Motivation letters: SwissJobs.app or Canva templates?

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 Canva actually offers for a motivation letter

The English page is titled «Free Cover Letter Maker» and promises four things: «Easy drag-and-drop editor», «1M+ professionally-designed templates», «Generate content and media with AI» and «Download or share designs easily». All four are accurate. Someone with no design experience can produce a page that looks like something, quickly.

One level down it gets more specific. We opened a single template in the gallery — the German-language edition of it, so the strings quoted in this paragraph are German. The breadcrumb above it reads «Startseite › Vorlagen › Briefköpfe», Home › Templates › Letterheads, and the credit line underneath says «Briefkopf von Everlin Piccinini» — a letterhead by a Canva contributor. In Canva’s own taxonomy a cover letter is filed under stationery, and it is made by a designer rather than by a careers service.

The largest offer on that template page is «Mit Canva drucken», print with Canva: a choice between standard paper at 118 to 148 grams per square metre and premium paper at 148 to 216 grams, a quantity of 25 letterheads, and a note that stock is available and ready to print. For a Swiss application, which is uploaded as a PDF or emailed, a stack of 25 printed sheets is not the bottleneck. It does show precisely what the tool was built for.

Beside it stood the button «Kostenlose Vorlage anpassen» — customise the template for free, so the template itself costs nothing. Seven of the related templates suggested on the same page carried a «Pro» badge.

The figure Canva prints in German and French, and drops in English

The German edition of the cover-letter page states, word for word, that «es besteht tatsächlich nur eine Chance von 17 %, dass der Personalverantwortliche dieses überhaupt liest» — there is only a 17 per cent chance the recruiter reads it at all. The French edition says the same: «il n’y a que 17 % de chances qu’un recruteur lise votre lettre de motivation».

The English edition of the same page — which is also the default served to every country without its own language version, including anyone browsing from Switzerland in English — drops the number and writes only «there’s only a slight chance that your recruiter will read it». The Italian edition does not mention it and argues the opposite: the letter is «ancora oggi uno strumento fondamentale», still today an essential tool.

We report the 17 per cent as what it is: a claim Canva makes about its own product, with no source given. We found nothing establishing it for the Swiss market and we do not assert it. What is worth noticing is the shape of the sentence — a sales page for cover letters opens by saying the cover letter usually goes unread.

29 language editions, and not one of them Swiss

The source of the cover-letter page lists its alternates in every other language. We counted them: 29, from Arabic to Vietnamese, plus a default edition. German points at /de_de/, French at /fr_fr/, Italian at /it_it/. There is no de-CH, no fr-CH, no it-CH in that list, and the default is the English page.

If you are reading this in English while applying in Switzerland, that is the whole problem in one line. Whichever language you pick, Canva serves you the neighbouring country’s edition — and the neighbouring country is exactly where the conventions differ. In Germany a Deckblatt, a cover sheet in front of the dossier, is more common than it is here; French practice leans towards one page and no photo, whereas arbeit.swiss states in its own words that the personal details section includes a photograph and sets the CV limit at three pages.

A Swiss dossier also carries things a US or UK application does not: Arbeitszeugnisse (the written references a Swiss employer issues at the end of every job), a line stating your work permit if you are not Swiss, language levels given as A1 to C2 rather than the word «fluent», and a workload stated as a Pensum in per cent. It is a CV and a motivation letter, not a resume and a cover letter, and the difference is not only vocabulary.

What the template names say, and what none of them says

The English gallery for the search «cover-letter» reported more than five and a half thousand templates on 4 September 2026 — by a wide margin the largest of the four language galleries we checked, and the one least matched to this market. Its template names are design names: «Cover Letter Doc in Dark Green Cream Orange Modern Style», «Orange and Pink Bold Funky Student Internship Cover Letter», «Blue and White Color Blocks Nurse Cover Letter». Colour first, then style, then purpose.

That is the right ordering for a design application, and it is exactly where a Swiss application letter works differently. The Swiss federal careers guidance at arbeit.swiss sets out what the letter has to contain formally: both postal addresses, the date, a subject heading, the salutation, the closing greeting and a signature — seven items, and it calls the whole thing «your personal business card». None of those seven items is a colour.

And then there is what an international gallery has no reason to include, because its readers do not need it: the permit line, CEFR language levels, the reference to Arbeitszeugnisse, the enclosures line at the foot. That is not a criticism of Canva. It is the reason a template from that gallery has to be rebuilt before it is right in Switzerland.

