By Santiago Fernández de Valderrama, Applied AI Operator · Last updated
career-ops vs Teal
Teal bundles an AI resume builder, a Chrome-extension job tracker, and a match-mode scorer into one polished web app. career-ops runs the same pipeline locally through your AI CLI, with the rubric and the code in the open. Same problem, different philosophy.
The honest summary
Pick career-ops if you want the pipeline plus pre-apply form drafting on your own machine. Pick Teal if the Chrome extension and the polished web app are the workflow that fits.
Teal is the friendliest UI in this space. The Chrome extension is genuinely useful — you find a job on LinkedIn, hit a button, and it lands in your tracker with metadata extracted. The resume builder is well-designed for people who do not want to fight Word templates. The trade-offs are familiar: $29 a month for the full toolset, your career data lives on their servers, and the match algorithm is a black box.
career-ops is the inverse. No Chrome extension. No drag-and-drop. You edit cv.md in your editor, configure a YAML, and invoke modes from a terminal. In exchange you get an MIT-licensed pipeline, a rubric you can read, a tracker that never asks for an account, and one feature Teal does not have — pre-apply. The apply mode reads each portal's form and drafts contextual answers for every open-ended question ("why this role", "tell us about a relevant project") using your profile and the JD. You review, paste, submit. That saves 15-20 minutes per application, every time.
If you have never used a terminal, Teal will be friction-free in a way career-ops never will. If you already live in one, the calculus inverts — and the pre-apply drafting is the part that compounds.
Feature matrix
| Feature | career-ops | Teal |
|---|---|---|
| Resume builder UI | No builder UI. You author cv.md and the tailor mode generates per-job variants from it. | Yes — drag-and-drop builder with templates and live ATS score. |
| Job tracker / pipeline | Yes — Go TUI dashboard with stages: scanned, evaluated, applied, interview, rejected. | Yes — Kanban board with status columns. Chrome extension to add jobs from any portal. |
| Match-mode scoring | Yes — six-dimension rubric scored 1.0–5.0, recommendations gated at 4.0. Cited evidence per dimension. | Yes — match score against a single job description. Algorithm not disclosed. |
| Resume tailoring | Automated per listing — tailor mode rewrites bullets and reorders sections against the JD. | Manual — suggests keywords to add, you edit. |
| Cover letter generation | Yes — apply mode drafts a tailored cover per listing. | Yes — included in Teal+. Limited in free tier. |
| Chrome extension | None. Scanning happens via your AI CLI hitting public job-board APIs and Playwright. | Yes — one-click save jobs from LinkedIn, Indeed, Greenhouse, and others into the tracker. |
| Data ownership | Local-first. Resumes, applications, scoring history never leave your machine. | Stored on Teal servers. Subject to Teal's privacy policy and terms. |
| Pre-apply form assistance | Yes — apply mode drafts contextual answers for every open-ended question on the portal form using your profile + JD. You review, paste, submit. Saves 15-20 minutes per application. | Partial — Chrome extension autofills standard fields (name, email, links) but does not draft answers for open-ended questions ("why this role", "tell us about a project"). You write those manually. |
| Recurring cost | $0 for the software. Only the AI CLI subscription you already pay for ($20/mo typical). | Free tier exists but is heavily gated. Teal+ at $29/mo or $79/year for the full feature set. |
| Source code | Open source, MIT-licensed. github.com/santifer/career-ops. | Closed. You see the output, not the logic. |
| Methodology transparency | Published rubric — six dimensions and the Block A–G evaluation prompt. career-ops.org/methodology. | Match-score algorithm is proprietary. |
| Press / media coverage | Featured in WIRED Greece and Business Insider (US & DE), April 2026. 44K+ GitHub stars. | Featured in Inc. and TechCrunch over the years. Backed by Inspired Capital. |
Pricing & license at a glance
career-ops
$0 (MIT, open source)
Recurring cost: only your AI CLI subscription (Claude Pro $20/mo typical). Your data never leaves your machine.
Teal
Free tier limited. Teal+ at $29/mo or $79/year (annual prepay).
Proprietary, closed-source. Cloud SaaS. Resume content, job descriptions, and tracking data stored on Teal servers.
Frequently asked
- Can career-ops replace Teal end-to-end?
- For technically comfortable users, yes. The scan, evaluate, tailor, apply, and track modes cover the same ground as Teal's job tracker, resume builder, match mode, and cover-letter generator. What career-ops does not have is Teal's Chrome extension and its polished GUI.
- Is career-ops really free?
- The software is MIT-licensed and costs zero. The only recurring cost is the AI CLI you already pay for. A typical job search runs on Claude Pro at $20/month and covers all the evaluations, tailoring, and applications you will need.
- What about my data with career-ops?
- Nothing leaves your machine. Your cv.md, the listings you evaluate, your tracked applications — all of it lives in local files. There is no career-ops account, no telemetry, no cloud sync. The only network traffic is what your AI CLI sends to its provider when you invoke it.
- Does career-ops have a Chrome extension like Teal?
- No. Job scanning happens through your AI CLI hitting the public APIs of Greenhouse, Ashby, and Lever (zero-token, no scraping), or through Playwright for portals without a clean API. The trade-off: no one-click save from LinkedIn, but also no browser permissions and no data flowing to a third party.
See all comparisons at /compare. Read about the project at /about.