every requirement with the line from the record it rests on | Résumé summaries from Co-Screen; ranking is the search relevance score |
| Whether anyone checks the rankerMatching that is never measured drifts. | Measured internally against a standing evaluation set before a change ships; the figures are not published | No evaluation published |
| Trusting what is on the record | ||
| Field-level historyWhat changed, who changed it, and from what. | Per-cell history on every plan, with the source of every AI-suggested change | Audit log report; advanced auditing listed as a Business Plus and Enterprise option |
| Undoing a bulk updateThe test of whether history is real. | Undo on the field, with a conflict check before it applies | Undoing a spreadsheet import removes records it created; it does not revert records it updated |
| Two people, one recordThe quiet data-loss bug in most CRMs. | Optimistic concurrency, so a stale edit is refused rather than silently applied | Not described in their documentation |
| Automatic profile updatesWhere the change comes from, and what happens next. | Your own emails, calls and messages become proposed field updates you approve or reject, with the message attached | Insights Agent enrichment from outside data — records stay fresh automatically as people change roles |
| What gets into the record | ||
| Meeting and call notesWho writes them up. | Kepler’s own notetaker joins the call and files the summary, next steps and full transcript against the record | Calls log as activities; recording and summarisation come from VoIP and notetaker partners |
| CV parsing at volumeDay one, and every day after. | Bulk CV drops and old-system exports parsed into structured profiles, on the engine behind RemakeCV | Résumé parsing on every plan; the Résumé Toolbox from Business |
| Your careers site and your data | ||
| Where the jobs are publishedWhose domain accrues the search authority. | Your own domain, server-rendered and indexable, with structured data per role | Portal hosted at jobs.crelate.com/portal/ |
| Public APIWhether you can build against it. | Included — scoped keys, read and write rate limits, idempotency | Full API and integrations listed on Business Plus, priced on request |
| Outbound webhooksHow the back office you already run gets told. | Included — endpoints with delivery logs and redelivery | MCP and webhooks listed among Platform add-ons |
| Getting in and paying | ||
| Published priceWhat you can work out without a call. | $119 per user / month billed annually — one figure, one edition | Essentials $85 and Business $119 per user / month; Business Plus and Platform on request |
| EditionsHow many decisions before you can buy. | One. Every feature included, no tier above it | Four — Essentials, Business, Business Plus, Platform |
| Records and storageWhether growth costs money. | Unlimited records and storage on every plan, no per-contact charge | Essentials up to 2 users and 20k contacts; increased data storage on Business Plus |
| MigrationWho does the unglamorous half. | Done for you and free on every plan — extraction, mapping, de-duplication, and 50 of your own records to check first | Standard and Advanced migration packages, scoped and priced by your sales contact |
Crelate’s Co-Pilot offers Skills that change with the area of the app you are in and the data in front of you, which is a sensible way to make AI useful inside a big product. Kepler’s assistant works the other way round: one sidebar on every page, roughly fifteen tools, the whole workspace in scope. It returns records rather than text, and it 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 |
Crelate ranks search results by how closely a record matches your keywords, and Co-Screen writes you a résumé summary once you are looking at someone. Kepler scores every candidate against the job’s own criteria and shows a verdict on each requirement with the line from the record it rests on — so a consultant who disagrees with the order can see exactly what the system read.
| 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
Crelate’s Insights Agent keeps records fresh automatically from outside data as candidates change roles, skills and contact details. Kepler works from the inside instead — it reads the emails, calls and messages already on the record, and every change it derives arrives as a proposal with its source attached, which you accept or reject.
Three candidates · this week
Re: Senior Data Engineer at Northwind
Thanks for sending the details over. The role sounds great, and I can start on 3 October if the timing works for them.
Are you still keeping half an eye out?
I handed my notice in this morning, so I am actively looking now.
James · 11:26For my next move I am looking for £105,000. I would want a step up for a move.
