A Cluely alternative built for coding interviews

Disclosure: we make Interview LLM. Cluely details below come from Cluely's own homepage and pricing page as we read them on Nov 14, 2026. Product names are trademarks of their owners, and this page isn't affiliated with or endorsed by Cluely.

What Cluely says it is

Cluely's homepage calls it "an AI meeting assistant that listens in real time" and "gives you instant answers, notes, and next steps." It works alongside Zoom, Slack, Webex, Teams and Google Meet, and its pricing page lists meetings, homework and sales calls as use cases. The free Starter plan includes limited meeting notetaking. In other words, it's a general assistant for conversations, and its features are organized around calls.

That's a reasonable product. It's just not the same job as a coding round, where the hard part usually isn't the conversation; it's the problem written on the screen.

Cluely vs Interview LLM side by side

As of Nov 14, 2026:

What a coding-round tool does differently

A meeting assistant is built around listening: transcribe what people say, work out what's being asked, answer, and summarize. A coding round mostly doesn't work that way. The interviewer may say a sentence or two, but the actual problem lives in CoderPad, HackerRank, CodeSignal or a shared doc, with exact constraints, input formats and examples. Online assessments often have no conversation at all. So a coding-specific tool is built around a different pipeline:

1. Capture the problem exactly. Interview LLM takes screenshots with a global shortcut, up to two queued, so a long problem that scrolls can be captured in two parts. Constraints like "n up to 10^5" decide which algorithm is acceptable, and they're easy to lose if you rely on someone reading the question aloud.
2. Extract before solving. The first model call reads the problem out of the screenshot. The solution step then works from that extracted problem, not from a transcript of what someone said.
3. Solve with complexity. The solution comes with an explanation and its time and space complexity, which is what interviewers ask about next.
4. Debug from what failed. When a test case fails, you screenshot the error or your code and get help fixing that specific bug, rather than starting over.
5. Choose the model per step. You can run a fast, cheap model for extraction and a stronger reasoning model for the solution, from OpenAI, Anthropic or Google.

None of this means a meeting assistant can't answer a coding question; we haven't tested Cluely on coding problems and won't guess. The point is that the two products are designed around different inputs. If your problem arrives as speech, a listener fits. If it arrives as text on a screen, a screenshot-based tool fits.

Cost over a typical 3-month search

Cluely's prices are public, so this one is easy to total:

To estimate API usage, assume a problem takes about 3,000 input and 2,500 output tokens across extraction and solution, as in our bring-your-own-key cost guide; that's an illustration, since screenshots and reasoning models vary. At list prices as of Nov 14, 2026, 300 problems a month would cost about $2.70 on Gemini 3 Flash Preview ($0.50 / $3 per million tokens) or about $18.60 on Claude Opus 5.5 ($4 / $20). Several Gemini models also have a free tier in Google AI Studio.

To be fair about it: if you only need help for a few weeks, Cluely Pro's first month is cheaper than $39. The totals cross in the second month, and the gap widens the longer your search runs. Cluely's annual prices didn't render when we checked, so we couldn't compare those.

When Cluely may suit you better

• You want one assistant for meetings, sales calls and study, not only interviews.
• Your interviews are conversational, such as behavioral or hiring-manager rounds, where listening matters more than reading a problem.
• You want meeting notes and next steps after calls.
• You want a free plan to start, or a mobile option. Interview LLM has no free tier or trial.
• You'd rather not set up an API key.

When Interview LLM may suit you better

• You're preparing for coding rounds and online assessments, where the problem is written on screen.
• You use Windows; we didn't see a Windows download on Cluely's pricing page.
• You want to choose the model, and want your key and session data to stay on your machine. The only outbound calls go to your chosen provider, and the full source code is included.
• Your search will last more than a month or two, and you'd rather pay once.

If that's the fit, see pricing and what's included. For design rounds, System Design LLM is the companion app.

A note on interview rules

Cluely's highest tier, Pro + Undetectability, is sold as "Completely hidden to meeting screen sharing software", and its homepage headline calls it "Undetectable AI for Meetings". Those are the vendor's claims; we don't make or test claims about any tool's visibility. Many employers and assessment platforms prohibit outside help during live interviews and online assessments. Know the rules for each round and follow them. For practice, a coding tool is most useful when you study its worked solution and then solve the problem again yourself.

Sources (checked Nov 14, 2026)

• Cluely pricing (plans, use cases, platforms): cluely.com/pricing
• Cluely positioning and integrations: cluely.com
• Google Gemini API pricing: aistudio.google.com
• Anthropic API pricing: platform.claude.com