«Match the design to the company» — what that costs in this market

One line on the German Canva page deserves checking against real adverts: you can «adapt the design to the company you are applying to, to create a feeling of familiarity from the start». The French edition puts it more directly still — mirror the company’s visual identity.

In the open adverts in our index on 3 September 2026, 30.9 per cent carry no company logo at all. For close to a third of the vacancies there is not even a mark to design against. And where there is one, the employer side is fragmented enough that the work is almost never reused: just under half of the employers in our index have exactly one open advert, measured in August 2026.

Building a bespoke design per application is therefore a calculation that rarely pays. Writing a bespoke text per application does — because what differs between two adverts is not the colour, it is the requirement.

Canva’s own advice contradicts itself across languages

Put the four editions side by side and two recommendations do not fit together. The German, English and French pages all set the length in their FAQ at 250 to 400 words. The Italian page, the only one written independently rather than translated, advises: «Mantieni la lettera breve: idealmente tra 8 e 12 righe» — keep it short, ideally eight to twelve lines. Eight to twelve lines is not 250 to 400 words; it is roughly a third of that.

The same Italian page explicitly recommends the opposite of what a Swiss application letter is for: «Crea una volta, utilizza per sempre» — create once, use forever. The «lettera di presentazione generica», the generic cover letter, stays saved in your profile, and you simply adjust the text to the offer.

Our own index argues against that. We have compared adverts carrying the same job title, from different employers, written in the same language: they share a median of 24.7 per cent of their wording, and in 39.4 per cent of pairs the overlap is lower still. That figure is already published here and was measured in August 2026. A generic letter therefore misses the advert’s own words most of the time.

What Canva does better, without qualification

Canva’s Swiss pricing page on 4 September 2026 shows four tiers in the yearly view with the note «Spare ab 16 %» for paying annually: Free at 0 CHF a year for one person, Pro at 128 CHF, Business at 210 CHF per person, Enterprise with no price and a contact-sales button. The free plan lists «more than 1.6 million templates», «over 4.7 million photos, videos, graphics and audio tracks», 5 GB of storage, and an AI allowance of up to 200 standard AI uses or up to 20 premium ones.

That arithmetic does not settle in our favour, and we are putting it in front of you anyway. Anyone unwilling to spend money gets a complete design application from Canva for CHF 0, with an AI allowance that is numerically larger than our ten letters a rolling month. If you are writing one application and want a good-looking page, Canva is the correct answer.

And there are jobs where the page itself is the work sample. Applying as a graphic designer, art director, illustrator or photographer means the document is a demonstration of your craft; there a designed letter is not decoration, it is part of the application. For that group our recommendation is unqualified: use Canva, and take your time over it.

What we do, and where we stop

Here the starting point is not a design but the advert. You pick a posting from our index or paste the text, add your CV, and the draft is written from both — in Swiss letter form: place and date, a subject line with the exact job title, a salutation, three to four paragraphs on one page, a closing greeting, an enclosures line. Every line stays editable afterwards, by hand in the editor or by typing an instruction into the chat panel.

Counted in the code and on the live pages on 4 September 2026: the editor opens with no sign-in, so a draft can be built anonymously. Generating from the advert and downloading require a free account with an email address and no card. That account allows five letters a day and ten per rolling month, plus five AI edits a day and ten a month — the motivation letter has its own budget and does not eat into the CV one. After that, a 7-day trial, then CHF 15 a month or CHF 95 a year, cancellable at any time. Export as PDF and as a Word file, neither watermarked. The worked example letter can also be downloaded as a Word file with no account; we checked that the same day.

Where we stop belongs here just as much. We have 54 design variations — 2 layouts times 3 fonts times 9 accent colours — which against a design application is not a gallery. We have no image library, no photo editing, no brand kits and no print service. If design is what you came for, you have come to the wrong place.

Who each one is right for

Choose Canva if you work in a design field and the document counts as a work sample. If you are writing exactly one application and have an evening for it. If spending nothing is the point — their free tier costs CHF 0 a year, and nobody needs to apologise for choosing it. And if the range of layouts matters more to you than the text inside them.

Choose SwissJobs.app if you are applying to several Swiss adverts in sequence and need a letter each time that picks up that one advert’s requirements. If you want the subject line, the enclosures line, the permit status and the CEFR levels already in the right places. And if you need the letter in the language of the advert — in our index a good quarter of adverts are not written in German, and English is far more common in Swiss postings than people arriving here expect.

If you want both, there is an obvious route: have the text written here from the advert, then set it in a Canva template. The content is the part that has to be new for every advert; the layout is the part that is allowed to stay.