CV in Word or with an online tool?

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.

What a Word file gets right

Start with what Word cannot be beaten on. The document is on your machine. It opens without a connection, without a login, without a company that might one day move it behind a paywall or change the export rules. In ten years it will still open, and nobody has to renew a subscription for that to be true. If that matters to you, it is a real argument and not a small one.

Word is also the format Switzerland officially hands out. The CV page of berufsberatung.ch — a service of the SDBB on behalf of the cantons — offers a fill-in CV as a DOCX file first, followed by three worked examples as PDFs. Follow that route and in twenty minutes you have a document shaped the way Swiss readers expect, without adding another tool to your life.

And Word is universal. Any HR department can open a DOCX, any staffing agency can reformat it, any friend you ask to proofread can leave comments in it. When a recruitment agency explicitly asks for an editable file — which happens, because they re-typeset the dossier under their own letterhead before passing it to the client — Word is the correct and only answer.

The Swiss lines your Word template does not have

The quiet problem with Word is not the program. It is what you start from. On 24 August 2026 Microsoft's German-language address for CV templates ended on an English page whose own address carries the language code «en» and whose heading reads «Free customizable resume templates». The French and Italian addresses ended the same day on a generic start page with no CV selection at all.

Look at what is offered there and you are looking at another country: Registered nurse resume, Attorney resume, Paralegal resume, Pharmacy technician resume, Office manager resume. Those are American job titles on American documents, marketed with the label «ATS-friendly».

The gap to a Swiss CV is not a matter of taste, it is a matter of which lines exist. The official portal lists, among the elements of a CV: a recent colour photograph against a neutral background, the full date of birth, the place of origin or place of birth, nationality, and — quoted — the type of residence permit for foreign nationals, «zum Beispiel Ausweis C oder B». Then languages starting with your mother tongue, and named referees with telephone numbers. No American template has fields for these, because in the United States several of them are unusual to unlawful to ask for.

For anyone who moved here to work, this is the expensive part. The CV that got you hired abroad is missing the permit line a Swiss reader looks for first, has no place for the Arbeitszeugnis references that carry a Swiss dossier, and puts a photograph nowhere — while the local convention still expects one. Downloading an American template means rebuilding those lines by hand in a document formatted by someone else, where every added row pushes the rest of the page around.

What Word actually costs here

«I already have Word» is a sentence that skips a bill. Microsoft's Swiss comparison page on 24 August 2026 shows four routes to the desktop apps: Microsoft 365 Single at CHF 9.95 a month or CHF 99.95 a year, Family at CHF 13.95 or CHF 139.95, Premium at CHF 19.95 or CHF 199.95, and Office Home 2024 as a one-off purchase for PC or Mac at CHF 159.95. Every subscription carries the note that it renews automatically unless you cancel it in your Microsoft account.

There is a free route, and it is worth naming precisely: Word in the browser. Microsoft's page promises free access to Word, Excel and PowerPoint on the web, plus 5 GB of cloud storage. The price is a Microsoft account and a file that lives online — which are exactly the two things people cite when they prefer Word to an online tool. «Offline and no account» describes the paid version, not the free one.

Our price belongs in the same table, so the sum is complete: CHF 15 per month, CHF 95 for a full year, seven days to try it first. That comparison does not run entirely in our favour, and it belongs on the page: if you need one CV and own a browser, Microsoft will give you a full word processor for CHF 0. No argument of ours beats that, and we are not going to pretend otherwise.

One file, four languages

Whether a single saved file is enough is decided by the adverts, not by the software. We counted the adverts published on SwissJobs.app by the language they are written in. For about three quarters the language is unambiguous, and within that group roughly 56 percent are German, 27 percent English, 13 percent French and 2 percent Italian. Better than one advert in four is written in English — in a country where English is not an official language.

That is not a handful of multinationals either. Among employers with more than one open advert, 24.3 percent post in more than one language; among those with five or more adverts it is 35.1 percent. The same company advertises one role in German and the next in English. Turn up twice with the same file and one of those two applications is in the wrong language.

Then there is the workload line, which is where a fixed document goes wrong most often. About a fifth of adverts state a percentage at all. Of those, 57.5 percent give a range instead of a number — 80 to 100 percent — and a quarter name a figure below 100 percent. So what you write about your availability is a different statement depending on the advert: «100%» in your CV does not answer a posting that asks for a range, and «60-80%» removes you from a full-time role before anyone reads your experience.

The official advice says the same thing in fewer words. Under «Unser Tipp», the CV page of berufsberatung.ch tells applicants to write a suitable CV for each occupation they apply to and save the versions separately. That is not a tool vendor talking; it is the cantons. In Word, it is manual work per version.

Word tailors too — the difference is narrow but real

One claim you will read elsewhere is that tailoring a CV to an advert is something only online tools do. It does not survive a look at Microsoft's own page. Microsoft writes it on the template page itself: «A resume template in Word makes it easier to tailor job applications for multiple positions you're apply for. Just start with a resume template, or existing document, then ask Copilot to alter for a specific job.» The five-step instruction below it includes «Chat with Copilot to help polish, enhance, or edit resumes using AI» and «Save, print, and share resumes as a PDF». Copilot inside the apps sits with the paid plans on the same pricing page, not with the free browser version.

So the difference is not the idea. It is one level down: in Word, you bring the advert. Open the posting, select, copy, switch windows, paste, check, export, name the file — that is the routine, once per application. On our side that trip disappears, because the page where you read the advert is the page that hands it to the CV.

In fairness, we are not alone in that idea: cvswiss.ch leads with tailoring a CV to a posting as its headline feature, and there you paste the advert in. So our checkable claim is the narrow one — one version for an advert you found here, with no copy-paste step. At twenty applications, that step is exactly where people start sending the same file a second time.

One more piece of honesty, because this corner of the market oversells badly. The «ATS-friendly» label on a Word template, and any equivalent claim from us, cannot be a promise: nobody can see inside an employer's filter, not Microsoft and not SwissJobs.app. What can be stated is the mechanism. A keyword search finds the wording that appears in the advert, not your synonym for it. The official portal gives the same advice in its French edition, where it tells applicants to compare their own qualities and skills against the keywords in the posting.

Who should use which

Stay with Word if you keep a good CV that you extend by one line a year. Stay with Word if working offline and without an account matters enough to pay a subscription or the one-off price for it. Stay with Word if someone explicitly asks for an editable file. And stay with Word if this is a single application — one document is not worth a migration.

Move once the second and third applications are in sight. The gain is not the layout; it is that the differences between versions — the language, the workload line, which role goes first — no longer have to be carried over by hand, and therefore do not get forgotten. Move as well if you do not own Word and do not intend to buy it, or if your applications get written across a phone, a library computer and a laptop.

Written on 24 August 2026. At a company that size, prices, template pages and product names have a short shelf life; anyone deciding on the strength of them should look them up at Microsoft first.