Which CV builder exports free without a watermark?

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

   Add your current CV and a Swiss advert, AI writes one tailored to it. Free to start, no signup.

   SwissJobs.app →

2. 

   2. lebenslauf.ch

   Free, but you write the whole CV yourself in an empty form. Every line from scratch, no AI help.

   lebenslauf.ch →

3. 

   3. cvswiss.ch

   AI-written Swiss CV in five minutes.

   cvswiss.ch →

4. 

   4. cv-easy.ch

   Done in 10 minutes, CHF 12 one-off.

   cv-easy.ch →

5. 

   5. lebenslaufapp.ch

   CV and cover letter, free to try.

   lebenslaufapp.ch →

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.

What was inside the files we downloaded

bewerbung.ch publishes eight finished sample CVs as PDFs on its own front page, openly, no account required. We fetched three and opened them. Two were printed straight from a browser — the file properties name "Skia/PDF" as the producer and "Chromium" as the creator, which is the identical route our own PDF export takes. The third had been re-saved through Preview on a Mac and names macOS instead.

What is absent matters more than the producer. We searched all three files for the string "bewerbung.ch", in any capitalisation, across the whole file rather than only the visible text. Zero hits, three times. Each of the three files contains exactly one image — the photo, which a Swiss CV conventionally includes and a US resume does not — and embedded fonts, meaning the text is real text and not a photographed page. These are Premium samples the vendor chose to show, though, so they say nothing about its free tier, and the free tier is marked according to the vendor's own price list.

cvswiss.ch leaves two free templates lying around as PDFs and one as a Word file, again with no account. Same finding: no "cvswiss" anywhere in the bytes, no watermark, and in the PDFs no metadata whatsoever. Both are two pages, around five kilobytes, with no embedded fonts and not a single image — lean, clean skeletons. The Word file is a Swiss-format skeleton written in English, and it carries a "B Permit (Residence)" line in the header: the residence-permit line that belongs on a Swiss CV and that no international template will prompt you for.

Two vendors write the watermark into their own price list

The clearest answer to the headline question comes from cvswiss.ch, in its own FAQ: "Can I try it for free? Absolutely! You can create and preview your CV for free. Download with watermark is always free. Remove the watermark from CHF 5." The same company sells a subscription at CHF 15 a month whose description ends "all templates and no watermarks". That is not a hidden condition, it is an openly published business model: the clean exit is the product.

Anyone taking the one-off should read the tile closely. It promises "1 professional PDF download" and "Credit never expires", and above those it says "No edits after download". The FAQ on the same page answers "Can I edit my CV after downloading?" with a yes, including template changes and re-downloading. Which of the two governs the one-off purchase we did not test — but it is the question worth asking before paying, because it decides whether CHF 5 buys a CV or buys a download.

bewerbung.ch needs one word for the same disclosure. Its price list gives the free Standardkonto "one layout template (marked with logo)" and Premium "versatile layout templates (unmarked)" — CHF 20 for one month, CHF 50 for three, both explicitly without auto-renewal. On its front page the same vendor shows 26 layouts, sixteen for the CV named after cities from Tokio to Napoli and ten for the cover letter. Every single one carries a "Premium" badge. The one layout that is free does not appear in that gallery at all.

Two where the question never arises

lebenslauf.ch, run by Universal-Job AG, answers the headline question most directly of all: no account, no paid tier, five templates, free choice of colour, typeface, type size and line spacing, and a plain "download your CV for free". On format the site answers itself: currently PDF, "or better still, send it as a link so the recipient always sees the newest version".

The catch is not a small one for readers of this page: the tool exists only in German. On 4 September we requested its /fr and /it addresses and got the identical German page back both times — byte for byte the same size as the homepage, with the same German title. If you are arriving in Switzerland without German, this otherwise excellent free answer is not available to you, and in our own index roughly one open advert in seven whose language can be identified is in French.

Europass is the second unconditional case, run by the European Commission: "You can create, store and share CVs in 31 languages", as many as you want, no subscription, no mark, no ceiling. The cost sits elsewhere. What comes out is a Europass CV — a European form with a fixed running order — and not a Swiss dossier. For a recognition procedure or an application inside the EU that is exactly right. For a Swiss advert it reads as a form, and it makes no provision for the things a Swiss employer expects: Arbeitszeugnisse (the written references every Swiss employer issues), workload stated as a Pensum in per cent, and the permit line.

