Comparison
HackOffer vs Cluely
A meeting assistant that now sells itself for sales calls, against a copilot built for interviews. Compare what the hiding costs, how fast the answer actually lands, and how many languages you can hold the call in.
The short version
Cluely is the best-known name in this category, and for most people it is the reason the category has a name at all. It has also moved on: its homepage sells meeting notes and live answers for sales calls, and its documentation says it is purpose-built for sales assistance during video conferences rather than as a general-purpose assistant.
HackOffer does one job. It hears the call through the system mixer, spots the question as the sentence closes, and writes an answer out of your resume and the job description onto a panel a screen share cannot capture. That panel is hidden on every plan, the free one included, and the audio goes straight from your machine to the transcription service without passing through our servers.
If you want a notetaker for sales calls with an iOS app and an admin console behind it, Cluely is the fuller product. If you have an interview next week, in a language that is not English, and would rather not pay $149.99 a month to be invisible, this is the shorter route.
~1.3 s
From the end of the question to the first word (Cluely: 5–10 s)
30 min free
To get started (Cluely: $19.99/mo)
9
Languages the interface is in (Cluely: 1)
HackOffer vs Cluely, row by row
| Feature | HackOffer | Cluely |
|---|---|---|
| What is visible, and what leaves your machine | ||
| Hidden from a screen share | ||
| What the hiding costs | Included on every plan, the free one too | A $149.99/month plan of its own |
| Hidden from screenshots and recordings | Claimed for recordings | |
| Says in writing where the hiding stops | The docs hedge; the homepage says "completely undetectable" | |
| Where the call audio goes | Straight from your machine to the transcriber, never our servers | Not stated; the privacy policy collects audio recordings |
| How long the transcript is kept | Transcript 30 days, delete it sooner yourself | No period published |
| During the call | ||
| From the question to the first word of the answer | ~1.3 s, end to end | 5–10 s (Business Insider test); 300 ms is their transcription figure |
| Nothing joins the meeting | ||
| Hears the interviewer without a headset trick | The system mixer, headphones or not | System audio |
| Price, and how you buy | ||
| Cheapest paid plan | $49/week, $89/month, $349/year | $19.99/month, or $11.99 on annual |
| Every price on a page you can read before signing up | ||
| Free tier | 30 minutes, no card | Free tier, no card, up to 3 files |
| Can be bought by the week | $7.99, on iOS only | |
| Minutes, sessions or credits | Unmetered on the paid plan | Free tier capped; the paid cap is not published |
| Cancelling | Two clicks in the app, runs to the end of the period | Self-serve, and no refund of the part you paid for |
| Refunds | No general guarantee; the EU and UK 14-day right, settled pro rata | 24 hours, and only with video evidence |
| What the answer is built from | ||
| Coding questions | Undocumented; the docs say it is built for sales calls | |
| Models you can switch between | 2, switchable, on every plan | Not named, and no picker |
| Platforms and languages | ||
| How it runs | Desktop app | Desktop app and an iOS app |
| Operating systems | macOS 13+ on Apple silicon and Intel, Windows 10+ | macOS 10.15+, Windows 11 only |
| Meeting apps named on their site | Zoom, Meet, Teams, Webex, Slack, Discord | Zoom, Meet, Teams, Webex, Slack |
| Interface languages | 9 | 1 |
| Transcription languages | 10 | 12+ |
Every cell about Cluely is taken from their own public pages and checked in September 2026; where a figure comes from somewhere else, the cell says where. A question their pages do not answer is left out of the table rather than guessed at.
Cluely is a trademark of its owner. This page is an independent comparison written by HackOffer; it is not endorsed by, affiliated with or reviewed by Cluely.
What $149.99 a month actually buys
Cluely’s pricing page lists three things: a free tier, Pro at $19.99 a month, and Pro + Undetectability at $149.99. The third one is not a bundle of extras. It is the same product with the window kept out of a screen share, and their changelog shows the tier arriving in October 2025 at $75 a month before reaching its current price. Their documentation also notes that invisibility is now opt-in, which means the default install of the cheaper plan is a window your interviewer can see.
The mechanism underneath is not proprietary to anyone. On macOS it is a window whose sharing type is set to none; on Windows it is the capture-exclusion flag. Both are operating-system features, both are one call, and every serious tool in this category uses them. What differs is who charges for the call. HackOffer makes it on by default on every plan, including the thirty free minutes, because a panel your interviewer can see is not a product with a cheaper tier — it is a different product.
We also say where it stops, in the same words on the landing page and in the terms: it hides pixels, not the process. A phone camera pointed at your screen still sees the panel, and proctoring software that enumerates running processes still finds the app. Treat it as private rather than as undetectable. Cluely’s homepage says “completely undetectable” without qualification; its documentation adds a conditional clause about software respecting the operating-system default. Both sentences are on their site, and only one of them is on the page people buy from.
