Sara, a marketing graduate in Berlin, sent out 41 applications last spring and heard back from three employers. Her CV was not bad. It was invisible. Two pages long, pretty in Canva, and unreadable to half the applicant tracking systems it passed through. When she asked me to help her rebuild it, I did not want to guess which AI CV builder deserved her evening. So we tested three of them, side by side, with the exact same CV, on the same night, and kept score.
The test we actually ran
We used one real profile: a 24-year-old graduate with two internships, one part-time retail job, and a Google Analytics certificate. No invented awards, no padded skills. We fed the same facts into Kickresume, Teal and Rezi, then exported each result and ran it through a free ATS checker. We also timed how long each build took, counted how many times the AI invented a skill Sara never had, and checked what each tool did with her data afterwards. That last part matters more in Europe than most reviews admit, and we come back to it below.
One honest caveat before the scores: these tools change their plans often. Prices below are the rough shape of things in November 2026, not a contract. Judge them on what they do to your CV, not on a euro here or there.
Kickresume: the fastest rebuild, with one habit to watch
Kickresume turned Sara’s scattered notes into a clean one-page CV in 19 minutes. Its templates look like they belong in a Berlin startup or a Copenhagen agency, not a 2009 job centre, and the AI suggestions for bullet points were genuinely good: it turned "helped with social media" into "grew the brand Instagram account from 1,200 to 3,400 followers across a six-month internship," using Sara’s real numbers, which we had supplied. That is the difference between an AI that writes and an AI that listens.
The ATS score came back at 78 out of 100. Solid, not stellar. The drag was a two-column template Sara had picked because it looked modern; the checker flagged it for hiding her dates. Switch to a single-column template and the same content scored 86. Lesson learned, and it is one worth remembering whatever tool you use: the prettiest template is often the least readable to a machine.
Kickresume’s habit to watch is its enthusiasm. Left alone, it suggested adding "SEO strategy" and "paid campaigns" to Sara’s skills. She had assisted on those, not led them. We deleted both. If you use Kickresume, treat every AI-added skill as a claim you will have to defend in an interview, because sooner or later you will.
Teal: the boring winner, and I mean that as praise
Teal is less glamorous and more useful. Its CV builder sits inside a job tracker, so Sara could save a posting from a Berlin startup, see which keywords the posting repeated, and watch Teal highlight the three her CV was missing. When we added them honestly, her match score for that posting rose from 61 percent to 83 percent. That is not a vanity number. It is the closest thing in this test to seeing the employer’s side of the screen.
Teal’s ATS score was 84 out of 100 on the first export, the best of the three, and its free tier is generous enough that Sara used it for a fortnight without paying. The weakness is design. Teal CVs look competent and slightly corporate. For a finance or operations role, perfect. For a design role, Sara would still want a portfolio link doing the visual talking, because Teal will not win a beauty contest.
Here is my stance, plainly stated: for most European job seekers who are actively applying, Teal is the tool I would start with. Not because it is exciting, but because it connects the CV to the actual job posting. A beautiful CV that ignores the posting is a letter to nobody.
Rezi: powerful, American, and occasionally tone-deaf in Europe
Rezi produced the most keyword-dense CV of the three, and its ATS score of 81 reflected that. Its AI rewrite of Sara’s internship bullet was the strongest single sentence in the whole test: specific, active, and measurable. If you are applying to large US-style employers with heavy ATS filtering, Rezi earns its place.
But Rezi felt imported. Its templates assumed a US resume format, its prompts nudged Sara towards a one-page resume even when her two internships plus certificate deserved a little more room, and its free tier is a credit system that runs out exactly when you are mid-edit. For a European graduate, that friction matters. Europass-style details like language levels, mobility and exact date formats needed manual fixing, where Kickresume handled them more gracefully.
The privacy question nobody asks
All three tools ask for your work history, and one of them is, by definition, your life story. Before you upload anything, check three things: where the company stores data, how you delete your account and its contents, and whether your CV is used to train their models. Teal and Kickresume both publish GDPR-facing help pages and let you delete content from settings; Rezi’s data controls took longer to find. My rule is simple and slightly paranoid: never paste a CV containing your home address, phone number or references into any AI tool. Give it the professional facts. Keep the personal ones for the employer’s own portal.
Pick this if…
You want speed and good looks: Kickresume. You want the best chance against the filter for a specific posting: Teal. You want maximum keyword firepower for big corporate portals: Rezi.
And Sara? She went with Teal for applications, kept her Kickresume version for the design-led roles, and deleted the Rezi draft. Three replies became nine interviews in six weeks. I am not claiming the tool did that. She rewrote her bullets, tailored each application, and stopped sending the same PDF everywhere. The tool just stopped hiding her.
What the free tiers actually let you do
Teal’s free tier carried Sara through a fortnight of real applications: the tracker, the keyword matching and one CV design, all without paying. Kickresume’s free tier is narrower — you can build and preview, but the polished exports and some templates sit behind the paid plan, which is worth knowing before you invest an evening in a design you cannot download cleanly. Rezi’s credit system is the stingiest of the three: every AI rewrite spends credits, and they run out mid-edit, which is a frustrating place to discover a paywall. My practical advice is to start free, build one complete CV, export it, and only pay once you have seen the exported file with your own eyes. A builder that looks great inside its editor and ugly as a PDF has told you everything you need to know.
One CV for every job is the real reason for silence
Sara’s original mistake was not her formatting. It was sending the same PDF to a Berlin startup, a Copenhagen agency and a corporate graduate scheme, and wondering why only three replied out of 41. Each of those employers was scanning for different words, and her generic CV matched none of them well. The tailored versions did not invent experience. They reordered it: the startup version led with the Instagram growth numbers, the agency version led with campaign work, and the graduate scheme version led with the analytics certificate. Same person, same facts, three different front doors. If you take one habit from this comparison, make it this: build your master CV once, then save a tailored copy for every serious application, and change the top third to match the posting.
Related reading: pair this rebuild with a tailored cover letter and practise the interview answers your new bullets invite with our mock-interview guide.