Editing your CV by AI chat — which tools take free instructions?

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.

Button or instruction — the difference no pricing page prints

Almost every CV tool now sells "AI". On a pricing page that is one line with a tick, and the tick hides two entirely different products. One is a menu: the vendor has anticipated a handful of operations, you trigger one, the AI performs it. The other is a text field: you describe in a sentence what should be different, and the tool has to work out for itself which part of the document you meant and what it should look like afterwards.

bewerbung.ch shows the first kind most honestly. Their AI is called BeKI, and the how-it-works section on their own information page is four steps: BeKI is available in many places, you click the BeKI button while entering a text, BeKI automatically produces a suggestion, you check it and accept it. That is cleanly built and completely transparent — and there is nowhere to write anything that is not one of the six intended applications. The sentence "shorten the second role and move education down" has no field there.

Enhancv turns exactly this distinction into its sales argument, in so many words: other builders send you to a separate interface or offer a fixed menu of preset prompts, while with them you type what you want in plain language and the edit appears inline in the right section. So you do not have to guess which kind of field you are looking at. The vendors that have the second kind say so.

What this means if you are applying to Switzerland from outside it

Most of the tools that take free instructions are international, and that is precisely where the trouble starts for a Swiss application. A Swiss dossier is not a US resume. Employers expect Arbeitszeugnisse (the written employer references you collect from every job), a photo is expected here where Germany and the UK discourage one, applicants without a Swiss passport name their permit on the page, language skills appear as CEFR levels — B2, C1 — rather than as "fluent", workload is a Pensum expressed as a percentage, and two pages is normal rather than a failure of discipline.

An instruction can only produce what the tool has a place for. Type "make this a Swiss CV" into an international builder and you will get a competent English rewrite of an American document: no permit line, because there is no field for one; language levels on a five-point beginner-to-native slider, because that is what the data model holds; no Pensum, because the concept does not exist in it. The assistant is not failing — it is faithfully editing the wrong shape of document.

The other trap is language. The instruction and the document are two separate languages, and tools differ on both. bewerbung.ch is German only: its French, Italian and English paths return 404. lebenslauf.ch answers on its French and Italian paths and then serves the German page. Kickresume has German and Italian sites but no French one. If you are applying across the language border — from Zurich to Geneva, or into Ticino — that matters more than any feature row.

SwissJobs.app

The editor puts the document on one side and, on the other, a panel headed "Edit your CV here" with the subtitle "Tell the AI what to change" and the placeholder "Ask something or describe a change…". What you type is not restricted to a list. It may also be long: one instruction accepts around thirty thousand characters, comfortably a full Swiss job advert plus the sentence saying what to do with it. Up to four attachments travel with an instruction — documents to 10 MB, images to 4 MB — and an uploaded image can be placed at a specific point in the CV by asking for it.

Underneath, the edit runs in two passes, and the second is why blunt instructions still work. First a fast pass locates the affected passages and replaces them precisely — the "shorten the profile" case, where everything else must stay untouched. If the instruction instead requires rebuilding the whole document, a translation or a new order of sections, it is handed to a second, more thorough pass that rewrites the file end to end. From your side both are the same typed sentence.

Two properties matter more than they sound. Every instruction is saved as its own version and listed with the line "Instruction (from your message)", so a rebuild that went wrong can be rolled back without starting over. And manual edits you typed straight into the document travel with the next instruction, so the AI works on what is actually on screen rather than on the last saved state. Tools that keep AI and hand-editing in separate modes lose exactly that.

The limitation belongs here too. The editor opens without an account; the instruction field does not. We tried it ourselves on 4 September 2026, calling the generation route as an anonymous visitor: the answer was a flat "Unauthorized". So you can type and rearrange anonymously, but the first AI instruction needs a free account — an email address, no card. After that the free account allows 5 instructions a day and 10 per rolling week, then seven free days, then CHF 15 a month or CHF 95 a year.

