Cluely Alternatives: What Users Switch To in 2026
"Cluely alternative" is two different searches wearing one phrase, and which one you're doing changes the answer.
Cluely launched on April 20, 2025 under the tagline "Cheat on Everything," with a video of co-founder Roy Lee using it on a date to fake his age and his knowledge of art. By late April the explicit cheating references were gone from the site, and by late 2025 the company was selling a desktop meeting assistant benchmarked against Otter and Granola (Wikipedia). So some people searching that phrase want a covert answer feed for a live interview. Most people searching it today want the thing Cluely now advertises, an assistant that listens to your calls and hands you notes afterwards, minus the parts they stopped trusting.
This post answers the second search. We build LUCI, and it's ranked first here. Worth saying upfront so you can weigh the rest of this accordingly. And to be direct about the first search, LUCI is not a real-time interview assistant. It doesn't feed you live answers on a call and we aren't building that. If a covert overlay is the job, nothing on this list does it, and you should stop reading rather than switch and be disappointed.
What people are actually leaving over
Three things show up repeatedly.
The price of the feature people came for. Cluely's free Starter tier is capped, Pro is $19.99/month, and the invisibility that made the product famous, "completely hidden to meeting screen sharing software," is a separate $149.99/month tier (cluely.com/pricing, checked 2026-09-06). If you signed up for the overlay rather than the notes, you're paying meeting-assistant money seven times over.
Billing. Cluely holds a 1.7 out of 5 TrustScore across 19 reviews on Trustpilot. A March 14, 2026 review describes upgrading to annual from inside the app and being charged £390 with "no confirmation screen, no total price shown, and no opportunity to cancel before payment was taken." An April 30, 2026 review reports being charged after cancelling; an August 5, 2026 one describes two months of AI-only support ending in being told to cancel the autopay themselves (Trustpilot). Cluely's own refund policy offers a 24-hour window conditional on video evidence that the app doesn't work, and no pro-rata refunds mid-cycle (refund policy).
"Undetectable" is a narrower claim than it sounds. Cluely's own documentation says it is invisible on screen-sharing software "as long as the software respects the Windows and macOS default for privacy & infinite overlays." That is the same overlay-exclusion behavior Zoom itself uses, not proprietary stealth (Cluely docs). Meanwhile Proctaroo's CEO Adrian Aamodt told TechCrunch on April 29, 2025: "When a Proctaroo session is active, we can see running applications and 'hidden' background processes — Cluely is no different." Validia shipped a free detector called Truely the same week (TechCrunch). Lee called the detectors pointless. Both things can be true: the overlay is hidden from a screen share, and a native proctoring agent can still see the process.
Separately, Lee retracted in March 2026 the $7M ARR figure he had given TechCrunch a year earlier; the real number was $5.2M (Wikipedia).
How we're ranking these
- Does it capture without a bot joining the call? This is Cluely's best idea and the thing most people don't want to give up.
- Where does the understanding happen? On your device, or on a vendor's servers?
- Is it honest about being there? Covert, quiet, or announced are three different postures, and different jobs need different ones.
- Can your AI tools reach the record afterwards? Or is it a notes app you operate by hand?
The ranking
1. LUCI — best for people who wanted the memory, not the overlay
LUCI captures meetings without a bot joining the call, and it does the understanding on your device rather than shipping audio to a server. It keeps working with Wi-Fi off, because the processing has nowhere else to go. Cards, keys, and passwords are blacked out before anything is saved.
It also covers ground Cluely doesn't. Alongside meetings it remembers what was on your screen, so "what was that number in the deck they shared on Tuesday" has an answer even though nobody read it aloud. Your agent writes your Life, a daily distillation of what you worked on, and Claude, Cursor, and Codex can recall it through the Agent Bridge, LUCI's built-in connection layer. Nothing to configure; it connects itself. Of the tools here, LUCI is the only one that keeps understanding on-device and ships agent access built in.
Honest trade-offs: no live answer feed during a call, sessions run up to four hours rather than permanently always-on, and it's closed-source. You can't read the code that handles your data, so the privacy claim rests on behavior you can test yourself. Pull the network cable; capture and search keep working.
Best for: people who liked bot-free capture and want the meeting record to be searchable later, by them and by their agent.
