Which CV builder knows Swiss conventions — photo, permit, language levels?

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.

If you are arriving from outside Switzerland, the photo rule is inverted

Most English-language CV advice is written for the US and UK markets, where a photo invites a discrimination complaint and is left off. Swiss practice runs the other way, and the official source says so without hedging: the English edition of the arbeit.swiss application tips lists CV contents as "personal details, including photograph", then professional experience, education and training, language skills, special knowledge, interests and references, with a limit of three pages.

The hedge exists only in the German edition, which says "gegebenenfalls mit Bewerbungsfoto" — where applicable. The French edition asks for a photo "vous mettant en valeur", one that shows you at your best, and the Italian edition specifies a format. So the same federal page, read in four languages, produces four strengths of the same convention. If you have been reading American guidance, the English edition of the Swiss source is the one that contradicts it most directly.

The practical consequence for a builder is small but real: a template designed for a US resume has nowhere to put the picture, and dropping one into it pushes the layout around. A tool built for Switzerland reserves the space.

The permit line is the row that actually separates the tools

Work in Switzerland is tied to a residence permit issued by the cantonal migration office, and the State Secretariat for Migration sets out how the EU/EFTA and third-country routes differ. On a CV that is one line among your personal details — nationality plus the permit you hold, or the fact that you are still applying for one. It is not legal advice and it is not a long explanation.

Our own blank scaffold reserves that slot twice: in the header line, next to city and website, and again in the sidebar block for availability. cvswiss.ch has no field for it, but it has the best writing on it: a dedicated guide naming the C, B, L, G and Ci categories with phrasings you can copy, including the case where the application is still in progress. Between a field and a good guide, either gets you a correct line.

The other three leave it out. Bewerbung.ch answers the question sideways with "Nationalität: Schweiz" in its sample — fine for a Swiss national, silent for everybody else. lebenslaufapp.ch never mentions it on its Switzerland page. And Europass structurally cannot: the EU template was built for a single labour market in which the question does not arise in this form. That is why the permit line, not the photo, is the reliable test of whether a builder was designed for this country.

Language levels: the advert asks in words, the CV should answer in letters

The A1-to-C2 ladder comes from the Common European Framework, and Europass publishes the full self-assessment grid: six levels across five skills, each described in a sentence, in every one of its language editions. As a reference it beats every commercial tool here — it is free and it is the source the others quote.

Swiss employers, however, mostly do not write in letters. They write "sehr gute Deutschkenntnisse", "verhandlungssicher", "français courant". Only 2.2 per cent of open adverts print a CEFR letter at all, and where one appears it is almost always the same two: about half of those adverts name C1 and slightly over four in ten name B2. So the level to answer with is usually B2 or C1, and the CV is where the vague requirement gets turned into something checkable.

What the tools do with that differs. cvswiss.ch shows letters in its own sample, the cleanest implementation of the five. Our blank scaffold ships the three language rows as words — Native, Fluent, Basic — and leaves the letter to you, while the blank template prompts for it explicitly in all four languages and a CV generated against an advert takes the level the advert asked for. Bewerbung.ch shows "Muttersprache" and "verhandlungssicher" in its own sample: not wrong, just not comparable against a requirement list.

What we could verify about our own tool, and what the account costs

Our own row was checked on 4 September 2026 rather than recalled. The editor opens without an account: the blank document came back anonymously, with the photo placeholder, the permit slot in the header and three language rows. Saving and downloading are what need an account — both of the calls behind those actions refused an anonymous request. The account is free and takes an email, not a card.

After that the ladder is the one in the code: the free account allows five documents a day and ten across a rolling week, the trial runs seven days, and after it CHF 15 a month or CHF 95 a year, cancellable monthly. Design: 54 variations, counted as 2 layouts x 3 fonts x 9 accent colours — not 54 drawn templates but freely mixed variants of one Swiss format. Export as PDF and as Word, neither watermarked. The job-search-efforts sheet is filled from your tracked applications into the official federal form; cvswiss.ch exports that form too, on its subscription.

The sharpest difference between these tools is not the photo. It is where the content comes from: we read an advert from our own listings and rewrite the sections against it, cvswiss.ch does the same but asks you to paste the posting in, and Bewerbung.ch, lebenslaufapp.ch and Europass start from a form rather than from a job.

Working in Switzerland without German

Two of the five builders here have a German-only interface. If you are applying from abroad or working in English in Zurich, Geneva or Zug, that alone decides it: Bewerbung.ch and lebenslaufapp.ch are usable only if you can operate them in German. cvswiss.ch runs in English and writes output in four languages. Europass covers 31. We cover four, each with its own pages, and the document is generated in the language of the interface you are using.

That matters more than it sounds, because the language of the advert decides who can apply. English-language adverts are the strictest of all four about naming a language requirement — 92.6 per cent do — and they are the least likely to express it as a letter, at 1.20 per cent. An advert written in English is not an advert that ignores languages; it is one that will describe the requirement in prose and expect you to translate it into a level yourself.

Who should pick which

Pick Europass if you want to spend nothing, or if your level has to be documented for a recognition procedure — the scale comes from there and nobody else offers 31 language editions. For a Swiss application you will then have to add the permit line by hand.

Pick cvswiss.ch if you need exactly one document and CHF 5 is the right price for it, or if their permit guide helps you more than a field would. Expect an English interface, and note that the one-off version cannot be edited after the download.

Pick Bewerbung.ch if subscriptions annoy you: CHF 20 for a month, CHF 50 for three, no auto-renewal, data on Swiss servers, plus a school edition for careers lessons. Pick lebenslaufapp.ch if designed templates matter more to you than Swiss detail. Both assume you work in German.

Pick SwissJobs.app if you are applying to Swiss adverts continuously and want the photo, the permit line and the level already in the scaffold instead of on your checklist — in the language the advert is written in, with an unwatermarked Word file and the job-search-efforts form alongside. For one application a year the advantage is small. By the twentieth it is the whole difference.