8 Best Cluely Alternatives, Re-Tested August 2026

Updated August 21, 2026: every tool below was re-verified against vendor pricing pages and primary sources. Ninjafy AI has been removed — its domain now redirects through a dead rebrand to an unrelated site. Interview Sidekick's Ultimate tier went from $10/month to $160/month list. Final Round AI restructured its plans around billing commitments and stopped publishing a price for the tiers that include stealth. The breach language has been softened to match the actual evidence, and a new section covers the free and open-source Cluely clones on GitHub.

You trust Cluely with your interview recordings, your screen captures, and your most honest career moments. The reasons to look elsewhere have been piling up since mid-2025.

In July 2025, a researcher operating as DarkAgent published a report claiming Cluely had exposed 83,247 users and 23,693 interview transcriptions through admin credentials left in a public GitHub repository, weak GraphQL authorization, and a client-side-only paywall check. The claim first surfaced publicly on July 8, 2025. Read it with the caveats attached: the original report's domain no longer resolves, no mainstream outlet covered it, Cluely never issued a statement, and there is no state Attorney General notice or Have I Been Pwned entry. Whether real user records were exfiltrated or merely demonstrated to be reachable in a proof of concept is unverified.

The second incident is documented from primary sources. Security researcher Jack Cable found a postMessage handler flaw in Cluely's Electron app: one malicious link opened inside the app let an arbitrary website invoke the screenshot handler and continuously record the victim's screen without their knowledge. Cluely's complete system prompts were also sitting in plaintext in the shipped app. Cluely responded with a DMCA takedown against Cable's tweets. That story has an ending worth recording: CEO Roy Lee first denied filing the notice, the employee who filed it admitted doing so without leadership approval, Lee retracted and apologized, and at Cable's request donated roughly $1,000 to the EFF. The tweet images were never restored. Cluely now runs a public bug bounty.

Then, on March 5, 2026, Lee admitted the "$7 million ARR" figure he had given TechCrunch was fabricated. The real number was around $5.2 million. His words: "the only blatantly dishonest thing i've said publicly online." Cluely has since pivoted its positioning away from interviews entirely — the homepage now sells it as "#1 Undetectable AI for Meetings," and its own comparison pages benchmark it against Otter and Granola, not against interview copilots.

If you're looking for an alternative, you're not alone. Here are 8 AI interview assistants, re-verified in August 2026, and what each one actually costs today.

Quick Comparison

Before we dive into each tool, here's how they stack up as of August 2026:

Tool	Platform	Invisibility	Languages	Pricing	Privacy Model
GeekBye	Desktop app (macOS, Windows)	OS-level native, included	33	Free plan; Pro from $74.99/mo	On-device OCR, text-only to AI
Interview Sidekick	Desktop app + web	OS content protection	52	$160/mo list, $80 with SAVE50	Cloud-based
Final Round AI	Desktop app + web	Pro / God Mode tiers only	91	Varies by billing commitment	Cloud-based
Cheating Daddy	Desktop (macOS ARM, Windows)	Best-effort, breaks macOS15	Model-dependent	Free, bring your own Gemini key	Your own API key, direct to Google
Sensei Copilot	Not stated	Claimed, mechanism unstated	30+	Free plan; annual lock-in	Cloud-based
LockedIn AI	Desktop app + web	Paid plans only	50+ (vendor)	Metered plans; $1,499.25 LT	Cloud-based
Parakeet AI	Desktop app + web	Yes; process named pmodule	50+ (vendor)	$38-$177 credits; $149.90/mo	Per-session Save Transcript toggle
Interview Coder	Desktop app	Undetectable modes	Not stated	$799 one-time or $299/mo	Cloud-based

Now let's break down what each one actually does.

1. GeekBye — Best Overall Alternative

Best for: Candidates who need genuine invisibility and refuse to send screenshots to the cloud.

