LockedIn AI vs Cluely: Which Interview Copilot Holds Up?

Both of these put an AI answer on your screen while you are still being interviewed. That is where the similarity ends.

LockedIn AI is an interview tool that grew features. Cluely is a viral brand that has since repositioned itself as a meeting notetaker. The pricing, the caps, and the credibility of each vendor differ enough that the choice is usually obvious once you see the numbers side by side.

Every price below comes from the vendors' own pricing bundles, checked 2026-08-21. Neither company puts prices in server-rendered HTML, which is why third-party "2026 pricing" articles disagree with each other and with reality.

The short version

LockedIn AI is interview-first. Coding copilot, mock interviews, online assessments, and a stealth overlay. Its plans are metered in minutes, and stealth is included on every paid plan except one.

Cluely is a general real-time assistant that now brands itself "#1 Undetectable AI for Meetings." Broader, cheaper to start, larger community, and it charges 7.5× on monthly billing for the single feature that makes it useful in an interview.

Pricing, side by side

Two caveats on that table. LockedIn's lifetime price moves with whatever coupon is live: the catalog base is $1,999.00, and the $1,499.25 figure is what the currently-active UNLOCK25 code produces. Cluely's annual pricing is JS-gated, so a plain fetch of its pricing page shows only $19.99 and $149.99.

The stealth math

Cluely's Pro plan does not include undetectability. The support article is explicit that the only difference between $19.99 and $149.99 is "completely hidden to meeting screen sharing software." One feature, 7.5× the price.

LockedIn includes Stealth Mode on all of its credit plans and its Lifetime plan. The exception is the Unlimited General tier ($39.99/mo billed quarterly, $54.99/mo monthly), where the toggle is visible but shows "Upgrade to enable" — a real trap, and one Trustpilot reviewer reports buying the wrong plan for exactly that reason.

So the cheapest honest path to a hidden overlay is $49.99/mo on LockedIn's quarterly plan, versus $44.99/mo on Cluely's annual commitment. Monthly, LockedIn is less than half the price.

Where LockedIn AI is the better choice

• You interview more than you take meetings. Coding copilot, HireVue and CodeSignal and HackerRank support, mock interview mode, resume-aware answers. Cluely's roadmap has been moving away from this.
• You want a second human in the loop. Duo invites a trusted helper into a separate channel where they see your screen and hear your audio. They can type formatted code into your side panel, coach you by voice-to-text, or take temporary remote control of your machine. Nothing in Cluely does this.
• Monthly billing matters. $69.99 with stealth beats $149.99 with stealth if you are not committing to a year.
• You want one payment. The Lifetime plan exists. Note that the refund policy does not mention Lifetime at all, which is a real gap on a four-figure purchase.

Where Cluely is the better choice

• You need one assistant for everything. Sales calls, standups, customer calls, and the occasional interview. LockedIn is narrow by design.
• You do not need to be hidden. At $19.99/mo, Cluely Pro is half of LockedIn's cheapest plan ($39.99/mo, no stealth) and well under a third of its $69.99 stealth-bearing one, and it does not meter your AI responses. If you are prepping rather than sitting a live screen-shared round, that is the better deal.
• Caps annoy you. 400 Copilot minutes is about six or seven hour-long sessions, and LockedIn draws coding, meeting, and assessment time from a single pool.
• You want the bigger ecosystem. More users, more third-party writeups, more community answers when something breaks.

The credibility problem, both ways

This is the part comparison posts usually skip, and it cuts in both directions.

LockedIn AI. Trustpilot currently displays no rating for the company, with the notice: "We've removed a number of fake reviews for this company." The real page shows 119 reviews, 22% of them one-star, with "Refund," "Cancellation," and "Spam" among the top mentions. Meanwhile LockedIn's homepage still shows "4.8 / 2,739 reviews" beside a "Rated on Trustpilot" card, its homepage schema markup declares 14 reviews, and its comparison page declares 97,000. Those four numbers cannot all be true. Its pricing page also carries a "Money-back guarantee" badge while the refund policy says monthly and quarterly plans are "non-refundable once started."

Cluely. On 2026-03-05 CEO Roy Lee publicly admitted that the $7M ARR figure he gave TechCrunch in 2025 was fabricated; the real number was around $5.2M. He called it "the only blatantly dishonest thing i've said publicly online." In July 2025, security researcher Jack Cable found that a single malicious link could make Cluely's app record a victim's screen; Cluely responded with a DMCA takedown against his tweets. The ending is better than the middle: an employee had filed it without leadership approval, Lee retracted and apologised, and donated roughly $1,000 to the EFF at Cable's request. Separately, a researcher reported a flaw affecting roughly 83,000 users and 23,000 interview transcripts — the report site is now offline and no mainstream outlet covered it, so treat the number as claimed rather than confirmed.

Both also publish language counts that contradict themselves. LockedIn says "50+," "45+," and "99+" on its own site simultaneously. Cluely markets "12+" while its support article describes 6 languages for audio input and 21 for transcription output. Neither number is worth using as a decision input.

What neither of them does

Stealth means one thing: the window does not appear in captured video frames. It does not mean you are undetectable.

• LockedIn's own support docs admit the web version "hides nothing at all," that Teams in a browser is "a known gap," and that image proctoring is only worked around by using a second monitor.
• Cluely's refund policy names "detection by screen-sharing software" as an explicitly non-refundable complaint, on the product you paid $149.99/mo to keep hidden.
• How well content protection holds against current macOS capture is an open question in Electron's own issue tracker, and on Windows a local proctoring agent can read the exclusion flag directly and kill the process.
• Neither ships a Linux desktop app.
• Neither defeats a webcam, a phone pointed at your desk, or a person in the room. Neither is permission.

A third option worth ten minutes

If the interview is the thing that matters and neither the metering nor the undetectability tax appeals, GeekBye is a native desktop overlay built for the same moment, with screen-share invisibility included on every plan including the free one, and no minute meter counting down while you answer. We keep an honest list of the field at best Cluely alternatives — including the cases where these two beat us.

Looking wider than these two? Start with the best Cluely alternatives, see how Parakeet AI compares to Cluely, or read the direct GeekBye vs Cluely breakdown.