Ezekia models the search assignment end to end — a client portal, off-limits flags, organisation charts, retainer billing. Kepler does none of that. What Kepler does is make everything you already own searchable in plain English, including the email threads and call notes sitting on each record, and show its working when it ranks someone against a brief.
If your firm runs retained executive search and the assignment is the unit of work, Ezekia is very likely the better product and this page will not pretend otherwise: Ezekia ships a client-facing portal, off-limits flags, organisation charts, GDPR consent records and retainer invoicing with fee splits, and it holds ISO 27001 certification. Kepler has none of those. Kepler is the stronger product underneath the workflow — plain-English search across your CVs, notes and conversations, a meeting notetaker that files the full transcript on the record, matching with a verdict and a source for every requirement, per-field history with undo, and one published price of USD 119 per user per month with the migration done for you.
Last checked 6 Sep 2026 · Written from Ezekia's own public documentation and pricing pages. Tell us if we have something wrong and we will correct it.
Kepler’s plain-English search is semantic and keyword together across candidates, CVs, notes and conversations — the email threads and call notes attached to a record, not only its structured fields. The notetaker joins the call and files the summary, the next steps and the full transcript against the right record, so what someone actually said is in the corpus rather than in a folder.
Kepler ranks your database against a job and shows a verdict and the supporting evidence for each criterion, rather than a single number. Criteria are per-job and editable, so when the brief changes you edit the brief and re-run it.
Kepler is USD 119 per user per month billed annually — USD 1,428 per seat per year — with every feature included, unlimited records and storage, and migration done for you on every plan. Ezekia does not publish pricing; its plans are scoped and quoted individually.
These are the dimensions Kepler wins. Ezekia is ahead of Kepler on most of what a retained search firm buys a platform for — the client portal, off-limits handling, organisation charts, consent records, retainer billing and ISO 27001 — and the blog post lists every one of them in full.
| Kepler | Ezekia | |
|---|---|---|
| Asking your own database a question | ||
| What plain-English search readsThe corpus, not the ranking. | Candidates, CVs, notes and conversations — semantic and keyword retrieval together | Vector search and Query Builder over Ezekia records, with Microsoft 365 mail, files and chats through Sidekick connectors |
| Recorded calls and meeting notesWhether the transcript is in the product or in another subscription. | A notetaker joins the call and files the summary, next steps and full transcript on the record | Integrates third-party AI notetakers — Metaview, Carv, CoRecruit and HireLogic — plus voice transcripts on researcher notes |
| Approval before anything is writtenWhat happens when the AI decides to act. | The assistant creates and updates records only after a person approves the change; runs can be paused and resumed | AI automations trigger an agent from an event, and an MCP server lets Claude or ChatGPT update records and progress assignments |
| Matching a person to a brief | ||
| Evidence for each requirementWhether a consultant can see why someone ranked where they did. | A verdict per criterion — met, partial, missing or not stated — with the line from the profile it rests on | Job-spec matching and semantic search with must-have, important and exclude filters; per-criterion evidence is not described in their published material |
| Where the criteria liveA brief that survives the search that produced it. | Criteria sit on the job, stay editable, and the shortlist re-runs against them | Search parameters refined per search and saved as Query Builder searches |
| Where the CV parsing comes fromWhether the engine has read real agency CVs before. | RemakeCV’s engine — our own product, which 300+ recruitment agencies use — used for bulk drops and old-system exports | A choice of traditional or AI parsing at import, with AI producing more natural-sounding summaries |
| Trusting what is on the record | ||
| Field-level historyWhat changed, who changed it, and from what. | Per-cell history with the source of every AI-suggested change, and undo | A Journal View gives a unified activity timeline per record; per-field history and undo are not described in their published material |
| 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 Ezekia’s published material |
| Keeping a profile currentApplied, or proposed for review? | Emails, calls and messages become proposed field updates and tasks that a person approves or rejects | Outlook emails, meetings, contacts and tasks sync automatically, and machine learning augments incomplete data |
| The rest of the desk | ||
| Which mailbox it connects toNot every search firm runs on Microsoft. | Gmail and Outlook two-way sync, with threads linked to the right record | Microsoft 365 and Outlook throughout; Google Workspace is not named in their published material |
| Your own careers siteFor the leadership-advisory and in-house half of the market. | A branded job board on your own domain, SEO-indexed, with applicants parsed and scored on arrival | No careers site or job board appears in Ezekia’s published feature list |
| Seeing what runs by itselfAutomation you can audit rather than discover. | A register of every automation — what it reads, what it writes, when it last ran, and a switch to turn it off | AI automations triggered from events, plus Zapier and Integrately for everything else |
| Getting in and paying | ||
| Published priceWhether you can budget before a sales call. | USD 119 per user / month billed annually, printed on the website | Does not publish pricing — a 30-day free trial at £0, then an Enterprise plan scoped and quoted individually |
| Records and storageWhat happens as the database grows. | Unlimited records and storage, with no per-record or per-contact charge | Not published; plans are scoped per firm |
| MigrationWho does the unglamorous half. | Done for you and free on every plan — extraction, mapping, de-duplication, and fifty of your own records to check before the full load | Migration services with free onboarding and training, scoped as part of the quote |
Kepler’s assistant is a sidebar on every page with roughly fifteen tools. It searches candidates, CVs, notes and conversations, ranks a shortlist against a job, answers questions about your desk, explains where any fact on a record came from, and drafts messages — 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 |
Ezekia matches against a job spec with must-have, important and exclude filters, and returns candidates ranked by relevance. Kepler returns the same ranked list and then opens under any row into the reasoning: for each criterion on the brief, whether it is met, partial, missing or not stated, and the sentence from the profile that decided it.
