Vitae vs Saply — CV Formatting Compared

What is Saply?

Saply.ai is a Belgian recruitment technology startup based in Oostende. The company was founded in early 2024, accepted into the Start it @KBC accelerator, and later selected for imec.istart with €300K in private funding. In 2025, Saply became an official Microsoft partner and launched its core product: a Microsoft Word and Google Docs add-on that formats candidate CVs inside the editor the recruiter is already using.

The premise is simple: instead of switching to a separate platform, recruiters install the Saply plugin and format CVs without leaving Word or Gmail. Saply also offers integrations with Bullhorn, Carerix, and Spott — though ATS integrations are limited to the Enterprise tier. The platform uses a credit-based pricing model where each generated CV consumes one credit.

Named clients include Cegeka, Cheops, and several Belgian staffing firms. The company is growing but is still in its early stages compared to more established CV automation platforms.

What is Vitae?

Vitae is the ONGROUP CV Automation Engine — a complete recruitment platform built for agencies that need to format candidate CVs at scale, manage a searchable talent pool, and match candidates to job descriptions with AI.

The platform uses LaTeX typesetting to render CVs. LaTeX is the same technology used by academic publishers, scientific journals, and professional typesetting houses to produce print-quality documents. The result is consistently precise typography: proper kerning, ligatures, hyphenation, and micro-level layout control that Word templates and web-based rendering engines cannot match.

Beyond formatting, Vitae includes a built-in candidate matching pipeline that combines vector search with LLM re-ranking to match candidates against job descriptions. This matching engine is exposed as an agent skill — a structured API endpoint that AI agent frameworks can call programmatically, enabling automations like inbox-to-shortlist workflows.

Vitae is ATS-agnostic, EU-based, and designed from the ground up for GDPR compliance and EU AI Act readiness.

The fundamental difference: plugin vs platform

This is the most important distinction between Saply and Vitae, and it shapes everything else.

Saply is a formatting plugin. It lives inside Microsoft Word or Google Docs. You upload a CV, the plugin extracts data, applies a template, and you get a formatted document. Saply explicitly states that it does not store personal data — information is processed during requests and discarded. This sounds good for privacy, but it means there is no persistent candidate database. Every CV is a one-off transaction. You cannot search across previously formatted candidates, build a talent pool, or run matching queries against your existing candidate base.

Vitae is a recruitment platform. It stores and manages candidate profiles with full version history. Every candidate has a searchable profile with structured skills, experience, education, and certifications. When a new job description arrives, Vitae can instantly match it against your entire talent pool — not just the CV you happen to have open in Word.

The plugin model works if your only need is formatting individual CVs faster. The platform model works if you want to build a compounding asset — a searchable, matchable talent pool that gets more valuable with every candidate you add.

Feature comparison

The table below compares CV formatting, candidate management, and matching capabilities.

Pricing: transparency vs sales calls

Vitae publishes its pricing openly. Saply does not — the pricing page shows plan names and feature lists, but actual prices are hidden behind a “Start 14-day free trial” button that routes to a sales call. You cannot evaluate Saply’s cost without speaking to a salesperson first.

What we do know about Saply’s structure:

• Starter — 1 seat, 120 CVs/year (10/month). Standard and EU templates. No ATS integration. No matching.
• Pro — 4 seats, 420 CVs/year (35/month). Adds AI matching, CV-to-vacancy tailoring, chatbot. No ATS integration.
• Enterprise — unlimited users, unlimited CVs. Adds API access, AI agent, bulk processing, ATS integrations (Bullhorn, Carerix, Spott), custom templates, SLA. Contact sales.

Both Starter and Pro use a credit system where additional CVs and users can be purchased as add-ons. Unused credits roll over on yearly plans only.

Vitae’s pricing, for direct comparison:

The difference in approach is telling. Vitae lets you evaluate cost before you commit. With Saply, you need to book a demo, talk to sales, and negotiate — before you even know if the price fits your budget. For agencies that value straightforward procurement, transparent pricing removes friction from the buying decision.

