I have wasted more time than I'd like to admit looking for a resume builder. All of the "free" ones I've found end up putting some type of watermark on it (and only disclose this after you've spent an hour building your new fancy resume in an attempt to sunk-cost fallacy you into paying $30). Well, I finally found a free and open source resume builder: Reactive Resume
Back in the golden years that were the early 2000's, everyone would just use a Word template to build a simple but functional resume. It was a bit cumbersome when you had to add a new "experience" entry (and then reduce the font of the whole document so that it would fit nicely on one page), but it was reliable and straightforward.
The Era of Fancy Resumes
At some point, however, these new and fancy resumes started showing up. The ones with a sidebar that lists their programming languages, and fancy coloring and margins and headers, and even the occasional headshot (??). It was like someone printed out a little website onto a piece of paper.
Naturally, I was impressed and decided I needed one. So I started Googling around and found a plethora of "Resume Builder" websites. And what a fun experience it was! Until I got to the end and money was demanded to download it. Or worse, they put a watermark on the bottom of it...
I get it, I get it, nothing in this world is free. So I figured I'd just stick to Word documents instead, and try my best to do something similarly fancy, despite Word being very finnicky.
Reactive Resume
Then, not too long ago, I decided to check again to see if I could find anything truly free. And to my surprise, I managed to find a platform that was free and sleek: Reactive Resume. And not just that, it's open source!
It's got a really nice interface, is easy to use, and you can create an account to save any number of resumes. On top of that, you can export your resume as a JSON to backup to your own devices, which you can use to import back into Reactive Resume later.
Sure, it doesn't have a huge amount of templates to choose from. But the ones that it does have are really nice and they're extremely customizable.
Anyway, I just wanted to post this in case anyone is still using a docx resume. And give a shoutout to Amruth Pillai for building this :)
Latest comments (35)
I need my resume
I love this Product, but still a couple more templates, if there are some more, then It will be more awesome, Other wise, it's perfect.
Awesome, Thank you for this!
Incredible work ! how long to develop this ! huge congrats !
Thanks for showing this site as I remember the pain to not only write, but design a fancy CV/resume to use when applying for jobs. Either a fancy design was locked behind a price or filled with ads and popups.
Wonderful to read it is open-source too!
Thank you so much for sharing 😊
Hello, what does it mean finally a free resume builder.
I also created a resume builder one year back which is free and open source
Source: github.com/aravin/resume-vita
Website: resumevita.com/
Product Hunt: https://www.producthunt.com/products/resume-vita?utm_source=badge-featured&utm_medium=badge#resume-vita
It will be simply UI
Wow, I was wondering where all the sudden traffic and GitHub stars were coming from. This is so unexpected :)
Thank you so much for everyone using Reactive Resume. As mentioned on the site, it's a passion project of mine that is self-funded (and through some donations from kind users). It will remain free for as long as time or money runs out, and the idea is just that no one should be paywalled into getting their next job.
If you are coming from JSON Resume or LinkedIn, I have implemented some naive ways to import data from these sources as well to create a new resume.
I do understand that content is key and most folks do prefer LaTeX or other formats. And sure, there is a place for that too. But there can be a place for those who are just out of school, and just need a way to stand out of the crowd. An always-online, updated and "flashy" resume just might be one way of doing that (speaking from personal experience).
Thank you so much @cppshane for the amazing post about it. I'm glad you found it at a time of need.
Happy New Year!
You are a legend man!
Been following you for many years across a few platforms. Love how you express and create new things
Much love!
Heh yeah I didn't expect it to blow up like this, I guess my pain resonates with people 😅
Either way, awesome platform!
great contribution
Cool! BTW, I created a Resume/CV template with Bootstrap from Codepen, so you can fork this and customize as you want :) dev.to/proyecto26/resume-cv-templa...