Enhancv — the serious rival on this specific question

On this question Enhancv is the strongest tool other than us, and that belongs at the top rather than buried at the bottom. Their AI assistant sits inside the document rather than in a side tab, takes freely worded sentences, and the change appears in the section it concerns. Preset chips sit alongside for the common cases, which is simply pleasant to use. If your target is an English-language application in a design-led field, their range of templates is wider than ours and the honest answer is to use them.

What remains for a Swiss application is not the interface but the dossier, for the reason above: an assistant can only edit the shape of document its data model holds. Ours holds the permit line, CEFR levels, the Pensum and the photo convention because it was built around a Swiss two-pager; theirs holds a resume.

Our own design range is deliberately narrower and it is fair to say so plainly: 54 design variations, which is 2 layouts times 3 fonts times 9 accent colours applied to one Swiss format. Freely combinable, but one format. If choosing between visibly different designs is what you want, that is Enhancv, not us.

cvswiss.ch, Kickresume and Teal — three ways to offer AI without an instruction

cvswiss.ch describes its writing feature itself: "Write keywords, get polished professional bullet points". The input is keywords, not instructions, and the tailoring runs off a pasted job advert. For a single application their price is hard to beat at CHF 5 one-off — with their own caveat, "No edits after download", which is worth knowing on a page about editing after the fact.

Kickresume writes sections from your job title and the advert, and its own page describes the follow-up as asking the AI to do it again until you are pleased. That is regeneration rather than instruction: the second attempt is another throw of the dice, not a targeted correction. It is a reasonable model — it just answers a different question from this one.

Teal meters its AI as credits against named operations, "Resume Bullets" and "Professional Summary", ten of them on the free plan, while the rest of the tool — unlimited resumes and an unlimited job tracker — stays free forever. For an English-language search where the real problem is keeping track of applications rather than rewriting prose, Teal is genuinely the better answer, and it costs nothing.

Copilot in Word and ChatGPT — free instructions, no application knowledge

Copilot in Word is the underrated option here. It takes freely worded instructions, drafts, rewrites selected passages and answers questions inside the open document — and that document is your own file, with your layout, no watermark and no export gate. It comes with Microsoft 365 Single at CHF 9.95 a month or CHF 99.95 a year on the Swiss Microsoft site. If you already pay for that subscription, you have already bought free-instruction editing.

The price is that Word does not know it is holding a CV. It has no permit line, no Pensum, no Arbeitszeugnisse and no two-page norm; it has paragraphs. Everything Swiss about the dossier stays your job — the AI helps with the wording, not with the format.

For ChatGPT and other general chatbots the same holds one notch sharper. The instruction can be anything, but there is no document for it to land in. You paste in, you copy out, and you do the layout by hand afterwards. For individual sentences that is free and good. For a dossier meant to look different after every advert, it is manual work with extra steps.

And the case with no AI at all: lebenslauf.ch

It is worth keeping the tool that does not ask the question. lebenslauf.ch, run by universaljob, is free, needs no login, and advertises editing "without a form": you click into the CV and type. Colour, typeface, size, line spacing and the order of entries are all on buttons. There is no AI — and for a good share of after-the-fact edits none is needed, because "shorter" and "higher up" are things you do faster than you can describe them.

Two caveats for anyone reading from abroad: importing an existing CV is still marked "coming soon" there, as is changing the document language. And while the French and Italian paths answer, they serve the identical German page — so the interface assumes you read German.

Who should use what

If you are applying to Swiss adverts continuously and want to sharpen each document after it is generated, SwissJobs.app is the fit: a free instruction field, every version kept, hand-editing and AI on the same document, permit line, CEFR levels and Pensum as part of the format, and PDF and Word export without a watermark. If you want design range and are applying in English, use Enhancv — their assistant does the same job in this discipline and their template range is larger.

If you are writing one application, cvswiss.ch costs CHF 5 instead of a month’s subscription; just note that nothing changes after the download. If your search is in English and the bottleneck is organisation, Teal is free and better at that than we are. If you already pay for Microsoft 365, Copilot in Word gives you free-instruction editing without another subscription — you supply the Swiss conventions yourself. And if you would rather spend nothing and type it yourself, lebenslauf.ch takes you further than any free plan that stops at the download.