Teal vs Apiva: a tidier job search, or the applying done for you? (2026)

We make Apiva. Read this knowing that.

Everything here about Teal comes from their own pricing page and site, checked August 2026. Their prices are on a public page, which is more than most of this category does, so go and read it before you spend money on either of us.

The 10-second version

Teal: a résumé builder and a job tracker. The free tier is genuinely free and genuinely good. Teal+ is $13 every 7 days, $29 every 30, or $79 every 90. No plan applies to anything. You do that part.

Apiva: we get the job applied to, and confirmed. Software does it where software can, a person finishes it where it can't, and the credit is only spent once the submission is confirmed. Free tier of 25 a month, paid from $19.

Want your search organised, your résumés tailored, and you're happy doing the applying? Them.

Want the applying to stop being your job? Us.

These are not the same purchase, and the rest of this post is mostly about why.

What Teal actually is

Two products that work well together.

The first is a résumé builder. Unlimited résumé versions, even on the free plan, so you can keep one per role type. Keyword matching against a job description, a match score, an analysis pass that tells you what's weak. Free gets you the top 5 keywords and a basic analysis. Teal+ unlocks all of it plus unlimited AI bullets, summaries and cover letters.

The second is a tracker. Bookmark a job, set a status, take notes, log where each application stands. Unlimited, free, forever. Plus a networking CRM and an interview tracker on top.

It is the best free thing in this category and I'd rather say that plainly than dance around it. Almost 4 million people have used it. If your search is 8 or 10 carefully chosen applications a week and your actual problem is that you've lost track of which recruiter you emailed on Tuesday, Teal solves your problem and it charges you nothing to do it.

The line Teal doesn't cross

Teal has an autofill extension. It reads the form, drops your details in, saves you the retyping.

Then you click submit.

You also answer the screening questions it didn't fill. You handle page two, and page three. You retype your work history into the portal that demands it even though your résumé is attached. You decide what to put in the box that asks about salary. You do that again on the next one, and the one after.

That's the honest shape of it. Autofill is a typing shortcut. It's a good one. It is not the same thing as the application being done.

So the tracker is filling in a form about work you did by hand. Which brings up the part that matters more than any feature row.

What your tracker actually knows

A Teal tracker row says applied because you told it you applied.

Most of the time you're right. Sometimes you're not, and those are the ones that cost you. A form throws a validation error under the submit button and you'd already switched tabs. A multi-step application dies on page two. A required question gets left blank and the portal takes the page but not the submission. You marked it applied. It says applied. Nothing landed.

You'd find out by logging into that employer's own portal and looking. Nobody does that for 200 applications.

An Apiva row is written by the thing that did the applying, and it carries a saved confirmation from the moment it went through, usually a screenshot of the success page and sometimes the employer's own receipt email. The credit is only spent at that point. Employer replies come into an inbox in the same place, so the tracker keeps itself current instead of waiting for you to remember.

That's the actual difference between the two products. Not features. One records what you say happened. The other records what it did.

Side by side

The money

Teal's entry tier bills weekly, not monthly, which is unusual. It offers a normal monthly and quarterly too. Worth understanding before you buy:

Their own FAQ is straight about how that renews: cancelling takes effect at the end of the current billing period, and "Teal cannot be held responsible for recurring subscriptions if a member fails to cancel their account." On a 7-day cycle that's 52 chances a year to forget. Their free tier needs no card at all, so the risk only starts when you upgrade.

Apiva's free tier is 25 confirmed applications a month, no card. Paid is $19 a month for up to 200 confirmed, $39 for 600, $99 for 1,500. Quarterly prices of $49, $79 and $239 are published and committed. Quarterly billing is coming.

Now, the comparison everyone reaches for is $29 a month against our $19, and I don't think it tells you much. Theirs buys unlimited AI writing and a design mode. Ours buys 200 applications actually submitted with a receipt for each. Same rough sticker, completely different thing in the bag. Divide ours out and it's around 10 cents per confirmed submission, and confirmed is carrying that whole sentence.

The comparison that does mean something: Teal costs you $0 to keep. If the tracker is doing something for you, keep it. It doesn't stop being useful because you also stopped filling in forms by hand.

Where Teal wins

The free tier. Unlimited résumés and unlimited tracking for nothing, permanently. We don't have an answer to that and we're not going to pretend we do.

The résumé builder as a builder. Design mode, templates, keyword scoring, a real editor. Ours rewrites your résumé for a specific role and shows you what changed before it goes anywhere. That's a different job. If you want to sit and craft the thing, theirs is better.

Networking. The CRM and interview tracker have no equivalent here. If your search runs on warm intros, that's most of your search and we don't touch it.

Low commitment. $13 for a week is a real option if you have one big application to get right. We don't sell a week.

Where Apiva wins

Something applies. This is the whole post. No Teal plan at any price submits an application.

Proof, not a checkbox. A saved confirmation per submission, versus a status you set yourself.

You pay for outcomes. The credit is spent when the submission is confirmed. An application that died on a validation error costs you nothing, so there's no refund to go chasing.

Volume without the hours. 200 applications a month is a full-time job when you're the one clicking. It's the $19 tier here.

A person, when it matters. When a form asks something guessing would get wrong, a human finishes it. Still one credit.

Which one should you pick

Teal if you apply to 5 to 15 jobs a week, the applications are ones you want to sit with, your search runs on networking, or you just want a free tracker and nothing else. Also Teal if you'd rather write your own résumé from a good editor than review one that was rewritten for you.

Apiva if the bottleneck is that there are 200 jobs you'd apply to and you have the evenings to do 20. Or if you've ever wondered whether an application you sent last month actually arrived, and had no way to check.

Both if you like the tracker and want the applying done. They don't conflict. Teal's free tier costs nothing to keep running alongside.

Bottom line

Teal is very good at what it does, which is making your job search tidier and your résumés better. It's free to find that out. If organising is the thing standing between you and interviews, start there and don't spend anything.

If the thing standing between you and interviews is that applying takes 20 minutes a form and you have a day job, no amount of organising fixes it. That's the gap we built for. Software applies, a person finishes what it can't, and nothing counts as done until there's a confirmation saved against it. Free tier is 25 applications a month, no card.

Whichever you use, go and check a few in the employer's own portal. Ten minutes, and it's the only way to know what your tracker is worth.

Checked August 2026. Spot something outdated or wrong about either service? Tell us and we'll fix it.

Teal and its logo are trademarks of Teal Labs, Inc, shown here to identify the product under comparison. We aren't affiliated with them and they haven't endorsed this.