Short answer: different lanes, and some stores will run both. Chargeflow is an established specialist that automates card-issuer chargeback disputes on a success fee. Kernos works a different money flow — settlement reconciliation and fee-mischarge recovery — where every proposed action passes four-eyes approval and a person executes it. Here is the full comparison, including where Chargeflow wins.
| Dimension | Chargeflow | Kernos |
|---|---|---|
| Core question | "How do we win more chargeback disputes without manual work?" | "How do we catch settlement shortfalls and fee mischarges, and recover them under approval?" |
| The money flow it works on | Card-issuer chargebacks — the buyer's bank disputes a specific transaction | Settlement files and fee schedules — what platforms owed you at payout versus what they actually paid |
| What triggers action | A chargeback or alert arrives from the card network | A rules engine finds a mismatch between the settlement file and your expected payout |
| Who executes | The system, end to end — evidence is assembled and disputes are submitted automatically, per public product claims | Staged by design — the system proposes, an approver who is not the initiator clears it, a person executes |
| Evidence | Built automatically from enriched data points per dispute (publicly advertised); merchants describe limited visibility into what gets submitted (public merchant reviews, one-sided account) | A complete evidence chain you own — every proposed recovery traced to the settlement lines it came from |
| Audit | Case outcomes reported in the vendor's dashboard | Append-only audit chain — every decision replayable with full context: who saw what, who decided, on which numbers |
| Pricing | Success fee — 25% of recovered chargebacks, nothing if lost (publicly advertised) | Fixed tiers from $500/mo; a $1,500 flat pilot — first project, 60 days |
| Deployment | Cloud SaaS, Shopify-first | Self-hosted or private cloud — recovery data stays in your perimeter |
Chargeflow entries reflect the company's public product claims and public merchant reviews as of October 2026; reviews are one-sided accounts, not our measurements. Both products evolve; verify against current documentation. Last updated: .
Pretending otherwise would waste your time. Chargeflow is a focused, mature product in automated chargeback recovery: Shopify-first integration, evidence assembled automatically for each dispute, alerts deflected before they become chargebacks, and contingency pricing — 25% of what it recovers, nothing if it loses — so the incentive points at outcomes. If your dominant pain is dispute volume and the manual evidence work around it, handing that pipeline to an automated specialist is a rational, proven choice.
Public reviews of Chargeflow cluster around three themes. These are merchant accounts, not our measurements — one-sided by nature — and the overall Trustpilot rating is high at the time of writing. We cite them because each theme is a control question worth probing in any automated recovery vendor, including us.
The pattern behind the three clusters is the same: when a system acts on your behalf by default, your control lives in a support ticket. Kernos exists for buyers who want the opposite default.
Both products move money claims forward. The difference is who can make an action real. In a fully automated pipeline, submission is the default and oversight is a dashboard. Kernos inverts the default: the system proposes a recovery with its evidence chain attached; an approver who is not the initiator — enforced server-side — has to clear it; and the approved action still waits, staged, until a person executes it. Approval is never submission. Every step lands in an append-only audit chain, so months later you can replay who saw what, who decided, and on which numbers. Black-box automation optimizes for throughput. A governed pipeline optimizes for provable correctness — and when the counterparty is a platform that owes you money, provable beats fast.
Chargeflow works chargebacks: the buyer's bank disputes a transaction, and the merchant answers through the card scheme's process. Kernos works the settlement side: platforms pay you on schedules, deductions appear, fee lines drift from the published schedule, and payouts come up short. A fee mischarge does not travel the chargeback path at all — it is a case you open with the platform, and the evidence chain you bring decides it. We do not replace a chargeback tool, and we will not pretend the lanes compete.
Fairness cuts both ways, so the boundaries are stated here and not in a footnote.
Comparison axis: Chargeflow automates card-issuer chargeback disputes; Kernos governs settlement reconciliation and fee-mischarge recovery with approvals and audit.
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