What is an alternative to Zety?

Feature comparison

As of 4 September 2026. "not stated" means it could not be read on their own site — not "does not exist". Our rows come from the code (lib/stripe/trialConfig.ts) and from walking the live flow, not from marketing copy.

Pricing side by side

As of 4 September 2026. "not stated" means it could not be read on their own site — not "does not exist". Our rows come from the code (lib/stripe/trialConfig.ts) and from walking the live flow, not from marketing copy.

Zety

Zety is an international CV builder with separate language sites for Germany (zety.de), France (zety.fr) and Italy (zety.it) alongside the English zety.com. The editor takes you through template, content, cover letter and download in four steps. Its own pages advertise eighteen ATS-friendly CV templates, a checker that scores your CV and flags issues, and a career library of well over a thousand articles. It is a competent product, and almost nobody goes looking for an alternative because the editor is bad.

Price, read on 28 August 2026: the free account lets you write and store, but downloads are limited to TXT — a plain text file with no layout. PDF and Word require Pro. Pro opens with a fourteen-day trial at USD 1.95 and then auto-renews at USD 25.95 every four weeks, roughly CHF 21 a charge. The annual package is USD 71.40 paid once.

What is missing for a Swiss application dossier: the language selector in Zety's own footer offers «Deutsch», «Français (France)» and «Italiano» — there is no Swiss variant in any of the three. A Swiss dossier is not a US resume. It states the workload as a Pensum in per cent, it lists Arbeitszeugnisse (the written employer references every Swiss employee receives when leaving a job), it names language levels on the CEFR scale rather than as «fluent», and applicants without a Swiss passport put their permit on it. Zety has a field for none of that, in any of its languages.

SwissJobs.app

A job board and a CV tool in one account. You find an advert here and build the CV against that advert, without pasting the posting text anywhere — the difference from every other tool on this list, all of which have to ask you for the text first. Documents come out in German, French, Italian or English, following the language you are using the site in.

Price: CHF 15 a month or CHF 95 a year, with seven days free first. No conversion, no four-week periods, no exchange-rate drift.

Who it suits: people applying steadily over weeks who want a separate dossier per advert. The honest limitation: Zety's annual package is about CHF 38 cheaper than ours, we offer far fewer designs, and after seven days it needs a subscription. If you are writing one CV and never touching it again, lebenslauf.ch or Europass will do it for nothing. If you are applying in Germany, zety.de is built for that market and we are not.

cvswiss.ch

A Swiss provider whose core feature is the same as ours: paste a posting, get a CV written against it. Four interface languages (German, French, Italian, English), an ATS check, an Arbeitszeugnis decoder, and an export for the official RAV/ORP job-search form that people claiming unemployment benefit have to hand in.

Price on 28 August 2026: CHF 5 once for a single CV, or CHF 15 a month for unlimited CVs and cover letters, cancellable monthly, with a seven-day money-back guarantee.

Who it suits: if you need exactly one dossier, CHF 5 is the cheapest paid option anywhere on this list. The limits are on their own pricing page: the single purchase is marked «No edits after download», so once you have the PDF that version is fixed, and the AI features are described as rate-limited. And cvswiss carries no adverts of its own — you still have to go and find the posting text yourself.

FlowCV

The international builder whose free tier is genuinely usable: one CV and one cover letter, unlimited PDF downloads, no watermark, every template, full control of layout, plus three imports of an existing CV.

Price: free. Pro is USD 5 a month billed yearly — USD 60 a year, roughly CHF 48 — and adds unlimited CVs, an application tracker and AI help. Students who verify a university address get a quarter off for three years.

Who it suits: anyone working in English who wants a clean, unfussy PDF without paying. This is the entry to compare against Zety's free account, because it does the thing Zety's free account does not — hand you a finished PDF. The limits: the interface and the writing suggestions are English-only, the format is international rather than Swiss, and tailoring per advert means duplicating, which needs Pro. Drop back to free and only your first CV stays editable; the rest are kept but locked.

Europass

The European Commission's CV tool, run by its employment directorate. You build a profile of education, experience and skills, then generate as many CVs from it as you like, stored and shareable in thirty-one languages.

Price: free, permanently, with no payment details.