Two numbers, and only one of them is the answer
Cluely’s homepage advertises a 300 ms response time. Read the line around it and the number belongs to transcription: how quickly words appear, not how quickly an answer does. Those are different measurements and the gap between them is where a live copilot is won or lost, because the transcript is the easy half.
The only end-to-end figure anyone has published for Cluely came from a journalist. Business Insider tested it in April 2025 and reported five seconds for the first question and ten for the second, describing a five- to ten-second delay as feeling like forever in a live interview; the founder attributed it to overloaded servers at the time. We publish ~1.3 s and we say what it measures: the end of the spoken question to the first word appearing on the panel, on the path the product actually takes — your machine holds the transcription socket, detects the question locally, and asks for the answer directly. It is a design budget rather than a percentile from a dashboard, and saying which of those it is seems more useful than a rounder number.
A sales assistant and an interview copilot are not the same tool
Cluely began as an interview product and has since become a meeting assistant. Its homepage sells notetaking and real-time answers for meetings, and its documentation states that it is purpose-built for sales assistance during video conferences rather than as a general-purpose assistant. That is a fair description of a good product, and it is also a description of something other than what you need at four o’clock on Thursday.
An interview answer has one property a meeting answer does not: it has to be about you. HackOffer takes your resume, the job description and any notes you add, and puts them into every request whole — no chunking, no embeddings, no retrieval step deciding which paragraph mattered. A resume is a couple of thousand tokens and the model’s window holds two hundred thousand, so there is nothing for retrieval to solve and a great deal for it to get wrong. What comes back names your projects and your numbers instead of a plausible candidate’s.
Why people move from Cluely to HackOffer
The hiding is not a product tier. Cluely charges $149.99 a month for the plan that keeps the window out of a screen share, and says invisibility is opt-in. Here it is on by default, on every plan, and on the free half-hour as well.
Nine interface languages against one. Cluely’s site carries no localised pages and its documentation lists reliable real-time translation among the things it does not do. HackOffer is translated into nine languages and transcribes ten, and the answer comes back in the language the call is held in.
A latency figure that measures the answer. Cluely’s 300 ms is a transcription number; the only published end-to-end test is Business Insider’s five to ten seconds. Our ~1.3 s is the whole path, and we say so.
Your resume goes in whole. No chunking, no embeddings, no retrieval step choosing a paragraph — the documents you attach are in every request in full, so the answer is your experience rather than a generic one.
A design round gets a whiteboard, not a paragraph. Design mode keeps a brief with the numbers, an architecture diagram and a data model on the panel and redraws only what the last question changed; Cluely’s own documentation describes an assistant for sales calls and says nothing about a design round.
What Cluely does not do
- Staying out of a screen share is a $149.99-a-month plan of its own, and their documentation says invisibility is opt-in rather than the default.
- Windows 10 is unsupported, and the refund policy names it: no refunds for Windows 10 computers.
- The refund window is 24 hours and needs video evidence. Being detected during a screen share and slow answers are both named as things that are not refundable.
- 1.7 out of 5 on Trustpilot across 19 reviews, with several describing charges that continued after they cancelled.
- No retention period is published anywhere — data is kept while the account exists — and no model or transcription vendor is named.
Choose HackOffer if
- The interview is not in English, or you would rather read the interface in your own language.
- You want the panel kept out of a screen share without buying a separate $149.99 plan for it.
- You want the answer built from your resume and the job description, read in full rather than searched.
- You would rather pay for one week than commit to a month.
- You want to know where the call audio goes, and would prefer it never reached the vendor at all.
Choose Cluely if
- You need it on a phone — Cluely has an iOS app and we have nothing on mobile.
- You are buying for a company and need directory sync, an admin console, a shared knowledge base or CRM sync.
- The job is sales calls and meeting notes rather than interviews, which is what Cluely now describes itself as being for.
Three questions that settle it
Is the interview in English?
If it is, Cluely is a reasonable choice and this page is a close call. If it is not, it stops being one: Cluely has no locale prefixes on its site at all, and its own documentation lists reliable real-time translation among the things it does not do.
Are you willing to buy invisibility separately?
Cluely sells staying out of a screen share as a plan of its own, at $149.99 a month. Here it is switched on by default on every plan, and on the free half-hour too. If that feature is the reason you are shopping, the two prices are not comparable.
Is this an interview, or a sales call?
Cluely’s documentation says it is purpose-built for sales assistance during video conferences. Nothing stops you using it in an interview, but the resume, the job description and the answer written out of them are our subject and not theirs.
Questions people ask
Moving over from Cluely?
Start with 30 free minutes. No card, and no trial that turns into a subscription — you find out whether it works on a real call before anything is charged.