SwissJobs.app or careerkit.me — which CV tool for a Swiss application?

Feature comparison

Everything about careerkit.me was read from the vendor's own page on 4 September 2026; our rows come from the code (lib/stripe/trialConfig.ts) and from walking the live flow. "not stated" means it could not be read on their site — not "does not exist".

Pricing side by side

Everything about careerkit.me was read from the vendor's own page on 4 September 2026; our rows come from the code (lib/stripe/trialConfig.ts) and from walking the live flow. "not stated" means it could not be read on their site — not "does not exist".

What careerkit costs depends on which of their pages you read

We opened the pricing page first, from Switzerland, on 4 September 2026. Free is CHF 0 "forever", listing ATS-compliant templates, three PDF exports, a live ATS score, a job tracker and one cover letter plus a career-link page. Pro shows CHF 2.95 "/ first 7 days" with "then CHF 19.95/month" underneath. Lifetime is CHF 129 once, with a 7-day money-back guarantee.

Then their FAQ page, same vendor, same day. On the free plan it says: the full resume editor, "three templates, and one export per month" — not three exports. On what Pro costs it says "$12 / month" or "$96 / year" — not CHF 19.95. The home page price card, meanwhile, prints "$2.95 / month", which is the trial figure carrying the monthly label. Three pages, three answers to the same question.

The practical consequence does not depend on which figure is the right one. It is that the number you are shown is not reliably the number you will be charged, so read the checkout screen rather than the marketing card. The currency compounds this: the price appears in francs because you are in Switzerland, but the billing FAQ on that same pricing page names "USD, EUR, GBP, CAD, and AUD" as the accepted currencies, and the franc is not in that list. If the charge lands in dollars, your Swiss card issuer adds a foreign-currency fee on top. Our own price is in francs, in one place: 7 days free, then CHF 15 a month or CHF 95 a year.

Two Swiss job indexes, side by side

This is the comparison that exists nowhere else, because it needs both halves. careerkit publishes the composition of its Swiss index on one page — by canton, city, field, industry and employer. We measured ours on 3 September 2026: open adverts, apprenticeships and internships excluded, canton resolved from the location text, which succeeds for 80.4 per cent of them.

Their index is bigger — by their own count about three and a half times ours, and we will not pretend otherwise. But it covers a different Switzerland. Of their canton-listed roles, 10.5 per cent are in the six French-speaking cantons and 0.6 per cent in Ticino. In ours it is 24.7 and 1.9 per cent. Geneva alone is 2.3 per cent of theirs and 9.2 per cent of ours. Their strongest cantons relative to ours are St. Gallen, Aargau and Basel-Landschaft.

They explain the mechanism themselves: their listings come "straight from company career pages". That favours large employers who run their own careers platform, and in Switzerland those cluster in the German-speaking cantons. One arithmetic detail worth knowing before you browse: the 26 canton figures on their own overview add up to about fourteen per cent less than the headline total on the same page, so roughly one listing in seven cannot be reached through the canton lists.

What careerkit does that we do not

Four things, named plainly. The lifetime licence at CHF 129 is the clearest: pay once, never again. If you expect to be applying on and off for years, or you simply refuse subscriptions, that beats our annual price and we have no answer to it. The career page at careerkit.me under your own name is the second: a link that always shows the current version, rather than a file that is out of date the moment you send it. We make files.

Third, AI headshots. A photo is conventional in a Swiss dossier — unlike in Germany, where applicants are generally advised against one — so an applicant arriving from abroad often needs a portrait they do not have, and a studio inside the software genuinely solves that. Fourth, their Arbeitszeugnis decoder and their monthly Swiss job-market report: content built for this region that international builders simply do not carry.

One more thing to their credit. Their Swiss template page describes the local form correctly — a photo, one to two pages, room for references. That is not a US resume with a Swiss label on it. Build a CV there for a job in Zurich and you will not get a wrong-shaped document.

The CV is one item in the folder, not the folder itself

A Swiss application is a folder, not a single sheet. Alongside the CV it normally carries Arbeitszeugnisse — the reference letters a Swiss employer hands over at the end of every engagement, and which the next one reads in full — plus diplomas, and, if you are not Swiss, the line stating which permit you hold. Two pages is normal here rather than the single page that American advice insists on, and a photo is expected rather than discouraged.

This is where the gap between the two tools sits, and it is narrower than a marketing page would claim. careerkit gets the CV right and even ships a tool for reading an Arbeitszeugnis. What it has no vocabulary for is the administrative side: permits, workload stated as a Pensum in per cent, tax at source, and the RAV — the regional employment offices you register with when you are out of work, which require a monthly record of your job-search efforts. Those words appear nowhere on the ten pages we read.

At our end the permit sits in the profile and travels into the document, workload is stated the way Swiss adverts state it, and /arbeitsbemuehungen fills the federal job-search-efforts sheet from the applications you have tracked. That last one carries a warning we would rather over-state than under-state: the record that counts legally is still the one you keep in Job-Room or on your canton’s own form. We hand you the completed sheet; acceptance is your RAV’s call.

Reading this from outside Switzerland

Both tools work from abroad — neither asks for an AHV social-security number or a Swiss address to sign up, which some Swiss services do. So the question is not access but coverage, and coverage is where they differ for you. If you are targeting Zurich, Bern, Aargau or St. Gallen and applying to large employers, careerkit’s index will show you more, and each listing sends you straight to the employer’s own posting, which is where you want to apply from anyway.

If you are aiming at Geneva, Lausanne, Fribourg or Lugano, the arithmetic reverses: their French-speaking share is 10.5 per cent against our 24.7, and their Ticino share is 0.6 per cent. Language decides more here than distance does. A posting written in French is, in practice, a posting for someone who works in French, and no amount of CV polish substitutes for that.

One habit worth unlearning: the document is called a CV, not a resume, and length is not a virtue in reverse. Two pages, a photo, your permit status, and language levels stated the way the advert states them. If the advert asks for "very good German", write that rather than a letter grade; if it asks for B2, write B2. Both tools will let you do either — only one of them will hand you the advert text to check against without leaving the page.

Who should pick which

Pick careerkit.me if you are searching German-speaking Switzerland at large employers, if you want a one-off payment instead of a subscription, if you need a photograph and do not have one, or if a permanent link to your profile is worth more to you than a file. For a software engineer in Zurich sending a handful of applications to corporates and then never touching the tool again, the lifetime licence is simply the better deal.

Pick SwissJobs.app if you apply in French or Italian, if you are searching the French-speaking cantons or Ticino, if you are registered with a RAV, or if you want one tailored version per advert without copying text between two sites. And if you want to know what something costs before you pay: our price is in francs, in one place.

Using both is allowed and cheaper than it sounds, because both let you start without an account. Build the same CV in each, look at the two PDFs side by side, and decide from the documents rather than from either company’s claims. That costs half an hour and nothing else.