Output quality: LaTeX vs Word templates

Saply formats CVs using Microsoft Word templates. The output is a Word document that you can further edit, then export to PDF if needed. This is convenient — it keeps everything in the Word ecosystem — but it inherits all of Word’s typographic limitations.

Vitae uses LaTeX, a typesetting system designed specifically for producing high-quality printed documents. The practical differences are visible in the output:

• Typography — LaTeX handles hyphenation, kerning, and ligatures automatically. Text flows evenly with consistent spacing. Word’s line-breaking algorithm is simpler and often produces rivers of whitespace and awkward breaks.
• Page breaks — LaTeX considers the entire document when deciding where to break pages. It avoids orphaned headings, widowed lines, and split sections. Word handles page breaks locally, which leads to more layout issues as CV length varies.
• Consistency — LaTeX output is deterministic. The same data always produces the same layout, regardless of operating system or installed fonts. Word rendering can vary between machines and versions.
• Professional perception — the difference is subtle but clients notice. LaTeX-produced documents have the same polish as professionally published books and technical reports. Word-formatted CVs look like … Word documents.

If your agency competes on the quality of candidate presentation — if the CV is part of how you sell your service — the rendering engine matters.

Candidate matching: talent pool vs one-off formatting

This is where the plugin-vs-platform difference becomes most consequential.

Saply’s approach: Saply offers “AI matching” on Pro plans and above, plus “CV-to-vacancy tailoring” that adjusts a CV to better fit a specific role. Technical details are not published. Since Saply does not store candidate data, matching appears to operate on the single CV you are currently editing — it cannot search across a pool of previously formatted candidates.

Vitae’s approach: candidate matching is a core platform feature. Every candidate you upload becomes part of a searchable talent pool with vector embeddings. When a job description arrives, Vitae’s two-stage pipeline finds the best matches:

1. Semantic search — vector embeddings are generated for every candidate profile. The job description is embedded into the same space, and pgvector finds the nearest matches using cosine similarity. This retrieves a broad set of relevant candidates in milliseconds.
2. LLM re-ranking — the top candidates are evaluated by an LLM that scores each match from 0 to 100. The model distinguishes hard requirements (must-haves) from soft requirements (nice-to-haves). Every score includes a written reasoning explaining why the candidate was ranked where they were.

The matching engine auto-extracts requirements from job descriptions, applies synonym expansion (so “K8s” matches “Kubernetes”), and uses adaptive pre-filtering to widen search when initial results are sparse.

The key insight: Vitae’s talent pool compounds over time. Every candidate you format adds to your searchable pool. Six months in, when a new JD arrives, Vitae can instantly search hundreds of candidates you’ve already processed. With Saply, those candidates are gone — their data was discarded after formatting.

The agent skill architecture

Vitae exposes its matching engine as a structured API endpoint that AI agent frameworks can call programmatically. This enables automation workflows:

• Inbox to shortlist — an AI agent monitors your inbox for incoming job descriptions, calls Vitae’s matching skill, and surfaces a ranked shortlist with reasoning before the recruiter opens the email.
• ATS-triggered matching — when a new job is created in your ATS, an agent automatically matches it against your talent pool.
• Built-in recruiting agent — Vitae includes an AI chat agent that can search candidates, run matches, explain scores, and retrieve detailed profiles through natural language conversation.

Saply lists an “AI Agent” and “API Access” on their Enterprise plan, but details, documentation, and pricing are not publicly available. You need to contact sales to learn what these features actually do.

See it in action: the Vitae recruiting agent

Here is what a real conversation with the Vitae agent looks like. The recruiter pastes a job requirement, and the agent searches the talent pool, runs matching, and returns ranked results with reasoning — all in a single chat interaction.

This is not a mockup — this is how the actual Vitae agent works. The recruiter types a natural language query, the agent calls the matching pipeline, and results come back with scores and per-candidate reasoning. The entire interaction takes seconds.

Try this with Saply: paste a job description into a Word plugin and ask it to search your talent pool. You can’t — because there is no talent pool to search.

