Cluely alternatives in 2026 and how they compare

Most people who search for a Cluely alternative have one of three complaints. The plan that hides the window from screen sharing costs a lot. They need something narrower, only for interviews or only for notes. Or they are not sure what the answers are based on. Below are the five products that come up most often in those searches, plus our own.

We checked the other products on 18 October 2026 and Prepped on 5 November 2026. Prices are public monthly list prices unless we say otherwise, and where we used an app ourselves, we describe what we saw.

The comparison at a glance

Cluely

Cluely sits on top of your screen as a small control bar and answers when you ask. Assist, What should I say?, Follow-up questions and Recap are each one click away. After the call you get a summary, the transcript, the list of requests it answered and a draft follow-up email.

Two of its defaults surprised us. In our session Use screen was on, so every request took a screenshot and sent it along with the question. You can switch that off in the settings. Hiding the window from screen sharing is a separate plan, Pro + Undetectability, at $149.99 a month, more than seven times the Pro price. On a free account our first request was stopped with a prompt to upgrade or to turn the hiding off.

Cluely transcribes speech on its own servers. Its answers to general questions and sales conversations were good. In an interview they can only be as specific as the files you give it, and the free plan takes three.

Final Round AI

Final Round AI organizes everything around a Goal. A goal is one job, with its company, role, job description, resume, materials and a debrief after each session. Its Playbook settings are the most detailed we found. You choose the answer length, the structure for behavioral answers (STAR, CAR, SOAR or none), whether the answer leads with the conclusion and whether it names trade-offs.

Setting up goals and materials is free. Live help, practice interviews and debriefs need Pro, and there is no free trial. The public site says Pro starts at $25 a month. When we signed in to the desktop app on 16 October 2026, it offered $150 a month, $250 a quarter and $300 or $500 a year, shown as monthly averages under a countdown discount. Read the checkout page slowly before you pay.

LockedIn AI

LockedIn AI gives you the most control in technical interviews. It has dozens of role presets, settings for online assessments such as HireVue and CodeSignal, 14 English accents and bilingual interview modes. You can change the answer language, length, structure and model in the middle of a session, and send several screenshots as one question.

Answers appeared about four seconds after each question in our test. We had not given it a resume, and it made up experience for the candidate anyway, claiming more than ten years in backend work and a sixfold speed-up from a rewrite. That is the failure to look for in every tool on this list, an answer that sounds good and is not true of you. One thing we liked is that LockedIn asks you to confirm recording consent once before your first session.

Its prices follow a common pattern, with a large discount on the first period. Unlimited sessions are capped at two hours each.

ParakeetAI

ParakeetAI gives you the most ways to pay. A credit buys an hour and is spent in half-credit steps of 30 minutes. A running session extends itself unless you turn that off, and credits never expire. There are also unlimited plans by the week, month or year. It handles more than 50 languages, lets you pick a GPT, Claude or Gemini model for each session, and runs in its desktop app, in desktop Chrome and in a phone’s browser.

Its FAQ says it is meant for conversations where AI help is allowed, and that it honors employers’ requests to block their hiring processes. We did not try the app, because the download only appears after you sign in.

Granola

Granola is for people who want good notes and no live answers, and it is the most polished product here. It records the computer’s audio without adding a bot to the call, writes notes from your own bullet points and the transcript, and answers questions across all your meetings. Its pricing page says audio is deleted once it has been transcribed. The free plan keeps 30 days of history.

Prepped

Prepped is our product, so read this section with that in mind. It is built around one test. An answer helps only if you can say it truthfully. Before a meeting it reads the material you add, such as a resume, a job description, slides, a project folder or a GitHub repository, and writes answers to the questions you are likely to get. During the meeting a small window shows each question with an answer drawn from that material, its key points highlighted so you can take it in at a glance and say it in your own words.

You set a daily spending limit, and a limit for a meeting when you want one, and every answer records what it cost. You can also write your own answers to common questions in the question bank and review them on cards, and in a meeting that expects one of those questions, the answer builds on what you wrote. The app is available in English, Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Spanish and French.

Beyond interviews it prepares meetings and talks. During a presentation it follows your slides on screen, and coding assistants such as Claude Code and Codex can set up its meetings for you.

Some things it does not have yet. There is no app in the phone stores, since the phone version runs in the browser. On a Mac, keeping the overlay out of screen sharing needs macOS 26 or later. And it is younger than the other products here.

How to choose

The most useful test takes five minutes. Give the tool your resume and ask about a project that is not on it. A good tool says it does not know, or marks the gap. A risky one invents a story in your name, and in an interview that story is yours to defend.

It also pays to know where the audio goes. Some tools transcribe on their own servers and some on your computer, and for a confidential conversation that matters more than a second of speed.

Look past the first month when you compare prices. LockedIn’s first month costs 60% less than its regular monthly price, and Final Round’s checkout ran a countdown discount. The regular price is the one you will keep paying. Check the platform you will actually use as well, because support for macOS versions, browsers and phones varies more than the marketing suggests.

Recording laws and interview policies apply whichever tool you pick. We cover them in a separate guide on recording consent.