Teal Review (2026): The Best Free Job Tracker — But It Won't Apply for You

We have a correction to make on this page, and we'd rather lead with it than bury it. When we first reviewed Teal, we praised something rare: its help centre said paid plans didn't auto-renew — you had to opt back in. On August 20, 2026 we went back to re-verify, and that statement is gone. Teal's current cancellation policy describes recurring subscriptions with 2-to-14-day refund-request windows, screenshot below. The free tier that anchors our rating is as generous as ever, the product is still the best free organiser we've reviewed — but the friendliest billing posture in the category has quietly become an ordinary one, and you should know that before you buy.

What is Teal?

Teal is a job-search platform built around three things: a resume builder, a CRM-style application tracker, and a Chrome extension that saves postings from job boards into that tracker. It's run by Teal Labs, Inc., which has operated since 2019 and is venture-backed (third-party sources put total funding around $20.7 million; we could not confirm that at the source).

Teal has enormous brand awareness — it's one of the first names people hit when searching for job tools — and that awareness is the reason this review exists. A lot of people arrive at Teal believing it belongs in the same category as auto-apply services. It does not, and the gap between what people expect and what it does is worth resolving before you spend an hour setting it up.

A note on our sourcing: tealhq.com blocks automated requests, including the rendering service we use, so we cannot screenshot Teal's own site. That's an unremarkable security setting, not a red flag — but it's why this review's lead image is Teal's Chrome Web Store listing (which doesn't block us, and which we read directly on August 20, 2026), and why the help-centre articles — also unblocked — do the evidentiary work below. Every claim we couldn't check at source is marked.

Does Teal apply to jobs for you?

No — and it doesn't autofill applications either. This is the most important sentence on the page, so let's be precise about the three different things people conflate:

• Auto-apply means software submits applications without you present. That's LoopCV or JobCopilot. Teal does not do this.
• Autofill means an extension pushes your saved profile into an employer's form and you press submit. That's Simplify. Teal does not do this either.
• Tracking and tailoring means saving a posting, tailoring a resume against it, scoring your keyword match, and reminding you to follow up. That's Teal, and it's very good at it.

No Teal plan at any price applies to jobs on your behalf. Every application is still opened, filled in and submitted by you, by hand. If you came here looking for a tool that reduces the number of applications you personally complete, Teal is not that tool and no amount of paying for it will make it that tool.

That's not a criticism of Teal — it's never claimed otherwise — but it does determine our rating, and it's the single most common source of disappointment we see attributed to the product.

How Teal works, step by step

1. You install the Chrome extension. It held 4.9 out of 5 from about 3,200 ratings across 200,000 users when we checked on August 20, 2026, published by Teal Labs, Inc. Note the last-update date the listing showed on our August 12 read — June 26, 2025, over a year earlier — which is worth knowing if you value active maintenance.
2. You save jobs as you browse. One click from LinkedIn, Indeed, Lever, Greenhouse and dozens of other boards pulls the posting — including the full job description and any salary data — into your tracker. Saving the description matters more than it sounds: postings get taken down, and you'll want the text when you're prepping for the interview six weeks later.
3. You build resumes in the builder. Unlimited versions, unlimited exports, on the free plan. Most people maintain a base resume plus targeted variants.
4. You tailor against a specific posting. Teal compares your resume to the job description and scores keyword match, highlighting what's missing. The full match score sits behind Teal+.
5. You track status and follow-ups. Application stages, contacts, companies, and reminders to chase. This is the CRM half, and it's the part regular users get attached to.
6. You apply manually. Always. Teal hands you a sharpened resume and an organised pipeline; the submitting is yours.

Teal pricing: free vs Teal+

Free — and unusually generous

Teal's help centre states that you do not need to upgrade to edit and export unlimited resumes in the Resume Builder, bookmark unlimited roles in the Job Tracker, or track unlimited contacts and companies. The Chrome extension is free too. From the source, re-verified August 20, 2026:

Read that again, because it inverts the usual freemium pattern. Most job tools give you a crippled free tier — three resumes, ten saved jobs — designed to make you hit a wall. Teal gives away the core utility without limits and charges for AI assistance on top. For a large share of users the free plan simply is the product, permanently, and that's not an accident of pricing but a deliberate posture.

Teal+ — reported at $13/week, $29/month, $79/quarter

Third-party reviews as of mid-2026 report those three tiers. We could not verify them at the source — tealhq.com blocks automated requests, so we did not see the pricing page ourselves. Treat the figures as reported and check the current price in your own account.

What Teal+ buys, per Teal's own materials, is AI rather than access: unlimited AI resume generation, the full keyword-match score, the AI cover-letter generator, and resume analytics. Useful during a heavy tailoring push; not something you need running in the background all year.

The billing posture — a 2026 change you should know about

Earlier in 2026, Teal's help centre stated that paid plans did not auto-renew — members had to opt back in each cycle. We read that ourselves on August 12, 2026, praised it in the first version of this review, and rated Teal partly in its light. When we re-checked on August 20, the statement was gone. Here is what the help centre's cancellation-policy article says now:

Recurring subscriptions. Cancelling "does not automatically trigger a refund." Refund requests accepted within 2 to 14 calendar days depending on plan, and "Teal cannot be held responsible for recurring subscriptions if a member fails to cancel." That's… a normal subscription policy. Which is exactly the point: the thing that made Teal's paid tier exceptional in this category is no longer documented, and buying advice has to change with it. Note your renewal date the day you subscribe, cancel ahead of it if you only wanted one cycle, and if you want a refund, request it inside the window — early.