| 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
A start date in an email, a resignation over WhatsApp, a salary on a recorded call. Kepler reads them and proposes the change on the field, with the message it came from attached, and you accept or reject it. Every field keeps its own history, so you can see what a value was before and put it back.
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
Does not publish pricing
Ezekia’s pricing page, checked 6 September 2026, lists a 30-day free trial at £0 with dedicated onboarding support, and one paid tier shown as CUSTOM — “Per user. Monthly. No annual commitment”. Alongside it Ezekia states “No fixed plans. No per-search fees. No hidden charges” and “All plans are scoped and quoted individually”. There is no published seat price, so there is none printed here; any figure you see for Ezekia on a review-aggregator site did not come from Ezekia.
Their model has a real advantage over ours and it is worth saying: Ezekia sells monthly with no lock-in, so a firm that wants to leave in month three can. Kepler’s published USD 119 is billed annually, with a USD 149 monthly option. What Kepler gives back is that you can work out your bill without a sales call, and that there is no edition above the one you bought.
For a firm doing retained executive search, Ezekia is very likely the better fit, and Kepler would rather say so here than in a demo. Ezekia is purpose-built for the assignment: it models Lists, Opportunities and Assignments as distinct project types, ships a client-facing portal, off-limits flags with time limits and notes, organisation charts and relationship diagrams, GDPR consent management, and billing with fee splits and multi-currency invoicing. Kepler has none of those. Kepler is the stronger product on the layer underneath — plain-English search across CVs, notes and conversations, matching with per-criterion evidence, per-field history with undo, and one published price — which matters most to a firm whose desk is mixed rather than purely retained.
No. As of 6 September 2026, Ezekia’s pricing page shows a 30-day free trial at £0 and a single paid tier listed as CUSTOM, described as “Per user. Monthly. No annual commitment”, with the note that “All plans are scoped and quoted individually”. Ezekia publishes no seat price, so a comparison cannot honestly print one. Kepler publishes USD 119 per user per month billed annually — USD 1,428 per seat per year — with every feature included, unlimited records and storage, free migration, and additional AI capacity on request.
No. Ezekia ships a client portal where a client sees candidate shortlists, reports, interview feedback, project updates and search activity in real time, with the firm controlling exactly which candidates, documents, custom fields and confidential project details are visible, and the ability to archive a portal when the search closes. Kepler has no client-facing portal at all. If your clients expect to log in and follow a search, that alone should decide this comparison in Ezekia’s favour.
Kepler’s search is hybrid semantic and keyword retrieval across candidates, CVs, notes and conversations rather than structured fields alone, so a plain-English question can surface someone because of a line in a CV, a researcher’s note, an email thread or something said on a recorded call. Kepler’s notetaker joins the call and files the summary, the next steps and the full transcript against the right record, which is what puts spoken conversation into that corpus in the first place. Ezekia offers vector search and a Query Builder over its own records, and its Sidekick connectors reach Microsoft 365 mail, files, chats and calendars; call transcription in Ezekia comes from a connected notetaker such as Metaview, Carv, CoRecruit or HireLogic.
Ezekia’s integration and MS 365 pages describe Microsoft throughout — Outlook, Teams, OneDrive, Excel, SharePoint, Microsoft To-Do, Power BI and Copilot — and synchronise emails, meetings, contacts, tasks and calendars between Outlook and Ezekia. Google Workspace is not named anywhere in Ezekia’s published material as of 6 September 2026. Kepler syncs two-way with both Gmail and Outlook, with threads linked to the right record, and also does calendar and scheduling with booking links. If your firm runs on Google, check that point with Ezekia directly before you shortlist either product.
No. Ezekia states it is certified to ISO 27001:2022 and publishes its certificate number on its own site. Kepler holds no ISO 27001 certification and no SOC 2 report. For a search firm whose clients run vendor security reviews — which in executive search is most of them — that is a straightforward reason to choose Ezekia, and it is not something product depth compensates for.
Kepler runs the migration for you, free, on every plan. You send an export from Ezekia along with any loose CVs, spreadsheets and shared-inbox archives 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, not just names and email addresses. Kepler also exports your whole workspace on request at any time with no exit fee.
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.