We Compared Every CV Formatting Tool. Here Are the Prices They'd Rather You Calculated Yourself

The number nobody puts on a slide: cost per CV

Agency CV tools are priced to make comparison difficult. Some quote per month against an annual candidate allowance. Some quote per CV. Some quote nothing at all. Divide everything down to one CV and the spread is not subtle.

HireAra publishes tiers of £180, £450 and £950 per month plus VAT, against allowances of 1,500, 5,000 and 12,000 candidates per year. Those are annual allowances against monthly prices, so the arithmetic is worth doing slowly: the £950 Professional tier is 12,000 candidates a year, which is 1,000 a month.

ConnectIQ Scale is £89 a month for 1,000 CVs a month. That is the same monthly volume as HireAra Professional for a tenth of the price — £0.089 per CV against £0.95.

This is not a like-for-unlike comparison hidden behind a footnote. It is the same unit — one candidate CV, converted into your branded template — at both ends.

• HireAra Starter: £180/mo + VAT ÷ 125 CVs/month = £1.44 per CV
• HireAra Scale: £450/mo + VAT ÷ 417 CVs/month = £1.08 per CV
• HireAra Professional: £950/mo + VAT ÷ 1,000 CVs/month = £0.95 per CV
• Candidately AI Resume Builder: $1.00 per exported resume, billed annually
• FormaCV: $0.99 per CV, pay as you go
• CVFormatter Standard: $79/mo ÷ 100 credits = $0.79 per CV
• CVFormatter Enterprise: $299/mo ÷ 500 credits = $0.60 per CV
• RefineCV Pro: $50/mo ÷ 200 CVs = $0.25 per CV
• ConnectIQ Agency: £29/mo ÷ 250 CVs = £0.116 per CV
• ConnectIQ Scale: £89/mo ÷ 1,000 CVs = £0.089 per CV

Two of the biggest names will not let you try the product

HireAra does not offer a free trial, and says so plainly on its pricing page: "We don't offer free trials because we want to be able offer live onboarding sessions, design support and training to all our users coming onto the platform to guarantee that you can get to value, quickly."

That is a defensible position for a high-touch enterprise product. It is also a commitment of £2,160 a year plus VAT at the entry tier before you have seen your own CVs go through the tool.

Allsorter goes further: its pricing page publishes no figure at all. Both tiers, Elite and Enterprise, say "Request Quote" and "Contact us for Custom Plans", with a stated minimum of five or more team members. You cannot find out what it costs without a sales conversation.

Candidately's products are billed annually, and its client portal starts at $99/month with one user included and $49/month for every additional user.

ConnectIQ gives you ten real conversions, free, with no card. Not a watermarked preview and not a text-only download — ten finished PDF or DOCX exports from your own candidates' CVs. If it does not work on the messiest CV on your desk, you have lost nothing.

• HireAra: no free trial, by explicit policy
• Allsorter: no published price, quote-only, minimum five seats
• Candidately: all plans billed annually; portal $99/mo + $49 per extra user
• CVFormatter: free tier of 5 resume credits
• FormaCV: 30-day free trial, no card required
• RefineCV: 10 free CVs, lifetime
• ConnectIQ: 10 free conversions, no card, watermark-free exports

Templates: the line item that quietly scales with your brand

Presentation is the entire point of this category, so it is worth noticing how many products treat templates as a metered resource.

At HireAra, template count is a tier lever: 5 templates on Starter at £180/month, 20 on Scale at £450, 50 on Professional at £950. If your fourth client wants their own layout, the answer is a bigger subscription.

CVFormatter charges a one-time $49 setup fee per custom template, and after the first three updates to a template, $24.99 per update. Changing your logo across your templates is a billable event.

ConnectIQ ships 57 stock templates to every account including the free one, and the custom template builder is self-serve: layout family, fonts, colours, curve style, logo slot and section order, edited in the browser and saved instantly. Scale includes unlimited custom templates. There is no per-template fee and no charge for changing one.

Credit where it is due: RefineCV matches this. Its pricing page states "No setup fee and no per-template fee, ever", offers a self-serve builder, and confirms "Edits and reuse are always free, with no charge per change." On template economics, RefineCV and ConnectIQ are the two honest options in this market.

• HireAra: 5 templates (£180/mo) → 20 (£450/mo) → 50 (£950/mo)
• CVFormatter: $49 setup per custom template; $24.99 per update after the first three
• RefineCV: no setup fee, no per-template fee, self-serve builder
• ConnectIQ: 57 stock templates on every plan including free; unlimited custom on Scale; no fees to create or edit

AI you ration versus AI you dial

Look closely at how AI is sold in this category and a pattern appears: it is metered.

