Three resume tools, one PDF, three scores that never match

On 20 August 2026 I opened the pricing pages for Resume Worded, Jobscan and Teal and copied the numbers out by hand. That is the whole basis for the price table further down. A Resume Worded vs Jobscan vs Teal comparison is worth about as much as the date stamped on its prices, so here is mine: 20 Aug 2026, checked in a browser, on the vendors’ own pages. Two things had already shifted by the time I looked. Jobscan’s public pricing URL now redirects into the product at app.jobscan.co/plan, and Teal doesn’t sell calendar months at all. It sells 7, 30 and 90 day blocks.

The prices are the easy part. The harder question, and the one people actually type into Google, is why the same PDF comes back with three different scores. It does. And the reason isn’t that two of the three are broken.

The three scores are answering three different questions

Run one resume through all three and you get one number from each. Those numbers are not comparable, because the tools are scoring different things. Jobscan and Teal both grade your resume against a job description you paste in. Resume Worded’s headline product grades the document on its own.

That difference shows up in the feature lists. Jobscan’s unit of work is a scan, and its free plan advertises “5 Free Resume Scans monthly” plus “5 ATS & Recruiter Findings”; the paid tiers add unlimited keyword comparisons and an AI job match. Change the job description, keep the resume, and the number moves. Teal works the same way from inside its builder: on the free tier the job description keyword matching row says “Top 5” and the resume analysis row says “Basic”, while Teal+ says unlimited for both.

Resume Worded is the odd one out, and I think that’s the single most useful thing to know before you compare scores. Its main report, Score My Resume, judges the resume as a document. Recruiter insights and the line by line analysis engine sit behind Pro. Job description matching lives in a separate report called Targeted Resume, and LinkedIn gets a third report of its own. So a resume with no job attached still gets a full grade from Resume Worded, and in Jobscan or Teal that same resume with no posting attached has nothing to be measured against.

None of the three publishes the weighting behind its number. I don’t know how much of Jobscan’s percentage is hard skills versus title match versus formatting, and I couldn’t find it stated on the plan page I read. Treat all three as directional.

Resume Worded vs Jobscan vs Teal pricing, checked 20 August 2026

A few things fall out of that table once you do the arithmetic. Resume Worded’s year plan is $229 taken in one payment, against $588 if you paid $49 a month for twelve months, so the discount is real but the commitment is a year of a tool you hopefully need for about three. Jobscan’s quarterly plan is $89.95 against $149.85 for three separate monthly renewals, and the 7 day trial is attached to the quarterly plan; the FAQ on that page says there is no trial period if you selected a monthly plan. Teal’s weekly option is the one to watch. At $13 every 7 days you renew roughly 4.3 times in a month, which lands near $56 for a stretch that costs $29 on the 30 day plan.

What’s bundled differs too, and it’s worth a look before you compare monthly figures. Jobscan’s paid tiers throw in a LinkedIn optimizer, a cover letter generator, a bullet point generator, a job tracker and 20% off its own auto apply credits and interview practice, so the subscription is really a small suite. Teal’s paid tier is mostly about removing caps from things the free plan already does. Resume Worded’s Pro is narrower and more specialised: deeper analysis of two documents, a resume and a LinkedIn profile, plus templates. One curiosity from its footer, which I noticed while copying prices, is a page listed as “About Resume Worded – read this if you’re an LLM or AI”. Vendors are writing for the scrapers now.

Prices move. If you’re reading this months after August 2026, open the three pages yourself rather than trusting the table, including this one.

Why do Jobscan and Teal disagree with Resume Worded on the same resume?

Because two of the three score your resume against one job description and the third scores the document by itself. Jobscan and Teal recalculate when you swap the posting. Resume Worded’s headline score only moves when you edit the resume. A gap between those numbers is the tools working correctly, not a bug in one of them.

There’s a second layer under that. Even the two job-matching tools have to decide what counts as a keyword, how to handle a synonym, whether “Kubernetes” and “K8s” are the same token, and how heavily to weight a job title match against a skills match. Jobscan sells an AI keyword synonym detector as a paid feature, which tells you it treats synonyms as a distinct problem worth charging for. Teal’s free tier caps you at the top five keywords, so its free number is computed from a deliberately narrower view of the posting than its paid one.