GeekBye takes a different approach from Cluely. Instead of running as an overlay that needs a separate $149.99/month tier to hide itself, GeekBye is a native desktop application that marks its windows as protected content through the operating system — the same mechanism banks use for sensitive screens — and maintains that protection against OS updates. The result: GeekBye is invisible to Zoom, Google Meet, Teams, OBS, and every screen capture tool — with no extra cost, no add-on, and no toggle to forget.

The privacy difference goes deeper. When you take a screenshot with GeekBye, the image gets processed by on-device OCR (using Apple's Vision framework on macOS) before anything leaves your machine. Only the extracted text travels to the AI — your actual screenshot images never touch a cloud server. Compare that to Cluely, where a security vulnerability allowed any website to silently capture screenshots through the app.

Key features:

• OS-level invisibility — native content protection, maintained across OS updates
• On-device OCR — screenshots processed locally via Apple Vision (macOS), only extracted text sent to AI
• Real-time transcription — dual audio capture (microphone + system audio) in 33 languages, with transcription language settable independently of output language
• 360 screenshots — capture everything on screen with a single shortcut
• AI-powered answers — instant responses to coding, behavioral, and technical questions
• Performance metrics — real-time dashboard with 6 scoring dimensions
• Meeting summaries — automatic key points, action items, and AI analysis after every session
• Privacy-first architecture — local SQLite database, OAuth tokens in OS keychain, screenshot images never leave your device

Pricing: Free Starter plan. Pro at $74.99/mo until August 31, 2026 — the new pricing doubles the monthly price after that date. Annual is $600/year and Lifetime is $750 once, and neither is affected by the August 31 increase.

Why it beats Cluely: You don't pay $149.99/month extra just to be invisible — every plan includes it. And your data stays on your machine.

2. Interview Sidekick — Best Question Bank and Model Choice

Best for: Job seekers who want a large prep library and control over which AI model answers for them.

Interview Sidekick combines preparation and live assistance in a single platform. The vendor's headline feature is a 10,000+ question bank covering behavioral, technical, and role-specific questions across industries. During live interviews, it captures audio, transcribes in real time, and displays suggested answers on your screen.

You get to choose your AI model — GPT-5, GPT-4.1, or Claude 4.0 Sonnet — which is unusual in this space. Most competitors lock you into whatever model they've integrated. It now ships as a native desktop app for Windows and macOS alongside the web interface, and Stealth Mode applies OS-level content protection to the app window so it stays out of a full-screen share; the vendor also claims it is hidden from Task Manager.

Key features:

• 10,000+ real interview questions across behavioral and technical categories
• AI model selection — choose between GPT-5, GPT-4.1, or Claude 4.0 Sonnet
• Screen capture — reads coding problems from screen-shared platforms
• 52 language support
• Post-interview analysis with performance feedback
• Resume upload for personalized answer generation
• Stealth Mode bundled in the paid tier, no surcharge

Pricing: Free Basic plan (a 2-minute test of the live assistant, no card). Ultimate Sidekick is $160/month list, $80/month with code SAVE50 at checkout. Their own structured data also references a ~$30/month regional tier. The $10/month figure that circulated earlier in 2026 is stale — it survives only on their own blog pages and is contradicted by their live homepage.

Trade-off vs GeekBye: Deeper prep library and real model choice, but the price is now above GeekBye's and there's no local OCR — screenshots and audio are processed in the cloud.

3. Final Round AI — Best for Interview Prep Ecosystem

Best for: Early-career candidates who need preparation tools alongside live assistance, and who can commit annually.

Final Round AI is the largest platform in this space by traffic. It's a full preparation ecosystem with mock interviews, resume building, cover letter generation, and structured prep materials, with Interview CoPilot running during live calls. In June 2026 it added Career Coaches, extending the product past the copilot.

The pricing story changed this year. The old $149.99/month basic tier with 4 sessions is gone from every first-party page. Interview CoPilot is now sold as one feature set at three billing frequencies — monthly, quarterly and annual, with the headline rate reserved for a full year paid upfront (their own pricing explainer lists the current numbers). Read the refund terms before you commit to twelve months: annual and quarterly carry a 3-day window, monthly is explicitly non-refundable.

