CareerCaddy vs Teal
Teal's free tracking tier is honestly excellent. The catch shows up if you ever need what's behind Teal+, priced by the week, with no annual option in sight.
Credit where it's due: Teal's free plan doesn't cap your job tracking, and that puts it ahead of most competitors on this alone. The real difference between CareerCaddy and Teal isn't about who tracks more for free. It's about what happens the moment you want anything past the basics, and whether your job search data needs an account at all.
The real difference
CareerCaddy started from one frustrating recruiter call, about a job someone had genuinely forgotten they'd applied to. The fix was simple: something running quietly in the background, auto-logging every application, flagging repeats, and keeping it all local to that person's own browser, with no account required to use it, ever.
Teal is a more ambitious product, a resume builder, job tracker, and AI writing tool bundled together, and its free tier is genuinely one of the more generous ones in this category for tracking alone. Where it gets expensive is Teal+, listed at $13/week, $29/month, or $79/quarter, with no annual plan. Run that weekly rate for a year and you're well past $600, for AI resume features layered on top of tracking you may already have working for free. CareerCaddy skips that tier structure entirely: one flat $15/year for unlimited tracking, and it doesn't try to also be your resume tool.
| Feature | CareerCaddy | Teal |
|---|---|---|
| Account required | No | Yes |
| Where your data lives | Locally, in your browser | Teal's cloud servers |
| Free plan | 10 tracked applications | Unlimited tracking (free tier) |
| Full access price | $15/year, flat | $13/week, $29/month, or $79/quarter |
| Annual billing option | Yes | No |
| Duplicate-application alerts | Yes | Not a dedicated feature |
| Resume builder / AI tailoring | Not included | Yes, on free, expanded on Teal+ |
| Application autofill | Not included | Not included |
| Data export | CSV / JSON (Unlimited plan) | Resume PDF export |
| Refund policy | 30-day money-back guarantee | Not documented |
| Setup | Install, no signup | Create account, onboard |
What Teal does well
Teal's free tier is legitimately strong: unlimited job tracking, unlimited resume versions, and a well-rated Chrome extension for clipping postings, all without paying anything. If you want a resume builder and AI writing help bundled with your tracker, and you're comfortable with an account and a recurring charge for the upgraded tier, Teal is a solid, well-reviewed choice. CareerCaddy isn't trying to replace the resume-builder side of Teal. It's for people who just want the tracking part, privately, without a subscription attached.
Frequently asked
questions
You might not need to. CareerCaddy's free plan (10 applications) is fine for a short search. The reason to choose CareerCaddy over Teal isn't tracking limits, it's what you're trading for that tracking: an account, your data on Teal's servers, and a product that's really built around its resume tools. If you want tracking without any of that, and don't want a subscription even if you ever do need to pay, CareerCaddy is the smaller, private option.
Teal's free plan costs nothing, so for pure tracking, Teal can be cheaper if you never touch Teal+. But Teal+ has no annual option, only weekly, monthly, or quarterly billing, so if you ever want its AI features, sustained use runs into the hundreds per year. CareerCaddy's paid tier is a flat $15/year with no other pricing tiers.
No. CareerCaddy is intentionally scoped to tracking: auto-detecting applications, flagging duplicates, and managing status. It doesn't build or tailor resumes.
Yes, though there's overlap. Some job seekers use Teal for the resume builder and CareerCaddy as a private, local backup log of every application, since the two don't sync with each other automatically.
Because everything is stored locally in your browser via Chrome's storage API. There's no server-side account to manage; even on the paid plan, you just enter a license key.
On the Unlimited plan, you can export your full history as CSV or JSON any time, a simple way to keep a backup outside the browser without needing a cloud account.