HireAra lists "AI Prompts" as a tier feature — 10 on Starter, 20 on Scale, 40 on Professional. CVFormatter sells Enhance Credits separately, at $14.99 for 50 or $24.99 for 100, on top of the resume credits you already bought.

ConnectIQ takes the opposite position, because the real anxiety about AI on a candidate CV is not how many times you can press the button. It is what the button does to the facts.

The AI intensity control is a slider from 0 to 100 across four bands. At 0 there is no rewrite call at all — formatting only, zero content change, which is the setting compliance teams ask for. Tidy fixes spelling and grammar and nothing else. Polish rewrites phrasing while preserving every fact, name, date and figure. Transform produces a full professional rewrite with achievement-oriented bullets.

Behind all four bands sits a deterministic guard that inspects the model's output and rejects it outright if new dates, numbers or figures have appeared that were not in the source CV. When that happens the CV is returned unchanged and you are told why, rather than being handed a plausible-looking document with an invented statistic in it. We have not found a competitor advertising an equivalent check.

• HireAra: AI prompts rationed by tier (10 / 20 / 40)
• CVFormatter: AI Enhance Credits sold separately from resume credits
• ConnectIQ: continuous 0–100 intensity, four bands, no per-use AI charge
• ConnectIQ: intensity 0 makes no AI rewrite call at all — a genuine format-only mode
• ConnectIQ: deterministic no-fabrication guard rejects any rewrite that introduces new dates, numbers or figures

The question every one of these tools dodges: where did that come from?

A recruiter's real risk is not an ugly CV. It is sending a client a document containing something the candidate never said — a wrong employer, a mangled date, a salary lifted from a page number.

One HireAra reviewer on Trustpilot put the problem exactly: any time saved during parsing is lost again checking for errors and hallucinations. That criticism applies to every parser in this category, ours included. Extraction is probabilistic. The difference is what the product does about it.

In ConnectIQ, every extracted field is linked back to the page it came from. Click a field and the original document appears with that value highlighted — the exact rectangle on the exact page. Verification stops being a matter of reading two documents side by side and becomes one click.

When the parser gets something wrong, you draw a box around the correct text on the original page and assign it to the field. The value is lifted straight from the source document rather than retyped, and the correction is recorded.

We have reviewed the public product and pricing pages of every competitor listed here and have not found this capability advertised anywhere. If a competitor does offer it, we will correct this section.

• Per-field highlighting on the original page, for PDF sources
• Character-level highlighting for DOCX sources, which carry no page geometry
• Draw a box on the source page to correct a mis-parsed field from the document itself
• The original file stays attached to the job and is always one click away

Speed, measured rather than claimed

Almost everyone in this category says "in seconds". Very few publish a number, and none that we found publish a bulk figure.

HireAra's product page does commit to one: "2 minutes. That's how long it takes to send a HireAra CV." Its described workflow is sequential — upload one CV, choose a template, proofread, share — and we found no mention of bulk or batch upload on that page.

Allsorter publishes no timing figure at all, only "Cut formatting time by +85%" against an unstated baseline.

Our own figures, measured on the live production server on 4 August 2026 rather than estimated: a single CV takes 5.5 seconds from upload to a reviewable record, across a range of 4.4 to 6.3 seconds. A batch of 20 CVs — mixed quality, including a DOCX and a two-column layout — completes in 45 seconds end to end.

Agency and Scale plans accept batches of 20 and 50 files respectively in a single upload, and the queue is scheduled so that one firm's bulk batch cannot park another firm's single urgent CV behind it.

• ConnectIQ: 5.5s per CV, measured (range 4.4–6.3s)
• ConnectIQ: 20 CVs in 45 seconds in one batch, measured
• ConnectIQ: batches of 20 on Agency, 50 on Scale
• HireAra: "2 minutes" per CV on its own product page; no bulk upload described
• Allsorter: no timing figure published

Where these competitors genuinely beat us

A comparison that finds the author winning on every axis is marketing, not information. Here is where we lose today, stated plainly, because you will find out in week one anyway.

ATS and CRM integration is the big one. HireAra integrates with Bullhorn, Vincere, Mercury, Access, JobAdder, Salesforce, Seven20 and Recman. Candidately has deep Bullhorn integration plus Salesforce, Invenias, JobAdder, Loxo, Avionté, JobDiva, Greenhouse and Lever. FormaCV covers Bullhorn, JobAdder and Vincere. ConnectIQ has none. If your requirement is that a formatted CV writes itself back into Bullhorn without a human touching it, we are not the answer yet and you should buy one of them.