Key features:

• Interview Copilot — real-time answer suggestions during live interviews
• AI mock interviews — simulated interview practice with feedback
• Resume builder and cover letter generator
• Career Coaches, launched June 2026
• 91 languages and regional accents on every plan (they separately quote 26+ for real-time transcription)
• STAR-method behavioral answers tailored to your role
• 10-minute trial session, not extendable or renewable
• 10% discount for students, veterans, first responders and the recently laid off

Pricing: Three billing frequencies; the advertised rate requires a full year upfront. Current figures are on their pricing page.

Trade-off vs GeekBye: Far more prep tools. But Stealth Mode is gated to their Pro and God Mode tiers, which are not priced on any first-party page, so the real cost of invisibility is unknown before you sign up — and the cheap headline rate locks you in for a year. Cloud-based processing means your interview data passes through external servers.

4. Cheating Daddy — Best Free & Open-Source Option

Best for: Developers who want a working overlay for the cost of their own API tokens, and who understand what they're giving up.

This slot used to belong to Ninjafy AI. Ninjafy is gone: ninjafy.ai now redirects to interviewninja.io, which redirects again to an unrelated Vietnamese football-streaming site, and its blog subdomain 404s. No pricing, product or support page is reachable.

Cheating Daddy is the open-source project people actually mean when they search for a free Cluely alternative — roughly 5,566 GitHub stars as of August 21, 2026, GPL-3.0, and still being worked on (latest release v0.8.0, July 23, 2026). It's a transparent always-on-top overlay that captures your screen and system audio, streams both to Google Gemini 2.0 Flash Live, and prints contextual answers mid-call. It ships preset profiles that swap the system prompt (Interview, Sales Call, Business Meeting, Presentation, Negotiation) and a click-through mode so the window ignores mouse events. Since v0.8.0 it bundles llama.cpp and whisper.cpp, so local inference is possible and the Gemini dependency is no longer absolute.

Be honest about the invisibility, because this applies to every open-source tool here. These apps hide themselves with Electron's setContentProtection(true) or NSWindow.sharingType = .none, and how well that holds against current macOS capture is an open question in both frameworks' own trackers — the Tauri issue is labelled upstream, Apple-imposed, and still open, with the Electron equivalent unresolved too. With a solo maintainer and no support obligation, nobody has to patch these tools when macOS changes underneath them.

Key features:

• Free and GPL-3.0 — the whole source is on GitHub
• Screen + system audio capture streamed to Gemini 2.0 Flash Live
• Preset profiles for interviews, sales calls, meetings, presentations, negotiations
• Click-through mode so the overlay doesn't intercept your mouse
• Local inference via bundled llama.cpp and whisper.cpp since v0.8.0
• Prebuilt binaries for Apple Silicon Macs (.dmg) and Windows (.exe); Intel Mac and Linux users build from source

Pricing: Free. You supply a Google AI Studio key and pay Google directly for every minute of streamed screen and audio.

Trade-off vs GeekBye: No subscription, but "free" means free of subscription, not free of cost — a key that hits its quota mid-interview is your problem. There's no support channel and 153 open issues against a solo maintainer. Its README also notes it reacts to the interviewer's speech rather than to you prompting it. And the invisibility caveat above is the real one: GeekBye's protection is maintained against OS changes, this is not.

5. Sensei Copilot — Best for Structured Responses

Best for: Candidates who want STAR-formatted answers and pre-crafted career narratives.

Sensei Copilot listens to interviewer questions, transcribes them, and generates structured answers in under one second. The standout feature is the AI Story Editor — a pre-interview tool where you craft career narratives using the STAR method, which the AI then weaves into its generated answers during the live interview. The pitch is that answers reference your own stories instead of generic templates.

The platform also includes a Coding Copilot module for technical interviews on platforms like CoderPad and HackerRank, plus support for 30+ languages. Pricing and features are unchanged since our March review, confirmed on their own site in August 2026.

