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CreateCVOnline

The editor

The CV builder, screen by screen

Most builders sell you a screenshot. This page walks through what is actually on the screen — the split editor, the live page beside it, and every control in between — and is honest about the things the tool does not do.

No card required. 16 templates and 5 PDF downloads a month on the free plan.

A live render of the Modern Professional template with the built-in example CV. This is not an image — it is the same component that produces your PDF.
templates in the editor
56templates in the editor
usable on the free plan
16usable on the free plan
paper sizes: A4 and Letter
2paper sizes: A4 and Letter
between autosaves while typing
1.2sbetween autosaves while typing

The layout

Three panes, no hidden modes

The whole editor is one screen. There is no wizard to complete before you can see your document, and no separate design mode where the preview goes stale.

Left: the section rail

Every section of your CV as a row you can drag. Grab a handle and the order changes in the preview as you drop it — the array position is the render order, so there is no separate “apply” step. Toggle a section off and it disappears from the page without deleting the content behind it.

Middle: the form

One panel per section, with fields for the things that actually belong on a CV: role, company, location, start and end dates, a one-line description and a list of achievement bullets. Long text fields grow as you type instead of scrolling inside a tiny box.

Right: the page

A real A4 or US Letter page, laid out at true page pixels and scaled down with a CSS transform rather than reflowed at a smaller width. That is why the preview is trustworthy: it is not an approximation of the PDF, it is the PDF at a different zoom level.

Features

What the builder does

Each of these is a thing you can verify in the first ten minutes of using it.

A preview that is the document

The preview and the exported PDF are produced by the same React component. There is no second renderer that can disagree with the first, which is the usual reason a downloaded CV looks nothing like the screen.

Autosave while you type

Edits are written roughly once every 1.2 seconds during active typing, and immediately when you leave a field. Close the tab mid-sentence and the sentence is still there.

Drag to reorder anything

Sections, jobs inside a section, and bullets inside a job. A career changer can lift Skills above Experience in about two seconds; a graduate can put Education first without editing a template.

Template switching keeps your text

Your content and your styling are two separate objects. Switching from a serif classic to a two-column tech layout changes only the styling object — no re-typing, no lost bullets, no truncation.

Zoom and page navigation

Zoom the preview to read 7pt type, or zoom out to see where page two begins. Page breaks are visible while you edit, so you find the orphaned heading before a recruiter does.

A4 or US Letter, per document

A4 is 794 × 1123 px at 96 dpi; US Letter is 816 × 1056 px — wider and 67 px shorter. Choose per CV, because the same document on the wrong paper can push your last line onto a second page.

Twelve built-in sections

Profile, experience, education, skills, projects, certifications, languages, awards, volunteering, publications, interests and references. Custom sections beyond those twelve are a paid feature.

Room for a long career

A single document holds up to 40 roles, 20 education entries, 80 skills and 30 projects. The constraint on your CV should be the reader’s attention, not the software.

PDF export in one click

Headless Chromium renders the same markup with the fonts embedded and hands back a file named after you — amina-el-fassi-cv.pdf, not document(3).pdf.

How it works

From empty document to exported PDF

Four steps. The realistic total for a first draft is under an hour, most of which is writing rather than formatting.
  1. 1

    Start a document

    Open a blank CV or load the built-in worked example and edit over it. The example is a complete, realistic CV, which is a far faster starting point than an empty form.

  2. 2

    Fill the left, watch the right

    Work top to bottom: header, experience, education, skills. The page on the right redraws as you type, so you always know how much room is left.

  3. 3

    Try three templates

    Switch layouts with your real content in place. A design that looked elegant with placeholder text often falls apart with a nine-year career in it — and vice versa.

  4. 4

    Export the PDF

    Download the file, open it once to check the page breaks, and send it. The PDF carries embedded fonts, so it renders identically on a recruiter’s machine.

Templates

Every template runs in the same editor

Switching between these does not change a single character of your content. A sample of eight, one from each corner of the library:

Modern Professional

modern · one column

Free

ATS CV

ATS-friendly · one column

Free

Software Engineer

technology · one column

Free

Corporate Executive

corporate · one column

Pro

Traditional CV

classic · one column

Free

UI/UX Designer

creative · two columns

Pro

Modern Clean

modern · one column

Free

Data Scientist

technology · one column

Pro

See all 56 templates or narrow it down to the layouts that parse cleanly in applicant tracking systems.

Limits

What it deliberately does not do

Every one of these is a decision rather than a missing feature, and each has a reason.
  • It will not write your CV for you

    There is no button that invents achievements. The bullets have to come from your own work — the editor makes them fast to write and easy to reorder, and that is the honest limit of what a layout tool can do.

  • There is no .docx export

    Only PDF. A Word file re-flows on a machine with different fonts, which defeats the point of designing the page in the first place. If an employer insists on Word, use their own form or template.

  • There is no import from an old PDF

    Extracting text from a two-column PDF reliably scrambles the reading order. Copying and pasting section by section takes about ten minutes and gives you a chance to cut the dead weight.

  • We do not score your writing

    Templates carry an ATS parse score from 1 to 5, because that is a property of a layout and can be tested. A number claiming your career is “87% optimised” would be invented.

  • You cannot drag a text box anywhere

    Layout is owned by the template. You choose the template, the accent colour, the paper and the section order; the template keeps the typography consistent so the document still looks deliberate at 2 a.m.

Questions about the editor

Specific to how CreateCVOnline works. Pricing questions are answered on the free plan page.

Yes, and not by careful maintenance — by construction. The preview, the template gallery and the PDF all render the same document component. The export step simply runs it through headless Chromium at page size with the fonts embedded, so line breaks, page breaks and spacing are identical.