Where Saply has an edge

A fair comparison requires honesty about where the other product does well:

• In-editor convenience — Saply lives inside Microsoft Word and Google Docs. For recruiters who spend their day in these tools, there is no context switch. You format CVs in the same application where you draft emails and write reports.
• Gmail and email integration — Saply can process CVs received via email directly from the inbox. This reduces the steps between receiving a CV and formatting it.
• Word-native output — because Saply works inside Word, the output is a native .docx file that anyone can edit. Some clients and ATS platforms require editable Word documents. Vitae currently exports PDF; Word export is planned.
• No data retention — Saply does not store candidate data after processing. For agencies with strict data minimisation policies, this may be a compliance advantage — though it comes at the cost of not being able to build a talent pool.
• Microsoft partnership — as an official Microsoft partner, Saply has a credibility signal in Microsoft-centric enterprise environments.

Where Vitae wins

• Output quality — LaTeX typesetting produces measurably better typography than Word templates. For agencies that compete on candidate presentation quality, this is a meaningful differentiator with end clients.
• Transparent pricing — Vitae publishes all plan prices openly. You know exactly what you’ll pay before you sign up. No sales calls, no negotiations, no surprises. Saply hides its prices behind a demo booking.
• Searchable talent pool — every candidate you process in Vitae becomes a persistent, searchable asset. Over time, you build a compounding talent database that makes future placements faster. Saply discards candidate data after each formatting request.
• Built-in candidate matching — Vitae includes a production-ready, two-stage matching pipeline (semantic search + LLM re-ranking) as a core feature. Every match returns a score with written reasoning. Saply’s matching capabilities are limited and not well documented.
• AI recruiting agent — Vitae includes a built-in chat agent that can search your talent pool, run matches, explain scores, and retrieve candidate details through natural conversation. This is available on Professional and Enterprise plans, not locked behind an opaque Enterprise tier.
• Agent skill API — Vitae exposes candidate matching as a structured API for AI agent frameworks. This enables automation workflows like inbox-to-shortlist and ATS-triggered matching — capabilities Saply does not publicly document.
• ATS independence — Vitae works with any ATS or with no ATS at all. Saply’s ATS integrations (Bullhorn, Carerix, Spott) are locked to the Enterprise tier. If you use a different ATS on Saply’s Starter or Pro plan, you get no integration at all.
• EU compliance and AI governance — Vitae is EU-based with GDPR compliance and EU AI Act readiness built into the architecture. Every AI decision (embedding, JD parsing, re-ranking) is logged to an audit trail. Matching prompts include anti-bias rules that score candidates on demonstrated skills only.
• Immutable version history — every CV version in Vitae is immutable and auditable. You have a clear trail of what was sent to which client and when. Saply’s stateless model means there is no version history to reference.
• EU institution templates — Vitae supports Europass out of the box. Additional institutional formats such as DIGIT TM 2, DIGIT TM 3, ITUSS21, and ITUS19 are available on request and can be added to your account within the same turnaround as any custom template.

Who should choose which?

The right choice depends on what your agency actually needs:

• Choose Saply if your only need is formatting individual CVs faster inside Microsoft Word, you don’t need a candidate database or talent pool, you prefer a plugin over a separate platform, and you’re comfortable with opaque pricing and a sales process.
• Choose Vitae if you want to build a searchable talent pool that compounds over time, you need AI-powered candidate matching with explainable reasoning, you value typographic output quality for client-facing documents, you want transparent pricing you can evaluate without a sales call, you need an agent-ready API for automation workflows, or you require EU compliance and AI governance as a baseline.
• Consider both if you value Saply’s in-Word convenience for day-to-day formatting but want Vitae’s matching and talent pool capabilities for strategic recruiting. The two can coexist — Vitae does not require exclusivity.

The best way to evaluate is to try both with your own data. Vitae offers a free tier with three CVs per month — enough to compare output quality side by side. Unlike Saply, you don’t need to book a demo to get started.