Key features:

• Sub-second response time — answers generated in less than 1 second
• AI Story Editor — pre-craft STAR-format career narratives the AI references
• Coding Copilot — specialized module for technical coding interviews
• Context-aware answers personalized to your resume, role, and job description
• 30+ language support
• Hands-free experience — no clicking required during interviews

Pricing: Free plan with 15-minute sessions. Paid Pro plan, with the low rate available only on annual billing.

Trade-off vs GeekBye: Better structured response format with STAR integration, but the site never states whether it's a native app, a web tool, or an extension, and it describes no mechanism behind its "fully undetectable" claim. Annual billing required for reasonable pricing.

6. LockedIn AI — Best "Duo" Feature

Best for: Candidates who want both AI and human support simultaneously.

LockedIn AI's unique selling point is the Duo feature — it lets you privately invite a friend to join your interview session. Your friend sees your screen and hears your audio through a separate channel with sub-second sync, types answers and formatted code into your private side panel, and can coach you by voice. It goes further than the earlier description: the helper can also take temporary remote control of your machine with one-tap consent.

The platform uses "True Stealth Mode" that's engineered to be invisible to Zoom, Teams, and Google Meet, plus process aliasing so the app blends into Activity Monitor or Task Manager. Read their own support docs before relying on it: they admit Teams-in-a-browser is "a known gap," that browser-tab joins are untested, and that "the web version of LockedIn AI hides nothing at all."

One more thing worth knowing before you buy. Trustpilot has removed LockedIn AI's rating and displays a guidelines-breach notice stating it has "removed a number of fake reviews for this company" — while the company's own pages advertise "4.8 / 2,739 reviews." Trustpilot's actual listing shows 119 reviews as of August 2026, 22% of them 1-star.

Key features:

• LockedIn Duo — a helper types, speaks, or takes remote control alongside the AI in real time
• True Stealth Mode — OS-level content protection plus process aliasing (paid plans only)
• Real-time coding copilot
• 50+ languages by their own marketing, though the same site also claims 45+ and 99+ on different pages
• Memory controls — clear, pause, and autoscroll
• Personalized to resume and job description

Pricing: Metered monthly and quarterly plans, both capped at 400 Copilot minutes. Lifetime at $1,499.25, which is their $1,999 catalog price with a 25%-off promo applied — the displayed figure moves with whichever promo is running.

Trade-off vs GeekBye: The Duo feature is genuinely unique. But stealth is excluded from the free tier and from every Unlimited General plan, the 400-minute monthly cap could run out during intensive interview seasons, and the refund policy calls monthly and quarterly "non-refundable once started" while the pricing page shows a money-back-guarantee badge. See our LockedIn AI vs Cluely comparison for the full breakdown.

7. Parakeet AI — Best Credit-Based Pricing

Best for: Occasional interviewers who don't want a monthly subscription.

Parakeet AI still sells credits instead of forcing a subscription: buy a pack, use it when you need it, done. Credits never expire, and the conversion is exact — 0.5 credits buys a 30-minute session, so one credit is one hour. That makes it the best fit for someone with a handful of interviews scheduled.

Two corrections to what circulates about Parakeet, both from the vendor's own systems. First, the pricing: list prices are $38 for 1 credit, $59 for 3, $118 for 8 (6+2 bonus), and $177 for 15 (9+6 bonus). The familiar $29.50 / $59 / $88.50 figures are exactly what the INTERVIEW50 50%-off code produces, not the list price. Subscriptions now exist alongside credits at $78/week, $149.90/month, and $599.90/year. Second, the free trial is not unlimited: it's 10 free sessions of up to 10 minutes each, with a 12-minute cooldown between them.

Privacy needs a correction too. Earlier versions of this article repeated that Parakeet auto-deletes transcripts and encrypts end to end. Neither claim is supported today. The workspace has a per-session "Save Transcript" toggle and keeps months-old transcripts, and its privacy policy (last updated August 2024) contains no transcript-retention clause and no auto-deletion language. No end-to-end encryption claim appears anywhere on the site. Their FAQ also concedes that the desktop process name, pmodule, cannot be hidden from Activity Monitor or Task Manager — which sits awkwardly next to the homepage badge reading "Task Manager Invisible."