What the ratings actually say

Store user counts are measured rather than self-reported, which makes the Chrome number the most reliable on the page. The Trustpilot sample is modest but coherent — praise concentrates on organisation and tracking. Third-party review coverage clusters its complaints on three themes: charges after cancellation, AI-generated resume content reading generic or containing errors, and ATS parsing trouble with two-column templates. We report these as reported; we have not verified them individually. Given the billing change above, the post-cancellation charge complaints are worth taking more seriously than we did in August's first read — watch your statement.

On the two-column template issue: this is a real and general problem, not a Teal-specific one. Multi-column resume layouts confuse a meaningful share of applicant tracking systems regardless of which builder produced them. If you're applying through large-company ATS portals, use a single-column layout — from Teal or anywhere else.

One structural caution about the extension: a June 2025 last-update date (as listed when we checked on August 12, 2026) means well over a year without a published release. Browser extensions that scrape job boards generally need regular maintenance as those sites change their markup. It may simply be stable; it's worth noticing.

Pros and cons

• ✅ One of the most generous free tiers anywhere in this category — unlimited resumes and unlimited tracking
• ✅ Chrome extension rated 4.9 from ~3,200 ratings across 200,000 users
• ✅ Saves the full job description when you bookmark, which pays off weeks later at interview prep
• ✅ Keyword-match scoring against a specific posting is a real, practical improvement to your resume
• ✅ Operating since 2019 with substantial venture backing — low risk of vanishing mid-search
• ✗ No auto-apply and no autofill: every application is manual, at every price
• ✗ It doesn't reduce your application workload, only your disorganisation
• ✗ The no-auto-renew posture we once praised is gone — subscriptions now recur, with 2–14-day refund-request windows (verified August 20, 2026)
• ✗ Pricing not verifiable at the source — tealhq.com blocks automated requests
• ✗ Third-party reviewers report generic AI output and post-cancellation charges
• ✗ Extension last updated June 2025 as listed on our August 12, 2026 check
• ✗ No interview or outcome guarantee — it's a tool, not a service

Who Teal is best for

Teal is a genuinely good pick if:

• You're running a long, deliberate search across dozens of roles and losing track of what you sent where. This is precisely the problem Teal solves, and it solves it better than a spreadsheet ever will.
• You tailor your resume per application and want the versions managed rather than scattered across your downloads folder.
• You want real utility for zero dollars. The free tier is not a trial; it's a permanent, unlimited product.
• You're the kind of searcher who follows up, and wants reminders to do it on schedule.
• You'd like to buy AI help for one intense stretch — just set the cancellation reminder the day you subscribe, now that plans recur.

Teal is the wrong tool if:

• Volume is your bottleneck. If you need to be applying to hundreds of roles, a better tracker doesn't help — you'll just have a beautifully organised record of not applying to enough jobs.
• You expected it to fill in or submit applications. It does neither.
• You're employed full-time and short on hours. Teal makes your manual search tidier; it doesn't make it shorter.
• You want an outcome commitment of any kind.

Teal alternatives

The full field — organisers, copilots, bots, and human services — is in our best auto-apply services roundup. The nearest comparisons:

Simplify — the same shape, plus autofill

Simplify overlaps heavily on tracking and matching but adds the thing Teal lacks: an extension that fills in application forms. Its free tier is excellent (4.9 across 500,000 users as of August 20, 2026). Its paid tier is opaque — no published price, no trial, no refund policy we could find.

Huntr — the other excellent tracker

Huntr is the closest head-to-head: a kanban tracker with unlimited free autofills (which Teal doesn't offer) but a 100-role cap on free tracking (which Teal doesn't have) and a refund policy that won't consider first-month buyers. We rate both 3.5.

Jobright — stronger matching, real autofill

Jobright leads on AI matching and also autofills, on a subscription reported around $39.99/month — though its consumer pricing page now renders a 404, and refunds are at Jobright's discretion per its terms. Better if discovery is your problem; Teal is better if organisation is.

ApplyAll — done-for-you, with a guarantee

ApplyAll is the opposite end of the spectrum: people apply on your behalf, ranked by interview probability, one-time payment, interview guarantee. See how it works.

Teal vs ApplyAll

These two barely compete, and pretending they do would be dishonest. Teal is a $0–29 tool that organises a search you run. ApplyAll is a service that runs part of the search for you. The comparison is only useful for working out which problem you actually have.

• What gets done for you. Teal: nothing is submitted on your behalf, ever. ApplyAll: real people review and submit every application.
• Where the time goes. Teal reduces the overhead around applications — finding, tailoring, remembering. ApplyAll removes the applications themselves from your calendar.
• How jobs are found. Teal saves whatever you find while browsing. ApplyAll crawls roughly 50,000 company career sites daily and ranks matches by your probability of an interview, using outcome data from more than 2 million applications.
• Cost and commitment. Teal is free, or a reported $13–79 on a subscription that now recurs until cancelled. ApplyAll is a one-time payment, larger, with nothing to cancel.
• What's promised. Teal promises software. ApplyAll promises at least one relevant interview within a month of application completion, or a 100% refund.

Where Teal wins outright: cost, control, and craft. If your search is going badly because you're disorganised, sending an untailored resume everywhere, or forgetting to follow up, Teal fixes that for nothing and no service can fix it for you. Plenty of people don't need a done-for-you service — they need to run a better search, and Teal is a legitimately good way to do that. We'd rather tell you that than sell you something.

Who should pick which. Choose Teal if your applications are good but scattered, your hours are available, and your problem is discipline rather than throughput. Choose ApplyAll if you've already been disciplined for months, your applications are fine, and the thing you cannot manufacture is more evenings. The honest test: if you know exactly what to apply to and simply aren't getting through enough of it, a tracker will not change that arithmetic — and if you don't know what to apply to, no done-for-you service should be your first purchase either. Start with the free Teal tier.