HireAra holds ISO 27001 certification. We do not. For some procurement processes that ends the conversation, and it should.

RefineCV is cheaper than us at low volume. Its pay-as-you-go rate is $0.40 per CV with no minimum, so a desk doing ten CVs a month pays about $4. Our cheapest paid plan is £5 a month. Below roughly twenty CVs a month, RefineCV costs less, and it also offers unlimited seats and free custom templates.

Candidately's client portal includes interview booking and a talent marketplace. We have candidate share links with open and download analytics, but not a booking flow.

Canva has design freedom none of us can match. It also has no CV parsing, no section detection and no ATS-friendly structure, so it solves a different problem — but if you want total layout control and are willing to rebuild each CV by hand, it is the better tool.

• ATS/CRM write-back: HireAra, Candidately, FormaCV and CVFormatter have it. ConnectIQ does not.
• ISO 27001: HireAra has it. ConnectIQ does not.
• Under ~20 CVs/month: RefineCV pay-as-you-go is cheaper than our lowest paid plan
• Interview booking and talent marketplace: Candidately
• Free-form design control: Canva, at the cost of losing parsing entirely

How to check every number in this article

Each figure above came from the vendor's own published page, read on 4 August 2026. Prices change; ours may have changed by the time you read this, and so may theirs.

Two figures reported elsewhere have been deliberately left out because we could not verify them at source. Third-party directories quoted conflicting HireAra batch timings — one claimed ten CVs in under three minutes, another said two to three minutes per CV — and the page one of them cited would not load for us. We also could not confirm a CVFormatter tier between $79 and $299 that appears in some write-ups, so it is not in the table.

One warning about the other comparison articles you will read this week: several of the sites ranking for "best CV formatting software" are published by companies that sell CV formatting software. A competitor's review of a competitor is a marketing document. This article is one too — the difference is that you can check it.

• HireAra pricing: hireara.ai/pricing
• Allsorter pricing: allsorter.com/pricing
• Candidately pricing: candidately.com/pricing
• CVFormatter pricing: cvformatter.co/pricing
• FormaCV pricing: formacv.ai/pricing
• RefineCV pricing: refine-cv.com/pricing
• ConnectIQ pricing: published in full at /pricing, with no quote-gating

Frequently asked questions

Which CV formatting tool is cheapest per CV in 2026?

On published prices read on 4 August 2026, ConnectIQ Scale is the lowest at £0.089 per CV (£89/month for 1,000 CVs). RefineCV Pro is next at $0.25 per CV ($50/month for 200). CVFormatter Enterprise is $0.60, FormaCV $0.99 and Candidately $1.00 per export. HireAra ranges from £0.95 to £1.44 per CV depending on tier, plus VAT. Below about twenty CVs a month, RefineCV's $0.40 pay-as-you-go rate beats every monthly plan including ours, because there is no monthly floor.

Can I try HireAra or Allsorter before buying?

No. HireAra states on its pricing page that it does not offer free trials, preferring live onboarding sessions. Allsorter publishes no price at all — both its tiers require you to request a quote, with a minimum of five team members. ConnectIQ, RefineCV, CVFormatter and FormaCV all let you process real CVs before paying.

Do these tools charge extra for custom branded templates?

It varies significantly. CVFormatter charges a $49 one-time setup fee per custom template and $24.99 per update after the first three. HireAra gates template count by tier: 5, 20 or 50 depending on which of the £180, £450 or £950 monthly plans you are on. RefineCV and ConnectIQ both charge nothing to create or edit custom templates and both provide a self-serve builder.

How fast is CV formatting really?

ConnectIQ measures 5.5 seconds from upload to a reviewable record for a single CV, and 45 seconds for a batch of 20, on production hardware on 4 August 2026. HireAra's product page states two minutes to send a CV. Allsorter publishes no timing figure. Most vendors in this category say only "in seconds" without a number, so treat unsourced speed claims — including in comparison articles — with suspicion.

What can ConnectIQ not do that competitors can?

ATS and CRM integration, which is the significant one. HireAra, Candidately, FormaCV and CVFormatter all write back into systems like Bullhorn, JobAdder and Vincere; ConnectIQ does not. HireAra also holds ISO 27001 certification, which ConnectIQ does not. If automated ATS write-back or that certification is a hard requirement, buy one of them.