Key features:

• Credit-based pricing — pay per interview, not per month; credits never expire
• 50+ languages per the vendor's own comparison pages; they decline to publish an exact count
• One language at a time — it answers in the language it hears; you can't set input and output separately
• Free trial: 10 sessions × 10 minutes, one new session every 12 minutes
• Works with Zoom, Teams, Google Meet, Webex, Lark, Amazon Chime, CoderPad and HackerRank
• Desktop app for macOS and Windows plus a browser version; no Linux

Pricing: Credits at $38 (1), $59 (3), $118 (8), $177 (15). Subscriptions at $78/week, $149.90/month, $599.90/year, plus an $899.90 lifetime that exists in their billing system but is not shown on the public pricing page. Refunds are 7 days and unused-purchases-only — using any credit voids eligibility.

Trade-off vs GeekBye: Great for occasional use, and the credit model is honest about what you're buying. But transcripts persist on their servers unless you toggle them off, there's no on-device processing, and no performance metrics or meeting summaries. Our Cluely vs Parakeet AI comparison goes deeper on the privacy side.

8. Interview Coder — Coding-Focused (Use With Caution)

Best for: Candidates who specifically need coding interview help and accept the risks.

Here's something most "alternatives" lists won't tell you: Interview Coder and Cluely share the same founder. Chungin "Roy" Lee built Interview Coder first while at Columbia University, using it to pass an Amazon technical interview (Amazon later rescinded the offer). Columbia suspended him, after which he dropped out. He then rebranded and expanded the concept into Cluely. The two products appear to be operated separately today — Interview Coder's own blog now reviews Cluely critically.

Interview Coder is laser-focused on technical coding interviews. It captures coding problems via screenshots, generates solutions in multiple programming languages, and includes audio support to understand spoken interviewer questions. Its free download ships the stealth features with no AI attached, which is an unusually honest way to let you test detection before paying.

Key features:

• Coding problem detection via screenshot analysis
• Multi-language code generation
• Audio transcription for spoken questions
• 20+ undetectability features, included at every tier including the free download
• Native desktop app for Windows and macOS

Pricing: $799 one-time (shown struck from $1,598), or $299/month (struck from $499). Free download with no AI features.

Why the caution: Shared founder history with Cluely, no published security disclosures of its own, no refund policy disclosed for the lifetime tier, and no AI model transparency. Competing vendors report that CoderPad and HackerRank have both shipped Interview-Coder-specific detection — treat that as an interested party's claim, but the specificity is worth weighing at $799. Our GeekBye vs Interview Coder comparison works through whether that price buys anything the cheaper tools don't.

Free & Open-Source Cluely Alternatives (GitHub)

Cheating Daddy (#4 above) is the strongest open-source clone, and two of the most-starred results here aren't open source in the sense searchers mean.

Glass is the most-starred at roughly 7,580 (August 2026), and the riskiest pick: its last commit landed October 2025 and the last feature work was July 2025. Pluely still calls itself "The Open Source Alternative to Cluely," but its README states plainly that v1 and later ship as proprietary binaries — only the pre-v1 GPL-3.0 history is open. Natively is the most actively developed of the set, with commits landing in August 2026, but it ships under a non-commercial personal-use source license and has no prebuilt installer: clone, npm install, compile a native module, populate a .env. free-cluely is Apache-2.0 and the literal name match for the query, with 31 total commits and build-from-source only. cue is the newest, created July 2026, and the most candid — its README says stealth is "best-effort, not guaranteed" and names macOS 15.4+ as a known exposure.

The trade-offs are identical across all of them. Bring-your-own-key is the funding model, so a quota that runs out mid-interview is your problem. There's no support channel and nobody obliged to fix a breaking OS update. And whether their screen-share stealth holds against current macOS capture is an open question in Electron's and Tauri's own issue trackers.

GeekBye's free Starter plan is the better starting point when you need invisibility that's maintained against OS changes rather than best-effort.

