Motivation letters in German, French or Italian — which tool does all of them?

The tools’ landing pages compared

All captured on 4 September 2026 at the same window width, so the comparison is fair.

1. 

   1. SwissJobs.appOur app

   CV and motivation letter straight from a Swiss job advert, no signup.

   SwissJobs.app →

2. 

   2. cvswiss.ch

   AI-written Swiss CV in five minutes.

   cvswiss.ch →

3. 

   3. cv-easy.ch

   Done in 10 minutes, CHF 12 one-off.

   cv-easy.ch →

4. 

   4. lebenslaufapp.ch

   CV and cover letter, free to try.

   lebenslaufapp.ch →

5. 

   5. RadarJob

   Job monitoring with a motivation letter attached, CHF 39 a month.

   RadarJob →

The tools compared directly

As of 4 September 2026. Every figure for another tool comes from that tool's own site; "n/s" means it was not readable there — not that the feature is missing. Our row comes from the code and from walking the live flow.

Three different things «it does Italian» can mean

The first is the interface — whether you can operate the tool at all, which says nothing about what ends up in the letter. Bewerbung.ch is where the difference becomes visible: the application itself exists only in German, while documents in another language are a line on the paid tier. If you work in Lugano and do not want to work in German, you never reach the letter.

The second is the language the document is written in, and here tools split into two families: those that write in the language and those that translate a finished text afterwards. That is not a matter of polish. A translated letter carries the structure of the original with it, including the salutation and the closing formula, which are set differently in each language. With us the choice therefore sits on the document and is made before anything is written; it is not reapplied when you edit later, so a finished letter never quietly changes language.

The third is convention. A Swiss motivation letter — Bewerbungsschreiben in German, the first page of an application dossier rather than an email body — is the same document in all three language regions, but it does not even carry the same name everywhere. On the application guidance at arbeit.swiss the German edition says Bewerbungsschreiben four times and Motivationsschreiben once; the French edition says lettre de motivation throughout; and the Italian edition uses both names within two sentences: «La lettera di motivazione è il vostro biglietto da visita personale», followed by «una buona lettera di presentazione». A tool that merely translates its Italian output will not land that doubling.

How often a Swiss advert actually wants a second language

The tool question rests on something measurable: how often does a Swiss posting ask for more than one language? In our own index, two thirds of open adverts outside apprenticeships state a language requirement at all. Within that group, 10.7 per cent ask for two or more of the three national languages.

The distribution is more useful than the average, because it runs against intuition. Where an advert asks for Italian, it asks for at least one more language in 71.8 per cent of cases — German in 61.3 per cent, French in 42.9 per cent; Italian on its own is enough in only 28.2 per cent. For French the figure is 63.5 per cent. For German it is 41.1 per cent: 58.9 per cent of adverts that ask for German ask for nothing else.

For someone arriving from outside Switzerland that inverts a common assumption. German is not merely the largest language here; it is the one most often sufficient on its own, which is why German-only tools survive in this market at all. The smaller the language, the more often a second one comes with it. So the number of languages you need is decided by your occupation and by the individual job, not by the canton you moved to.

Translating is not the same as writing

Bewerbung.ch makes the difference plain, and that is a design choice rather than a failing. Their help page answers «how do I create a CV in another language» with the built-in translator and the note that it requires Premium access. Their AI page lists, among BeKI's abilities, «Übersetzen von Lebensläufen in Deutsch, Englisch, Französisch und Italienisch». Both places name the CV. Writing the letter itself is a separate item on the list of AI applications, and each application spends one credit — ten credits cost CHF 5.

A CV survives translation better than a letter does. It is made of titles, dates and keywords; a letter is made of sentences carrying a salutation, a subject line, a closing formula and a tone, and those are precisely the parts set differently in each language region. If you take the translation route, read the result against a model letter in the target language before it goes into the dossier.

That check is free. The application guidance on arbeit.swiss — the platform of the State Secretariat for Economic Affairs together with the cantonal employment offices — is published in all four languages. If you want to know what the document is called in the target language and which formal parts it has to carry, it is there in the language you need it in, with no account and no subscription.

Our own row, checked rather than remembered

In our letter wizard the language sits in the first step as a row of four choices: German, English, French, Italian. It starts on whichever language you are reading the site in, and you change it per letter. Read the site in English, apply in Lausanne, and the letter comes out in French without touching the interface. It is written from the advert text and the CV you pick as the basis; afterwards it sits in an editor where you change any line by hand or by instruction. The rules the letter is written to can be overwritten inside the tool as well.

The honest objection belongs in the same paragraph: the letter wizard asks for an account on the very first screen. The CV editor starts without one — on 4 September 2026 it answers anonymously — but the document list the wizard picks your CV from does not. If you only want to see something once, Europass shows you more, faster, for nothing.

And the numbers, because they change: a free account writes five letters a day and ten per rolling month, plus five AI edit instructions a day on a letter. Downloading starts after the seven-day trial; after that the access costs CHF 15 a month or CHF 95 a year, cancellable at any time. PDF and Word both leave without a watermark. Our four motivation-letter pages exist in German, English, French and Italian, each with its own example letter — the Italian one opens «Gentili Signore e Signori», the French one «Madame, Monsieur».

Which one to pick

Take Europass if you want to pay nothing and need a correctly structured letter in one of the three languages. It walks you through the parts, costs nothing, and covers more languages than any paid tool here. What it does not do is write: the text comes from you, and the result carries the European form rather than the Swiss dossier format.

Take Bewerbung.ch if you apply in German, want no subscription, and need a fully designed Swiss dossier — one month for CHF 20 that ends by itself, plus credits for the AI. Take cvswiss.ch if this is a single application and a CV is all you need: CHF 5 once is the lowest price in this list. Wanting a letter and the four languages there puts you on the CHF 15 monthly card, which is the same figure as ours.

Take SwissJobs.app if you apply to Swiss adverts continuously and switch language while doing it. That is the case the tool is built for: the choice sits on the document rather than on the interface or the country site, the letter is written from the text of that one posting, and PDF and Word both come out unwatermarked. For a single application we are not the cheapest — that is the cost of being built for the twentieth.