We sell career guidance software, so treat this page with appropriate suspicion. That is exactly why we are going to be straight with you: Ireland's free career guidance is better than most countries', and for a lot of students it is enough. Here is the honest comparison, including the cases where you should not pay us anything.
The options side by side
| Option | Cost | What it does best | Where it stops |
|---|---|---|---|
| Your school guidance counsellor | Free in school | Knows you, your school, your grades and your circumstances. Can advise on personal issues, appeals, access routes and the actual application. Irreplaceable. | Time. One counsellor often covers hundreds of students, so one-to-one time is scarce. |
| CareersPortal | Free | Excellent free career exploration: sector guides, career profiles and a free interest profiler with a printable report. | Exploration-led rather than a personalised ranked CAO shortlist with written reasoning. |
| Qualifax | Free | The National Learners' Database. If a course exists in Ireland, it is listed - CAO, PLC, apprenticeship, adult education. | A search tool. It will not tell you which of those courses suit you. |
| CAO handbook and CAO.ie | Free | The definitive source for course codes, requirements, key dates and the application itself. Always the final word. | Reference material, not guidance. It assumes you already know what you are applying for. |
| CourseCompass | €4.99-€90, or via your school | Psychometric assessments turned into ranked, reasoned matches across 830+ CAO courses plus apprenticeship and PLC pathways, with results a counsellor can review. | Paid, self-report, and not a human. Depends on honest answers and works best alongside a counsellor. |
Your guidance counsellor comes first
We mean this literally. A guidance counsellor knows you, your school, your subject levels and your circumstances, and can advise on things no platform should attempt: family situations, wellbeing, access routes, appeals, repeating. Our terms explicitly place us as educational guidance information rather than counselling, in line with Department of Education Circular 0035/2017. The constraint on counsellors is time, not expertise - one person often covers hundreds of students. That is the gap we try to help with, which is why our school package puts results in a counsellor dashboard rather than only in the student's hands. We wrote more about the role in the role of a guidance counsellor in Irish schools.
CareersPortal: genuinely good, and free
CareersPortal offers sector guides, career profiles and a free interest profiler that produces a printable report. If your question is "what kinds of work exist and which broadly appeal to me", it will answer that for nothing. Where we differ is the depth and the destination: we run a suite of assessments - interests, personality and teamwork, values, learning style, study skills, aptitude - and convert them into a ranked CAO shortlist with reasoning for each match, alongside dedicated apprenticeship and PLC matching. Use CareersPortal first. If it answers your question, you are done.
Qualifax and CAO.ie: reference, not guidance
Qualifax is the National Learners' Database and lists essentially every course in Ireland. CAO.ie and the CAO handbook are the definitive source for codes, entry requirements and deadlines, and they always outrank anything we say - including our own course pages. What none of them do is narrow 830-plus options down for one particular person. Ours is the narrowing step; theirs is the verification step. Do both. And for the points mechanics, our free CAO points 2026 guide and calculator costs nothing.
When you should not pay us
- You already know your course, have researched it and just need the points. Free tools cover you.
- Your school already has CourseCompass. Ask your guidance counsellor for your access code instead of buying.
- You have not yet used the free options. Start there; come back if you are still stuck.
- You want someone to make the decision for you. No assessment does that, ours included.
When we do add something
The students who get most out of CourseCompass are the ones who say "I have no idea what I want to do" or "I like too many things". Structured assessment plus reasoned ranking gives them something concrete to react to. Read a free sample report, check the pricing, and decide with your eyes open.