FlowCV: no branding — and the number printed beside it

FlowCV is the international builder that answers the question with the plainest yes. Its pricing page shows the free plan at "$0 /month", "Free forever", "No credit card required", and underneath "Unlimited PDF downloads" and "No watermarks or branding". Unlimited exports, no mark, no card. It is about as unambiguous as a free tier gets.

The consideration sits in the same box: "1 resume and 1 cover letter". One CV. The FAQ repeats it and draws the consequence for anyone dropping back down from the paid tier — only the first version stays editable, and "additional versions remain safely stored in your account but are locked until you upgrade again". Pro costs USD 5 a month billed yearly, so USD 60 a year.

Whether that ceiling matters comes down to one question: do you send the same CV everywhere, or a different one per advert? For the first way of working FlowCV is free and faultless. For the second, a plan holding exactly one stored version is not an economy measure, it is a way of working the tool does not permit.

What is in our own file, and what is not

We hold our own row to the same standard. On the occupation-template route covering over 190 professions the answer is written out on the page itself: create a CV, fill it in and download it as a PDF free of charge — no watermark, no credit card, no trial that rolls into a subscription. Editing and exporting need a free account with an email address and nothing else. What we charge for is not the clean exit but the tailoring to a specific advert: seven days free, then CHF 15 a month or CHF 95 a year, cancellable at any time. Nowhere in the export path is there a check that would write a vendor name into the document — there is no such place in the code at all.

Rather than merely assert that, we produced a Word file with the same component our export uses, unzipped it and read the properties. Visible on the page: nothing foreign. In the properties: the author field holds "Un-named", the placeholder the underlying library writes when the caller supplies no name, and the extended properties block is entirely empty. No application name, no company name, no image — the text is text.

And because a check is only worth something when it also reports the inconvenient part: running the identical check on the free Word template from cvswiss.ch returns exactly the same author, "Un-named", because both tools use the same open library. Two competitors ship files that are indistinguishable at that level. A clean properties panel is therefore not an advantage, it is the baseline — and if you want your own name in that field, you type it into Word yourself.

The real question: how many clean files do you need?

The moment more than one application is involved, the question moves from the watermark to the quantity, and there the offers separate sharply. A plan holding exactly one stored CV and a price of CHF 5 per download are the same model approached from two directions: both assume you need one file. Ten clean files in one month cost CHF 50 in one-off purchases at cvswiss.ch, CHF 15 on the same company's subscription, CHF 20 at bewerbung.ch, CHF 15 with us — and nothing at all at lebenslauf.ch or Europass. On FlowCV, ten separate versions are not something the free plan provides for.

How many it really is in your case is set not by a vendor but by your canton. arbeit.swiss puts it this way: "How many applications? This depends on your personal situation (e.g. occupation, education and training, age, geographical mobility, language skills) and on the regulations in your canton. Contact your local RAV as soon as possible to jointly determine what degree of efforts to find work are reasonable in your situation." There is no federal number; the ten above is an arithmetic example, not a requirement.

The same official page says something else that bears directly on which tool you pick: "A good application is carefully put together (current CV, tailored cover letter) and refers to a job that matches your skills and experience." Not one CV for everything, but one that fits the post. Follow that advice and you need several versions — and for you the watermark question is only half the question.

Who should pick what

You want a clean CV, in German, with no account and no money: lebenslauf.ch. There is nothing to argue about there, and we have nothing that solves that case better — their export needs no account, ours does.

You need your CV in a language no small Swiss vendor supports, or for a recognition procedure inside the EU: Europass, free, 31 languages. You need exactly one well-designed CV and send it everywhere: FlowCV, free and unbranded. You are applying precisely once and refuse a subscription: cvswiss.ch at CHF 5 one-off — cheaper than any monthly plan, theirs and ours included. You are working with a careers adviser or sitting in a Swiss school careers class: bewerbung.ch, whose school edition is built for exactly that.

Pick us if you are applying to Swiss adverts over a period of weeks and want a different CV per advert. The occupation template is free and unmarked, the editor opens without an account, and on top of that sits what nothing else on this list does: read the text of the advert, write a CV tailored to it, keep changing it by instruction, and keep a separate version per application — in German, French, Italian or English, as PDF or Word. But if your question really is only "free and no watermark" and stops there, two of the answers above cost nothing and need no account, and we are not going to pretend otherwise.