→ Bot-free notetaking · AI meeting notes · Download
2. Granola — best if you liked the invisibility for the politeness
Granola shares Cluely's best trait without the covert-overlay framing. Nothing joins the call, nobody gets a "Notetaker has entered the meeting" banner. It's the most polished notetaker in this category, and if you used Cluely because you didn't want a bot in the room with clients, this is the closest match.
The trade: audio goes to a cloud transcription provider rather than being processed on your machine, and the desktop app labels speech "Me" or "Them" rather than by name. Check their pricing page for current tiers.
Best for: teams who want Cluely's frictionless capture with a normal product and a normal billing page.
→ LUCI vs Granola · Full Granola alternatives comparison
3. Otter — best if you want the opposite of stealth
Otter is the inverse of everything Cluely was marketed on. It joins as a visible participant, everyone in the room knows a record exists, and it builds a searchable archive across every meeting. Where consent matters more than convenience, being visible is the point. It has a real free tier to start on.
The trade: a bot in the meeting is exactly what many people left Cluely's category to avoid, and processing is cloud-side.
Best for: anyone whose problem with Cluely was ethical rather than technical.
4. anarlog (formerly Hyprnote) — best if you want to read the code
If what broke your trust was the billing and the ambiguity rather than the feature set, an open-source local notetaker answers that directly. Hyprnote's MIT-licensed local app continues under the name anarlog: on-device transcription, notes as plain markdown files you own, bring your own model.
The trade: the Hyprnote name now points at the team's separate cloud product, the local app is Mac-first, and the free path expects you to supply an API key or run a model yourself. Audio only, no screen.
Best for: developers who'd rather audit a repo than trust a policy page.
5. Staying on Cluely — listed for context
If you want live on-screen answers during a call and you're comfortable with the ethics and the price, nothing above replaces that, and switching will feel like a downgrade. Cluely is the product for that job. It's last because for most people searching this phrase in 2026, the live-answer feature isn't why they installed it. The notes are, and everything above does that part with less baggage.
Cluely alternatives compared
| Tool | Bot-free capture | Live answers on the call | Where understanding happens | Screen memory | Your agent can recall it |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| LUCI | Yes | No | On-device | Yes | Yes, via Claude, Cursor, Codex |
| Cluely | Yes | Yes | Cloud | Reads your screen live | No |
| Granola | Yes | No | Cloud transcription | No | No |
| Otter | No, a bot joins | No | Cloud | No | No |
| anarlog | Yes | No | On-device | No | No |
The question worth asking before you switch
Cluely's pitch assumes the useful moment is during the conversation, and that whatever was said becomes disposable once the call ends. For interviews, maybe. For the meetings most people actually sit in, it's backwards. The value is that in three weeks you can still find what was decided and who owned it. That's a memory problem, not a prompting problem.
Frequently asked questions
What is the best Cluely alternative?
For most people, LUCI: it keeps the bot-free capture Cluely users liked, does the understanding on your device, remembers your screen as well as your meetings, and is the only option here your AI agent can recall directly. Granola is the better pick if you want polished shared notes and don't mind cloud transcription; Otter is better if you'd rather the recording be announced.
Is Cluely actually undetectable?
Not unconditionally. Cluely's own documentation scopes the claim to screen-sharing software that respects the Windows and macOS overlay-privacy defaults, using the same mechanism Zoom does to avoid infinite overlays. Native proctoring software is a different problem: Proctaroo's CEO told TechCrunch in April 2025 that an active session sees running applications and hidden background processes, "Cluely is no different," and Validia shipped a free Cluely detector the same week.
Why is Cluely charging me $149.99 a month?
That's the Pro + Undetectability plan, the only tier that hides the overlay from screen-sharing software; standard Pro is $19.99/month. Check your invoice for which plan you're on before contacting support. If an annual upgrade charged you unexpectedly, Cluely's published refund policy is a 24-hour window conditional on video evidence that the app isn't working, with no pro-rata refunds mid-cycle, and several 2026 Trustpilot reviews describe that exact dispute.
Does LUCI give live answers during a job interview?
No, and that's a deliberate choice. LUCI is a bot-free meeting notetaker with screen memory. It records and understands what happened so you and your agent can recall it afterwards. It has no live-coaching overlay and we don't plan to build one. If real-time interview assistance is what you need, LUCI is the wrong tool and this list won't help you.