Who it suits: applications to EU institutions, internships, exchange programmes, and anyone who wants an official format that is understood across borders. One detail worth knowing if you are arriving from a country where the advice is the opposite: Europass's own guidance tells you to «add a professional photograph of yourself», which matches Swiss practice — a photo on the CV is conventional here, not a faux pas. The limit: the form is the same for every profession and every country, there is no tailoring to a specific advert, and Switzerland is not an EU member. Swiss recruiters expect a more freely laid out dossier of one to two pages.

bewerbung.ch

A Swiss provider that meters its AI in credits — one application of the AI costs one credit. The free account comes with three credits and a single template carrying the provider's logo. There is a school edition and a separate ATS product, and the data sits on Swiss servers according to the provider.

Price: CHF 20 for one month of Premium with ten credits, CHF 50 for three months with thirty — both marked, explicitly, as having no automatic renewal. Top-ups cost CHF 5 for ten credits and CHF 10 for twenty-five.

Who it suits: anyone whose actual complaint about Zety is the renewal rather than the editor. Here the absence of a renewal is the selling point on the pricing page. The limits: tailoring per advert spends a credit each time, importing an old CV is done by hand by the provider and costs CHF 80 on top (CHF 70 in the three-month package), and the interface is German only — although the documents it produces can be in English, French and Italian.

lebenslauf.ch

A free generator run by the Swiss staffing firm Universal-Job AG, headlined «100% kostenlos und ohne Login» — free and no login. Five templates, adjustable typeface, colour and spacing, editing straight in the document rather than through a form, drag-to-reorder sections, PDF download and a share link that always shows recruiters the current version.

Price: nothing. No account; an email address is enough to pick up where you left off.

Who it suits: German speakers who want a tidy standard CV for free. The limits matter more here than elsewhere on this list if you are reading this from abroad: the interface exists in German only, so it is effectively unusable if you do not read German. Beyond that, there is no tailoring to an advert, no writing help, and several advertised features — CV import, attachments, applying directly — are labelled «coming soon» on the site itself.

resume.io

The closest structural twin to Zety: template picker, pre-written phrases, ATS templates, a cover-letter editor, and Word and Google Docs variants. Anyone who has used Zety needs no adjustment period.

Price on 28 August 2026: USD 2.95 for a seven-day trial, then automatically USD 29.95 every four weeks — around CHF 24 a charge, slightly more than Zety. A quarterly plan costs USD 49.95, with a seven-day refund window.

Who it suits: people who specifically want American-styled templates and are not staying in Switzerland. The limit is why it appears on this list at all: if the four-weekly billing is what sent you looking for an alternative, this is the same model at a higher price. It shows up constantly in search results as an «alternative» to Zety; it is not an escape from the thing people are usually escaping.

Word or Pages

The template in a word processor is missing from almost every list like this one, and is still what most people in Switzerland actually use. It deserves the same seriousness as a paid product because on three counts nothing beats it.

Price: nothing extra if you already have Word; Pages ships free on every Mac. The file is yours, works offline, needs no account, never renews, and will still open in ten years.

Who it suits: anyone applying two or three times a year. The limits: every adjustment to an advert is manual, nothing checks the result, and layouts tend to break when sections move. The workaround is to build one good template properly and then replace only the top ten lines per application — title, profile summary, and the three duties that match the advert.

Which one to pick

Applying steadily to Swiss adverts and want a separate dossier per advert: SwissJobs.app or cvswiss.ch. Need exactly one CV and want to pay nothing: FlowCV in English, lebenslauf.ch if you read German, Europass if it should look official. Want to pay but not to be renewed: bewerbung.ch. Applying from outside Switzerland and unsure of the conventions: any tool works for the file, but read up on the Swiss dossier before you send it.

Applying in Germany, France or Italy: zety.de, zety.fr and zety.it are built for those markets and we are not — but take the annual package rather than the four-weekly plan, which is the same product at roughly five times the yearly cost. Applying twice a year: Word.

Nothing on this list requires a Swiss address or an AHV number to sign up, so all of them work from abroad. What does not travel is the format: a CV written to a US or UK pattern reads as foreign here, and that is a content problem no builder solves for you unless it knows what a Swiss advert asks for.