SwissJobs.app or LiveCareer — which CV builder for Switzerland?

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.

Twenty-five country editions, and Switzerland is not one

At the foot of every LiveCareer page there is a region switcher. We read it off the German, French and Italian home pages on 4 September 2026 and it holds the same twenty-five entries each time: Germany, Brazil, Czechia, Denmark, Spain, Finland, France, Greece, Hungary, Indonesia, Italy, Japan, Korea, Mexico, the Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Saudi Arabia, Sweden, Slovakia, Türkiye, the United Kingdom and the United States. No Switzerland. No Austria either.

The domain livecareer.ch is registered — it has name servers and a mail record — but it carries no web address at all, and www.livecareer.ch does not resolve. So there is a reserved Swiss name with no site behind it. The company behind the sites is Bold LLC of Guaynabo, Puerto Rico, together with Auxiliant S.à.r.l. of Strassen, Luxembourg.

For an English-speaking reader that has a practical consequence. Arrive in Switzerland, search in English, and LiveCareer will serve you the US or UK edition, both of which are written for a market where the CV is a one-page resume, references are supplied on request and no permit line exists. The Swiss material they do have is in three other languages.

What their Swiss pages say, in the languages that have one

It is worth being precise about the quality of those three pages, because they are not equally good. Their German one — one address out of the 366 in the German sitemap — mentions Switzerland fifty-five times and the words Arbeitszeugnis, Bewilligung, Pensum and Bewerbungsfoto not once; it recommends formatting to the German DIN standard for typing and layout rules, and its sample CV carries a German address, a +49 phone number and a Berlin degree. It also advises listing references directly in the CV, which is the opposite of what arbeit.swiss, the federal employment service, states: "the CV usually notes that references will be supplied on request".

Their French page is better and openly aimed at the frontalier — the cross-border commuter — telling readers to name their Permis G eligibility and their nationality, treating the photo as optional but strongly advised, and to state languages from A1 to C2. Their Italian page is better still, with a sample built around a nurse in Lugano and a section calling the Arbeitszeugnisse fundamental.

None of that reaches an English-speaking applicant, which is the point of this section rather than a complaint about their writing. If you read German, French or Italian well enough, their guides are free to read and worth twenty minutes. If English is what you have, LiveCareer offers you Swiss guidance in no language at all.

What is free, what the plan costs, and whose law is on the contract

LiveCareer's terms of service describe the free tier exactly: free is "using our CV builder, which includes using our proprietary content and downloading a .txt version of your CV". A plain text file is free; the formatted document is not. The German edition's own FAQ puts it in one line — you need a paid subscription at the download step.

Pricing is published on the English editions only. The US page lists USD 2.95 for fourteen days' access, auto-renewing at USD 23.95 "billed every four weeks", or USD 71.40 paid up front for a year; the UK page GBP 1.95, then GBP 19.85 every four weeks, or GBP 83.40 a year. Every four weeks is not the same as monthly: it is thirteen charges a year rather than twelve, so USD 23.95 comes to USD 311.35 over a year, not USD 287.40. The German, French and Italian editions carry no pricing page in their sitemaps at all — the number appears at checkout.

Clause 23 of the terms sets the governing law as that of the payment processor: New York State for Bold LLC, Luxembourg for Auxiliant. The following sentence preserves the mandatory consumer protections of the EU country where the consumer lives, and says that "in other cases" New York law applies. Switzerland is not in the EU and therefore falls into that second sentence. The fourteen-day right of withdrawal in clause 10 is not limited to the EU. We are describing what the contract says, not advising on it; a consumer advice office is the place for your own case. Our equivalent sentence is short: CHF, a Swiss provider, cancel any month.

Why one template per occupation is too coarse — measured on our own adverts

LiveCareer organises its material by occupation: a CV for a doctor, for a manager, for an office administrator, for a project manager. Behind that sits the assumption that two jobs with the same title want broadly the same things. Our own index can test it.

From the live adverts of 3 September 2026 we took ten job titles each advertised by at least four different employers — Software Engineer, Project Manager, HR Business Partner, Sales Manager, Chef de partie, and six others across health, trades and hospitality — and read the full text of 68 of those adverts. For every pair inside the same title group and the same advert language we measured how much of their vocabulary overlaps.

The result: 143 pairs, mean overlap 6.7 per cent. The control — randomly drawn adverts in the same language with different titles, 371 pairs — sits at 3.6 per cent. Sharing a job title not quite doubles the overlap and still leaves more than ninety per cent of the wording different. Of the terms that appear anywhere in a title group, on average 80.3 per cent appear in only one of the adverts.

That remainder is precisely what an occupation template cannot carry, and it is what gets quoted back at you in the interview. A template decides what a CV looks like. It does not decide what it says. Pre-written phrase libraries — LiveCareer advertises more than a hundred thousand of them in its German builder — answer the blank page, not a specific posting.

What SwissJobs.app does, read off the code rather than recalled

The flow: you paste a Swiss advert, or open the generator straight from one of the twenty thousand-plus live Swiss postings we hold, in which case the advert text is already there. A draft is written from that text in about a minute. Every line can then be edited by hand, and a prompt box takes instructions that rewrite the document in seconds. The motivation letter works the same way. Trying it needs no account: the bootstrap call answers anonymously with a draft.

The design figure was re-counted in the code on 4 September 2026 rather than repeated from an older page: 2 layouts (classic, filled sidebar) x 3 fonts (Inter, serif, grotesk) x 9 accent colours, which is 54 design variations of one Swiss format. That is deliberately a different kind of number from a template gallery. LiveCareer offers designed layouts; we offer variations on a format that follows Swiss conventions. If visual range is what you are after, theirs is wider.

Output is PDF and Word, with no watermark on either. Both export paths are gated on the same access check in the code: viewing and editing are free, downloading needs a running trial or a subscription — seven days of full access before the first charge, then CHF 15 a month or CHF 95 a year. And /arbeitsbemuehungen fills the official job-search-efforts form from the applications you have tracked, which is a Swiss-only feature with no equivalent in an international builder.

When LiveCareer is the better choice

When your applications cross borders. LiveCareer has real editions for Germany, France, Italy, the Netherlands and twenty more countries, each with its own advice pages and templates. We have exactly one country. If you are applying in Basel and Lörrach in the same week, we do the Swiss half well and the German half not at all.

When you want design. Their UK pricing page promises "50+ unique templates" even on the free tier, and the German edition shows more than thirty designed layouts across four styles — more visual choice than our 54 variations of a single format, whichever count you take. The number does move around their own site: "20+" in the German FAQ, "over thirty" in the headline, 30 in one of the builder's loading messages and 32 in another. For design, advertising and media, where the document is itself a work sample, that range can decide it.

And when you just want to read. LiveCareer's advice library is free, long and signed by named authors, and their French and Italian Swiss pages in particular are more careful than most free guides. Reading how a Swiss dossier is put together costs nothing at either of us.

The case where we are the better answer is narrower and clear: you are applying to Swiss adverts, you want a separate version per advert rather than one template per occupation, and you want the permit line, the CEFR levels and the photo already handled without adding them yourself.