Why People Leave Cluely

If you're reading this, you probably already know. But here's the full picture, with the sourcing stated:

The reported breach. In July 2025, a researcher operating as DarkAgent published a report claiming that admin credentials in a public GitHub repository, weak GraphQL authorization and a client-side paywall check had exposed 83,247 users and 23,693 interview transcriptions. The report's site is now offline, no mainstream outlet covered it, and Cluely never responded publicly. Whether records were actually exfiltrated is unverified. The pattern is well attested; the numbers rest on one researcher's account.

The security vulnerabilities. This part is primary-sourced. Jack Cable found that Cluely's Electron app exposed its IPC and postMessage handlers to any page opened inside it, so a single malicious link could invoke the screenshot handler and record the victim's screen continuously. System prompts were stored in plaintext. Cluely's first response was a DMCA takedown. Its eventual response was better: the notice was retracted, Lee apologized, roughly $1,000 went to the EFF at Cable's request, and a bug bounty now exists.

The fabricated revenue number. On March 5, 2026, Lee retracted the "$7 million ARR" figure he had given TechCrunch. The real figure was roughly $5.2 million. If a company will inflate the one number investors check, the numbers on its marketing pages deserve the same scrutiny.

The $149.99/month invisibility tax. Cluely charges $19.99/month for Pro and $149.99/month for "Pro + Undetectability." The entire difference between those two tiers is one line item: "Completely hidden to meeting screen sharing software." Every other tool on this list includes some form of stealth in its base pricing or for free. Their refund policy separately names "detection by screen-sharing software" as an explicitly non-refundable condition.

The pivot away from you. Cluely's homepage now sells a meeting notetaker, benchmarks itself against Otter and Granola, and advertises "12+ languages" — the lowest count on this page. If you came for an interview assistant, that is no longer the product being built.

Does Cluely Have Competitors?

Yes. Cluely has at least eight direct competitors, including GeekBye, Interview Sidekick, Final Round AI, Cheating Daddy, Sensei Copilot, LockedIn AI, Parakeet AI and Interview Coder, plus other free open-source clones on GitHub. Several undercut Cluely's $149.99/month undetectability tier, and most include invisibility in their base price.

The competitive picture has also moved fast this year. Prices swung in both directions between March and August 2026 — Interview Sidekick's paid tier rose 16x on list price ($10 → $160; $80 with a code), Final Round AI's fell — and one tool on the March version of this list, Ninjafy AI, stopped existing. The eight entries above are the ones that survived re-verification, ordered by who they actually suit.

Which Alternative Should You Pick?

It depends on what you prioritize:

• Privacy and invisibility above all else — GeekBye. Native desktop app with OS-level protection and on-device OCR, at $74.99/mo until August 31, 2026. Your screenshot images never leave your machine.
• Free, and you're comfortable in a terminal — Cheating Daddy or one of the other open-source clones covered above. You pay Google for tokens instead of paying a subscription, and you accept that its stealth is best-effort and unmaintained.
• A full prep ecosystem, and you can commit for a year — Final Round AI, if you don't need their tier-gated Stealth Mode and are comfortable paying twelve months upfront to get their advertised rate.
• Biggest question bank and model choice — Interview Sidekick at $160/month list, $80/month with code SAVE50. No longer the budget pick it was in March.
• A few interviews, no subscription — Parakeet AI credits at $38-$177 list, one hour per credit. Turn the Save Transcript toggle off; see our Cluely vs Parakeet AI comparison.
• Structured STAR responses — Sensei Copilot with the AI Story Editor for pre-crafted narratives, if you can live with a vendor that won't say what platform it runs on.
• Human + AI support — LockedIn AI for the Duo feature that lets a friend type, speak, or take the wheel. Weigh it against the removed Trustpilot rating and the refund terms in our LockedIn AI vs Cluely comparison.
• Coding interviews only, risks accepted — Interview Coder at $799 one-time, with the founder history and the reported CoderPad and HackerRank detection in mind; see our GeekBye vs Interview Coder comparison.

Whatever you choose, read the fine print on data retention and on refunds before you pay — three of the tools on this page contradict their own marketing on their own websites.