| Candidate | Available from | Status | Expected salary | Notice period | Company | Owner | Skills | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Sophia Bennett | Not set | Passive | £90,000 | 1 month | Monarch Analytics | Priya Nair | ||
| Amir Hassan | 14 Oct 2026 | Passive | £85,000 | 2 weeks | Northwind Capital | Priya Nair | ||
| James Okafor | Immediate | New | £100,000 | 3 months | Juniper Systems | Tom Reilly | ||
| Mei Tan | Not set | Passive | S$160,000 | 2 months | Atlas Cloud | Tom Reilly | ||
| Elena Rossi | Not set | Active | €78,000 | 1 month | Forma | Tom Reilly | ||
| Oliver Chen | Immediate | New | £88,000 | None | Northwind Capital | Priya Nair | ||
| Rahul Menon | 2 Nov 2026 | Active | £92,000 | 1 month | Juniper Systems | Priya Nair | ||
| Yuki Tanaka | Not set | Passive | ¥14,000,000 | 3 months | Atlas Cloud | Tom Reilly | ||
| Hafiz Rahman | 20 Oct 2026 | Active | S$145,000 | 2 weeks | Meridian Partners | Priya Nair | ||
| Clara Nowak | Not set | New | €84,000 | 1 month | Forma | Tom Reilly | ||
| Daniel Okonkwo | Immediate | Active | £78,000 | None | Northwind Capital | Priya Nair | ||
| Ana Ferreira | 8 Dec 2026 | Passive | €96,000 | 3 months | Juniper Systems | Tom Reilly | ||
| Tomas Novak | Not set | Active | €71,000 | 1 month | Monarch Analytics | Priya Nair | ||
| Grace Adeyemi | 27 Oct 2026 | Active | £105,000 | 2 weeks | Atlas Cloud | Tom Reilly | ||
| Ivan Petrov | Not set | Passive | €88,000 | 2 months | Forma | Priya Nair | ||
| Leila Haddad | Immediate | New | £82,000 | None | Meridian Partners | Tom Reilly | ||
| Marcus Reid | 16 Nov 2026 | Active | £98,000 | 1 month | Monarch Analytics | Priya Nair | ||
| Nadia Kaur | Not set | Passive | S$172,000 | 3 months | Northwind Capital | Tom Reilly |
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
Essentials $85 · Business $119 per user / month
Crelate publishes four tiers on its pricing page, read 6 Sep 2026. Essentials is $85 per user per month paid annually, capped at up to 2 users and 20,000 contacts, and covers the ATS, the recruiting CRM, the job portal, résumé parsing and sourcing. Business is $119 per user per month, annual or monthly, and is the first tier with the AI Assistant, client and team portals, reports and analytics, and email connections. Business Plus is custom-priced per user and is where automation and sequences, business-development workflows, the Advanced AI Assistant, increased data storage and the full API and integrations sit. Platform pricing is a custom user or site licence, with MCP and webhooks, priority support, increased API limits, advanced auditing and ISO/SOC 2 compliance listed as add-ons and enterprise options.
That is a legible ladder, and for a two-person firm the Essentials tier is genuinely cheaper than Kepler. It is also four decisions rather than one, and the features an agency usually demos — the assistant, sequences, the API — are not on the tier the entry price advertises. Kepler’s single edition is the opposite trade: less granularity, nothing to work out. Crelate’s data migration is quoted separately as a Standard or Advanced package scoped by your sales contact; Kepler’s is free on every plan.
It depends on whether your bottleneck is workflow breadth or the database underneath it. Crelate is the broader platform: it has an optional back office for assignments, timekeeping and invoicing, an external sourcing pool of around a billion profiles, text messaging, a mobile app and a certification route on its top tier, and Kepler has none of those. Kepler is deeper on the AI over your own data: one assistant across the whole workspace rather than Skills scoped to the screen you are on, search that reads emails and call transcripts as well as CVs and notes, matching with a verdict and evidence per requirement, and per-field history with undo. A staffing firm running contractors should look hard at Crelate. An agency sitting on years of unsearchable CVs, notes and email should look hard at Kepler.
Crelate publishes Essentials at USD 85 per user per month paid annually, limited to up to 2 users and 20,000 contacts, and Business at USD 119 per user per month, available annually or monthly. Business Plus and Platform are custom-priced. Kepler is USD 119 per user per month billed annually — USD 1,428 per seat per year — with one edition, every feature included, unlimited records and storage, and free migration. Additional AI capacity is available on request. Both sets of figures were read from the vendors’ own pricing pages on 6 Sep 2026.
Yes. Crelate Co-Pilot is an in-platform chat assistant, and Crelate publishes a set of named capabilities around it — Co-Screen for résumé summaries, Co-Target for competitor recommendations, Co-Interview for interview questions and Co-Create for content and email drafting — plus a Discovery Agent that searches an external pool of around a billion profiles and an Insights Agent that enriches your records. The Skills available in Co-Pilot vary with the area of the app you are in and the data on the screen, and the AI Assistant starts on Crelate’s Business plan. Kepler takes a different shape: one assistant in a sidebar on every page, reading the whole workspace, able to write changes back once you approve them, and included in the single price.
Crelate does and Kepler does not. Crelate Deliver handles assignments, timekeeping, invoicing and payroll export inside the platform for firms with lighter contractor volume, and Crelate names back-office partners such as People 2.0, Bilflo and GorillaWorks for firms that outgrow it. Kepler has no timesheets, no invoicing, no payroll and no back office of any kind, and no plan to pretend otherwise: the integration story is a public REST API and outbound webhooks, both included in the single price, so the pay-and-bill system you already run can be fed from Kepler. If you need pay and bill inside the CRM itself, Crelate is the correct choice and this page will not argue with that.
Crelate’s search is a full-text Boolean query over résumé text, notes and tags, with results scored by Elasticsearch on how closely each record matches your keywords; Crelate’s own August 2026 post on Boolean versus semantic search describes their model writing the Boolean query underneath a natural-language prompt. Kepler retrieves semantically and by keyword together, over candidates, CVs, notes and conversations — including the email threads and call transcripts attached to a record. For an agency whose institutional memory is mostly in email and transcripts rather than in structured fields, that difference in corpus is the whole comparison.
Kepler runs the migration for you and it is free on every plan. You send an export from Crelate plus any loose CVs, spreadsheets and shared-inbox archives; Kepler handles extraction, mapping, de-duplication and validation, and rebuilds 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. Crelate quotes its own migrations as a Standard or Advanced package scoped by a sales contact, which is the usual arrangement in this market; free on every plan is not.
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.