Reactive Resume

What is Reactive Resume?

Reactive Resume is a free and open-source resume builder that keeps your data private. It needs no account, supports multiple resume layouts, and lets you host your own instance so CV data never sits on someone else's server.

Best for

Job seekers who prefer not to give personal data to a resume site

Why choose Reactive Resume

Reactive Resume is the answer to a genuinely annoying problem: building a decent-looking CV without paying a subscription or handing your work history to a service that will market to you afterwards. It runs entirely in the browser — no account required, nothing uploaded — offers several real templates, and exports properly formatted PDFs. If you prefer, you can self-host the whole thing, which makes it usable as a small private service for a team's hiring or a school's careers office.

Replaces

• Canva Resume
• Zety
• Novoresume

Key features

• No account required
• Multiple templates and layouts
• PDF export
• Self-hostable

What to watch out for

The feature set is opinionated: it does layouts and structured sections well, but if you need a deeply custom design, you will hit the ceiling and start fighting the template system. Resume conventions vary by country and industry, and templates designed for one market can look subtly wrong in another. As a self-hosted single-page application it has minimal backend needs, but it is also a small project with occasional rough edges in PDF rendering across browsers — always check the exported file rather than trusting the preview.

How to deploy

• Docker

Getting started

Try the local browser version first, because for a single person there is genuinely no reason to run a server — the data stays in your browser and exports fine. If you self-host, deploy the static build behind a simple web server and confirm that PDF export works in the browsers your users actually have. Keep a plain-text copy of your CV content alongside the exported PDF, so you are never locked into any particular tool. Check the printed output on paper or in a PDF reader before sending it anywhere; that is the form a recruiter will see.

Typical setup

For a single person it runs entirely in a browser tab with no server at all, which is the point. Organisations that self-host use it as a small internal service — a careers office, a recruitment team, a company giving staff a standard CV format — deployed as static files behind a web server. Either way the exported PDF is the artefact that matters, and it is worth checking it in a real reader before sending it anywhere.

Who should look elsewhere

Not a candidate for a genuinely custom design; the template system will stop you quickly if you want a distinctive layout. It is also unnecessary for anyone happy with their current CV tool — the value here is specifically about not paying a subscription and not handing over your personal history, which only matters if that matters to you.

Project health

• GitHub stars: 43,627
• Last code push: 2026-10-01
• Open issues: 55
• Status: actively developed

Figures pulled from the GitHub API and refreshed periodically.