SwissJobs.app or Zety — which is better for applying in 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.

What Zety costs, in dollars and in francs

Three packages sit on zety.com/pricing. Basic is free and stays free. Pro opens with a 14-day trial for USD 1.95 and then renews automatically at USD 25.95, billed "every 4 weeks". The annual package is USD 71.40 paid in one go, displayed as USD 5.95 a month, renewing yearly.

At the European Central Bank rate of 3 September 2026 that is roughly CHF 1.60 for the trial, roughly CHF 21 per four-week charge, and roughly CHF 58 for the year. Those franc figures are snapshots. They move with the exchange rate without Zety changing anything, which is why anyone budgeting a whole job search in francs should plan against the dollar amounts and leave headroom.

The line that is easiest to miss sits in the feature table rather than in the headline price. The free account lets you write, save and revise as much as you like; the download row for Basic reads "TXT format only". A text file is a CV with no layout, no type sizes, no columns. What you look at while you work is not what you take away for nothing.

What SwissJobs.app costs, and where free stops

CHF 15 a month or CHF 95 a year, seven trial days first, cancel any time. No conversion, no four-week periods, no exchange-rate risk: the amount on the statement is the amount on the page.

In front of that sits a free tier, and it is worth writing down exactly where it ends, because that is the number comparisons usually leave out. The editor opens without an account at all, with a finished Swiss-format document you can start working on. With a free account you get five documents a day and ten per rolling week, plus five AI edit instructions a day and ten a week. Building, previewing and revising are free; paying happens at the moment the file leaves the building.

That is the exact mirror image of Zety. There you may download without paying, but only a text file. Here you get PDF and Word with no watermark, but only once the trial has started. If you need one file tonight and want to spend nothing, this comparison points at Zety — provided the format does not matter to you. If you are applying steadily for weeks, our year costs less than the thirteen four-week charges a Pro year adds up to.

English-language Swiss adverts are the ones that warn you least

Four things belong in a Swiss dossier that an international CV form has no field for: the Pensum (your workload, stated in per cent), the permit or right-to-work line, language ability as a letter level on the European scale rather than as "fluent", and Arbeitszeugnisse — the written reference certificates a Swiss employer issues, sent along with the application. On 4 September 2026 we drew about 120 open adverts at random per advert language, apprenticeships and internships excluded, and looked in the advert text itself for how often any of them is spelled out.

Across all four languages, 21.2 per cent of adverts name at least one; 3.9 per cent name two or more. Split by the language the advert is written in, the spread is wide: French adverts are the most explicit at 37.8 per cent, German ones follow at 26.3, English-language adverts sit at 11.2 and Italian ones at 9.3.

For a reader arriving from outside Switzerland, that last comparison is the one that matters, and it runs against intuition. The adverts most likely to be answered with an international tool are the English ones — and they are close to the quietest about Swiss expectations. Nothing in the posting tells you that a photo is conventional here, that two pages is normal rather than a fault, or that "fluent German" reads as evasive where B2 and C1 are the currency. A generic builder will feel perfectly adequate right up to the point where it is not, and the advert will not be what tells you.

Treat the figure as a floor rather than a rate of expectation. The convention holds whether or not the advert mentions it; almost no posting asks for a photo, and Swiss dossiers carry one anyway.

Zety has nine national editions and none of them is Swiss

This is not a gap Zety is hiding. Its own footer offers English (US), English (UK), English (IN), Deutsch, Español, Français (France), Italiano, Polski and Português (Brasil). There is no Swiss region in any language, and the French entry names its country in brackets.

You can watch the consequence in each edition. zety.de teaches the German application: Deckblatt (a cover sheet), Bewerbungsmappe, Kurzbewerbung, Gehaltsvorstellung. zety.fr explains "les 6 types de CV français". zety.it sends you to the curriculum vitae europeo and the Europass form. Each is correct for its home market. None of them is the Swiss dossier, which has no Deckblatt, does expect a photo, and treats reference certificates as attachments in their own right.

For someone relocating, the practical version of this is short. A Swiss CV runs one to two pages, reverse-chronological, with a photo, a line stating your permit or citizenship if you are not Swiss, language levels written as A1 to C2, and a workload figure where a job is not full time. A US-style one-page resume with a skills bar and no photo is not merely a different taste here — it is missing information the reader expects to find.

Where Zety is the better answer

If the application is leaving Switzerland. zety.de, zety.fr and zety.it are built for Germany, France and Italy, and the US, UK, Indian, Spanish, Polish and Brazilian editions for their own markets. Writing from Zurich to Berlin or Milan, Zety gives you the right convention and we give you the wrong one.

On annual price, if you pick the right route. USD 71.40 once is around CHF 58 against our CHF 95 — Zety is cheaper over a year, and stays cheaper unless the exchange rate moves sharply. What the advertised route does not do is take you there: starting from the 14-day trial lands you in the four-week subscription, not the annual package.

On visual choice. Eighteen to twenty-eight separately designed templates is more visible variety than our 54 variations, because ours are combinations of layout, typeface and accent colour applied to one Swiss format rather than 28 distinct designs. If a particular look is what you are shopping for, Zety is more likely to have it. Add a very large library of written guides and a checker that claims to find over thirty classes of problem.

Signing up from abroad

A practical point that decides more than price for people who have not moved yet: neither tool asks for anything Swiss at signup. Ours needs an email address and no card to create a free account, and no AHV number (the Swiss social security number) or Swiss residential address — which several Swiss services do require and which is the usual reason a tool turns out to be unusable before arrival.

What you cannot do from abroad, with either tool, is register with an RAV. Unemployment benefit and the job-search-effort obligations attached to it begin with residence and registration in a canton; a CV builder has no part in that, and neither of these two claims otherwise.

Who should pick which

You are applying steadily to Swiss adverts and want a separate dossier per job: SwissJobs.app. The tailoring against the advert text, the Swiss-specific fields and the proof-of-efforts form are together the reason we recommend ourselves here, and each of those three is separately checkable.

You are applying to Germany, France, Italy or the US: Zety, in the national edition of the target country — and take the annual package rather than the four-week subscription.

You need one file today and want to spend nothing: Zety’s free account, if a text file is acceptable to you. If it is not, a free Swiss builder is the better route, and we have listed those prices separately.

One sentence on the RAV form, because it matters: ours fills the official SECO sheet from your tracked applications. Your job-search efforts only count once they are submitted the way your own RAV requires. We produce the filled-in paper, not the recognition of it.