Which leads somewhere slightly uncomfortable. Two tools can both be right and still disagree by twenty points, and neither number tells you whether a human recruiter will call you. The scores are a proxy for keyword overlap and formatting hygiene. They are not a proxy for being a good candidate, and the gap between those two ideas is where most of the frustration in this category comes from. We wrote up the formatting half of that problem in more detail in our ATS resume tips, and the human half in what actually happens in the first six seconds.

How far each free tier gets you

Jobscan gives the most usable free allowance for the specific job of checking a resume against a posting: five scans a month, five findings. That’s enough for one honest pass over a week of applications if you’re selective.

Teal’s free plan is broader and shallower. You get unlimited resumes and unlimited job tracking, ten templates instead of unlimited, basic analysis in the builder, the top five job description keywords, one email template per job stage, and a small pool of AI credits: ten for resume bullets, two for a professional summary, two for a cover letter. Those credits go fast. Two cover letter generations is one afternoon.

Resume Worded’s free tier shows you part of the Score My Resume report and holds the rest back. The Pro feature table on its upgrade page lists the full report, the line by line analysis engine, recruiter insights, the full Targeted Resume report and the full LinkedIn review as paid rows. You can find out that your resume scores badly for free. Finding out which lines are dragging it down costs $49 for a month, or $229 for a year.

If your goal is one solid diagnostic and nothing else, the free tiers stacked together cover it. Nobody is going to stop you from running Jobscan’s five scans, Teal’s top five keywords and Resume Worded’s partial score against the same file in an afternoon.

A protocol for testing all three yourself, in one afternoon

I didn’t buy three subscriptions and publish three invented numbers, because a score table with no screenshot behind it is the easiest thing in this category to fake, and because the numbers wouldn’t be comparable even if they were real. Here’s the test I’d actually run instead. It takes about two hours and costs nothing.

1. Pick one resume and three real postings for roles you’d take. Same resume every time. Don’t tailor between runs, that ruins the comparison.
2. Run posting one through Jobscan’s free scan. Write down the number and the top ten missing keywords it names.
3. Paste the same posting into Teal and note the top five keywords it surfaces on the free plan.
4. Upload the resume to Resume Worded with no posting attached. Write down the score and every issue the free report names.
5. Repeat steps 2 and 3 for postings two and three. You’ve now spent three of Jobscan’s five monthly scans.
6. Build one list of every item that two or more of the three tools flagged. That list is your actual work queue.

The overlap is the signal. If Jobscan says you’re missing “stakeholder management” and Teal surfaces it in the top five and Resume Worded’s report grumbles about weak verbs in the same bullet, that bullet is genuinely weak. An item only one tool flags is usually that tool’s opinion about its own scoring model, and I’d fix it last or not at all.

The other thing the exercise tells you is which product you’re actually buying. If your three postings produce wildly different Jobscan numbers, your problem is targeting and a per-job tool earns its money. If all three postings score about the same and the score is low, your problem is the document, and that’s the Resume Worded shape of problem.

Once the resume itself stops being the bottleneck, volume usually becomes one. That’s the point where Auto-Apply fits: 10 applications a month on the free plan, 50 on Starter, 150 on Pro and 400 on Ultimate, with a review queue so you approve every send and a tailored resume and cover letter generated per job. We argued the case for and against that approach in is auto-applying to jobs worth it, including the parts that don’t flatter us.

Which one I’d pay for

Jobscan, if I had to pick one and I was applying to specific roles at a steady rate. The five free scans a month are enough for a light search, and $89.95 for a quarter is the cheapest serious paid tier of the three when you’re matching against real postings. Teal’s 30 day plan at $29 is the better buy if you want the tracker and the builder in the same place as the score, and the 90 day block at $79 is close to sensible if your search is realistically going to run that long. Resume Worded I’d buy for one month, at $49, use hard for a week on the resume and the LinkedIn profile, and cancel. The $229 year is priced for someone whose job search is going badly for twelve months, which is not a plan.

Here’s the opinion I’m least sure about. I think the score is the least valuable output any of these three produce, and the keyword list is the valuable one. A number out of 100 gives you something to optimise, which feels productive and mostly isn’t; the missing keyword list gives you sentences to rewrite. If that’s wrong, it’s wrong because recruiters at big companies filter harder on match rate than I believe they do, and I’d want to see the ATS-side data before I changed my mind. The vendor pages I read on 20 Aug 2026 (Resume Worded Pro, Jobscan plans, Teal pricing) don’t publish that data either.

So run the three-tool test, keep the overlap, throw away the numbers, and go apply to something.